Beginnings tend to be messy: ask anyone who’s ever given birth, tilled the soil, sculpted, composed, or built something to last. By their nature, beginnings tend to begin unformed and void, at first dark and uncertain, then haltingly lurch toward something-ness.

Each year, Jews recycle Torah and begin its reading anew. This week we again start at the very beginning (a very good place to start), with the story of Genesis – creation, unformed and void, dark on the face of the deep, light, goodness, evening and morning, time and space, sun and moon, life and death, humanity, a garden with two special trees, an apple, a showdown, an expulsion…. The story is mother’s milk to theology itself. Except for cosmologists embracing the Big Bounce rather than the Big Bang Theory of Everything, we can understand Genesis as a pre-scientific (or extra-scientific) theology of beginning-ness.

If we look closer, however, we see that the Biblical creation starts with a false start – and maybe more than one. Torah’s first chapter recites a first creation, but then Torah’s second chapter tantalizingly suggests a second creation story. The first story posits six days of creation; the second story just one day. The first story evolves humanity at the end of the creation narrative; the second story creates humanity upfront before plants. The first story chronicles humanity’s creation equally in both male and female form, both in the divine image; the second story creates first a male and then a female from the male’s side.

Torah’s creation story is a mess. Biblical exegetes ascribing to the Documentary Hypothesis reason that the Genesis narrative must combine two separate tellings, by two separate narrators, redacted and mushed together into our codified Torah. Creation sure is a messy business.

There’s more. Jewish mystics imagine not two creations but seven (Zohar 1:24b). And why not? If there could be two creation stories, and if creation can be wiped out later (tune in next week forNoah and the Flood), then why not more? Better yet: why not imagine that creation happens each instant? So teaches quantum mechanics, which aligns with traditional Jewish morning liturgy that praises the force “that in goodness constantly renews the work of creation.”

We may never fully unlock the secrets of the universe: there’s plenty of Jewish wisdom that counsels us mere mortals not to try (Talmud, Chagigah 14b). But as to what we ourselves create, we have an important choice to make. We can deem our creations made once, over and done; or we can choose to scrap some of them and start over. Or, we can see each moment literally as pregnant with possibility, a whole universe waiting to unfold by our attitude, word and deed. Which one we choose will shape the kind of creators we are and can become, and with it our own human power to renew our world for good.

Rabbi David Evan Markus

Sukkot – the holiday called the time of our joy, Z’man Simchateinu. The sukkah, the structure which we erect for the holiday of sukkot evokes both the time of wandering in the wilderness during which time God provided us with food and protection and the huts used during the harvest season, the culmination of a great deal of work.

As one of the three pilgrimage festivals, Sukkot most captures for me the power of God’s creation. A successful harvest is dependent on planting the right crop in the right soil at the right time with the right amount of sun and the right amount of rain. Even with the great technology of irrigation, we can see that having rain at the right time is critical. A temporary dwelling like a sukkah is not that dissimilar from the kind of dwellings many people on the planet live in for 52 weeks a year. A dwelling that is vulnerable to fire, earthquakes, and torrential rains.

So we decorate our sukkot with fruits and vegetables, grateful for the bounty in our lives. We invite friends and neighbors to share meals with us in the sukkah, grateful for the love in our lives. On Sukkot, we temporarily move back outside into nature, feeling more vulnerable to nature and delighting our senses – smelling the fall leaves; hearing the wind, birds, and crickets; using our hands to build the sukkah; eating delicious foods and drinking good wine; and seeing the sky.

The roof of a sukkah must permit a person to see the stars through it. The millions of stars that form constellations are predictable from season to season showing an underlying order to the world of creation. There are times when it seems that that order is missing and the world is out of balance, that the power of nature is destructive rather creative. We have the ability to correct to that imbalance: we can feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and give shelter to the homeless.

The story of sukkot describes the Israelites as refugees on their way to a new home.  Sukkot is also an opportunity to act as the “image of God” and offer protection to those who are seeking better lives.

JoHanna Potts

For nearly 30 years I have practiced as a lawyer in the field of trusts and estates.  I’ve referred to it as a practice in death, dying and disability.  Not the comedy portion of the law. As a Rabbi, I’m called upon to officiate at funerals and unveilings.  This past Shabbat I sat with a couple grieving over the loss of a prematurely born child.

I sit with people as we figure out together what purpose we can glean from our experience of loss.  We do that while holding two competing challenging ideas about life and death. The first idea is that Jews cherish life.  In Torah we are instructed to choose life.  When we toast we say L’chaim.  Sanhedrin teaches if you save one life it is as if you have saved the world.  Life is a treasured gift. The second idea is that death is tragic.  There’s no escaping the tragedy of life, which is that from the day we are born we are destined to die.

When we come to the yizkor part of the service we bring with us both cherishing life and abhorring death. Yet our mourning does not have to be a sense that death is failure.  There is a kind of fix for this and it is based in remembering and the way we apply memory. We can employ our experience and knowledge of death in a pursuit of creating a better life because sometimes it takes death to remind us to cherish life. 

Remembering is the counter balance to understanding death as failure. Remembering is our opportunity to glean value and to bring forward lessons learned.

I have the opportunity to remember someone like my maternal great grandmother, Anna, and her children. She was a widow in the Ukraine, whose husband had died and left her with six children. They left Novgorod Volinsk over a century ago to come to America. She sent the oldest to America first. And then Anna took her four younger children and set out for America too. Remember they didn’t book tickets on United Airlines; complain about security lines and luggage fees. They traveled by wagon to the train and from the train to the port to board ships, perhaps a cargo ship.  Along the way, they got ill, and one even died.  In bringing her children to America, my great grandmother Anna lost her youngest child when he fell out of the carriage in which they were riding. He was about 3 years old. His name was Bernard. I didn’t hear the story from Anna so I can’t explain how she had the fortitude to bury a child and continue on the journey to America.  I can only assume that death was not unfamiliar to her, and that within her grief and suffering there was also some acceptance that death comes to each person, and to some far too soon.

I was reminded of that story recently. I’ll bet some of you are already predicting why.  We woke up one morning during Labor Day weekend to see a deeply disturbing photo on the front page of the paper or in your news feed. The picture shows a small boy. He is wearing a red T-shirt and long shorts that stop below the knee. His shirt is hiked above his waist, exposing his midriff. He is wearing black sneakers with no socks. And he is dead; face down in the rocky surf.

There was a second photo; a policeman is carrying the boy away. The policeman is wearing latex gloves. The boy’s tiny feet dangle below the policeman’s waist; we see that one of the Velcro straps on his sneakers has come undone. The boy looks almost as if he is asleep in what might be his father’s arms, just the way 3 year olds can be limp and sleep almost anywhere when exhausted. And though we can’t know what the policeman is thinking as he carries a dead child from the ocean, one thing is clear: He is looking away. Turkish officials identified the Kurdish boy who washed up on the beach as 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi.

The memory of Aylan Kurdi was enough to shock the world into action.  As Rabbi Sharon Brous recently reminded us we slept through years of the Syrian civil war with some 250000 dead and did not really react.  Only upon seeing that picture that morning on the front of our newspapers and in our newsfeeds did we, as Jews, wake up. We woke up to remember that the world abandoned Jews to die 70 years ago and we have an obligation to do more. And how many other humanitarian crises have occurred since then – Cambodia, Uganda, Rwanda, Bosnia, the list is too long.  With our memory engaged and awakened, Jewish aid organizations began raising money to help the refugees. The enormity of a civil war, especially one in a country that was pledged to the destruction of Israel, could not wake us from our slumber. But the sight of Aylan Kurdi woke us from our dreaming, because it triggered a memory.

Yizkor is here to reconnect us with the memories of people we loved but it should not be and it cannot be a perfunctory exercise in being sad about loss, or a sense of failure.  It has to be a time for us to reconnect with those people whose existence helped to give life to us, to shape who we are, who taught us something by their very being.  And then we have to do something with it.

Remembering is a catalyst.  We remember Shabbat to sanctify it.  זכור את השבת לקדשו We are told to remember Shabbat so that we take the time to rest and honor creation and freedom.  We are commanded to remember the exodus from Egypt. How can we be the guardians and champions of freedom if we have forgotten our own slavery? 

We are commanded to remember the golden calf built by the recently freed Israelites in the desert as they despaired Moses’ disappearance and chose to worship a tangible manifestation of the divine rather than have faith. We remember so that we focus not on possessions and material things but rather on the true faith that we can dedicate ourselves to higher purposes.

In the yizkor prayer we pledge to give tzedakah in the memory of the departed.  I often bristled at this pledge in the middle of yizkor, as if the appeal for funds was tucked neatly into our time of grief. Remember your loved ones and support charity! But the word for charity in Hebrew is tzedakah, Justice. Justice is what we have to give to the world in the name of those we remember.

Death is the inevitable last stage of life. Can we dare to accept death and glean the lessons of lives lived. Memory creates presence.  Memory keeps living the essence of what inhabited the body.  Memory is context.  Memory is what keeps us learning and creative.  Memory keeps us searching for serenity and love.

Life is a lot more than a pre-mortality condition. But life is uncertain. And the art of living is learning to live with this uncertainty. It is about living, not just surviving.  The value of living is to extend ourselves to others with tzedakah, in justice. With caring, compassion and charity. With thoughts, prayers, words and deeds. With our whole selves, with our life force, with our love. Death is not a failure. But a life lived selfishly is. A life lived without caring is a failure. A life successfully lived is taking the opportunity to activate memory into action.

Rabbi Evan J. Krame

What a week we’ve reached! The Days of Awe, days of introspection, Yom Kippur, rehearsing death (reminding us of our impermanent lives), reaching for the angels of our better and purest nature, ushering in the harvest of Sukkot.  It’s a lot.  It’s the whole cycle of time, the inner work of a lifetime, telescoped into an intense window of reflection, ritual and repair.

What if this week really were our lifetime? Jewish wisdom calls us to live each day just that way – as if it were our last (Talmud, Shabbat 153a) – because someday it will be.  Among Yom Kippur’s many reminders is that we’re mortal, and that our mortality gifts us with the precious impulse to treasure each day, so that we can attain a heart of wisdom (Ps. 90:12).

If this week really were our lifetime, what might we do?  We might make special effort to savor special people and places; we might give forgiveness and ask forgiveness; we might wrap up unfinished business.  Maybe we’d write a “swan song” – an ethical will to offer loved ones our emotional and spiritual legacy after we pass from this world.  Or maybe we’d write a poem, as Moses did in this week’s Torah portion (Ha’azinu) before his death.  Indeed, the whole of this week’s Torah portion is that poem – the poem of Moses’ life, his hopes for the nation he’ll leave behind, his ethical will to the world.

What would be the poem of your life?

During this week that connects Yom Kippur’s mortality and renewal with Sukkot’s harvest and celebration, we rehearse Moses’ swan song precisely to connect the two.  We harvest life’s bounty by rehearsing mortality and purifying all we can.  We reach deepest in so that we can reach farthest out.  We write the poem of our lives.  What will yours be?

Shanah tovah.

Rabbi David Evan Markus

Have you been to a poetry slam?  It’s a form of poetry competition.  The poets present their works in a struggle for dominance.  One doesn’t naturally associate poetry with a sport.  Drop any notion of poetry as a lovely art form.  The poems presented are often confrontational and clever.  There is no chance Elizabeth Barrett Browning would win one of these.  Yet it begs the question, what is the role of poetry that is confrontational?

In the Torah reading for this week Moses says:  “Write down this poem and teach it to the people of Israel; put it in their mouths, in order that this poem may be My witness against the people of Israel.”  A poem stands as witness, like an accuser in a courtroom.   Like Picasso’s masterwork Guernica, a grey toned depiction of the Spanish Civil War’s destructive aftermath, Moses’ poetry calls to the conscience of each person who might have been tempted toward immorality.

The Greek historian Polybius wrote: “There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.”  Polybius could have been talking about the High Holidays, when the liturgy beckons us to use our own thoughts to stand as witness to our shortcomings in this process we call teshuvah.  It is not easy to set aside the ego and the protective instinct that insulates us from doing the soul work necessary to improve ourselves.  At Proverbs 18:17 we learn that the one who pleads his cause first seems righteous but his neighbor will come and expose him.  For me, this means that we need accusers, like Moses’ poem, to expose us to our own failings and set us on a path of improvement.

In the special way that a painting or poem can unlock the heart, we should also have prayers and services that help open us up to our errors and shortcomings during these High Holidays.  That is one role of the liturgy and of clergy.  Our job is to employ words to their purpose of urging us on toward self-improvement.  The words can be prayer or poetry.  My prayer for these yamim noraim, these Days of Awe, is that the machzor prayer book, like Moses at a poetry slam, stands as witness and confronts you so that your heart is open to do meaningful teshuvah.

Rabbi Evan J. Krame

I have a friend who makes the most delicious challah. Every week she creates beautiful sweet challah that is the edible definition of “hiddur mitzvah’, enhancing a mitzvah. Every week she made challah for her family and our Torah study group.

One week the challah tasted just a bit different, it was almost the same but not quite the same.  She told me that she hadn’t done anything differently and she wasn’t sure what I was noticing. However after giving it more thought, she remembered that this time she had not been as focused on making challah as a act of love as she usually is. So now I understood why it tasted different. It was missing a spiritual ingredient, kavanah, intentionality and mindfulness.

I was reminded of the challah as I thought about this week’s Torah portion, Nitzanim. In it Moses tells all the Israelites that they will be blessed in the land if they love Y-H-V-H, walk in god’s ways, and keep the mitzvot. At first I interpreted this as an implied question and answer,  “What does it mean to love Y-H-V-H?” – To walk in god’s ways and perform the commandments. And then my friend’s delicious challah came to mind and I saw a different way to understand this. In all you do, love Y-H-V-H, do it with intention, do it mindfully, do it with kavanah. When you walk in god’s way, do it with intention and love. When you perform the commandments do them mindfully, with love.

The time from now through Yom Kippur is a gift to look at what we are doing and how we are doing it. If we open ourselves, the time in prayer can give us the inspiration to know where to begin. The high holiday liturgy tells us “Teshuvah, Tefillah, and Tsedakah will lessen the decree”. Our self-reflection and self-judgement should guide us.

Is there a mitzvah you’ve been thinking about taking on but have not yet done so? Perhaps it is kashrut, or observing Shabbat, or studying Jewish text, or not participating in “Lashon haRa” (gossiping). Often we get blocked by the feeling it is too much. In this week’s parsha, Moses tells the Children of Israel that it is not too much for them – it is neither in the heavens nor across the sea, but rather it is in their mouths and heart. Begin with a piece of it and when you do that piece, do it with intention and love.

One might begin giving Tsedakah that connects a theme to each holiday throughout the year giving both the holiday and the mitzvah of Tsedakah that much more kavanah. Supporting organizations addressing homelessness could be the focus of Sukkot tzedakah, Shemini Atzeret could focus on water, Chanukah could be about education, Tu b’Shevat could be on the environment. As partners with God in creation, our Tsedakah can help make the world God created whole again, truly an act of love.

The new year is a time to renew and begin again, or even begin. Shanah tovah

JoHanna Potts

It’s just like Passover in September (not Christmas in July), but with a High Holy Day spiritual message about gratitude and the means of spiritual growth.

This week’s Torah portion (Ki Tavo) features the Passover Haggadah’s re-telling of the journey from bondage to liberation: “My father was a wandering Aramean.  He went down to Egypt few in number to sojourn, and there became a great and mighty nation.  The Egyptians … oppressed us … [and] we cried out … and God heard our plea … and freed us from Egypt with a mighty hand, an outstretched arm, awesome power, signs and wonders” (Deut. 26:5-8).

Cue matzah, four cups and Seder songs!  But why these words now, and how do they cue up the upcoming Days of Awe?

These words are the first liturgy of monotheism, prescribed to be spoken when we “come into the [Promised] Land … and take the first fruits of the ground” in gratitude to God for “bringing us into this place, and giving us this Land – a land flowing with milk and money” (Deut 26:1-2, 9).  Our spiritual ancestors were called to give thanks and to use specific words linking them collectively to their timeless ancestral story.

In our day, people all kinds of houses of worship – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc. – do much the same, using prescribed texts shared in communal prayer for collective expression.  Even Jews who typically don’t attend synagogue, who fill synagogues on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, will encounter prescribed liturgy – the shared texts and stories of collective ancestry and prayer experience.

As we prepare for the Days of Awe, this week’s Torah portion comes to signal that once again we’ll journey from bondage to liberation (though our shackles might be of inner bondage rather than physical slavery), and to remind that our path to liberation must include gratitude.

But can text really command gratitude?  Can fixed words really evoke a spiritual journey?  Words can be important, but liturgy is just jargon unless we give it life.  As we ready for the High Holy Days, the season asks us to enliven our words with intention, focus and heart.  The Days of Awe call us to offer words as if they were fruits of our inner harvest after reaching a land of promise.

And when this lofty goal eludes us (it always might), when our words don’t fully reach the heart, may our words rest gently on the outside of the heart, waiting their moment to go deep and bring forth a bountiful harvest of inner liberation and gratitude beyond words.

Rabbi David Evan Markus

I recall in the 1960s when fringes were all the fashion.  In their essence, fringes are threads that move loosely.  Whether an adornment for beaded moccasins or brocade draperies, the imperfect fringes were understood to enhance beauty. Fringes are a contrast to the smoothness of the adorned material. It seems that imperfection can be used to enhance beauty.

Fringes are also an ancient design. In parashat Ki Teitzei we get this instruction: “You shall make tassels on the four corners of the garment with which you cover yourself.” Why adorn a garment with tassels? The tassels are a reminder that the seeming perfection of a garment can best be appreciated with adornment of something that appears as if frayed. Previously in Torah we learn that tzittzit [fringes] are for you, and when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of G‑d to perform them (adapted from Numbers 15:38–40). How interesting that something that is seemingly imperfect gives us the impetus to strive for holiness.

The same theory applies in another later instruction. We are told to leave something unfinished when constructing a home. The custom is called zeicher l’churban and it comes from the Talmud (Baba Batra 60b) directing that we leave a cubit without stucco or without paint. The reason is so that we remember that the beit hamikdash, the holy temple, was destroyed. With the pride of constructing a beautiful home, we stop to notice what remains imperfect in our lives – be it fringes or a cubit of a wall without stucco. In noticing imperfection we are reminded of something holy.

As we approach the High Holidays, we are directed to notice what is imperfect in our lives. What are the fringes you have added to the fabric of your life? Perhaps you’ve made an error regarding how you treated your family, or a failure to take care of your health. These imperfect fringes can serve to enhance beauty by the contrast of their imperfection. For example, did the distance created with a family member make you appreciate the relationship all the more?  Or have you come to value good health more because of an episode of self-neglect?

Even as they are imperfect, you can notice the fringes of your life so that they serve a purpose.  In noticing them, you may be moved toward enhancing holiness. The role of the High Holidays is not merely to take stock of imperfections. The High Holidays help us to improve our lives by engaging with imperfections as if they are a talisman of holiness. See them and remember to make improvements in yourself and the world.

Rabbi Evan J. Krame


This is the beginning of the month of Elul, the month that precedes the holiday-packed month of Tishrei. It is now that we begin sounding the shofar daily, signaling that it is the time to prepare for the transformation we hope to make in the coming year. First we must look into our spiritual mirror and honestly at ourselves. We need to engage in a “soul searching” that reveals ways in which we hold ourselves back, act out of fear and close ourselves off to different ways of seeing our role within this world. This isn’t an occupation review. It is about how you do, not what you do. There are a few questions to consider in this process: 

How are we living up to being made in the image of God and seeing others as made in the divine image as well? How can we be our most generous selves? Do we give others the benefit of the doubt? How do we feel and express gratitude? Do we see the wonder in our world? How do we alleviate the pain others may feel? How do we support our community? How do we pursue justice?

If we find, while gazing in that spiritual mirror, that the image of ourselves reflected back doesn’t yet match our aspirations, each day gives us an opportunity to come closer to it.

 

by JoHanna Potts

This week’s Torah portion (Re’eh, “See!”) recaps key aspects of Jewish tradition – monotheism, freedom, holidays and dietary laws. Perhaps its most important line, however, is a deceptively simple call: “After YHVH your God you will walk” (Deut. 13:5). What might it mean in our day to “walk in God’s ways”?

It seems straightforward to follow something physical: the Book of Exodus ends with the image of desert literally following God’s “cloud by day and fire by night” (Ex. 40:38). God, however, isn’t to be seen (Ex. 33:20). And if “God’s ways” were only Torah’s laws and traditions, then Torah might simply tell us to follow them: Torah wouldn’t need to add “walk in God’s ways.”

This question has called and confounded people for centuries. Talmud asked, “How can a human being walk after God?” Talmud’s answer was to walk after God’s attributes (B.T. Sotah 14a):

As God clothes the naked [like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden], so we also should clothe the naked. As God visited the sick [like Abraham after his circumcision], so we also should visit the sick. As God comforted mourners [like Isaac after Abraham’s death], so we also should comfort mourners. As God buried the dead [like Moses in the desert], so we also should bury the dead.

In this understanding, behaviors – clothing the naked, visiting the sick, comforting the mourner, burying the dead – evoke God’s attributes. But God is more than behaviors and attributes: God is holy. “Be holy,” Torah records God to say, “for I, YHVH your God, am holy” (Lev. 19:2). To be holy, our ancestors imagined, is to be merciful and gracious – qualities more expansive and dynamic than any fixed set of behaviors or laws. After all, we can’t codify God any more than we can squeeze or freeze God into any one idea however glorious and grand. Maybe that’s why tradition calls us into both particulars practices and overarching qualities – verbs and also adjectives, specific acts of our hands and also loftiness of our souls. Like a tree needs both deep roots and tall branches, we humans need both the rooting of specific behaviors and the high and holy aspirations of spirit.

In a recent lesson, I asked a child how we earth-bound humans can be holy and “walk in God’s ways”? At first she offered a list of behaviors – follow laws, obey parents, do homework, etc. – but quickly she switched into listing attributes. To be holy, she concluded, was to love… have compassion… be forgiving… be generous… be kind…. be patient. To be holy, she decided, is to see the world as God sees the world, and try to see as we imagine God might see.

“And a little child will lead them” (Isaiah 11:6).

R’ David Evan Markus