I want everyone to look around for a minute. Those in the sanctuary, and those at home. Maybe Ven, our camera person can pull back for a minute so that those at home watching on Zoom can take a look at the sanctuary. I want all of us to notice what’s here, and perhaps more importantly I want us to notice what’s not here. Or more accurately I should say who, who is not here. A lot of us are not here, that’s one of the challenges of this. year, but there is one group of people missing in their entirety. Children.
One of the most heartbreaking aspects of High Holidays this year, and there are a number, is that our COVID-19 Risk Mitigation and Safety Committee, of which I am a member, made the unanimous recommendation, that, because of the spike and uncertainty associated with the Delta variant, unvaccinated children under 12 could not be present in the sanctuary during the High Holidays this year. Period.
What a year it’s been for our kids. I’m sure many of them would not put not sitting through hours of services at Society Hill Synagogue at the top of the list of what’s been hard, but still, to have to endure what this generation of children has endured—it’s really unthinkable to many of us.
I still remember when the pandemic first felt real to me. It wasn’t when infections were skyrocketing in China and Italy and the virus was making its way around the globe. Whatever state I was in, it was not one where I was ready to accept the reality of the pandemic at that point. It was not when Seattle became the first epicenter of the virus here in the United States. No, for me the moment when the pandemic first started to hit home was when, just a couple blocks from my home, I saw a little girl riding her scooter and she had on a mask.
What has become commonplace—it’s remarkable what we human beings are capable of getting used to—was at first quite jarring to me. A mask, covering a child’s face as she was playing outside? What was this world coming to?
Of course those masks, uncomfortable, alienating, and disconnecting as they can be, have probably saved tens maybe hundreds of thousands of lives in the US alone, and little did I know, that just over a year after seeing this mask, I would be dropping off my daughter Lila, my two year old daughter Lila, at her first ever day of school in a mask, and she’s worn one ever since.
We all have put up with a lot these nearly two years, the loss of loved ones and grieving them in relative isolation, the cancellation of joyous events or holding them in sparse crowds, the inability to gather in the ways we know and love, but sometimes I think about the kids.
Kids, You have been incredibly resilient. As one 13 year old Bar Mitzvah student of mine reminded me, you had to go through a year of school with only the lame parts and none of the fun parts. The homework but no friends, the math but no gym. (Gym was fun for me at least) No excitement about who you’d be assigned to sit next to in class, no sitting next to your friends on bus trips to special events, no assemblies, recess, dances, all of the human parts—the glue that holds together the experience of being a kid. All of that, you’ve been deprived of.
Sure for some of you, it hasn’t been so bad. We’ve all found benefits of learning or working from home. Getting to wear sweatpants, getting to sleep in a little bit later. Maybe you even like all of the opportunities that are available through a computer screen. Lord knows I was spending plenty of time on my laptop even before the pandemic.
But let’s be real, it’s been hard. There is an energy to being in person. To experiencing the full dimensionality of other people: hugs, handshakes, and high fives, an intangible energy that can’t be captured over the screen.
So this sermon, it’s really more of a letter, is to the kids.
Dear Kids.
I’m sorry this year has been so hard. You didn’t deserve this. No one did thoughI’m sure that’s little consolation. When you look back later in life hopefully you’ll be able to say, “wasn’t that incredible that we were the generation raised during COVID? That’s the craziest thing we ever went through!” Hopefully that’s something you’ll be able to say. We don’t know, but hopefully.
In the meantime, I want to offer you the little I have to offer you which isn’t much, but it’s what rabbis have to offer. Essentially, the case for how Judaism has the potential to help you navigate the years ahead. The ways that I believe being Jewish, can serve as a pathway to meaning, to connection, to holiness as you grow up in this world, to help us all connect to what really matters as we move through the stages of life that lay before us.
Now, I should be clear that just because I am a rabbi, does not mean I always thought being Jewish was all that meaningful or important.
My dad was a rabbi, and so I really had no choice about being immersed in Jewish life when I was a young kid, but I demonstrated plenty of resistance to it. To this day I remember griping to my dad when I was in kindergarten about why it was that my mom, who didn’t have the attachment to Jewish law that he did, could use the computer on shabbat but he and I couldn’t. My uncle tells me I used to call Shabbat “boring day,” because we didn’t use electricity and I wasn’t allowed to watch tv. A while after he died and my mom no longer made me keep kosher, I tried every type of non kosher food I hadn’t been able to try up until that point. I went through a long period when I grew up where Judaism was in the background, a feature of my life with which I engaged only occasionally.
But as they say, that was then, and this is now.
Then, I found Judaism to be a burden; now it’s a lifeline; then it was an annoyance; now it’s oxygen.
I’ll explain. And I think the best way for me to do this is for us to take a journey through the Jewish life cycle, the journey from birth to death when, at each pivotal moment, Jewish tradition and ritual invites us to pause and reflect on how we got here and where we’re going.
Let’s start with the phase of life where you are, which, for most of you kids not able to be present here today, is Hebrew School. I should start with a confession, which is that I never actually went to Hebrew School. Instead, from first through sixth grade my parents sent me to Jewish Day School, meaning I spent nearly half of each school day engaged with Jewish studies, rather than the once or twice a week on the weekends or after school that Hebrew School consists of. But there is someone near and dear to me for whom Hebrew School was a formative experience and that is my wife, Caroline.
Now, I don’t know how typical Caroline’s experience is because, like me, when it comes to Judaism she is, as she put it in her teaching on Rosh Hashanah, a big nerd. But from her, I have evidence about what Hebrew School can be. Sure Hebrew School can be a bummer. You go after a long day of school or wake up early on the weekend and have you go to something that is still called school. But Hebrew School, if done well, should be something entirely different than school. As one tweet my wife recently shared with me put it, Hebrew School, Religious school should be a source of constant love when the world is upside down.
Hebrew School can focus on the fact that no commandment is repeated more often in the Torah than “remember and take care of the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Hebrew School can focus on the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, leading to Jacob receiving the name Yisrael, which comes from the word sar, wrestle or strive, with el, god. God-wrestling is our heritage—Hebrew school can focus on that.
My wife is an example. Hebrew School impacted her profoundly. She was one of those kids who, based on her Hebrew School experience, asked her parents if they would send her to Akiba, now Barrack, the Jewish High School in Philadelphia, and who majored in Judaic studies in college.
To this day she has a letter she wrote to her rabbi from when she was eight years old, which Im going to read a little bit:
Dear Rabbi, she wrote. I have a few questions for you about God: 1) How does God talk or show signs that God is there? How Hard do you have to look?. (I guess that is a two-part question.)
2) What if someone else is talking to Him too? (She was comfortable with a gendered God). Will God still hear me?
3) Is God anything like Mother Nature?
And finally (4) Back in History God showed signs that were very clear. Why doesn’t God show miracles like that today?
Now, of course, we could spend a whole sermon answering these questions and some day, I might, but in the meantime, I want to underscore what’s possible out of the Hebrew School experience: the flowering of questions, making space for the holy and the good, being a constant source of love. As my wife put it, Hebrew School was a place where she had close friends, where she knew that she was safe, and where she was around adults who loved her.
And, kids, if you’re watching, it’s true: we love you. This community loves you. I love you. That is part of our job—to serve as loving presences for you as you make your way in the world.
(And by the way if you ever want to send me a letter like Caroline sent her rabbi, that would only make me, like, the happiest rabbi ever.)
OK, but let’s not get too hung up on the Hebrew School part of the journey, we’ve got a few more stops to make.
Next, in some sense the capstone of the Hebrew School Experience, though it’s meant to be as much an inauguration into the next stage as it is a culmination of the previous one, is the B’nei Mitzvah.
To me there are two features that stand out about the B’nei Mitzvah experience. The first is the one we’re all deeply familiar with, which is the expectation that students get up in front of their community and offer some combination of leading the community in prayer, chanting Torah and Haftarah, and offering a D’var Torah, teaching on their Torah portion. The purpose or function of this, as I see it, is to identify a moment of transition—a particularly fraught, potentially nerve-wracking transition: the transition from childhood over a course of several years through adolescence, into adulthood—to identify this transition and to accompany the young person through that transition with a warm embrace, and doing so in a way that makes clear to them all the beauty that they—that you—are capable of. Public speaking, public performing is regularly identified as one of the scariest acts we can do—listed right up there with, I don’t know, heights and death as what people are most afraid of. On your B’nai Mitzvah, however, you show us how capable you are of not only a public performance, but one that is done through the medium of a 4 thousand year old language and tradition, engaging with that tradition and its values and teachings in the process.
One of those core teachings, which is the second key feature of the Bnei Mitzvah experience as I see it, is the student’s formation of a relationship to this idea that has long been central to our Jewish identity, and that is the idea of Mitzvah, commandment.
Now, on a surface level, what Mitzvah refers to is that when you turn 13 and have your B’nei Mitzvah, you are theoretically subject to the mitzvot, the commandments. If we’re being technical about it, according to Jewish law, before you turn 13 you are not expected to fast for all of yom kippur; once you turn 13 you are. Before you turn 13 it is not your responsibility to worry about whether you, I don’t know, keep kosher, love your neighbor as yourself; it’s your parents’ responsibility. Once you turn 13, it’s yours.
On a deeper level though, becoming Bnai Mitzvah is about forming a relationship to this key plank of Jewish life, known as the mitzvot. 613 precepts, that cover each and every corner of our lives, the ethical and the ritual: how to treat our loved ones and the stranger, with the decency and respect that comes with us all being created in the image of God, and how to mark all of life’s moments with blessings and holiness. These mitzvot, which once seemed like a burden to me—having to keep kosher, having to stop what I’m doing to pray—now feel like opportunities, like blessings. Creating space in my heart for connecting to and expressing my yearning for the Source that suffuses all of life—I now consider this to be largely a sacred heritage which has been passed down to me. The mitzvot, the quote-un-quote commandments, are, as I see it, pathways to holiness, created by our ancestors for us to unfurl our yearnings for connection, some of which will speak to us and some of which will not, but they are sacred invitations, and in the course of preparing for becoming b’nei mitzvah we have the opportunity to formulate our own relationship to we’re going to respond, or not, to these invitations.
So that’s the B’nei Mitzvah, being publicly held by your community in a moment of transition, and beginning to form a relationship to mitzvot.
What comes next?
Well, looking at the Jewish lifecycle timeline, the landscape gets a bit barren in your later teen years, on into your twenties.
The Jewish communal world has tried to conjure up attractions that facilitate Jewishly engaged teens and twenty-somethings, with mixed results. There is Hebrew High and youth group, as a means of continuing the conversation with your Hebrew School friends and other Jewish teens, (which I absolutely recommend here at Society Hill Synagogue, by the way); there’s Hillel, which builds Jewish community on college campuses; and there’s Birthright, which offers a certain perspective on Israel as it tours young people around the country, trying to foster a connection to the land. So there are Jewish communal efforts. But this is definitely a period in your life where Jewish communal structures don’t have the gravitational pull they do when you’re a younger kid or when you’re older.
And yet in a sense, this might be one of the moments, our teens into our twenties where, I would argue, our souls are most in need of Jewish or spiritual connection, in need of a moral compass that has been forged through time to help us navigate rocky seas.
One piece of Torah that I would like to offer as you reach your late teens and twenties, is that it is ok, and I would argue a good thing, to open up space in your heart for a relationship to the Holy One; to make space in your life for the idea that we all flow from one source who pulls upon our heartstrings to pursue the good and true. Judaism can serve as a roadmap to help explore this relationship and what it would have us do in this world to help make it more whole. Sometimes Jewish spaces seek to de-emphasize this aspect of Judaism, the aspect of Judaism that is about forming a personal relationship to God and holiness. and I both understand that and find it slightly unfortunate. In my personal experience, especially in my teens and twenties when I was struggling, being open to a relationship to the divine, whatever that means for us, can help us navigate that period of time when we are exploring the world, trying to find our purpose and trying to form lasting relationships by attuning ourselves to that which would connect us all.
Speaking of lasting relationships, the next stop on the Jewish lifecycle journey that some of you will choose—not all, but some, and I have to pattern this a little after my own life— is, of course, a wedding.
Many standout features arise during a Jewish wedding, including, perhaps, meeting with a rabbi or other counselor who can help facilitate preparatory conversations about your and your partner’s lives together: each of your ultimate values, your visions for your future together, your love languages, how each of you give and receive love. All of these are conversations that preparing for a Jewish wedding—not only preparing for a Jewish wedding, other spaces effectively do this too—but that preparing for a Jewish wedding can help facilitate.
Another notable feature of the Jewish Wedding comes through the liturgy itself. We all know about that iconic moment, the shattering of the glass marking the end of the ceremony and the beginning of the marriage. But what many of us don’t know is that that moment symbolizes not just joy, but also a reminder, in the midst of one of the most joyous moments in our lives, that, like the glass, the world remains broken. In exile. We don’t turn a blind eye to that brokenness, even on our wedding day. But the liturgy complements this symbol, by naming that in the sacred partnership between you and your partner, the seeds for redemption from this exile are planted. The wedding liturgy speaks about creation—the moment in the Garden of Eden when all was holy and pure—and a future time of redemption when all of our hearts will be reunited once again in peace and love. And it essentially intimates, it suggests that your partnership, your love contains within it echoes, whiffs of these two paradigmatic moments, creation and redemption. Creation, redemption, and our wedding day, or a climactic moment of love between people. Those are moments on this earth that are ultimate, our tradition suggests. We each get a taste of that ultimate-ness, and, to the extent we can replicate the love and peace that manifests on our sacred day as we go out into the world, we can help bring about that redemption.
A next step in the Jewish life cycle, not for all of us—sometimes by choice, sometimes not by choice, the seeds of its own heartbreak—is the welcoming of a child. And right as we welcome in a child, we turn to the next ceremony, whether it’s a Brit Milah, commonly referred to as a Bris or Circumcision, or a Brit Bat, or Simchat Bat, extensions of these ceremonies to include girls, there is a ritual welcoming the child into the community.
And the element of these ceremonies that is standing out to be right now is when we bestow on our child a Jewish names. This naming element, which happens in almost all ceremonies, so often carries a weight that we do not recognize until we are older.
I am named Nathan Samuel Kamesar, for my great grandfather Shimon Kamesar, a man I never met and know shamefully little about, because when I was young, and the keeper of those memories, his son, my grandfather Armon Kamesar, tried to regale me with stories of him, I wasn’t interested.
When his son’s son, my father Daniel Kamesar, died, my mother renamed their newborn daughter Henya Marie after him so that she became Henya Daniela. And Caroline and I have done the same with our daughter Lila Daniela.
To me, the naming of children is a profound example of what we call shalshelet hakabala, the chain of tradition. We pass on the chain of tradition in many ways, not only through children, through our myriad interactions with members of our community. And As Rabbi Richard Hirsh notes, names have the special quality of embodying “memories, hopes, and ideals. The Jewish name announced at a naming ceremony or brit milah is the name that will be used when the child reaches the age of bar or bat mitzvah and is called to the Torah, it is the name used on Jewish documents that sanctify committed relationships; it is the name used in the mi shebeirach prayer for healing; and it is name by which Jews are memorialized after death. Perhaps most importantly, when children are old enough to ask why they are named as they are, including for whom they are named, the answers that parents give become an essential piece of their developing identity.”
So kids, don’t make the same mistake I made. For me, the two links, my father and grandfather, that directly connect me to the person for whom I am named, are gone. It is, when we are young, hard to attune ourselves to the eternal nature of the torch we carry, but if you can create spaciousness in your lives to hear about and investigate the lives of those who came before you, perhaps for whom you are named, it’s unlikely to disappoint.
After the naming of children the lifecycle for some of what we’ve talked about starts over. Maybe kids head to Hebrew School and become b’nai mitzvah and maybe they get married, and then, just like in our late teens or early twenties, there’s a period in our life in our 50s, 60s and beyond, where the Jewish lifecycle landscape can clear up a bit.
Recently there has become a little bit of a popularization of what is known as a second B’nai Mitzvah, going along with the verse of Psalm 90 which says:יְמֵֽי־שְׁנוֹתֵ֨ינוּ בָהֶ֥ם שִׁבְעִ֪ים שָׁנָ֡ה The span of our life is seventy years. From that verse, an innovation was conceived that said that if the span of our life is seventy years, then we start a second life at age 70, and should have a second B’nai Mitzvah at 83. Those who turn 83 are called up once again to the Torah for an aliyah, and offer a teaching about their Jewish journey, celebrating this milestone with the community. So there are innovations in the Jewish life cycle but for the most part, later in life Jewish life cycle rituals become less frequent.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Jewish community goes away. One of the most inspiring features I’ve encountered in this community is the collection of adults, who make the Society Hill Synagogue community their home, nearly each and every Shabbat morning.
Each Shabbat morning folks in this period of their lives wake up and effectively say, I know this Torah was promulgated some 3000 years ago, and this prayer book isn’t much younger at 2000 years old, and I’m not sure I quite identify with the God as articulated in these texts, and I know there are a lot of other compelling activities I could take on this Saturday morning, like sleeping in, or getting brunch or going to Yoga or soccer, but once a week, once a week for two hours, I want to be with my people. I want to show up and do this thing called prayer and Torah study, not necessarily because I’m supposed to or because it always resonates, but because this project of creating space in my life for engaging with these timeless questions—about where the world comes from, why we’re here, what’s expected of us, and how we engage in this project together—this project of creating space in my life for these questions, that I approach through a combination of prayer and torah study and community, is a sacred one. I can feel that my engagement with it helps lend meaning to my life and helps me see the holiness that imbues all life. And that is real and worth coming back to again and again.
So later in life, while once again, the Jewish lifecycle landscape can look a little barren, there Shabbat is gleaming at us like a diamond in the rough. Shabbat, the talmud, says, is echad me’shisshim olam ha’bah, a regular opportunity to experience echad me’shisshim, one sixtieth, a taste, of olam ha’bah, the world to come.
The world to come. What is the world to come? That brings us to the final stop on our Jewish life cycle journey. And kids, parents, if you want, or you want your kids to step away for the discussion of our final stop of the Jewish life cycle journey, now is a good time.
The final stop, is of course, the day of death. It is fitting that we should talk about death on Yom Kippur for, as Rabbi Alan Lew points out, what is Yom Kippur if not a dress rehearsal for the day of our death? We wear, at least traditionally, a white shroud, “we refrain from life-affirming activities like eating, drinking and procreating,” and Yom Kippur and our deathbed are the only times in life we recite the vidui, the confessional. As the tradition states מיתה ויום הכפורים מכפרין. Death and Yom Kippur atone. These are the two ultimate purificatory, purifying moments in life, the moments when we have the clarity of mind, of heart, of spirit to recognize what is truly sacred in life. One could argue that Judaism is in some ways built around tapping into the clarity of purpose and meaning we experience in the moments before passing from this world. In moments of moral crisis, we are actually taught in Judaism to imagine ourselves on our deathbed in order to help us do what is right. The choreography of Yom Kippur, the liturgy, who shall live and who shall die, is meant to remind us of the fragility of life, to help us focus on what is important, insights that we then carry with us into the new year and then reinforce through the myriad mitzvot rituals, throughout the Jewish day, week, month and year, helping us live lives of holiness.
But inevitably, those lives do come to an end, at least as we understand them in this world, and Jewish ritual steps up to hold us as we and our loved ones part from this world. The Hebrew word for funeral is halvaya, which means accompaniment, or companionship, and we provide that companionship in two important respects. First, to those grieving. We accompany them or their journeys of grief, we are accompanied on our journeys of grief, demonstrating that none of us is alone. Being Jewish, and being human, means that through connection, our lives are enriched. And one of the most profound places that connection shows up is through the grieving process, the funeral, the burial, shivah, saying kaddish in community during the first year after one’s passing—the ways in which we are held by our community.
And the second form of halvaya, of accompaniment, companionship, is the accompaniment of the deceased to their final resting place; we are accompanied by others to our final resting place. We demonstrate our sense of togetherness, until the very last moment.
This is what it means to be Jewish and to be human, to make space in our lives for the recognition that we cannot do this alone—that halvaya, that companionship is one of our most fundamental needs. To open ourselves up to that fact, recognizing that companionship can come in many forms—family, friends, community, God. Being human means having the humility to say, “there but for the grace of others go I.” Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh bazeh. All of us are responsible for one another, the talmud teaches. That sense of interdependence can be both our deepest pain point and the source of our most profound joy.
So there it is the Jewish life cycle journey, birth to death. Kids, this probably wasn’t what you were hoping for out of Yom Kippur. Not being stuck at home watching another program on Zoom and not listening to a 5000 word sermon by your rabbi.
But my hope is that it demonstrates, though it hasn’t always been apparent to me, that engaging with Jewish living is the sort of scaffolding that helps us traverse life in ways that help us see its inherent holiness.
This is not to say Judaism has a monopoly on truth. It doesn’t. I am sure you can live lives of meaning and holiness in ways that do not involve Judaism. Billions do around the world. But as my father said when he discovered Jewish practice for his own life, you could also plug up your ears instead of listening to the music, but why would you want to? Judaism is that roadmap handed down to us by ancestors to help us discover holiness on an ongoing basis. We can, will, and should take detours from the map and make it our own. But we can also recognize it as a gift and a starting point as we find our own way in life. I wish you safe and peaceful passage on your journeys. Shanah Tovah.
