Yom Kippur - v02 - Locked For Captioning
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I am Ilana Gleicher-Bloom,
the vision director of Mensch Academy and director
of Family Programs at Mishkan,
Chicago. You just heard and maybe sang
along with some of our Mensch
kids and families singing the prayer,
Modeh Ani.
When we created Mensch Academy four years ago,
I thought a lot about rituals. Mensch Academy
was brand new.
We were starting it from the ground up,
so we have no schedule and no set rituals in
place that had to happen.
Obviously,
we're going to have a musical prayer, t’filah
experience as part of Mensch Academy.
This is Mishkan
after all.
But which prayers
would we say and why?
As I thought about this and talked it out with
Rabbi Lauren and Rabbi Lizzie.
I kept going back to the core values of
Mensch Academy.
My dream was that at its center,
Mensch
Academy would be a place where kids and families
felt loved enough and safe enough to
take risks and develop their own Jewish ideas
and their own Jewish selves.
Which prayers and rituals would help them
get there?
And then we moved to virtual.
The Mensch team has spent the past few months
thinking about how we adapt our
rituals to the virtual space and how we create
new ones.
Now, more than ever,
we need our rituals.
It's easy to forget what day it is,
what month it is,
even what season it is.
I have found that I need rituals to help mark the
time for me and help
remind me that I'm human.
Help make me feel secure and safe.
We started each session with the familiar
that then lead into Modeh Ani
and I watched kids faces in their Zoom squares,
light up with recognition.
They knew these prayers.
They knew these voices.
I watched as so many of the Mensch kids,
some who rarely sing out loud in person,
moved their mouth,
singing out loud. In this difficult time,
more than ever,
we need rituals,
and often they aren't even the same rituals
we've had in the past
but new ones.
Things that make sense for us right now.
At Mensch Academy,
our team has been meeting over the past month,
creating new rituals and new ways of being
with kids that can help them feel loved
and safe and supported,
even online and even in a pandemic.
Now is the time to continue our previous
rituals while also creating new ones that
help remind us and center us within our values.
I invite you to take a deep breath,
pause and think about your own routines and
rituals.
What routine do you already have
that gives you the opportunity to pause and
be grateful?
I always mean to pause and drink my morning
coffee quietly while reflecting on my
day, gratitude.
But I have kids in my house,
and so that rarely happens.
Instead,
I happen to have a daily planner,
and in it there are daily prompts asking me
what I'm grateful for.
And so every morning when I sit down at my
desk, I see the planner there and I write my
gratitude.
It's not as beautiful and peaceful looking as I
would like with
the coffee image,
but it's still something,
and it works for me right now and that's what's
important.
If you feel comfortable,
you could share in the chat something that helps
you become present and grateful as you start your
day.
Shana Tova.
We can take a seat.
We pick up with the blessing for light, bottom
of 127.
I invite you to gather the four corners of your
tzitzit around you.
as we connect with the most powerful and
important of all of the metaphors for what
God is, who God is.
The experience that God is,
which is Ahavah Rabah,
great
big
abundant
powerful love.
So go ahead and just chant after me.
First two words of this
blessing.
Turn to the blessing 129.
Morning.
Shana Tova.
A few weeks ago,
my son started daycare again.
And while we had thought he's gonna be so happy,
he's gonna go,
he's gonna see all his friends.
He's gonna play with all these new toys.
He's just gonna be thrilled.
The truth
was he protested going.
He didn't want to get out of the car.
And then when we got to the door,
he didn't want to go inside,
and we kind of didn't know what to do about this.
He missed us.
He wanted to hang out at home.
He had gotten very used to with six months
of hanging out with us, with his baby
sister.
He didn't wanna be in a new environment
with lots of cool toys and all of his friends.
And so the director of the daycare sent us a
note and said
it would be helpful if you could remind him
that you too went through this once
that you too were scared and went to school
and didn't know what to expect,
and then it was okay.
It was great, that you learned, that you grew.
Remind him
that you went through this yourself and it will
help him know that he can do it too.
It's working.
It's working.
I think
also,
just time is working.
What we are about to do now as we enter
into Mi Kamokha.
Which then leads right into the amidah,
is we remind ourselves as a people that we can do
hard things.
Rabbi,
Yitz Greenberg, who I mentioned at Rosh
Hashanah,
the rabbi who talks about the dream,
how the Jewish people are carriers of a dream.
And that dream is the Garden of Eden.
You know,
a world that looks and feels and smells and tastes
like the Garden of
Eden.
A world of harmony and peace and coexistence
between peoples between humanity
and nature. That this is a dream that we
have to hold in our mind at the very same
time. The world as it could be at the very
same time as we live in the world as it
is.
And he says,
how is it that we,
as a people could do this,
can have the audacity to believe that a
different world than the
one that we're in, is possible?
This is a staggering pedagogic challenge,
he said.
And so it requires daily reminders multiple
times a day that
we have done hard things before.
That is what Mi Kamokha is here to take us into,
to remind us that you,
your people,
your an-
spiritual ancestors,
your actual ancestors and also your spiritual
lineage lets you know
you can do it because it has been done before.
Our people, as bad as Egypt was were somehow
comfortable in our misery.
We knew where our food was coming from.
We knew where the roof over our heads was.
We were terrified of the desert.
We were terrified of leaving.
The text says that we were so scared to that we were so scared of our
circumstances.
We were so oppressed by the labor and by our
and by what we were
going through that we couldn't even breathe.
We couldn't even hear Moses saying
there's a way through.
It took plagues.
It took darkness.
It took death to somehow get us to believe that we
could leave,
that we could change reality.
Michael Walzer,
the historian and political commentary writer,
says.
Wherever you are,
it is probably Egypt. Wherever you are,
it is probably Egypt. And the only way through,
and the only way out is to join hands
and to start marching.
Mi Kamokha is our reminder that we have done
hard things and a reminder that we can stand
up and join hands and start marching toward
a new reality. That miracles
are possible.
Mamonities says a miracle isn't showing you
what's impossible,
a miracle actually,
is just showing you what is possible.
Holding the dream right in front of you and
knowing we might not get there right
away,
but it is possible.
Keep marching.
So after Mi Kamokha,
which we do in the tune of Bob Marley's
Redemption Song.
Because Bob Marley too was inspired by this
vision of the exodus.
Of knowing that hard things had been done
before and could indeed
redeem even the darkest evil of chattel slavery.
That redemption is possible.
And so Mi Kamokha is like our Redemption Song,
and we sing it together,
and then we will stand for the amidah
where we locate all of those prayers for the
world that
we want
to birth into existence,
that is not actually an impossibility,
but a possibility just waiting to be born.
Four years ago at high holidays,
I said a racist thing from the bima and it was so
subtle that of the 1200 people who were
there in the house that
day,
nobody noticed.
And it was so obvious that there was one woman who
got up,
left your seat and walked into the lobby and
started crying.
And I only know this because there was
somebody who saw her.
Somebody whose wedding I've done a few months
earlier who walked up to her and said,
hey,
are you okay?
And this young woman, a professor,
a black Jew from the East Coast,
said,
no,
I'm not okay.
I feel like the rabbi just erased me.
And this person whose wedding I had done said,
you know,
I know the rabbi,
could I let her know?
And thankfully,
um,
this professor said,
yes,
you can let her know and that's how it came
to pass
that I got a chance to sit down with her and
actually hear
out of her mouth,
the way in which I'd hurt her and anyone else
in the room who was coming from the
perspective of a person of color,
and I was fully prepared to lose her over this
comment.
I had hurt her,
and I had been incredibly insensitive.
Admittedly,
I didn't even realize it.
1200 people in the room didn't realize it,
but that actually sort of drives the point
home even further.
Part of my shame in that moment was that
Mishkan's whole claim to
being a radically inclusive space felt like a sham.
You know,
it felt like it was a radically inclusive space
for white Jews.
So the seven communities of the Jewish Emergent
Network over the past 30 days have been
participating in an anti-racist curriculum
designed by
Yavilah McCoy,
who is herself a modern Orthodox black
Jewish diversity
trainer.
And in this 30 day challenge called
Confessions of the
Heart,
taken from the liturgy of the high holidays,
we've been watching short videos,
listening to podcasts, reading a piece,
reflecting, journaling on the ways
in which we participate in white supremacy,
knowingly and unknowingly,
and not just white Jews,
but also Jews of color and exploring together
how we might grow more loving,
more just and less racist in the year to come.
Part of this curriculum is confession.
So this Vidui, al cheit that we're about to go into
is for the sins of racism.
If racism,
if the heartbeat of racism is denial than the
heartbeat of anti
racism,
not just being neutral,
actually being anti racist is confession.
So this year,
we, Mishkan,
we signed the letter called Not Free to Desist,
which was written by Jews of Color, who are leaders
of Jewish organizations,
and it commits us to taking active steps
toward dismantling the white supremacy
that exists even here in
this radically inclusive Jewish community.
To start off on a path of true diversity and equity
to have more representation of the actual
Jewish community.
On our board,
our staff and in our community,
this isn't something that will happen by accident.
It's something that will happen as we take
active steps toward collectively
admitting where we have missed the mark
and how we will
not repeat those mistakes in the future.
So I'm gonna go ahead and read down this list
and I invite you to join me.
This is gonna be in English so you can
read every single word of these out loud
and like the other confessions,
you know,
it's gonna go fast,
and you're not gonna have the time to really delve
into the depth of each one of
these.
It's we're going more for quantity than quality.
But that's what the hope and expectation
that this will spark a process for
you, will wake up within you awareness that
you will follow up on over the
course of this day and over the course of
this year,
you know.
So as we go through these, as we strike our chest
and say each one of these out loud,
I invite you to think about what you may want
to have a conversation with somebody who you
trust later today or sometime next week
about and see how we together may
actually make our community in our world less
racist in the coming
year.
For the sins that we have committed
through conscious and
unconscious racial bias, for the sins we have
committed
through hardening our hearts for the need
for change,
for the sins of colluding with racism,
both openly and secretly,
for the sins we have committed through
uttering racist words
for the sins we have committed through acts
of racial micro aggression, for the
sins we have committed through insisting on
urgency and perfectionism as a
measure of human value,
I am saying al cheit.
Let's just do this,
um,
without the tune.
I'm Rabbi Steven.
I was our first rabbinical intern back when Mishkan
lived out of Rabbi Lizzie's trunk and
my laptop.
It is an honor to connect with each of you today,
and amazing to see how much this community
has grown.
Today we're called to stand before the enormity of
existence.
The liturgy of Yom Kippur asks us to recognize our
smallness,
to see how we are but one part of a much larger
world.
We tend to live most of our lives,
believing that we are in control of our own
small corner of the
universe.
But this year in particular,
we have seen how the best laid plans can
change in an instant,
how we don't really know what tomorrow might bring.
And in fact,
very little of the world is within our control.
There is a lot I imagine we would like to see
different, that
we would like to see change for the better.
We are a time in which there is so much
brokenness in the world around
us.
And we're called both by our inner empathic
impulse and
our tradition to meet that brokenness with empathy,
with justice,
with the desire for change.
But faced with the enormity of the problems ahead of us and
recognizing today our own ability to control
so little of
the world,
what do we do? We call out Avinu Malkeinu.
Our parent,
our sovereign.
What is it possible for us to do?
We are so small and the world is so big.
How can I?
How can you change it all?
Here's the thing.
It's not up to you to change it all.
There is no way that you have the power or
the responsibility to
do everything. That's okay.
So loosen your grip a little bit.
Be gentle with yourself.
Breathe.
Let go of the idea that it is only up
to
you. We're not responsible for doing
everything yet if you are alive right now,
know
that is because the universe has conspired in
such a way to bring you into
existence at this very moment.
For there is only
something that you can bring into the world.
If you are here right now,
it is because you are needed.
There's some small act that only you can give.
There's some small kindness that only you can offer.
There is a uniqueness,
a talent an ability that is only yours to give to
this world in
need.
So set aside that ego that tells you that you
need to do it all
so you can create space to dig deeply into
yourself and
find that vital,
bright,
beautiful part of you.
That unique and necessary thing that this
world so desperately needs.
We know, history of our people tells us that
redemption comes as the cumulative effect
of innumerable
small acts.
So while it may not be up to any one of us to
change
everything. Together,
change is possible.
I want to invite you to
look through the Machzor if you have it in
front of you.
And if you don't, look through the prayers
and the hopes
and the dreams and the yearnings that you
have been nursing
quietly, journaling about, speaking about
maybe even unaware of until this moment
but now invited
to place them into this sort of open arc, this
plea, avinu malkeinu
help us. Forgive us.
Help us start again.
Help us get through this.
What is the prayer that's on your heart?
That's on your lips?
So take a few moments
now,
if you want to read through the Hebrew,
or the English on these pages. We'll come
back together in a few
moments and join each other
to
sing them into the heavens.
We're about to begin the Torah service.
Like every other part of this service for this
high holidays,
it'll be a little bit different from the way we
would be celebrating this if we were all together
at the
Vic.
And there's some things that are going to be
the same.
We're going to take the Torahs out of the ark.
We're gonna hug them,
We're gonna love them.
We're going to dance in the streets with them.
We're going to celebrate with Torah.
Jews over the ages have gone to great great
lengths to be able to read
and hear and,
most importantly,
study and internalize
Torah. Torah is not just a book.
It's not a scroll that has words written on it
that we venerate like it's
a god.
You might think,
you know,
the way that we celebrate it and and hold it and
look at it that we're worshiping Torah. We're not
worshiping Torah. We're worshiping God. The unity that flows throughout
the universe that connects all of us and that
inspires wisdom within us
nnd that has inspired the wisdom of our people
transmitted through the ages in the form of
Torah, not limited to but in this moment that
sort of the embodiment that we
hold.
And so I want to invite you to
you know,
sort of reach out in the way that we might in
a service,
all in person and get close with your finger to
the computer screen and reach
out as the Torah is passing and and get a
little kiss,
get a little bit closer.
The whole idea is that this is something that
we as a people
love and considered to be an expression of
love from the divine
and the closer we get to it,
even as we socially distance as we dance
and we sing the closer we get,
the more inspired and the more hopeful and
the stronger we become.
So,
uh,
let's get this Torah service started.
Yay Torah! Torah!
Yay Torah!
The Torah portion that we will read today
details a list of sacrifices and
actions that the high priest would undertake
on Yom Kippur in the time of the temple,
things like sprinkling blood and tying strings
around goats,
things that feels so far from our time and
place today.
And yet year after year,
we still read these same portions.
Not because we think that one year soon we're
going to go back to tying a string on a goat and
pushing it off a cliff.
But because these things remind us that the
work we're doing on Yom Kippur,
the ethical soul searching, the connection
that we make with ourselves and with others
is actually not enough.
We need the ritual.
In addition to the personal actions that we take.
Rituals don't always make sense to us.
In fact,
sometimes the best rituals are ones that
specifically don't make sense
because their role isn't to explain things in
our lives.
Their role is to elevate our lives, to give them meaning in a different way.
So there's actually something very soothing
about having a formulaic
ritual to settle into.
It helps us disconnect
our thinking brains,
the ones that we engage when we do teshuvah.
When we connect to other people,
when we do introspection and we beat our
chests for our sins,
ritual helps us move out of that type of
engagement with the world and
move into a deeper part of our brain, our emotive
connective,
primal experience.
So as you read the readings today,
I invite you to picture not just what's happening,
but how it would transform you to be part of
an experience like
this,
something that is visceral,
something that is not understandable and
something that has to be undertaken in community
and know that we are recreating these
rituals in small ways today by
showing up on Yom Kippur so that all of the
work that we've done over the last
several weeks or hours becomes more powerful,
it becomes an embodied experience,
not just a memory of a thought,
but a memory of an action that will then
carry us to live differently in the
coming year.
So as we call these aliyots,
if you feel like any of the groups that we
mentioned speak to you,
you say to yourself,
yeah,
I actually think that that applies to me,
too.
Stand up.
Join for the aliyah.
We'd love to know what you're doing,
so share it in the chat.
Also,
just a brief time reminder that family
services are set to start at 10:30.
So do a quick time check and make sure
that you click on that separate link
if you're ready to join family services.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a priest who
would just
do the work for us?
Atone for us.
Not how it works.
For 2000 years we have been the priests of
our lives.
We are mamlekhet
kohanim goy
kadosh,
the Kingdom of Priests and the holy nation
tasked with
atoning for ourselves,
you know?
And if it's a sin against God,
so then making confession to God.
But if it's a sin against another person,
I got news for you as we have discussed,
you know,
no matter how many times you beat your
chest in this service,
that actually doesn't do the work.
And, you know, what we learned from reading this
parsha
as you'll see is it's actually messy.
You know,
the messiness of animal slaughter described
in the parsha is
mirrored by the emotional messiness of atonement.
You know,
regret,
reconciliation,
teshuvah in our lives.
And we get to do that now.
You know,
once upon a time there was a priest who did it,
but we don't get that.
Now we get to do it with and for one another.
And that brings us to how we're gonna call
aliyot this morning,
and this first aliyah
this first aliyah is for the people who are
guiding and leading our
community,
our board and why
and how is this connected to the parsha?
Because a Jewish community,
a spiritual community is an intentional community.
It is a group of people who decide to be part
of this
little creation.
You know,
this vision of what the world could look like
and here at Mishkan
our mission is to help people find purpose
and connection and
inspiration and to create a community in
which people could bring their whole
selves.
You know,
with all of our messy differences into dialogue
with and community with celebration with
support for one another.
And that's what we've been doing for nine years.
Yaamdu
May they stand, all of the members of
Mishkan's board,
including Mark Achler,
our current board chair.
Lisa Portnoy,
our incoming board chair.
Jane Charney,
our secretary.
Al Rosenberg, Hannah Bloom, Shira Marks,
Adam Case, Avi Lewittes,
Stephanie Cohen and Michael Kornick.
L'aliyah
harishona.
When you create a new Jewish community,
when you create anything,
there is a sense of purpose to it.
You know,
there's a sense of this needs to exist for a
reason.
You know,
otherwise we wouldn't be here.
We'd all be somewhere else and our our
raison d'être,
our purpose is to create a space where
people can bring their
whole selves to something bigger than
themselves.
You know,
a Jewish space where you can find a sense
of what you're meant to do in the world, a
purpose.
Meaning where you confined connection to
other people, to God, to your
deeper why and finally to inspiration.
And these people care so deeply about that
mission. And I wanna give a loving shout out
to Mark
whose tenure as board chair
is coming up and and say,
you have been the- You have been
the exemplary board chair.
You have been the best board chair anybody
could have imagined or hoped for in my
position.
And I'm sure,
Rachel Cort,
who is not here recording this with me,
but I'm sure she would agree if she were,
there's,
ah,
moment in the Torah where Moses is
leading the Israelites into
battle.
And,
um,
every time Moses puts his hands in the air,
the Israelites are able to fight and they're
able to prevail.
And when Moses' arms fall,
they fail, as well.
And so Aaron, Aaron,
the high priest who you just learned about,
comes and puts a rock next to Moses so he
can sit there and hold up Moses'
arms.
And this is like the kind of board chair, Mark,
that you have
been. Somebody who is just incredibly supportive
and
not without moments of questioning and
challenging,
but always from a place of love and support.
And I'm so grateful for your leadership these
past three
years and you have always made yourself available.
You are a busy guy with a ton of other things
going on, with an organization that you run,
with other boards
that you sit on.
Um,
you have never failed to make introductions
to send us articles and mostly
to
answer the phone and,
um,
be present in the most palpable and meaningful
ways for all
of us.
So I want to say thank you and Lisa,
our treasurer,
who is our incoming board chair, how excited
we all are
to
see your star rise as our next board chair.
And just to say that everybody on the board
thank you from the bottom of our
heart.
We couldn't do this without you.
Yaamdu Rhonda Abrams,
Rachel Cort, Rabbi Deena Cowans, Ashley Donohue,
Ilana Gleicher-Bloom,
Hannah Rehak,
Ellie Spitz,
Aviva Stein.
Rebecca Stevens,
Rabbi Jeffs Stombaugh who is now with the
Well in Detroit,
Zach Weinberg,
Rabbi Lauren Henderson,
who is now at work Or Hadash in Atlanta.
Anna Wolfe who is now in
rabbinical school at JTS.
Steven Chaitman,
Arielle Dubowe, Shterna Goldbloom, Jordan Golding,
Katy Ibur, Rachel Mylan,
Amy Nadal,
Essie Shachar-Hill and Rabbi Allison Tick Brill.
Welcome.
Come on up.
And mostly just know how appreciated,
valued and loved you are by so so many
people whose lives you touch every
day as you have graced and blessed this
organization with your talent.
Thank you.
We, in creating this this thing this Jewish
project called
Mishkan Chicago, um,
get to employ, get to have on our staff people
whose training and talent comes from so
many different backgrounds.
That is actually quite astonishing.
um,
how seamlessly the Judaism that we create together
reflects all of the different inputs of
experience that people are bringing.
And I just feel so lucky to get to learn from
you from you,
our staff,
every single day. You come with backgrounds
in community organizing
and engagement
work and Judaism and communications and
education and anti racism and anti
oppression work and theater.
Oh,
man,
we've got a lot of theater happening at
Mishkan Chicago right now and social work.
And did I already say music?
Um,
and inclusion
work and disability rights.
And,
um,
conversion classes.
And, and, and, and I just feel so,
so moved and grateful that we,
as a common project,
get to build a Jewish community that reflects
our values.
And that reflects the kind of light that each
one of you is capable of
bringing into this world.
And that Mishkan can be a platform for that.
It's an honor.
Yaamdu,
come forward.
Everybody who became a builder in this past
Hebrew calendar year.
L'aliyah hashenit.
And if you've joined in the last five minutes
or in the last couple of days and
we didn't have the chance to invite you into
this aliyah,
I invite you to stand where you are and join
this aliyah.
So in this last year,
almost 100 people became builders,
people,
couples,
families,
um,
joined our community.
This is against a backdrop of people really
questioning the relationship to
organized religion across the country,
not just in the Jewish community but across
religious traditions and
in the midst of COVID.
And we were really concerned.
We thought it was possible when we went
virtual that the
draw, the draw of being part of a Jewish
community,
which is,
you know,
putting your arms around each other and
taking care of each other in person and seeing
each other and singing with each other.
We we really thought that many of you
would disappear,
and not only didn't that happen,
but more and more people,
I think,
realized that it's in these specific moments
that we actually need each other more
than we might have before.
And,
um,
you started joining not from just Chicago,
but from places like Washington, DC.
And Liberty Texas.
Um,
this is an aliyah for all of you who stepped
up in this past year to
be known and to know,
you know?
When we went into quarantine,
we invited builders to make phone calls to
one another just to check in,
and almost 200 of you stepped forward and said,
how can I help?
And out of those phone calls came grocery
store runs and food
drop offs and friendships and relationships
that would not
be possible if you hadn't stepped forward
and said,
here I am.
Hineni.
What can I do?
Rely on me.
We're living in a moment right now where
you have options for how to experience
spirituality.
You can get online and for free.
you know,
watch videos,
hear music, be taken on spiritual journeys
that really will be
quite effective in,
you know,
helping you tap that deep place of,
you know,
spiritually connection.
And will ask nothing of you.
Won't ask you to put your name in a field or
put your credit card number in or tell
anybody who you are, will just let you remain
completely anonymous.
They won't bother you.
You know you can have that experience and
not be bothered.
And to become a builder at Mishkan is to
want to be
bothered or rather to want to not be
anonymous in Jewish community, to want
to be part of something,
you know,
to step forward and say hineni I'm here.
What can I do?
How can I contribute? And it's a really beautiful
thing to see people actually doing
that.
And so if this sounds compelling to you,
if you're watching this realizing,
you know,
you thought what you wanted was high holiday
tickets and you come to high holidays and then
go back to doing to
Jewing however you Jewed before and then maybe
like,
based on what you've seen and based on a little of
what I have and other people have said, maybe you
actually want to be part of something bigger than
yourself, that's going to ask something, that's
going to demand something of you in this coming
year. That's gonna involve you in the bigger
project of building something that creates in
the world a little corner,
a little corner of the world where we live and
practice,
Jewish values in this particular way, in the style
that is Mishkan
Chicago.
If you want to help build that,
I invite you to join as a builder.
Um,
the information is in the chat.
Just click it,
do it.
I guarantee you won't be sorry.
And I can't wait to welcome you with open arms.
Virtual open arms for right now.
But open arms eventually. In the next
aliyah
We'll-
we'll read about the continuation of the ritual
of two goats.
Spoiler alert: It doesn't end very well for the
goat who had this string tied around it
and was supposed to carry off all the sins of
the people of
Israel. On the flip side of the spectrum,
this aliyah, we'd like to honor those people
who've helped carry our community since we went
virtual in March.
People who have hosted things like virtual
Shabbat dinners and anti racist book groups
and meatless charcuterie board making and
so much more.
So please join us in honoring and thanking
them for all that they've done to help carry this
community.
If you also have done something to help
carry this community,
whether that's showing up on a Friday night and
singing your heart out in your own home or
connecting with other people who need help,
you're invited to
also
stand and join for this
aliyah.
Yaamdu
everyone who helps carry this community
wherever and whenever they are, l'aliyah ha'revi'it.
I want to take a moment now
to honor everyone who survived something this year.
This is sort of a break in between aliyot.
We have a blessing specifically for
survival,
for making it through something, you know?
A
harrowing experience may be a long journey.
Um,
maybe a car accident.
You may be watching this and you know exactly who
you are as I say that word survival.
Making it through something.
You know who you are.
You survived COVID.
You got a clean report from your oncologist
after a year of treatment,
maybe it'll take you a minute to realize you
belong in this group.
You know,
you survived a rough pregnancy or you
survived a failed
pregnancy.
You got out of an abusive relationship.
You survived the death of someone who you really
loved and relied on.
I want to invite, you, anybody who has
survived something this
year to stand up to recognize yourself,
your strength,
your resilience,
your power.
If you're in the room with other people,
so allow them to celebrate and recognize
you as well.
If you're alone, know,
that we collectively will respond to you,
as you say,
the blessing recognizing having made it
through something.
So here's what's gonna happen.
Anybody who this applies
to, you stand, and you're gonna say this
blessing along with me.
We'll put- print the words on the screen and
then for everybody
who you know,
this wasn't you this year.
Um, lucky you.
You get to affirm and witness and celebrate
everyone
for whom this is the case by responding,
and we'll put those words on the screen as well.
So I invite you to stand
and say with me.
And everybody else say
amen.
May the one who has been good to you
continue to be good to
you.
Continue to bless you and grace you, amen.
Okay,
and now I want to take that energy of power
and of strength and of
survival and leverage it into our prayer for
healing, into mishaberakh.
So as you bring to mind now,
people who are in need of this prayer,
people in need of this blessing,
people who we're praying for. I also wanna
bring into the room
prayer for the people who are caring for and
supporting the people who were praying
for.
You know,
when we say the Mishaberakh it is often
because we're sort of at our wits end.
We're at our our abilities end. We've done
everything we can do.
You know?
We're not doctors,
we can't prescribe medicine or do the surgery.
Or do the physical or mental therapy necessary
to help that person we're thinking
about move from sickness into health until
we think about
them and call them and we check in on
them and we pray for them.
And something we can do is support people
who are supporting them.
Now I invite you to share people that you're
thinking about. Healers and those who
are in need of healing,
as we go into our Mishaberakh.
If you're thinking about somebody,
and you want to stand to say their names,
sort of even with greater power,
say their name out into the world.
So we're all holding all of those names and
praying for every single one of their recovery.
In this next aliyah we'll read about the ritual that
the person who brought the goat off to Azazel
undergoes in order to come back into the
encampment.
It feels like the Torah's way of recognizing that
there are people out there getting their hands
deep into it in order to make things happen
for the entire community.
So for this aliyah, we'd like to recognize and
honor our organizing team. That small
group of people who have been putting in the time,
week after week and month after month to
help us as a community and to help
individuals in the Mishkan community walk
the walk of justice.
So we'd like to honor them with this aliyah,
and we'd like to invite you to get more involved.
In a few minutes,
you'll hear a direct ask about one specific
way that you can contribute to the
campaigns that we've been working on.
But we also want to ask you to fill out that
spiritual pledge form, to
let us know what excites you about making
the world a better place,
so that in the next year you could be like these
people who take on important tasks for the
community in order to do something bigger
than each of us individually.
Yaamdu
the organizing team.
L'aliyah ha'amisheet.
Hi.
My name is Elli Krandel.
I've been a member of Mishkan since 2010
and I've been a part of the justice team since
2018.
I wanted to take a minute today and talk to you
about investing in your local ballot issues
and local
candidates during our upcoming election.
It's really easy to get caught up in the many
conversations about our national candidates,
but the reality is that we have more power
on local issues.
Our voices are louder and more likely to be heard,
and our individual vote makes a bigger impact.
Change happens on a local level. This November,
you specifically,
folks living and voting in Illinois have the
opportunity to take a really simple action
that will
have a concrete impact on the lives of all
Illinoisans.
After much hard work and organizing,
we get to vote this November on a fair tax in
Illinois.
Right now,
Illinois has a flat tax,
which means that no matter your income level,
you pay 4.95% of your income in taxes.
With a fair tax, also known as a progressive
tax or a graduated tax,
individuals with a higher income will pay a
higher tax,
and individuals with a lower income will pay
a lower tax. Seems fair,
right?
If past, 97% of Illinois will get a tax cut
and only
those making over $250,000 a year will pay
more in taxes.
Illinois has a huge budget deficit and for has
for a long as I can remember,
due to a revenue crisis.
The fair tax will raise $3.4 billion yes,
B, billion in revenue,
which can support incredibly important
causes such as housing,
health care,
education,
mental health services and so much more.
As a Chicagoan,
it's been really devastating to see the
ongoing effects of our budget crisis.
As a staff member and an interim housing agency,
I saw firsthand the impacts of the lack of
affordable housing for people in need.
We have no safety net for individuals with
mental health needs, for people who have
lost jobs,
for people are really trying their best to survive
in a system that is always against them,
never for them. In this moment of uprising,
as we recognize the pervasive racism
throughout our country,
both in our policies and in our hearts and minds,
passing a fair tax is one small way we can
begin to work towards true equity.
We need money in our state budget if we're going to
provide the critical services that all Illinoisans
especially black and brown folks,
have been denied for far too long.
I urge you to check out the links on your
screen to sign a fair tax pledge card
saying that you will vote yes on the fair tax in
November. To
learn more about issues in your area and to
learn about candidates locally that you might
not know about.
We have seen time and time again,
how our local representatives and our local
politicians make the key decisions that
affect our everyday
lives.
No matter what issue you care about most,
you have to start at the first level,
though,
which is voting.
And now I invite everyone to share in the chat
one local issue that you commit to learning about our
championing this year.
Thank you so much.
Shana Tova.
Thank you.
yasher koach to
all of our Torah readers.
You are incredible.
Bless you and thank you.
Um,
we're gonna turn now to our Haftara,
Isaiah,
before we go there,
I wanna zoom out for a moment.
We'll zoom back in.
I promise.
People have asked me where the name for
this community Mishkan comes from.
It has everything to do with our mission and
our vision of what
we as an organization do and what Judaism
can do in the world.
So I want to describe this on two levels.
The first level is very mundane,
but really important.
When we held our first service nine years
ago in Jacob's Living Room,
we knew that we had a very diverse spread
of backgrounds in the
room and people who were comfortable with Hebrew
and also really uncomfortable and unfamiliar
with Hebrew.
And so we wanted to figure out a name that
would be accessible
for the average person,
whether or not they knew Hebrew,
something that everybody could pronounce when reading it.
Mishkan,
Mishkan,
Mishkan.
Maybe you're a Hebrew speaker,
Mishkan.
All good.
Anybody listening
who knows what the Mishkan was
knows what you're saying when you say that word.
Mishka,
ah,
the Mishkan in the Torah.
So okay,
that's the first part.
And it has to do with accessibility across
backgrounds.
The second thing,
this is going a level deeper.
What was the Mishkan in the Torah?
What-
What are we actually referring to?
If you can imagine or maybe you've seen
this when Cirque du Soleil comes to
town and all of the trucks and all of the
equipment and the poles and the fabric
and the number of people and,
um,
the effort and the vision and the organization
that it takes to create this
traveling space in which once it is erected,
the most incredible feats of human talent are
on display and shared by thousands and
thousands of people.
That is what the Mishkan in the Torah was.
It was this immense feat of human creativity
and collaboration.
And it wasn't that,
you know,
at the end of a show,
you felt God's presence.
It was that God's presence infused all of that
work and all of that collaboration and
creativity.
And also,
you know, what you experienced when you went in there.
Um,
but it was not just,
you know,
the work of one master designer,
Moses.
It was actually the collaboration of hundreds
and hundreds thousands and thousands of people
bringing the best of themselves contributing
talent and also
money to make this thing happen.
That has been the founding ethos of Mishkan
from the beginning.
And,
you know,
if you were around in those early days,
and some of you were,
it was very much like a clown car would,
you know,
pull up to wherever we were having services,
you know,
a living room in Lakeview,
Diversey Harbor.
You know,
once we moved into our office here in Ravenswood,
we've now moved office space is three times
in the same building,
but a swarm of volunteers would,
you know,
gather around my Honda Civic hybrid may
its memory
be a blessing and,
you know,
take boxes of siddurim, of prayer books out
of my car and a big
sandwich board sign that said Mishkan and
very often trays of food and
blankets and bring it wherever we were going
and we would set up and we would daven
and we would eat and we
would sing, and we would pray
and then we'd sing more.
And then at the end of the night,
everybody would bring all the stuff back to my car,
fold up shop,
and we do it again next week.
And there was a dynamism and a collaborative
spirit to that that was actually
reminiscent of the ancient Mishkan and
I mentioned this now because nine years later,
Even as we have 2000 square foot office
space here in this
building in Ravenswood,
and we're a little more stable in terms of
where we have service is week to week.
We don't switch it up every single time.
We still value that creative spark that is
required to constantly be on the move,
and we've actually honed in on it even more.
You know,
the more stable you are,
the more necessary it is to consistently be
experimenting and figuring out ways
to innovate.
Be creative.
As I mentioned earlier,
we have an army, a small army, nonetheless
of theater people on our staff,
writers and directors and actors and I don't
think that's a coincidence.
And I think about Moses. Moses,
who did not actually design the Mishkan.
He worked with a guy named Bezalel and
Aholiab,
and they were basically the artists in
residence whose artistic
and strategic vision created the structures
that allowed the work
and the spiritual energy to flow.
So I mention all of that because over the
years we have leaned on the
talents of artists and one specifically,
Rebecca Stevens,
who comes with a design
background and experience design and
performance art.
And she has helped us design spiritual
experiences for the past six
years.
Seven years,
um,
she's worked with me to build games,
a table games for Passover to make sure
that hundreds of people attending a Seder
aren't just sitting back being passively
entertained by a reader at the front of the room,
but are actively engaged.
She's designed high holiday spiritual
scavenger hunts,
the mishmash groups,
any small groups that we're doing right now,
and all of our in person offerings have
Rebecca's fingerprints on them.
And she just joined our full time staff as
director of strategy and design.
She's basically our Bezalel
and this is allowing for a deepening of that
artistic sensibility across all of our
work,
including our family programs.
We're really excited about this.
So as we move into hearing the prophetic words of
Isaiah,
I know that's a little awkward of segue
because he's not exactly a guy
known in Jewish literature for the artfulness
of his
rhetoric or delivery.
He's sort of he's a sort of like a guy with a
megaphone on a soap box,
you know,
or or a person who's just saying things that
nobody wants to
hear,
but that we all need to hear.
And that's why the rabbis put him front and
center on
Yom Kippur, the most well attended synagogue
day of the year is precisely because this guy
Isaiah,
has a message that is timeless,
that is vital and that none of us really wants to
encounter if we're being honest with
ourselves because it could make us very
uncomfortable.
Yom Kippur is actually about experiencing
discomfort,
not performing it just by fasting and,
you know,
wearing white and abstaining from leather
and sex and
and food and drink.
But by really encountering the things that
make us uncomfortable and in order
to do that and not run away,
we need artfulness.
And we need to think about how we
integrate this into our lives.
And that is why Rebecca is going to help
unpack it with us.
After Eli delivers this- delivers our
Haftara.
So thank you,
Eli,
for rendering Isaiah for us.
And thank you,
Rebecca,
for helping us integrate what religion is really
supposed to be about on
experiential level to help transform us and
transform the world.
Here we go.
I want to start by admitting that there's a kind
of despair that settles in me during Yom
Kippur.
I am so far from being the person I think I
should be.
The world is so far from being a place that is
good or kind or fair.
I am complicit and how terrible the world is
for so many.
For all the talk of being grateful for the
chance to reflect, for the chance to improve,
I know the truth.
It's hopeless.
I really hate this feeling,
and the problem is that this feeling has spilled
out past the bounds of Yom Kippur onto the
calendar.
The west coast is locked inside
as ash rains down.
The Midwest is locked inside
as the pandemic rises.
The south evacuates as hurricanes surge.
We don't even know how to begin to count our debt.
More and more of us are beginning to arrive
at what feels like a truth.
It's hopeless.
The environmental writer Eric Dean Wilson writes,
whether we like it or not,
a confrontation with our limits,
our own demise,
certainly.
But for the moment,
I mean the limits of our way of life,
our nation and perhaps the global
organization of humanity seems to be
arriving quite soon.
In response,
I often hear variations on the question.
Is there hope to solve the climate crisis?
In all honesty when I hear that question,
is there hope?
I'm not sure I understand what's being asked.
Wilson lingers on
this question about our climate crisis.
But it's also the question I land on
mid morning on Yom Kippur.
Is there hope?
Wilson points out that this question often means-
Do we get to continue on like this?
Can we promise this is as bad as it will get?
Will the cost be minimal?
Well,
will my people be safe?
Will I be comfortable?
One could plausibly reward this question asked.
Can we still be optimistic about what
happens next?
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,
reminds us that historically,
Jews haven't found much use for optimism.
He writes,
one of the most important distinctions I have
learned in the course of reflection on Jewish
history is the difference between optimism
and hope.
Knowing what we do of our past,
no Jew could be an optimist,
but Jews have never, despite a history of
sometimes awesome suffering,
given up hope.
What precisely is hope
without optimism?
What does it look like to have hope in a
world that we're not optimistic about?
Sacks suggest those who hope refused to be
comforted while the hoped
for outcome is not yet reached.
That is why,
when the prophets saw evil in the world,
they refused to be comforted.
On Yom Kippur,
we seemingly practice self denial,
that is,
to say,
personal discomfort to atone for where we
have missed the mark.
The plan,
more or less is that by occupying a state of
discomfort for 25 hours,
we reconcile with God. But then like
clockwork every year the Prophet Isaiah
storms into the service just as we've settled in
to
let us know that he knows we're up to
and he's definitely not impressed.
He asks,
is this the fast
I want? A day for people to starve their bodies?
You call that a fast? A day when adonai will
look upon you with favor
Isaiah's blistering evaluation of our
performative act of penance,
which rings out in this beautiful translation
by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat
is followed by instructions that are as direct
and clear as they are
seemingly impossible.
This is the fast I want. Unlock the chains of wickedness.
Untie the knots of servitude.
Let the oppressed to go free, their bonds broken.
Share your bread with the hungry and
welcome the homeless into your home.
When you see the naked,
clothe them,
all people are your kin.
Do not ignore them.
This directive is not unfamiliar to us.
It's general outline forms
the backbone of most major religions.
Do a better job taking care of others,
particularly those less fortunate than you.
We hear it every year.
Most of us agreed and feel some degree of
shame of how we don't dedicate more of our
energy to healing the world.
And we admire the people that do,
and we go back to our busy,
exhausting,
complicated lives,
trying to squeeze in some amount of contributing
to make the world a better place.
This year,
as disaster rains down around us,
I hear what Isaiah promises is on the other
side of remaking the world.
I hear him say,
if we do this,
then you will rebuild yourselves.
You will restore foundations laid long ago.
You will be known as the one who restores
what has fallen. This year
I hear this promise,
and I think,
oh,
thank God someone has a plan.
The thing about this plan is that it strikes us
as unrealistic because it is so large and
requires fundamental shifts and how we operate.
But Isaiah suggests to us that our inward focus on
Yom Kippur is misplaced and that we should
think not at the individual level but at the
collective one.
Thinking collectively is massively difficult.
Acting collectively is even harder.
Solving homelessness,
hunger,
oppression,
these things seem like good ideas,
but too large to make any real progress on.
And because they are so large,
many of us don't take tangible steps towards
making this progress.
In an article published in the Atlantic in
January of this year,
Eitan Hersh,
a professor of political science at
Tufts University,
shared the data from his 2018 survey on
political engagement.
In it,
he determined that those who were college
educated reported they spend more time on
politics than other Americans do,
but less than 2% of that time involves
volunteering in political organizations.
The rest has spent mostly on news consumption,
41% of the time.
Discussion and debate 26% and contemplating politics a
lot.
21%.
Not everyone in our community went to college,
and not everyone fits into the statistic of how
they spend their time.
But it's worth saying we're spending 88% of
our time reading,
watching,
thinking and discussing. Sort of like how
most of us are spending all
of Yom Kippur.
Isaiah would probably suggest we increase
that 2% of action,
at least by a few percentage points. Now,
an obvious critique of this is that being involved
in politics is not the only way to contribute
to the common
good.
So I want to broaden my points to suggest
that most of the time we think about
prayer as reading,
thinking and talking.
And these days,
watching screens. And just as it might help us to think about politics as
actually comprised of action.
Prayer might be comprised of action, as well.
I say this in part because my own experience
of prayer has so little to do with reading or
speaking.
I would tell you that I am not particularly
religious and generally not observe it,
which is true,
except,
of course,
that I am the director of strategy and design
at Mishkan
Chicago and I spent all day and lately a lot
of the night working
on religious services.
If it got to be a little late a little later in that
dinner party and you asked me why I
converted to Judaism,
I would give you a bunch of reasons about love
and marriage and family and culture and child
rearing.
And then if you press me,
I would probably admit that when it came
down to it,
believing in God seems more interesting to
me than simply ruling it out.
I still haven't ruled it out,
but I've never in my life had a conversation
with God.
Except,
of course,
nearly every holiday any of you have attended
in the past five years here at Mishkan
has had my attention on it.
I do not think of myself as someone who prays,
but I am always shaping how we pray together.
To me.
This is what the poet Mary Oliver is getting
at when she says,
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention.
On a day designated for prayer,
I want to simply suggest that we pray all year
with our attention on how we choose to focus
it.
This is what I think Isaiah might be kicking in
the proverbial door to say.
Our fast means nothing if our attention and
by extension,
our actions are in the wrong place.
So I'll return to my question.
Is there hope?
Or maybe the better version of this question?
What does it mean to hope in a world that
we are not optimistic about?
I'll answer like this.
I have a child,
a child born into lock down on April 3rd,
born into a hospital
so strained for resources at the time that I
gave birth,
that when I asked a doctor,
will you have enough masks?
He said to me,
I hope so.
Born at a moment when tests were so scarce
that we entered the hospital untested
and my husband was not allowed to leave
my delivery room for four days.
The first question many,
many people asked me when I told them my
son had arrived
was - was your husband able to be there
while you delivered?
My child was born into 2020 and he'll only
know the world going forward,
not the world
we grieve and wish we could- and wish we could return to
in the heat of an extraordinarily hot summer
as the sounds of ambulances mingled
with the sounds of helicopters. As the
pandemic, with the protests,
I sat up late at night holding a newborn and
thinking about what he will
need to live in this world and what I might
hope for him.
What I have come up with is that he will
need to understand that he is indelibly
linked to other people,
that his fate lies with theirs,
that he must have both resilience and grace
to not just survive the crises into which
he is born,
but to find meaning and joy within them.
This, I think, is what Isaiah brings to us
midway through this day.
Our fate is linked to other people,
people we choose and people we don't choose.
It will be our ability,
ability to act collectively,
the ability to direct and sustain our attention
that will bring the possibility of a liveable
world,
what version,
we have no idea,
in to view.
May you be inscribed in the Book of Life.
May each of us
make it to this point next year.
And if we do, may we be reminded that it
will be because of what we
choose to pay attention to between this day
of fasting and the next. How we choose to
pray, when we leave this day behind.
I wish for you the sort of hope that you can
build as a sukkah,
a shelter. And- and invite in others from
the storm that is
raging.
The art of losing seems like it shouldn't be
hard to master.
Death is,
after all, the only thing guaranteed any of us
in our lives and we will
meet- we will meet death throughout our lives,
always at the wrong time,
even if it was our loved ones
time. The
art of losing seems like it shouldn't be too
hard to master.
Death is all around us.
We're reading about it daily.
We're reading about so much of it,
perhaps,
that our hearts have become somewhat
numb to death.
So you might think the art of losing shouldn't be
hard to master except when it's not a statistic
in the paper.
But it's your mom,
your dad,
your sister,
your brother,
your child,
your best friend.
Then
losing is indeed a disaster,
even though the art of losing shouldn't be
hard to master.
And the only other people who understand
this are people who
share this sacred,
painful fellowship of loss.
Yizkor, this fellowship of loss.
This is the time we set aside to formally
include in our
prayers and our davening,
the family and friends that have died more
expansively and at
greater length than we do for Mourner's Kaddish
during every other service.
You may know this Ashkenazi custom,
which is that if you have two living parents, you
sit this service out because inevitably you
too will
join this sacred fellowship of loss.
But until then,
you should go call your mother or your father.
You should enjoy who you have while you have them.
And I want to say there's another theory,
which is that mourners needs someone in
the room to say amen as you're saying
Kaddish.
So it's not everyone's custom to sit this
service out.
So if you are here now and you intend to stay,
maybe there's somebody else who you're remembering.
You are welcome in this sacred fellowship of loss.
No one chooses to be here.
No one takes pleasure in joining this fellowship
and thank God for the time and space that
our tradition gives to
honor those who shaped us so that we can
cry and laugh
and remember among the aspects of in person
prayer that are the most challenging during
these times,
I think this mourning practice and
specifically saying Kaddish in a
minyan
are the most challenging to do at a distance.
So we're going to just have to bridge that
distance with our hearts and our intentions
wrapping our collective arms around each
other and supporting each other in our
shared losses,
even at a distance.
Knowing we are here with you, so many of us.
Millions of Jews around the world today
who share this fellowship of loss are here
with you.
So we recite yizkor on each of the major Jewish
festivals.
But I think the high holidays,
you know,
as we're thinking about our lives,
you know,
big picture and who we are and who shaped
us and who loved us into being.
I think we feel more connected to those who
we've lost today and more people show up
to Yom Kippur yizkor than at any other point
in the year.
Also,
the rituals of the day bring us closer to the
realm of the
angels and the spirits.
It almost feels like the veil between the
world of the living and the world of
the dead is a little more transparent.
Grief is hard to pin
down.
Hard to describe,
hard to predict,
the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
wrote recently in The New
Yorker article called Notes on Grief
about her father's death this summer.
She said, we don't know how we will grieve until
we grieve.
I don't particularly like t-shirts,
but I spent four hours on a customization
website designing t-shirts to
memorialize my father,
trying out fonts and colors and images.
On some,
I put his initials and on others the Igbo words “omekannia” or “oyilinnia,”
which are similar in meaning, both meaning
her father's daughter
but more exultant,
more pride struck.
Often.
I pause to cry.
Often I think of what he would think of them.
He viewed my interest in fashion,
especially less conventional choices,
with an accepting amusement.
He would approve of some t-shirts,
I think. It is design as therapy,
filling the silences I choose because I must
spare my loved ones
my endless,
roiling thoughts.
I must conceal how hard grief's iron clamp
is.
I finally understand why people get tattoos of
those they have lost. The need to proclaim
not merely the
loss,
but the love,
the continuity.
I am my father's daughter.
It is an act of resistance and refusal. Grief
telling you that it is over
and your heart saying that it is not. Grief trying
to shrink your love to the past and your
heart
saying that it is present.
It does not matter whether I want to be
changed because I am changed.
Some of you are here to remember parents
who watched over
you and nursed you and stayed up late with
you and cried with you about things that
felt really important to you at the time and
that they knew were insignificant in the grand
scheme
but they took seriously just to support you as
a kid and as a
teenager and as a young adult and as a parent
they were proud of you, even though they sometimes
didn't say it.
And they made all manner of sacrifices for you,
for which you will never be able to fully pay
back or even to really,
really acknowledge.
Some of you are here to remember a wife or
husband.
A
partner and maybe someone whom with whom you
were truly united in hopes and pains and
frustrations and failures
and achievements.
A person with whom you created a home,
raised kids,
raised pets, traveled,
went to the theater and to movies,
just sat around the house,
some of you remembering siblings,
brothers and sisters who shared the youthful
adventures of childhood and
adolescence and with whom you had
ongoing relationships into adulthood
as you began to care for your aging parents.
Some of you are here to remember your children
entrusted to
you for far too brief a period of time, whom you
cared for and whose lives were enriched by
your love.
You may be here to remember grand parents or
uncles or aunts or
cousins or other relatives,
people who you loved who loved you.
People who weren't perfect and in your remembering
them
today, you hold all of them. The good stuff and the
stuff that you choose now to walk a different
direction,
in the other direction,
away from. Without judgment,
accepting what they gave you that was a gift.
All of the people you're remembering today
left a hole.
And so in reciting El Maleh Rachamim,
the memorial prayers for them.
You bring them a little bit closer and you
bring yourself a little bit closer to them.
We say in this prayer u’tsror b’tsror ha’hayim.
Let their memory be bound up in the bonds
of the living.
It's often translated as the bonds of eternal
life,
but that happens on its own. That their
memory should be bound up in the bonds of
the living
which is to say in your memories,
in your conversations, in your heart,
that's the thing that we say out loud and we
pray for, to make it so. I
pray that memories and prayers for
your loved ones today bring you comfort and
sustain you as you bring them close and
we say kaddish for them.
So we're gonna give you some space now to
say El Maleh Rachamim
the memorial prayers, yourself. They are on page 250-
and 251 in the machzor that we're using.
The eit ratzon machzor.
We'll also have the words up on the screen
and then we'll sing these words together and
then we'll say Kaddish.
And then after Kaddish,
you know,
50 of you sent in yizkor submissions,
pictures and words about people who you're
thinking about this year at
yizkor.
And so we'll sing Psalm 23 as we look at
those memories, as we share those
memories together.
And if you didn't submit,
I invite you now to,
like,
get your phone out and pull up pictures,
you know,
or pull a photo album down off the shelf and
really use this time to
bring their memories alive and to the fore.
Grab a box of Kleenex on let's remember together.
If we read the Bible carefully,
we may notice that there's actually not a lot
of difference between humans,
God and angels.
Humans,
after all,
are made in the image of God.
We experience many of the same emotions.
We care about a lot of the same things.
The main thing that separates us, humanity,
from the divine beings
is that we are born and we will die.
Rosh Hashanah
and Yom Kippur prompt us to consider this
difference very acutely
and the Unetane Tokef prayer that we're about
to say it's sort of the pinnacle of
this consideration.
It forces us to reckon with all of the ways
that our bodies are
vulnerable.
That we may not live another year.
And yet on Yom Kippur,
we're supposed to be like angels. We're supposed
to step out of some of our fleshy
worldly concerns.
We deny our body food and water and
intimate relations with others
so that we can be like the angels.
We stand all day because angels are reportedly
never able
to sit.
So, as we say the
Unetane Tokef prayer today
and then we move right into the Kedusha,
we experience this drama in a little microcosm.
We go from the depths of despair, the depths
of considering our own mortality in to
emulating the angels,
singing their songs, in their way.
It can be a really hard transition.
It's really hard to go from thinking about how
you or your loved ones
might die, to
considering an eternal life.
So I want to share with you a quote from one
of my favorite teachers,
Rabbi Eliezer Diamond.
He talks about this transition from considering
our own earthly
mortality to our connection to divinity and
infinity,
and he writes,
Where does this leave us?
In the end,
while our time on Earth is brief,
the length of our days and the manner of their
end unknown,
We, like God, are holy
and we increase our own holiness and God's
through a life of holiness.
A metaphor that's helpful to me,
he writes and I hope to you, is that of an
orchestra playing a perpetual
symphony.
Each of us is given an instrument and notes
to play. The violin
perhaps, percussion, woodwinds.
But the symphony is incomplete without our
performance. We are given the gift of
playing a few notes,
a few bars and then someone else takes our part.
But that brief period playing in the orchestra,
of being part of the
performance lifts us up
and we transcend mortality and the prospect of ephemerality.
As God's instruments,
we count,
we matter.
We are temporary manifestations of an eternal
reality.
That is the promise and challenge of the
Yamim Noraim,
the high holidays. That is the promise and
challenge of life itself.
So,
as we say,
the Unetane Tokef,
we list these ways in which we may not be
written for another year of life.
Someone we know may not be written for another
year of life,
and we remind ourselves that there are things
we can do to change
not what happens
but the way we feel about it.
I want to invite you to see yourself as part of
the symphony,
that what matters not is when we end.
But how we spend the time before our end comes.
Join us.
Good morning.
You're still here.
Mazal tov!
Congratulations.
You are hardcore.
If you're still here,
you are so hard core. Pat yourself on the back.
Oh,
that feels good.
Okay,
I want to invite.
I want to invite all of us right now, in the midst
of, I know the fastest beginning to kick in. In the
midst of a little bit of the discomfort on the
inside, which I know,
you know I talked about it last night.
It's good for us.
It pushes us. It's resistance training. Doing hard
things inside teaches us do hard things on
the outside.
Let's give ourselves a little massage. If you
haven't already taken that taken that hand,
dug into some of those muscles in your shoulders
do it with your right hand.
I just recommended it so highly. If there's
somebody else in the room who could do this
for you, great.
But,
you know,
I think the human body was designed with this
in mind, with the idea of us being able to
relieve a little bit of our own stress
and tension.
Yeah.
Just give yourself a massage.
Alright?
Okay.
Both hands.
So, alright,
I'm just gonna do some stretching.
You're invited to
follow what I'm doing here as I speak.
Um,
just reach up into the air if you want to stand up,
great.
I'm not going to stand up because that
would then mean,
um, making you nauseous,
holding the computer and, you know,
changing the angle or whatever.
So I'm just going to stretch to the left and to
the right and to breathe in.
Breathing deeply to your rib cage, to your
diaphragm.
Right, like, food and water nourishes us
but not nearly as much as breath.
Breath gives us what we need to at least live
for a couple days without food and water.
So we can do this.
You can do this.
You can do this and just consider this discomfort
that comes with the fast like the
kind of hurts so good kind of discomfort.
You're being in your stretch zone,
your stretch zone like what we're doing.
You know? We can't grow without stretching.
You can't grow without stretching,
and you know there's like the panic zone.
There's the zone,
where it's like you can't learn and you can't
grow because you're just too scared to move.
So that's not what we're talking about.
And there's also your comfort zone,
which is like,
You're just so comfortable that that growth
doesn't happen there either.
But there's a zone in between.
We don't often talk about your stretch zone,
and that's I think,
where Yom Kippur lives and in that stretch zone is
the possibility for great joy.
I wanted to make sure that we talked about
that today because I know we live in intense
times,
and Yom Kippur is an intense day,
and there is the possibility that you might
think that this day is supposed to be sad
somehow. It can be serious. It is very serious
actually.
It can feel somber,
even. It's not sad per se,
and the reason why is because,
yes,
while the knocking on our chest,
the waking ourselves up,
the naming for ourselves
the ways in which we have fallen short and in which others have fallen short
and we're still,
you know,
holding grudges,
holding onto that burning coal,
you know, that we're hoping one day to throw
at them and
in the meantime
is burning a hole in our own hand?
This, this is hard.
It's- It's not easy stuff and the reason why
we have a whole day devoted to it,
you know,
let alone every single amidah throughout the
whole year
where we knock on our heart just a little bit.
Every single amidah where
we knock on our heart just a little bit over
the course of the year,
three times a day.
But on Yom Kippur,
it's
a whole day we devote to this because it's hard,
but not because it's sad.
It's actually the opposite.
Embedded in this day is the possibility for
transformation, for change,
for growth,
for stretching ourselves.
And you know,
it's an incredible thing
what happens when we stretch. We can change.
And so I want to invite you in a moment to
stand up with us,
to sing and to dance
and to embody the joy that our tradition
actually says
this day is about. There are two most joyful days
on the calendar,
the Talmud says, one is Tu B'Av in the summer,
and the other is Yom Kippur.
There were days when young women would go out
into the field and dress in white, in borrowed
clothes, so that nobody would know who was rich
and who was poor and go and find love,
you know,
and I just think like we don't know what this
next year holds.
I think there's a lot of fear,
and I certainly feel it too.
But that is all the more reason to harness and
amplify and embody our
joy.
So join me and join us.
Stand up.
V'yitnu l'kha keter
melukha
and we acknowledge and we crown love, king,
as the direction we want to move our
transformation in.
Hello.
I'm Casper Ter Kuile,
the author of the Power of Ritual
and I'm so glad to be with you here today.
You might have heard that the health and
well being industry has grown to be a $4.2
trillion dollar business.
The growth of boutique fitness gyms, of
more and more complicated
skincare rituals every morning
and of course,
the ever present diet world has contributed
to the growth of this industry.
And often the language that's used to describe
it falls under the umbrella of self care.
Now,
despite its important radical roots of that term,
we use it today to kind of describe the
responsibility that we each have to
solve our own problems, to make ourselves
well, to make ourselves healthy
and I find it a very dangerous idea.
It's sort of the progressive version of the pull
yourself up by your own bootstraps ideology
because it
reveals a core lie at the heart of American
culture, which is the focus on individualism.
It's nearly a sort of religious adherence that
we have for individualism
and it's why I'm so passionate about
communal practices,
rituals that bring us together,
that we practice together,
whether it's singing and dancing,
eating together or indeed praying together,
as you are about to do. So often,
we practice these rituals not because they're
tailored perfectly for the individual,
but because by doing it together we share with
one another something that we couldn't do just by
ourselves.
It breaks that lie that we can all make
ourselves well.
We need each other.
We are one another's medicine and so often
with communal practices
what it can do is that it can help expose that
the lies that we tell ourselves, whether we think
we're better than everyone else.
We're kind of brought down into humility or when
we think we're worse than anyone else.
More more shameful.
It reminds us that we are inherently part of
one another's world and cannot be
excluded from it.
So as you enter this time of communal prayer,
I invite you to lean into these words not just
for yourself,
but as a gift to the people around you.
Even if they're not sitting next to physically, the
other people who were praying with you in this
moment because I think these communal
prayers help us remember the
equally true story of community that sit next
sits next to the one
of individuality.
I'm so grateful for all of you and for Mishkan
and wish you every blessing here from the UK.
All my best. Thank you.
So I invite you to just strike your heart a little.
You can also put a hand on your heart as we
say each one of these words,
each one of these words which we say,
by the way,
in the plural.
Because we may not be guilty of all of
these things
but collectively we take care of each other
and we help each other stay on the
straight and narrow
and when somebody trips and falls,
we're all sort of responsible for helping
each other up.
And so we all say each one of these together
because this is really all of us.