sermons

First Night Rosh Hashanah
5765
"Pillars of Beth Am"

Shanah Tovah!

We come together this year as in many years past for the High Holy Days. We look around the sanctuary and see many of the same faces that we have seen in the past, but this year we recognize it is also a little different. As many of you noted in your kind phone calls and emails to me, with Rabbi Zuckerman leaving, this year is quite a bit more intense for me. The offers of oxygen and other aid while I have been writing sermons were most appreciated. I realize, however, that what you see up here is not only a change for me, but for all of you as well.

As you can well imagine, I have been thinking a great deal about change in the past months and weeks, and I would like to share some of my ideas with you these Holy Days. I'd like to focus on the concept of change and talk a bit about where I see Beth Am going in the years to come. Tomorrow, I will speak about how we as Jews get ourselves ready for and open ourselves up to change, and on Second Day we will look to the future and talk about the directions that Beth Am will head as we move into this New Year. But tonight, I'd like to focus on the things that make us who we are. I believe it is foolish to change when one is not aware of what one has already. And here at Beth Am we have a tremendous amount.

Our Congregation was built up, as many shuls have been, by a core group of people, many of whom sit in this room tonight. For them, as Beth Am grew in the tire store, it was a home, a place where they could come to see familiar faces, to talk to friends and, most of all, celebrate their Judaism with family.

There was and has always been a focus at Beth Am on family and on our children, because we recognize that they are the future of Judaism. There is a rabbinic midrash that explains the importance of children in Judaism: When God was preparing to give the Jewish people the Torah, God asked who would guarantee that the Torah will be kept. According to the story, God was not satisfied until the Jews said, "Our children." Only then did God give the Torah to the Jewish People.

Our preschool and JLC have grown with us over the years to become two of the top synagogue schools in San Diego. There is a waiting list for our preschool as we are full on both campuses. The Jewish Learning Center has submitted its curriculum to the United Synagogue of the Conservative Movement, and has become one of the few schools to be included in the Framework of Excellence-a coveted award that is only given to those schools that meet and exceed the expectations of our movement.

We also have a large segment of our membership who have found that Day School education can give their children the type of background and connection that they are looking for. And so we find that many of our families have a home not only at Beth Am, but also at the Jewish Academy just down the road.

It is not only through learning, however, that we reach our children. A paramount goal of this synagogue is to have our children feel comfortable here. Think for a moment about the shul you grew up in. What type of memories do you have? Our youth groups can be found at shul throughout the week, participating in programs, services, and hanging out with their friends at lounge night. They have become comfortable in their shul, and that is important. Our children should be able to approach the Rabbi and say hello, as a matter of fact, we encourage it. They should feel that this is a place that is for them. So we have built services and programs that allow our youngest member to come and create those memories.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am happy to say that our children are being, and will continue to be, well taken care of as we constantly improve and build on what we have.

In the past five years, Beth Am has begun to bring another value into focus. With all of the attention on educating our children, we found that many of the parents and other adults in our community were thirsting for some connection of their own. The Center for Lifelong Jewish Learning was created for the purpose of reaching out to adults in our congregation and larger community and giving them a place to learn and connect to Judaism as an adult. Survey after survey has shown the different reasons that Jewish adults stay away from Jewish Learning. And year after year we have broken the trends by bring thoughtful and adult learning to hundreds of people. People who have not been on the bimah since their own Bar or Bat Mitzvah have learned Torah Trope and stepped forward to read. Every year I speak about the Beit Midrash program-that time on Monday evenings when we get together to learn simply for the joy of learning-and what was once a class of four is now a class of more than twenty adults with diverse backgrounds and interests who can join with each other once a week and grow.

Last year we tried something new. We wanted to give people an opportunity to have some intense learning without having to commit months of time. The Jewish Ultrafit Challenge allowed for people to pick their own learning track and experience what Jewish learning can be like. It was such a success that this year we will run it again, and look forward to a target of more than 150 participants.

We have always had speakers as a part of our adult learning program. Over the years we have hosted people such as Ron Wolfon, Joel Grishaver, and Dennis Prager-all wonderful teachers. This year, however we are bringing someone very special. Rabbi Danny Gordis lives in Israel and is one of the Movements top speakers on the topic of Jewish spirituality. He will join us November 21st , and his topic will be Judaism and the Modern Quest for Spirituality. Just as our speakers of the past, this will be an incredible evening.

So we find that there are two pillars to our Beth Am community-the nurturing of our children and the nourishing of our adults. But I have found over the years that there is a chasm between the two. We see more and more that there is an ever widening gap between what our children know and what we as their parents know. This is not only the case with Jewish Studies, but we can see it in other areas too. Watch how quickly our children pick up the cutting edge computer skills. It seems as if they almost are born knowing how to use a mouse. We adults always seem to be a just a bit behind, and have to make sure that we take steps to keep up.

We each seem to have our own worlds, children and adults even in the same household, living separate lives. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel understood this well. In his work The Insecurity of Freedom he writes, "What is characteristic of the modern family is that on the level of profound personal experience, parents and children live apart."
As our children grow there seems to be less and less that we find to share with them, and unfortunately, this pattern has been fostered in most synagogues in America. Hebrew school is for the kids and the adults do their thing. Synagogue programming is for the adults and the kids do their thing.

It is time for a change.

In an age in which we are frantically searching for anything to connect us to our children and create an active bond, why are we spending so much time isolating ourselves from one another? We should be looking for ways to bridge the gap, to find those rare moments where parents and children, of any age, are on the same page with one another and truly connect.

The synagogue should be a place that happens. Imagine how wonderful it would be to have the chance to explore together with the ones you love the heritage that you share. We must take Judaism once and for all out of the realm of personal chore and move it back into the realm of family celebration.

That is the path that is ahead of us, and it begins here and now. Rosh Hashanah offers us a framework for reconnecting with those ideal that have always been important to us, the constants in our history. We find ourselves making commitments this time of year to correct the things we see that are not the way they should be.

Rabbi Jack Moline wrote a top ten list of things that Jewish parents don't say enough to their children, but I'd like to suggest that perhaps these are thing that children can say to their parents as well. When we remind each other, they bring us back to the basics and become even more powerful. Here are some of them:

• Some part of any money which comes your way is for tzedakah
  
• The way you fulfill your appetites should be a reflection of your Jewishness.
  
• You have a home in Israel.
  
• Come to Synagogue with me
  
• Be at our Shabbat table
  
• Zai a mensch
  
• This is what I believe about God.

This time of year we look at change as a good thing, understanding, however, that there are certain fundamental things that make us who we are, that can never change. Any attempt to do so, no matter how strong will lead us into rocky waters.

I leave you this evening with a portion of an actual radio conversation between a US navel ship and the Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland in October 1995.

Canadians: "Please divert your course by 15 degrees south to avoid a collision".

Americans: "Recommend that you divert your course by 15 degrees north to avoid a collision"

Canadians: "Negative. You have to divert your course by 15 degrees south to avoid a collision"

Americans: "This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course".

Canadians: "No. I say again divert YOUR course".

Americans: "THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS LINCOLN. THE SECOND LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNITED STATES' ATLANTIC FLEET. WE ARE ACCOMPANIED BY THREE DESTROYERS, THREE CRUISERS AND NUMEROUS SUPPORT VESSELS. I DEMAND THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR COURSE BY 15 DEGREES NORTH, I SAY AGAIN, THAT'S ONE FIVE DEGREES NORTH, OR COUNTER-MEASURES WILL BE UNDERTAKEN TO ENSURE THE SAFETY OF THIS SHIP".

Canadians: "This is a lighthouse. Your Call"