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Rosh Hashanah Sermon-5768 2007
Rabbi Jonathan Miller
Temple Emanu-El
Birmingham, Alabama
The older I am getting—pardon me—I meant to
imply “The older YOU are getting”, the more I visualize life as a journey. We journey along the road of life. Sometimes it feels like we are on an
eight-lane toll road. We fly along,
driving faster than we ought to, and of course we pay a toll for every mile we
race in the fast lane. Less often, we
meander leisurely along the blue highways, the country roads, taking in the
scenery with no real rush and no place particularly to get to. And sometimes we become immersed in our
labyrinthine neighborhoods, and we go around and around and around on city
streets without really realizing that we are getting nowhere. And sometimes, sometimes, we find ourselves
out of cell phone range stuck on a dirt road with a flat tire or an overheated
radiator in the middle of nowhere with no way to get going again. If we are fortunate to live a long life, all
of us will find ourselves traveling all these roads on that wonderful and scary
and exhilarating and excruciating and frustrating and seemingly never ending
road from our birth to our death. “When
are we going to get there?” we want to ask.
But we dare not ask that question out loud because we don’t really want
to know the answer. We know we are going
to get there, we know, and we will not ask when. We will keep on driving and moving forward
with our eyes on the unknown prize that awaits us at the end of the journey.
Every year, Rosh Hashanah is our stop at the
filling station. We pull into Temple
Emanu-El to get spiritually recharged.
Spiritually, some of us fill up on the substance of Diet Coke and
Pringles. Others of us aim to consume
something more nourishing to give us the fortitude to keep on trucking. Our being together with each other and in
communion with God is meant to give us energy, to refocus us, to redirect us,
to get us back on the road to move towards our destination, not in a haphazard
way, but to move forward by design and by determination.
It is no coincidence then, that our sages
instructed us to read the Akeidah,
the Binding of Isaac, on Rosh Hashanah morning.
We tend to think of the story in terms of its climax: with father
Abraham holding the knife over his son; son Isaac terrified on the altar; the Angel
of God crying out to Abraham to stop; and the bleating ram caught in the
thicket by its horns. But that moment of
terror was only one instant in a long, long journey. By far and away, the story is less about the
climax and more about the journey. Like
us, Abraham and Isaac did not quite know where they were going. They were on a journey to a particular place
that God would one day show them. They
traveled for three days. They climbed a
mountain. They carried the wood and the
knife and the fire. They built an
altar. They prepared themselves not to
be killed, but to be rescued; not to sacrifice to God their future in blood,
but to receive from God His covenantal blessing. Theirs was a journey, and ours is a journey,
and we climb to the top of the mountain and like our spiritual ancestors, we
prepare ourselves to receive God’s blessing.
It is curious that we call this passage in
Hebrew, “The Akeidah” which means,
“The Binding.” So many other terms
might better describe the story. Try
these on:
1. The abuse
2. The rescue
3. The
blessing
4. The reward
5. The shofar
6. The test
7. Three days
to the mountain and back
Instead, we call it “Akeidat Yitzhak, the
Binding of Isaac”. That is so strange,
unless you stop and really consider and understand the story the way our rabbis
understood the story.
The most enduring image of this mystifying
story is the binding of Isaac on the altar.
The abuse, the rescue, the blessing, the reward,
and the shofar were all just momentary
episodes in the story. The test was conceived and fulfilled. Three
days to the mountain and back was just that, three days. But the binding of Isaac is the most enduring
image of this puzzling story. The
binding of Isaac is forever. Isaac could
have run away from his aged father, but he traveled the road with his dad, he
climbed the mountain with his dad, he carried has dad’s wood and his dad’s
knife and his dad’s fire. The father and
the son were bound together on the same road.
Isn’t that always the Jewish way?
Isaac could certainly have broken free from
his father’s grip, but he willingly gave of himself to be bound to the faith of
his father and the promises given by his father’s God. Isn’t that the Jewish way? Both Abraham and Isaac could have recoiled
before God and refused the test, Abraham and Isaac could have turned away from
God’s command (we do it all the time), but together they were bound to
God. They were on the road
together. They were bound together,
father and son, past and future, on the same journey bound together. Isn’t that the Jewish way?
So as the story ends, Isaac is never
unbound. He is never unbound. Even as the ram is brought as the sacrifice,
Isaac still remains bound on the altar.
I used to think to myself, “Poor pathetic Isaac, always stuck on the
altar—poor poor Isaac, what a shlemazel!
Always bound, always tied to the past, always awaiting his
freedom.” Hence the rabbis named the
story, Akeidat Yitzhak, the
ever-bound Isaac.
And that is why this story is read on Rosh
Hashanah. It tells us that we are much
like Isaac. We are ever bound on Isaac’s
altar. Some of us rebel against the ties
that bind us. We think that we would
rather be free and unbound; free from obligation and free from commitment and
free from duty and free from responsibility.
We want to be free of the ropes that bind us on the altar.
In our minds, we operate according to this
false dialectic. Either we are free, or
we are fettered. Either we determine our
own destiny as free men and women, or we are slaves. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ended his most
famous speech “. . . In the words of that old Negro spriritual, “Free at last!
Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!" Here are the words to that spiritual.
Free
at last, free at last,
Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last.
The
very time I thought I was lost,
Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last;
My dungeon shook and my chains fell off,
Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last,
This is religion, I do know,
Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last;
For I never felt such a love before,
Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last.
But Isaac is forever
bound. He is never free.
And Isaac is forever
blessed.
That is the paradox
of Jewish living, and that is the paradox of living fully as a human
being. At the end of the day, when the
journey is over, when the view from the mountaintop has faded away, all of us
would rather be bound to the altar and receive God’s blessing than wander
aimlessly alone on solitary paths of our own choosing. Our only source of blessing is the ties that
bind us.
If again given the
choice, with all of its obligation and hard work and occasional difficulty
sometimes sorrow, most of us would choose the bonds of marriage and family and
all the obligations that come with this choice, even knowing what we know
now. It is remarkable that even after a
couple goes through the agony of divorce—and even when divorce is the last
alternative, and there is no other way forward, divorce is still an agony—most
people seek to renew themselves in a committed relationship. Go figure.
After people divorce, most want to remarry again. They know that as painful as the past has
been, love and blessing comes from being intimately bound together with
somebody. Freedom, without being bound
to a lover, is loneliness. The ties that
bind us bring us blessing.
And our children are
not always wonderful (although I understand from others that grandchildren
are). It is not easy to raise children
and sometimes they are challenging and sometimes disappointing and sometimes
rebellious, in much the same way that we might have been to our own
parents. But no matter how difficult and
trying and disappointing a child might be to the parents that raised him or
her, I have yet to see a parent that does not yearn for his son or
daughter. The ties that bind us bring us
blessing.
For most people I
know, the most difficult day of work is not our first day back from
vacation. The most difficult day of work
is our last day on the job. For most of
us, retirement provokes a challenge.
What do we do? We take the big
trip, we golf every day or ski an entire winter, visit the grandkids, and now
what? How do we find meaning and purpose
in a life unbounded? Most people who
retire look to volunteer, to somehow stay productive, to stay bound to
something meaningful, because they know what they have learned after a lifetime
of labor: that the ties that bind us
bring us blessing.
There is one more
special place where the ties that bind us bring us blessing on our life’s
journey. First a little history.
In June, 1882, Isaac
Hochstadter gathered together sixteen Jewish men at Birmingham’s Masonic
Hall. They bound themselves together and
created the first synagogue and what was to become the first Jewish institution
in the newly formed eleven-year-old city of Birmingham, Alabama. Temple Emanu-El observed its first Rosh
Hashanah 125 years ago, and conducted its first service in the Cumberland
Presbyterian Church. Like Birmingham
itself, Temple Emanu-El has had a colorful history over these past 125 years.
When I reflect back
on what Rosh Hashanah must have been like in Birmingham only 125 years ago, and
what we experience today, I am in awe.
When we move away from the day to day struggles and the crazy schedules
and the committee work and the budgets and the daily obligations and duties and
year in and year out challenges of Temple Emanu-El life, when we stand back and
gaze at our accomplishments over our history, we can only conclude that God has
guided and blessed this congregation.
We have always been
few in number. We are less than 0.2% of
the population of Birmingham. But our
numbers have not diminished our ardor and passion for the betterment of
all. We have built buildings. We have nurtured Jewish children and paved
the way for future generations of Jews to flourish. We have expanded our staff and our
programs. We have taken care of the
generations of Jews who have stood under the wedding canopy, who have given
birth to their next generation and sought to educate them in the ways of our
people, and who have laid their loved ones to rest in their final resting
places. We have taught Torah and been
its exemplars at home and in our work and in our community at large. We have established our presence in this city
and have impacted it positively.
In every generation,
some of Birmingham’s most prominent citizens have been members of Temple
Emanu-El, who were taught Judaism’s mandate of communal responsibility and
social justice and paying civic rent.
The museums and the symphony and the hospitals and the universities and
the social service agencies and the educational institutions would not be what
they are today without the involvement and the passion and the dedication of
Jews from Temple Emanu-El. No Jews have
done more to birth the great Jewish institutions of our city and provide them
with leadership and resources; the Birmingham Jewish Federation and the
Birmingham Jewish Foundation, the Collat Jewish Family Services, the N. E.
Miles Jewish Day School, and the Levite Jewish Community Center than have the
Jews from Temple Emanu-El.
If God would grant
me a personal wish Rosh Hashanah, I would wish that I could bring back my father
and my grandparents to join me this day.
I would want them to share in my pride today. And I would want them to join us here in the
congregation with the other Temple guests that I would invite. I would want them to join in prayer and
thanksgiving with Isaac Hochstadter and Rabbi Morris Newfield and Rabbi Milton
Grafman and Samuel Ullman and Mervyn and Dora Sterne and Leo Steiner and Carl
Hess and William Engel and Ben Weil and Robert Aland and Louis Jacobson and
Joseph Blach and Adolphe Loveman and Louis Pizitz and their wives and their
children and all the others that I cannot name only because time does not
permit, who were in those generations of founders and builders and dreamers and
doers and believers and say to them, “Come back to your sanctuary, for just one
day. Be with us this Rosh Hashanah and
see what we have become. See how we have
fulfilled your dreams, even beyond your expectations.”
And I would sit them
down right here, between the early service and the late service, (who would
imagine back then that we would need to have three services on Rosh Hashanah
morning?) and say to them, “We have done all this. We have built our buildings. With Project Shofar, we are now in the
process of securing our future for our children’s children. And we have done this for you.” We have done this because we feel ourselves
bound to you and to your dreams and to your vision. At Temple Emanu-El, the bonds of Jewish
community and continuity continue even after our death. We are bound to you, and you are bound to us,
and we will not let go of you, as you have not let go of us. These bonds are the bonds of eternal
life. These bonds redeem our loved ones
and our leaders from death’s oblivion.
These bonds will assure that we have a stake in the future long after we
have been laid to rest, that the journeying of others continues at the end of
our three days to the mountaintop, even after our own journey is over. We are never free at last, free at last. We are always bound to the people who came
before us.
We are never free at
last, free at last. We are always
bound. And if you listen carefully, you
will hear the voices of the builders and the dreamers and the doers and the
believers of Temple Emanu-El who are yet to be born, who are yet to come to be,
who have not yet stepped foot in what will become their sanctuary, who have not
yet studied Torah, or had their first kiss, or found their soulmate, or handed
their child the Torah, or helped the poor, or taken their first trip to Israel,
or heard Kol Nidre, or heard the sound of the Shofar. These, the future generations of Temple
Emanu-El, are our future. On this New
Year, 5768, we are bound to them. We are
bound to the future of Temple Emanu-El and the future of Birmingham and the
future of Jewish life and the future of Torah and the future of our
people. We are bound to them, and they
are bound to us—across the generations.
These are the ties that bind and sustain and give hope and give
meaning. These are the bonds by which
God grants His people blessing each and every year. And I know, with all my heart that they will
thank us in their day, in the Rosh Hashanah’s to come, for what we will have
done for them in our day, as we thank with eternal gratitude those who have
come before us for what they have done for us.
May we be as worthy in their eyes as our founders and our parents and
all those who have come before us are in our eyes.
We are never free at
last, free at last. We are always bound,
bound to the altar and bound to the ties that bring us blessing. Like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, like Sarah,
Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, like our mothers and our fathers who have come before
us, may our souls be bound up in the bonds of eternal life. And, above all, we pray on this Rosh Hashanah
one hundred and twenty five years since our founding, that these bonds will
never break. May the blessings continue
forward.
Mazal Tov!
Amen
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