Note: this sermon was delivered the evening of Erev Yom Kippur / Kol Nidre, October 1 2025, by JRC Rabbi Rachel Weiss. The full transcript is below.
During these Days of Awe, Yamim Nora’im, the book of life is open, the book of life closes. In the middle is the work we do now, and the life we pray we will live.
I don’t open a lot of the books in my office these days. I now have an app that contains thousands of years of Jewish texts, interactive and portable, and instantaneous. Those volumes on the shelf make a good zoom background, a reminder of the breadth of our tradition, a symbol of years of accounting and creating. The books that I open most regularly, however, are the childrens’ books. Like the family service version of our long days of tefillah, they lift up the most concentrated themes of the holidays, sharing what is essential in 45 minutes, or 45 pages. I’ve opened this one a lot this year: Lifetimes: the beautiful way to explain death to children.
Lifetimes: There is a beginning and an ending to everything that is alive. And in between is living.
All around us, everywhere, beginnings and endings are happening all the time. With living in between.
There are lots of living things in our world. Each one has its own special lifetime.
For everything – insects to butterflies to animals to people.
No matter how long they are, or how short, lifetimes are really all the same.
They have beginnings and endings and living in between.
Here we are with our lifetimes, right here in this room tonight.
One of the most unexpectedly meaningful moments during Rosh Hashanah last week came at the 2nd aliyah of our Torah service. You gathered right here, bringing babies, new wedding rings, brand new tallitot, and arms around each other coming heavily up to the bimah with your ritual experiences. We surrounded the Torah with lifetimes – beginning to end.
This year in our community:
- 11 babies named and blessed and welcomed
- 10 teens became Jewish adults
- 24 adults affirmed their adult relationships with Judaism through the ritual of Adult Brit Mitzvah
- 12 weddings
- 2 divorce rituals
- 2 coming out and transition rituals
- 28 funerals.
The purpose of a life cycle ritual is to make explicit that which is implicit. To bring to the surface a private reality, and hold it with care and joy and weeping and reflection, and let others share it. These numbers are not statistics. They are stories.
Every ritual throughout our lives is a mirror. Where are we right now? What is happening to us? What are we moving from, and where to? Am I where I want to be?
At their essence, rituals mark transitions; lifecycles don’t just happen to the one at the center; they happen to all of us. They help us dig deeper into what matters – less what we have done, and more of who we are.
Each life cycle asks, how am I living my lifetime?
Naming and covenanting rituals for babies remind us of our role as transmitters of Jewish tradition. We are part of the chain that creates the world before you were born, and we create the community into which new life is welcomed, whether we are parents or not. We ask, what is my Torah, Chuppah, Ma’asim Tovim – how am I learning, loving, and changing the world for good? How am I guiding the next generation to these core values?
As we welcome a teen into new Jewish adulthood we question, How am I showing up to keep my community thriving? Am I living my Jewishness in public, so our new teenage-adult Jews see out loud who their people are? Am I blessing them with support to see them growing into themselves, or comparing a laundry list of activities or how well they did chanting Torah?” Am I doing that for myself?
A Jewish folk saying teaches that “everyone gets married at a wedding;” weddings inspire or spiritually elevate guests , but more, reconnect us with relationships in our own lives. Wedding blessings are all about intimacy – of communication, money, physicality, sexuality, emotions. They frame the questions back to us and ask, how are my relationships? What is resonant, and what needs work? Are we living into our connections and commitments in a way that is loving and generative? Are we leaving words of love unspoken?
And perhaps the ritual that ultimately asks the question of who we are, how we live, and what is most essential: Funerals.
I led 28 Funerals this year. For context that is about twice the number of funerals that I officiate in a typical year, and doesn’t include the JRC funerals Cantor Howard led. 7 were JRC members, all of them the beloveds of people in this room right now. This has been a year of grief and loss, too much for any one person to hold.
How often do you leave a funeral service and think about your own life?
I always do.
This year at funerals, I heard you reflect:
“how do I grow up to be like them?”
“this just makes me want to change the way I…”
“Will my family talk about me that way?”
“I wonder who will come and remember me?”
“If only I would give more, do more, connect more”
Because funerals are mirrors. These rituals, like Yom Kippur today, push us to go inward and really look. We mine our lives for who we want to be, and too often we absorb only the embarrassment, shame, or grief that we somehow do not measure up. It is so hard not to compare our legacy to others’. We can’t help but wonder: if someone were counting my life, what would they count? What would they say mattered? What was at the core of me?
Martin Buber tells the story of the great Hasidic Rabbi Zusya of Hanipol in pre-Poland Galitzia. He was humble, tried his best, but felt he never measured up. On his deathbed he began to cry uncontrollably and his students and disciples tried hard to comfort him.They asked him, “Rabbi, why do you weep? You are nearly as wise as Moses, you are just as hospitable as Abraham, and surely heaven will judge you favourably.”
Zusya answered them: “It is true. When I get to heaven, I won’t worry so much if God asks me, ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Abraham?’ or ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Moses?’ I know I would be able to answer these questions. After all, I did not have the righteousness of Abraham or the leadership of Moses but I tried to be both hospitable and thoughtful.
But when God asks me, ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Zusya?’ I will have no answer.
I think of that story every time I lead a funeral. Because funerals tell truths. They don’t measure us against Moses or Abraham, or even our beloved who has died. They measure us against ourselves.
Funerals slow you down. The world keeps moving—emails, errands, meetings, accomplishments—but at the funeral, time pauses. In grief, time moves slower.
Funerals strip away the nonessentials. They show us how contradictions are not failures—they are part of reality. “He could be so infuriating, and he was also deeply kind.” “She was bipolar, which in her generation was never acknowledged, and yet her excitement with every detail created some of our best and most delicious family experiences.” “They gave so much of themselves to everyone, was everyone’s mentor, but sometimes that meant there wasn’t time left for their children.”
The mirror reflects, the question hovers: What is essential about me?
This work is hard. This work is deeply internal. It can be filled with joy and pride, but often regret and shame.
It is not just shame for what we’ve done wrong, as we’ve been confessing this Kol Nidre night. It is shame for what we have left undone.
It is not the kind of shame that says, you are worthless.
It is the shame that whispers, you are not yet finished becoming yourself.
This is where Yom Kippur meets the cemetery. We are here to look deeply at what is essential, what is within us that can be pushed aside, and what is there to nurture and become.
Yom Kippur is our rehearsal for our own funeral. We fast, as if we were not alive. We wear white, as if dressed for burial. We say the Vidui, the confession on our lips, as if we are at the end.
And yet—we are still here. The final shofar has not yet sounded. The gates are not yet closed.
And so the story says, There is a beginning and an ending to everything that is alive. And in between is living.
We don’t control our beginning. We often don’t control our ending. But the in-between—the fullness, the sweetness, the contradictions—that part belongs to us.
Sharon Kolin, an author on Ritualwell offers a commentary on Unetaneh Tokef – acknowledging who will live and who will die – on how we might focus on our lifetime, our living, in this season of change: “Teshuvah, Tefillah, Tzedakah. These will help. Return and repentance – getting right with one another now – and not waiting. Prayer – attaching our minds and our hearts to things bigger than us. And Righteousness, acting to repair our broken world in every and any way we know how. These things will help us live in a world where loss is inevitable.
So we offer this… as a gentle tug on our hearts. It is not as important to figure out how we will die, but it is exceedingly important to figure out how we will live.”
How will you go inside and find, create, become, more of the you that you already are in this open expanse of this day, this year, this life before you?
You are here, right now. You are here for this holiday. You showed up. Here is the time, the space, the sacred container to hold us as we expose a vulnerable heart. Perhaps you will sing, or pray, or sit in silence, or take a walk, or talk with someone, or listen. There are so many ways to nurture the essence of yourself, and you don’t have to know the answer by sunset tomorrow.
You do, however, have to start asking the questions.
Every Shabbat, Julia and I bless our daughters with the blessing that we gave to each other at our wedding. Not just may you be like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, but also these words from Marcia Falk: Be who you are and be blessed in all that you are.
Like the Hasidic story, be not only like Abraham and Moses, but to be like Zusya.
This is what Yom Kippur, that Shabbat of all Shabbatot, calls us to work towards:
To be who we are, and be blessed in all that we are.
This is very hard.
We will surely not accomplish perfection. We will absolutely make mistakes. There is never enough time or space or energy all at once. But we have this space to pause – like at a life cycle ritual – and ask the question: What is really most essential?
What would it look like to strip away the titles, the grades, the achievements and the activities? When you’ve collected things you’ve bought and people you’ve met, what then would you do with them to live into what you care about? What would it feel like to reach for the parts of yourself you are not proud of and turn them into parts you desire? What takes up too much unnecessary space? What is really most essential?
The poet Yehuda Amichai teaches,
“A man in his life has no time to have
Time for everything.
He has no room to have room
For every desire. Ecclesiastes was wrong to claim that.
his soul is knowing
very professional,
Only his body remains an amateur
Always. It tries and fumbles,
doesn’t learn and gets confused,”
But then it concludes,
“He will die as figs die in autumn,
shriveled, full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there is time for everything.”
What if this is the goal?
Not to die having done it all, and well, but to die full.
To live until our lives are sweet with the fullness of who we are—our contradictions and flaws, our laughter and tears, our mistakes and our repair.
After twenty-eight funerals, I think about that line a lot: to die full of oneself and sweet. Humans age like dried fruit; we become the most concentrated versions of ourselves.
What does that most concentrated version look like, and what do we ask of ourselves to get there?
Not: How will I become Moses?
Not: How will I become Abraham?
But: How will I become myself?
Not: How will I erase my shame?
But: How will I let my shame awaken me?
Not: How will I resolve every contradiction or flaw?
But: How will I live my contradictions and my flaws honestly?
That is the possibility of change. That is the gift of this ritual.
Tonight, we stand together on Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the year, and ask: What will my life mean? What is essential?
When my time comes, may it be said of me—not that I was perfect, not that I was Moses or Abraham—but that I was myself.
That I lived the in-between.
That I ripened like a fig in autumn.
That my ending was full of who I am, and sweet.
And may each of us, tonight, hear the question of Zusya, the metaphors of Yehuda Amichai, the gentleness of Lifetimes, and the reminder of every funeral we’ve attended:
No matter how long they are, or how short, lifetimes are really all the same.
They have beginnings and endings and in between is the living.
G’mar chatimah tovah.
May we be sealed for life, for becoming, for memory, and with all the fullness of the living in-between.
Rabbi Rachel Weiss
Yom Kippur 5786/2025
October 1, 2025