This is the sermon I presented at Temple Sinai in Cranston, Rhode Island, on the evening of Rosh Hashanah.

The Haftarah we will read at tomorrow morning’s service includes one of the most moving stories of prayer in the Hebrew Bible. The story comes from the book of Samuel and it tells of a young woman named Hannah whose life was filled with love and filled with sorrow.

Hannah was one of two wives of a man named Elkanah. We hear in the story that Hannah was Elkanah’s favorite wife, but we also hear that she was barren – she could not bear children. In contrast, Penninah, Elkanah’s other wife, was the mother of many sons and daughters. We sense immediately that this is a family in pain. There is a beloved wife who watches in grief as she sees another woman bearing children for the man she loves. There is an unloved wife who bears children for a man who is in love with somebody else.

Each year, Elkanah took his family to the Temple in Shiloh to bring the first fruits of their harvest as an offering to God. Each year, Penninah took the opportunity to make Hannah feel inadequate for her inability to bear a child. Peninah would say, “Look, Elkanah has given me so much food from the harvest to share with my children, but poor, childless Hannah only has her one meager portion.”

Hannah just couldn’t take it any longer. One year, when at Shiloh, she entered the Temple and stood before the altar of the God of Israel. Tears ran down her cheeks as she silently prayed for a child — a child who would fulfill her dreams of motherhood and who would end her years of humiliation. Her lips trembled as she quietly made her petition to God.

The priest, Eli, saw this young woman with a ravaged face prostrate in the Temple. He saw her clothes, rumpled from lying on the ground. He saw her mouth opening and closing noiselessly. All he could think was, “Who has let this drunken harlot into my Temple?” Eli said to Hannah, “How long will you be a drunkard?  Get rid of that wine you’ve been drinking!”  

Hannah, startled by the priest’s accusation, turned to Eli and protested, “Oh, no, sir! I am no drunkard. I don’t drink wine or strong drink at all! The only drink I have poured is my own heart, which I am opening to God in prayer. Please, do not take me for some kind of a fallen woman. All this time I have only been praying a prayer of my anguish.”

Eli recognized in Hannah’s tears that she was not what he had first imagined. He regretted how quickly he had judged her, and now spoke to her with kindness. “Well, then. May you go in peace. And may the God of Israel grant the request that you have made here.”

The Bible tells us that Hannah’s prayer soon was answered. She returned to her home and became pregnant. Her son would grow up to be Samuel, the great prophet who anointed both King Saul and King David, Israel’s first two kings.

On one level, the story could be read as one in which Hannah makes  a bargain with God — “If you give me a son, I will dedicate him to You.” God takes the deal and rewards Hannah with a son. It is a familiar story and there are many like it in Jewish tradition and in folklore from around the world. Samuel is the “miracle baby” who is destined for greatness. However, like many legends, it should not be read only on that literal level alone.

The point of the story is not that, if you pray hard enough, God will fulfill your lofty dreams. If that were true, then the opposite also would have to be true — if you have not received the things in life you deeply desire or need, it must be because you are not praying hard enough. Imagine what a message that would send to the many "Hannah"s in the world today – women who struggle with infertility.

The story is about something deeper. It is about the human need to express ourselves to eternity. It is a story about prayer as an expression of our deepest yearnings and highest aspirations. It is a story of how prayer can help us to transform our lives.

There is something within almost all human beings, I think, that makes us want to be heard. We want, as Hannah wanted, to speak the great truths of our lives into the cosmos. Even if we recognize that our lives are brief and our needs are petty compared to the vastness of time and space, we still need to shout out our unique selves and affirm that our pain and our joy, our sorrow and our celebration, our gratitude and our awe all matter and have meaning. That is the essence of what prayer is about.

The rabbis of the Talmud, who lived about a thousand years after Hannah’s time, regarded her prayer as the great example of everything that prayer should be. From the verse that says that “Hannah spoke al libah” — meaning that she spoke “to herself,” or more literally, “upon her heart” — the Talmud says that prayer should be “from the heart,” done mindfully with purpose and intention. In the words of Rabbi Eliezer in the Mishnah, “Anyone who will only pray a fixed prayer has not really prayed to God at all” (M. Berachot 4:4). Prayer must be an act of the heart before it is an act of the mouth.

From the verse that says that Hannah’s lips moved as she prayed, the Talmud concludes that we should make every effort to pray with words. It is not enough to just think about our deepest hopes and highest aspirations, we must actually try to express them in words. There is something about putting our best and most soul-shattering thoughts into words that helps us hear them. Without words, our prayers remain muffled and drowned out by the roar of our busy lives by the internal chatter of our restless minds.

The Talmud observes that Hannah prayed silently so that only she could hear her prayer. The rabbis said that this shows that prayer should not be ostentatious. It does not need to be shouted or turned into a display of false piety. Rather, prayer is a quiet experience, soft enough for us to be able to hear our own souls speaking [B. Berachot 31a].

The rabbis of the first century of the common era had other reasons, too, to like the story of Hannah’s prayer and to make it their model for ideal prayer. The story’s conflict between Hannah and the priest, Eli, resonated with them as a metaphor for Israel’s transition from worship through sacrificial offerings to worship through words.

While the Temple stood in Jerusalem under the leadership of priests like Eli, worshipping God primarily meant bringing offerings of animals, fruits, grains and vegetables to the Temple to be burnt upon the altar. Worshipping God through prayer existed in the time of the Temple, but it was not until after the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE that prayer became Judaism’s exclusive means of worship. The story about Eli, the priest, and Hannah, the woman in prayer, might have reminded the rabbis of Israel’s transition from Temple sacrifices to synagogue prayers.

The rabbis also identified with Hannah because the Bible depicts her just as the rabbis saw themselves — sincere, humble, heartbroken, and loyal to God. Her earnest and heartfelt prayer reminded the rabbis how they viewed spoken prayer not as a pale substitute for sacrifices, but as, in every way, the equal of the sacrificial rites of the Temple.

As the centuries passed, the idea of prayer as a replacement for Temple sacrifices faded.  By the medieval era, the Temple and its rites were thought of as a practice from a long-ago time, without much pertinence to their own day. When medieval Jewish thinkers wanted to convince their fellow Jews of the importance of prayer, they hardly ever referred to prayer as a substitute for sacrifices.

Maimonides, the pre-eminent Jewish philosopher of the middle ages, wrote that the purpose of the daily fixed prayers was for our own growth, not for God’s benefit. He said that the practice of prayer trains our minds and hearts in the values that the prayers talk about — love of God, ethical behavior, compassion, reverence and humility. Maimonides saw prayer as a discipline that Jews accept as a daily reminder to live according to the highest values and principles of Jewish belief.

At about the same time, Jewish mysticism developed a different way to think of prayer. To the kabbalists, the fundamental purpose of life is to act as God’s partner in repairing a world that is broken and shattered. Kabbalah claims that we can help repair the universe by becoming aware of God’s hidden presence in the world and releasing that presence by performing mitzvot. According to Jewish mysticism, when Jews pray, we are not just reciting wise and edifying words, we are uncovering the hidden divinity that is within our souls. Prayer helps us to release divine hidden sparks to help repair the cosmos.

By looking at the history of Jewish worship, we see that there is no one way in which Jews have understood prayer. There has been an evolution in Jewish thinking over time and there have been — even in a single age — a diversity of ways for Jews to understand what we are doing when we pray.

And what of us today? What do we believe we are doing when we pray? That’s a difficult question for us to answer because many of us come to High Holy Days services unaccustomed to prayer in any form, or for any reason. We may fall easily back into the habit that many of us have known from childhood of singing along with the congregation or of reading the words in the prayerbook. But many of us do so without a clear answer to the “why” question.  Why do we pray? Why is it important to us? Why should we keep doing it?  

We have a great deal to gain by finding a way to understand prayer as a meaningful experience.  I believe that we need prayer, as much as any generation before us, to express ourselves and the meaning of our lives to the cosmos. I believe that we can improve our lives by find a discipline of prayer that works for us.

Here is a way of thinking about prayer that I believe can work for us. In the twenty-first century, prayer can be our way to find our way back to who we really are in a society that tries so hard to make us into something else.

We are living in an age in which we are bombarded by messages about what we are supposed to want. Whether we are told to want money, power, ice cream, an iPhone, or a really killer set of abs — it’s hard not to feel confused in a society that seems obsessed with the trivial and in which it is so difficult to find clear statements of what is truly meaningful and fulfilling in life. As a result, many people feel disconnected from their values and many struggle to find a higher purpose in their lives.

Prayer for us can be a way to quiet the voices that tell us what we should crave, and focus our attention, instead, on the things that really make life fulfilling: loving relationships, meaningful work, a sense of purpose, dedication to our values, and a sense of wonder for the miraculous world around us.

Let me give you some specific examples of the prayers in our tradition that help us to do this. We have prayers in Jewish liturgy that are about recognizing our physical, bodily needs. In the morning service, we recite blessings for getting up out of bed in the morning, for getting dressed, and even for the ability to use the bathroom. We use prayer as a way of staying in touch with the sanctity of our bodies and our physical needs, which are the foundation for all of our other needs.

We also have many prayers in Jewish liturgy that are about the need to bring justice and righteousness into the world. These prayers seem designed to lift our thoughts beyond our physical needs and into an awareness that we live in a moral universe that is shaped by principles and ideals. These prayers energize our desire to make the world a better place for ourselves, our families and communities. They remind us to live for principles and values, not just for fulfilling our cravings and desires.

Many of our prayers call us to think about our gratitude for the miracle of just being alive. These prayers turn our thoughts away from our momentary desires and into the realm of awe and reverence. We reflect on how we fit into the big picture of a world that we did not create. We open our minds to the obligations that accompany the gift of our existence — what we owe to others and what we owe to ourselves. In prayer, we stand before God and feel ourselves to be a small part of an eternity that stretches beyond our imagination. In that moment, we can rediscover the comfort, joy and equanimity of belonging in the universe. We remember that the meaning of our lives is part of the universe’s meaning — that our lives matter.

Now, I want to ask you something. How would your life change if you took the time on a regular basis to remind yourself — no matter how crazy the world around you may get — that there is a meaning and purpose to your life? How would you, as a person, change if you regularly and intentionally reminded yourself that your life is actually a mission to honor your highest values, to make the  world around you a better place, and to lovingly care for others? How would the way you think about yourself change if you regularly took the time to develop a sense of inward peace?  

This is why, I believe, we can benefit from developing a prayer practice in our lives — it has the potential to awaken our hearts to the things that really matter to us. It can help us join with others to make our community a healthier and kinder place. It can make us happier.

Hannah offered her prayer for a child in a private and spontaneous moment. She had no need of a prayerbook to find the right words to say to God. All she had to do was to open her heart and allow her powerful feelings to flow out of her. That quiet place of the soul where our deepest yearnings live is the place that we can touch and release in prayer. 

Prayer does not require a prayerbook or a prescribed formula to work, but many people find that fixed prayers help them find the words that express what they feel in their hearts. Prayer can happen in the synagogue during regular worship times, or it can happen while we are walking in the woods. It can even happen while we are standing on the check-out line in the supermarket. All it takes is the determination to listen to the yearnings of our own souls in a focussed and disciplined way.

If you are feeling right now that you are unequal to the task of taking on a prayer practice. If part of you is saying, “Yes, that sounds like it would be good for someone else, but I’m not that kind of person,” I want to let you know that it doesn’t really matter what kind of person you are.    

Psalm 69 contains a verse (v. 14) that appears at the beginning of the traditional morning service: “Va’ani t’filati l’cha, Adonai.” Literally, the verse can be read to mean: “I am my prayer to You, Adonai.”  The verse reminds us that all we can really offer when we pray is ourselves — I am my prayer – and that is enough. 

We do not need to pretend to be someone else when we pray. We do not need to approach God as if we were saying, “God, I’m not really a good enough person to be talking to You. I’m not religious enough; I don’t believe in You enough. I’m actually kind of embarrassed just to be talking to You.” None of that is necessary, thank God. If it were, no one would ever bet able to utter a single word of sincere prayer.

“Ani T’filati,” “I am my prayer,” means that your best prayer is the one that comes from you just as you are. You are already good enough. You don’t have to be someone else in order to express your pain, your joy, your hopes and your disappointments to the cosmos. Doing so, just as you are, can do for you what it did for Hannah. It can make you feel heard. It can make you feel that your life matters, that your sorrow has dignity, and that your gratitude for what life has given you can help you better enjoy life. It can bring you a sense of inner peace when you are surrounded by turmoil and it can give you strength to face life’s toughest moments. 

I am my prayer. I am the very thing that I need to say to eternity, and I feel that eternity answers back to me in the quiet and moving moments of my life.

This year, at our High Holy Days services, we are using a new prayerbook, Mishkan HaNefesh. It is, I think, an opportunity for each of us to re-evaluate our relationship to prayer. Maybe this is the first time you have sat in a synagogue using a prayerbook that talks about God in a way that seems approachable. Maybe you miss the heightened language of “Lord,” “King of the Universe,” and “Blessed art Thou.” Or, maybe you are ready to think of prayer as being more like a poem than like a rigid legal formula. Maybe this prayerbook has you ready to think about how you can be your own prayer.

As we go through the Days of Awe together between now and the final shofar blast of Yom Kippur, I would like to invite you to try praying like you’ve never prayed before. Pray as a way of uncovering the things in life that you are truly grateful for. Pray as a way of discovering your sense of your life’s mission and purpose. Pray, like Hannah did, as a way of openning up the places where you feel wounded and in pain. My hope for you, is that your prayer be a source of meaning, joy, discovery and healing.

This Rosh Hashanah, make the choice to include some kind of prayer practice in your life on a regular basis. It could be a moment to look up to heaven while you’re waiting on the grocery check-out line just to say, “Thank you.” It could be including a moment of gratitude for your food before you dig in. It could be a moment to sing Shema with your child before tucking her or him in at night. It could be a moment to hope for the wellbeing of the people you love as you lie down to sleep at night.

Try it. You might find that it eases your pain, gives you a sense of purpose, helps you feel heard in a noisy world. It may make you feel like you can finally hear yourself. And, it might make you feel happier.

L’shanah tovah tikateivu.  May you be inscribed for a good year

This is the sermon I delivered at Temple Sinai in Cranston, Rhode Island, on Yom Kippur morning.

The Roman siege of Jerusalem in the years 69 to 70 CE was an ugly business. For more than a century, there had been religious tensions between the Jews and the Roman Empire, which ruled over them and the land of Israel. Around the year 40 CE, the Roman Emperor Caligula had ordered a statue of himself to be placed in the courtyard of the Temple in Jerusalem. For the Jews, it was tantamount to an order to commit idolatry. Riots broke out in the city. 

Violence escalated into full warfare in 66 CE. Jews throughout the land of Israel protested Roman taxes and refused to pay them. Then the Roman governor responded by sending troops into the Temple treasury and seized more than 1,200 pounds of gold, claiming it for the Emperor. The violation of the Temple was more than the Jews could stand and fighting broke out throughout the province. The Romans cracked down on the rebellion by executing as many as 6,000 Jewish men who opposed them. The Romans brought in a massive number of troops from bordering provinces, and later from Rome itself.

But the Jews, as one might have hoped, did not respond to Roman militarism by joining together in common cause. Inside the walled capital of Jerusalem, there were bloody battles that pitted Jews against Jews. A powerful Jewish faction known as the Sicarii took control of the city, using targeted assassination as a tool to intimidate their fellow Jews. Eventually, the leader of the Sicarii was, himself, assassinated by a Jewish member of a different faction and all the Sicarii were ejected from the city. 

Later, another Jewish faction, the Zealots, entered Jerusalem. They were militant fighters who had been driven out of the north by the Roman army. They came to the heavily fortified capital of Jerusalem in the year 67 to make their last stand against the Romans. Jerusalem, however, was led by the Sadduccees, a Jewish faction that favored negotiation with the Romans to end the war. For the next year and a half, behind the capital’s sturdy walls, Jerusalem was in a constant state of internecine warfare between Zealots and Sadducees. 

When the Romans finally did come to take control of Jerusalem in 69, all they had to do was build their own wall outside the city’s walls to keep the Jews from escaping the city. Then, they waited while the Jews killed each other inside. The Zealots, in an effort to force the Sadducees to fight the Romans rather than negotiate, burned the city’s food supply. With the city weakened by starvation, the Romans broke through the walls in the summer of 70 and took it easily. They burned down the Temple, expelled the Jews from Jerusalem, and sent them into an exile that would last 2,000 years.

For the ancient Rabbis, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was beyond heartbreaking. However, they were wise enough to recognize that it was a tragedy that the Jews had helped to bring upon themselves. The rabbis wrote in the Talmud that the destruction of the Temple was not God’s punishment for the Jews failing to study Torah or to perform mitzvot. They said that it was a result of the Jews own “baseless hatred,” or sinat chinam (B. Yoma 9b).

The Jews were so engulfed in their own infighting of one faction against another that they failed to see the larger reality. They were so filled with practiced, studied, ingrained hatred for each other, that they could not see past their own anger. 

The rabbis even chastised themselves for not taking action to stop the hatred of Jew against Jew. In retrospect, they recognized that they had been so distracted by their own internal debates about legalistic minutiae that they had not acted while a civil war of Jew against Jew was brewing.

Perhaps to illustrate this view, the rabbis told a story that is one of the most famous in the Talmud. It is a story about two men who hated each other (B. Gitin 55b-56a). The destruction of Jerusalem, says the Talmud, came about because of two men who had similar names that were easily confused. One was named Kamza and the other was named Bar Kamza. 

A certain man of Jerusalem had a friend named Kamza and an enemy named Bar Kamza. He planned to host a big party and he instructed his servant to send an invitation to Kamza. The servant, though, must have misheard, because he accidentally sent the invitation to Bar Kamza instead. On the day of the party, when the host saw Bar Kamza sitting at a table in his home, enjoying the party with his other guests, he was furious. 

He said, “You who tells lies about me, what are you doing here? Get out!” Bar Kamza – who, after all, had been invited – implored the host, saying, “Since I’m here, don’t embarrass me. Let me stay and I will pay you for whatever I eat and whatever I drink.”

The host’s anger was not in any way satisfied. He again ordered Bar Kamza to leave. Bar Kamza said, “Let me pay half the cost of the entire party. Just don’t throw me out in front of all of these people.” Again, the host refused. Bar Kamza pleaded, “Let me pay for the whole thing! Just don’t humiliate me!” Still, the host refused. He grabbed Bar Kamza and physically threw him out of the house. 

You can only imagine how furious Bar Kamza must have been. You can only imagine what was going on in his head as he thought about getting back at the party host and all of his friends. Bar Kamza must have begun to make up stories in his head about what had happened – the humiliation he had endured, the complicity of the other guests, and the hatred he felt toward his own people. The story in the Talmud tells us that Bar Kamza thought to himself, “Since the rabbis were sitting there at the party and did nothing to stop the host, they must think that what he did was right. I will have my revenge against them, too!”

Bar Kamza went to the Roman authorities and he inform against the rabbis, against all the Jews of Jerusalem, and, indeed, against every Jew in the Land of Israel. The Romans responded and Jerusalem fell.

Now, I don’t think that the story about Kamza, Bar Kamza and the party host is factual. The tale does seem a bit far-fetched. But, I think the rabbis told this story in the Talmud to make an altogether truthful and important observation about the times in which they lived, and an important observation about how human beings can behave. When people start hating each other for no good reason – when people allow their anger to run away beyond the bounds of reason or the reality of their situation – disaster can happen. 

The story describes a habit of the human mind that you have probably seen in your own life. When people become deeply angry with another person, their anger can become all-consuming and self-destructive. Think about your own experience. Think about the times when you have been so angry with someone that you started making stories up in your head, just like the party host and Bar Kamza did, about how simply awful that person must be and how evil their motivations must be. 

When you start thinking that way, you can justify in your own mind some of the very worst behavior of which we are capable. Once our anger gets riled up – and, sometimes, for good reasons – we all allow our minds take us for a ride of imaginary reasons to get even angrier. We can get carried away with our feelings of hurt and injustice, and end up doing things we will later regret. I have seen otherwise good people humiliate others when anger got the better of them, like the party host did. I have seen people so poisoned by anger that they tried to get back at their “enemies,” like Bar Kamza did, without thinking about how far the damage would spread. Baseless hatred can make us do terrible things.

This is how the story is usually taught nowadays, as a lesson about us as individuals – about the danger that each of us faces when we allow sinat chinam, “baseless hatred,” to grow in our hearts. It is worth remembering, though, that, in the Talmud, this was not just a story about two individuals. It was a story about how an entire people, an entire nation, can self-destruct when it is engulfed in anger and hatred.

This ancient observation should not be news to us. You might say that we are living today in an age of sinat chinam. American society seems to be locked into something like a 50-50 stalemate in which half the country thinks that the other half are mindless, immoral and un-American. Which, not coincidentally, is exactly what the second half thinks about the first. Even our cable television networks divide us, with broadcasters on each side cheering their viewers into believing that they represent the truth and those who watch the “other network” are merchants of fascism, terrorism, lies and evil. We are knee-deep in baseless hatred.

Unfortunately, this baseless hatred is not just a phenomenon that divides Red States and Blue States. It slowly has become a divide within the Jewish community as well. 

Last March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a passionate speech before the U.S. Congress about a deal negotiated by the Obama Administration and five other nations with Iran to end that country’s nuclear weapons program. Iran’s nuclear ambitions, of course, are of paramount concern because Iran funds terrorist organizations that attack Israel and Iran’s leaders have repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction.

But Prime Minister Netanyahu told Congress that the deal negotiated by the Obama administration was wrong-headed and would increase, not decrease, the likelihood of a nuclear Iran. The American Jewish community, which has largely supported President Obama, was split in half. Some defended the deal as the best available course to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. They cited statements in support of the deal from nuclear weapons experts and even members of Israel’s security establishment. But neither deal supporters nor deal opponents have been able to convince the other to change their minds. All this summer, the American Jewish community was at an impasse.

All this is to be expected. Nobody who knows the Jewish community would expect all Jews to agree on anything. But the vitriol in this debate has spilled over into something closer to hatred than mere political disagreement. The fact that the Iran deal is deeply complicated – to a level that it can only be understood fully by a handful of experts in nuclear weapons development and nuclear inspection protocols – has done nothing to subdue the tenor of the debate. In fact, the very impenetrable nature of the deal seems to be an important part of why it makes people so angry.

I read, almost every day, in the Jewish press and in exchanges with friends and relatives, about the outrage people feel on one side of the issue or the other. I see people whom I admire and respect speak of other Jews and Jewish allies with deeply hurtful words. 

A past president of the rabbinic association to which I belong wrote in a national publication that the President of the United States employed anti-semitic themes in his defense of the plan. Colleagues with whom I have joined on numerous other issues have made comments about how the opponents of the plan are on the side of warmongers. Again, I fear, we are seeing an alarming level of baseless hatred in the Jewish community.

This is more than merely impolite lack of civility. For sixty-seven years, since the founding of the State of Israel, Jews have been committed to the idea that Israel should never be allowed to become a partisan issue in American politics. The Jewish community has not handed the title of “defender of Israel” to either the Democratic or Republican party to the exclusion of the other. It has not labeled either party as the “enemy of Israel” – and with good reason. 

We have seen how other political footballs in American politics – abortion, the death penalty, and gay marriage – have divided the country. We want no such division about Israel. Support for Israel should never become a “wedge issue” in American politics, as some say it already is becoming. Can you imagine what would happen to Israel on the day that a U.S. President is elected on an anti-Israel platform? We cannot allow that to happen.

As much as the division on the Iran deal is a political disaster for Israel, it is an even greater disaster for relations within the Jewish community. The Jewish people have too many external enemies for us to be engaged in internecine warfare. We cannot afford to weaken ourselves by doing the real antisemites’ job for them. We cannot afford to engage in sinat chinam, baseless hatred.

Even now, after the Iran deal seems certain to be enacted, American Jews are still bickering and casting blame against each other instead of joining against our common enemy. Remember, everyone in this conversation agrees that it is Iran, and the prospect of Iran gaining nuclear weapons, that is our enemy. No matter what our opinions may be, we must recognize that our enemy is not other Jews who happen to disagree with us.

Think of what American Jews could be doing right now about Iran if we weren’t still fighting over a decision that already has been made. We could unite in asking the White House and Congress to make another deal – a deal with Israel. We could be going to Washington to make sure that the U.S. will commit all resources possible to enforcing the terms of the imperfect deal with Iran – to use the maximum level of inspections and surveillance to prevent an Iranian bomb. We could be demanding that the United States step up its enforcement of international laws that prohibit Iran from sending money and arms to militant groups like Hezbolah, which threatens Israel on its northern border, and to Hamas, which threatens Israel on its western flank. We could be lobbying for the U.S. to upgrade Israel’s defensive capabilities to defend itself from its hostile neighbors.

If the Iran deal was an issue that boiled your blood this summer – if it is still boiling your blood even now that its adoption is secured – I ask you to stop directing your anger toward other Jews and other Americans. They are not your enemies. Instead, join with people who may have seen the Iran deal differently than you did, and find common cause with them. Write letters to your representative urging their support for the defense of Israel and their support for measures to improve our new inspection regime against Iran. Build bridges within the Jewish community. Do not tear them down.

Part of our commitment on Yom Kippur is to transcend the passions that distract us from our real goals in life. At this time of year, and on this day, we commit ourselves to seeing a picture that is bigger than just getting our way, and winning out over our political opponents.

On this Yom Kippur, let us resolve to rid ourselves of sinat chinam. Let us notice, as the ancient rabbis noticed (even if only after the fact), how much damage we can do to ourselves as a people when anger and hatred divide us from our fellow Jews and our fellow human beings. Let us notice that it is possible to disagree with people – even to disagree passionately – without seeing them as monstors. Let us notice how we become our own worst enemies when we allow our minds to steep in the vinegar of bitterness, anger and hatred. 

Let us free ourselves of hatred so that we can recognize the wisdom of our tradition that urges us to be brothers and sisters to each other, and to see how good and pleasant it is when we dwell together in peace.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah. 
May you be sealed for a good year.

(This is the sermon I delivered at Temple Sinai in Cranston, Rhode Island, on Kol Nidre night.)

Dear Alice,

I am writing to apologize about our date last month. I guess the fact that I have not heard from you and you have not returned my phone calls means that you are angry at me for what happened.

Let me explain.

I asked you out after my mother – who has been friends with your mother for many years – suggested that I call you. My mother told me that you were feeling down because you had just been dumped by your old boyfriend. I thought I was being kind and gentlemanly by asking you out to dinner, but I guess that was a mistake on my part. My bad.

While we were at dinner, I wanted you to get to know me better, so I told you about my childhood in Chicago and about my ex-stepfather who used to try to be “buddies” with me by taking me to basketball and football games, even though I hate sports. I also told you about the girls I dated in high school and college and how I have been unlucky in love. Sad, but true.

When you told me about your interest in American history – you see, I do remember that – it reminded me of a girl from my high school. I told you the story about how she had a crush on our history teacher and how she accidentally gave him a picture she drew of him surrounded by hearts and kisses instead of giving him her homework. So funny!! 

I’m sorry you didn’t like that story and, I guess, I’m sorry that the other stuff I told you about myself wasn’t so interesting to you, either. My mother told me that your mother said that you complained that I wasn’t very nice to you. I don’t understand why you think that, but I guess you have your reasons. I just think it was all a  misunderstanding. Maybe no one has ever taken enough interest in you before to tell you about themselves. 

I guess the thing you disliked most was when I asked you to pay for your half of the meal. It only seemed fair to me, but I’m sorry if you don’t see it that way. I am agonized by the thought that you think I’m cheap or something! I’m sorry that I swore at you when you got up and left the table. That wasn’t very nice of me, but I don’t think your behavior was so nice, either. After you left, people in the restaurant were just staring at me and whispering to each other about me. That made me feel pretty small. So, you see, I was pretty hurt, too, by our evening together.

I’m writing this letter to you because my mother told me that I should apologize. I hope you’ll forgive me and, maybe, go out with me again some time. Next time, I’ll pay without you even asking.

Sincerely,
Fred

Sometimes, apologies aren’t really apologies. Sometimes, words like “I’m sorry” and “I apologize,” are really just there to convince ourselves that we’re being nice when, actually, we’re denying, deflecting and blaming the other person. I’m sure you have received an apology that didn’t really apologize for anything. I know that I have offered what I thought at the time were apologies that actually just made a situation worse. 

Offering a good apology is not just good etiquette. From the perspective of Judaism, apologizing is a commandment and an obligation. It could even be seen as a spiritual act – a sacred act. Learning to apologize well is learning to to be a mensch – a decent human being and a person of integrity.

Yom Kippur is a day when we focus on apologies because we are told that today is our deadline to make our apologies to the people we have hurt and to apologize to God. Jewish tradition teaches that, if we do this with sincerity, we will be forgiven.

When I talk about the need to apologize during this time of year, people often ask questions about the experience of being on the receiving end of an apology. They ask, “How can I accept an apology from someone who has hurt me so badly?” “Why should I forgive someone just because they say, ‘I’m sorry’?” “If I say, ‘I forgive you,’ aren’t I just setting myself up to get hurt again?” Those are all good questions and, there is no doubt, it is sometimes hard to accept an apology.

However, I notice that people want to focus on the apologies that other people owe them and they don’t often want to talk about the difficulties of being the person who needs to  make the apology. That’s what I want to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what it means to make a good apology. I want to talk about how to say, “I’m sorry.”

So, let’s first think about what makes bad apologies bad. You know you’re about to hear a bad apology when someone says: “I’m sorry, but…” For example, “I’m sorry that you were hurt when my car ran over your dog, but you sure take these things personally.” That is not – in any way, shape or form – an actual apology.

“I’m sorry but” is just another way of saying, “I know that I should say something in the form of an apology, but I really think that I did nothing wrong.” Sometimes it’s worse than that. Sometimes, “I’m sorry but,” really means, “I know I have to apologize under these circumstances, but, really, I think you need to apologize to me first.” That’s not an apology. That is blaming – the opposite of apologizing.

Another way to make a bad apology comes in the form of “I’m sorry, but only vaguely.” This is when someone says, “I’m sorry about what happened” or “I apologize for anything that may have hurt you.” If you know that you did something wrong, and you want to be forgiven for it, then name it. Say what it is that you did. “I’m sorry that I embarrassed you in front of all your friends when I called you an idiot,” is a lot more likely to be accepted than, “I’m sorry for what happened back there.” Right?

Maybe the most common bad apology is “I’m sorry if.” You hear this all the time in pseudo-apologies like, “I’m sorry if your feelings were hurt when I made other plans for the night I said I would come see your debut at Carnegie Hall.” It’s not hard to see that “I’m sorry if” is just a way for the speaker to suggest that he or she is not the person really at fault. “I’m sorry if” implies that the real blame lies in the way the other person failed to perceive the situation correctly. It’s a way of saying, “I wouldn’t have to apologize if you weren’t so easily offended.” Again, not a real apology. 

I would venture to say that we have all, at one time or another, offered a bad apology like one of these. We even do it when we know how much it hurts to receive such a non-apology. Why do we do it, then? We make bad apologies because making good apologies is really very hard. How hard? 

The great Jewish medieval philosopher and legal scholar, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon – who is better known to the world as Maimonides or, in Jewish circles, as the Rambam – wrote that the repentance of Yom Kippur is really a series of good apologies to the people we have hurt and making a good apology to God. He said that a good apology consists of four steps.

The first step, according to the Rambam, is to admit in clear words what you did wrong. He said that you have to confess your wrong verbally and ask for forgiveness. The second step, he said is to express remorse, to say that you recognize the damage you have done and your determination not to make the same mistake again. The third step of the Rambam is to make amends. You must commit to righting your wrongs and repairing the damage you have done. Finally, the Rambam says that repentance is not complete until you face the same situation again and make better choices. No apology can mean anything unless it means that you have changed because you recognize the wrong you have committed.

Putting the Rambam’s principles into practical rules for saying you’re sorry, we could say that a good apology needs to take responsibility for actions and acknowledge their hurt. It needs to express sincere remorse and provide reasonable assurance that it won’t happen again. It needs to offer to make up for the harm done.

For example, here is what Fred might have said to apologize to Alice: “The way that I spoke to you in the restaurant was hurtful and inconsiderate of your feelings. I should have listened to you in a way that made you feel appreciated and heard instead of dominating the conversation with trivial stories about myself. I should have treated you with respect and courtesy instead of insulting you, especially after you let me know how hurt you felt. I understand that my behavior made you feel belittled and ignored. I feel terrible that my behavior hurt you so much that you felt that you needed to leave so quickly. I promise that I will do whatever I can to make sure that I never treat anyone like that again. Please let me know what I can do to make this up to you.” That is what an apology should sound like.

Is making an apology like that easy? Of course not. Even after working hard at apologizing, people find it difficult to make this kind of good apology every time that an apology is called for. But making good apologies has tremendous benefits for us – benefits that should motivate us to try to make more good apologies.

Good apologies can transform our relationships. We often shy away from making a real apology because we think that an apology will make us look weak, unkind or imperfect. Somehow, we fail to realize that apologizing does just the opposite. When we sincerely apologize for something we’ve done wrong, it actually causes others to see us as self-confident, compassionate and humble – all good qualities.

There is an example of a good apology that you may know about in recent Rhode Island history. The actor James Woods had a brother named Michael who died in 2006 at age 49 when he had a heart attack in the emergency department at Kent Hospital in Warwick. He had gone to the hospital complaining of a sore throat and vomiting. It later came out that Michael Woods’ death was directly related to the fact that a medical order that was written by the attending physician was not carried out by the Emergency Department staff.

James Woods sued the hospital and the case dragged out in lawyers’ offices for years. When the case eventually went to trial, the CEO of the hospital, Sandra Coletta, went to the courthouse and found out that the hospital had made mistakes in treating Michael Woods. She asked for a meeting with the famous actor who was suing her hospital, and in that meeting she listened to the pain that James Woods, the person, had endured in the loss of his younger brother. Coletta then did something unexpected. She apologized. She admitted the mistakes that the hospital had made and she said she was sorry. 

She also did more than that. Coletta offered to establish an institute at the hospital, named in honor of Michael Woods, to prevent such errors from happening again in the future. She acknowledged that the words “I’m sorry” are meaningless if they are not joined to action to repair what has been broken. They are pointless if they are not backed up with real change.

That was the breakthrough that was needed to settle the case. As a result, the hospital was able to get past a lawsuit that was a public relations disaster for them. James Woods and his family got the acknowledgement they needed that the hospital recognized their fault in his brother’s death. Because of the work of the Michael J. Woods Institute to Improve Medical Care, our community now has a hospital with shorter waiting times in the emergency department, which, in turn, can help save lives. 

Of course, most apologies do not attract the media attention that this apology did. Most apologies do not result in better medical care for thousands of people and the prevention of unnecessary deaths. But apologies do bring together people who have been kept apart by resentment and bitterness. Apologies do help to heal damaged families and save them from estrangement and brokenness. Apologies do help people transform old animosities and inner turmoil into forgiveness and self-forgiveness. Good apologies can do all of that. They can transform us into better and happier people.

On this Yom Kippur, I want to ask you to do something real. I want you to think about the apologies that are missing from your life. You can consider the apologies that are owed to you, if you like, but, chances are, you can’t do too much to make those happen. You can, however, control the apologies that you owe to others. 

I want to ask you to notice what has kept you from offering those apologies. Maybe you think that too much time has gone by. In reality, it is never too late to say, “I’m sorry.” Maybe you think that apologizing would just stir up old pain. The truth is, you will never know what pain another person is still feeling and will continue to feel until you apologize. Maybe you think that you shouldn’t apologize because the other person won’t apologize back. Of course, if you both feel that way, you could both be suffering as you wait for the other person to apologize first.

Don’t do that to yourself. Take the risk. Find the strength. Heal the wounds. Say, “I’m sorry.” And make your apology, not just a good apology, but a great one.

G’mar chatimah tovah.
May you be written and sealed for a good year.

I hate to point this out, but Kim Davis' arguments about refusing to issue marriage licenses in Rowan County, Kentucky, are not just legal nonsense. They also are a biblical train wreck.

Davis is, of course, the county clerk who has refused to obey a court order – one upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court – to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. That defiance has put her in jail for contempt of court. It also has made her the most famous county clerk in America, and that is reason enough for me not to write about her. She and her offensive claims about religious persecution have gotten her far more publicity than she deserves. I hate to add more fuel to a controversy that already has exceeded its fifteen minutes of fame.

I also hate to write about Davis because, in my opinion, the very lunacy of her legal claims is actually a good thing for the future of marriage equality. The outrageous nature of her argument – that she has a constitutional right to ignore and defy the rulings of the Supreme Court – only goes to show that marriage discrimination is on its last legs. If Kim Davis is the symbolic leader of the rebellion to keep gay and lesbian couples from marrying, it is a rebellion that is looking increasingly like a fringe movement of the willfully ignorant and the intellectually dishonest.

But I can't help myself. I have to write about Kim Davis because there is such a glaringly obvious contradiction in her understanding and interpretation of the Bible. I am such a consummate nerd of biblical study that it pains me not to point it out.

In her defense, Davis published a statement that says, in part, "I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage. To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God's definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience."

I'm going to put aside for the moment the idea that there can be any religious justification for public officials to refuse to carry out the duties of their offices. More on that later.

I have written in the past about the so-called "biblical definition of marriage." Suffice to say, if God has a definition of marriage, God has never published it. There is no single, clear definition of marriage to be found anywhere in the Bible. Any biblical support for Davis to justify her refusal to do her job must be based on her interpretation of the Bible. The Bible does have a few things to say about sex between people of the same sex and about marriage, but not all of them will support the choices that Davis has made in her job and in her life.

Davis, I am sure, will rest her case largely upon Leviticus 18:22, which states: "Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman. it is an abomination." This is not the only biblical verse that deals with male-male sexuality, but it is one of the clearest. The Hebrew Bible does not like the idea of men having sex with men. It is not clear whether the verse is talking about consensual sex between men who love each other, or if it is talking about rape. There are no examples of the former in the Bible, but there are examples of the latter (see Genesis 19:5-6.) It is entirely possible that Leviticus 18 is talking mainly about rape, not consensual sex.

Some will note that Leviticus 18 is a prohibition against sexuality, not against marriage. That is true, but marriage is mostly equated with sex in the Hebrew Bible. In fact, there really is no verb "to marry" in Biblical Hebrew and there is no noun that just means "wife." The idiom for marriage is "to take." A wife, in the Hebrew Bible is a woman who has been acquired as a possession. When the Bible says, "He took her to be his woman" it means both, "He married her" and, "He had sex with her." From a biblical perspective, sex is marriage and marriage is sex. Some sex is permitted, and, thus, marriage is permitted. Some sex is prohibited and, thus, marriage is prohibited.

The word "abomination" used in Leviticus 18 about sex between two men sounds pretty strong – definitely not something that God wants people to do. However, this is not the only place in the Bible that talks about "abominations." In fact, the Bible uses the exact same word (to'eivah in Hebrew) in the book of Deuteronomy to talk specifically about marriage. Here is a fairly literal translation of the passage:

When a man takes a woman and masters her, but she does not find grace in his eyes because he finds something obnoxious about her, he writes her a bill of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her away from his house. She leaves his house and goes to become another man's. But if the other man hates her, writes her a bill of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her away from his house – or, if the last man who took her as his woman dies – then the first husband who sent her away cannot take her again to be his woman after she has been made ritually impure — for that is an abomination before Adonai. You shall not bring sin upon the land that Adonai your God is giving to you as a possession. (Deuteronomy 24:1-4)
 
Any honest reading of the Bible would suggest that if a marriage between two men is prohibited, then the remarriage of a divorced couple after the woman has been married to someone else must also be prohibited. The first prohibition is based on an interpretation of Leviticus – one that says that they cannot have sex with each other even if they are in a consensual relationship, and that the prohibition against sex implies a prohibition against marriage. The second prohibition requires much less interpretation, as it is clearly spelled out in Deuteronomy in precise, legal language. The prohibition in Leviticus is tangentially related to marriage; the prohibition in Deuteronomy is directly fixed on marriage.

I want to make clear that this is not my interpretation of the Bible and it is not my understanding of what Judaism teaches. But Kim Davis reads the Bible rather differently than I do. She claims to read the Bible as giving clear and certain teaching for the present day about a definition of marriage. My belief is that the definition of marriage has changed greatly over the centuries and that we should feel fortunate not to live in a time in which the Bible's rules about polygamy, captive brides and women being required to marry their rapists still apply.

I respect those who have a greater sense of certainty than I do about what the Bible decrees about marriage, but I do ask them to apply those standards consistently. Kim Davis does not.

One might assume that Kim Davis, who refuses to "violate a central teaching of Scripture…regarding marriage," would refuse to issue marriage licenses to couples who want to get remarried after their divorce even after the woman was subsequently married to someone else. After all, such a marriage is clearly and directly prohibited in the Bible. It is an "abomination." Maybe Davis did refuse to issue such marriage licenses. I don't know.

However, I do know that she would have a pretty hard time explaining her refusal to the couple who wanted to get remarried, because she was in exactly the same situation herself. Davis has been married to Joe Davis since 2009. It is her fourth marriage. Joe Davis was also her second husband, from 1996 to 2006. In between her marriages to Joe Davis, she was married to Thomas McIntryre in 2007. Kim Davis' lawyer says that she is "a completely different person" today than she was in 2011 because she now "loves the Lord." Her conversion, however, did not include the rejection of her marriage which is a clear violation of a biblical law, an ongoing and current "abomination" according to a literal reading of Deuteronomy.

Is it fair for me to use Kim Davis' personal life as an argument against her? After all, people can make mistakes, change, and be forgiven. How long can we hold a person's past against him or her? Should not Jewish and Christian ideals allow us to forgive past mistakes? Yes, absolutely. 

However, it is Kim Davis who has not repaired her past mistakes according to her own stated fidelity to the "teachings of Scripture regarding marriage." She is still married and enjoying the benefits of marriage to a man who is biblically prohibited to her according to her own strict standards. It is Kim Davis who has intruded into the personal lives of others by denying them their constitutional rights to benefit from civil marriage. I think that opens the possibility that we look at how she applies her principles to herself.

Here is our biblical train wreck, and it is becoming all too common in our times. Many so-called "biblical literalists" and fundamentalists like Kim Davis grant themselves the authority to apply their interpretation of the Bible to other people's lives. Even worse, people like Kim Davis are using Scripture as a weapon against others without applying it equally to themselves. That is not what either Judaism or Christianity teaches. Both religions guide us to be scrupulous in applying high standards to ourselves and to be compassionate and loving to others. Kim Davis has done the opposite.  

Just to make matters worse, Davis, her lawyers and supporters have thrown on top of this noisome heap of hypocrisy the charge that Davis is being persecuted for her religious beliefs. No less a figure than Senator Ted Cruz has charged, "Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny. Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith. This is wrong. This is not America."

No, Senator Cruz. Davis is in jail for disobeying a court order. If she wants to conduct herself according to a religious standard in her own life – even a hypocritical standard – that is her right and she is welcome to it. But she does not have the right to use her elected office to impose that standard on others. Religious persecution is when the government prevents you from practicing your religion, not when the government stops you from forcing others to adhere to your religion. Claiming religious persecution, in this case, is offensive to the many people in the world today and throughout history who have been been denied basic rights of faith and religious practice.

We are a country in which public officials perform their duties according to the law, not according to their ecclesiastical whim. If there is no way for Davis to execute the duties of her office within the confines of her conscience, she should resign. 

Bad legal arguments and bad biblical interpretation are the double sign of those who want to cling to a discriminatory past – a past that is now sputtering to its oblivion in much the same way as biblical arguments in favor of slavery sputtered out in the 19th century, and biblical arguments against interracial marriage sputtered out in the 20th. I remain hopeful that this train wreck is a sign that the debate over marriage equality is coming to an end.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Searching for How the Bible Defines Marriage
What Does the Bible Say about Marriage? What Should We Say?

One of the first words that most people pick up when they learn Hebrew is "S'lichah." It is the Modern Hebrew word that means approximately the same thing as the American English expression, "Excuse me."

When I'm in Israel, I usually find myself using the word frequently. Someone bumps into me while I'm standing in line for the bus. I say, S'lichah. I need to get the waitress' attention in a restaurant – S'lichah. I apologize for interrupting someone who is speaking too fast for me to understand – S'lichah. 

At some point, I realize that, with my American attitudes about etiquette, I am saying "S'lichah" far more often than any Israeli ever would. In Israel's culture of "all for one and one for all," s'lichah can sound a little too polite, too unassertive, and even a bit whiny. It takes us Americans a while to catch on to the idea that when we say "excuse me," to an Israeli, it sounds like we're calling unnecessary attention to our own needs. "You feel like you need to be excused? Who cares?"

But the lack of s'lichah in Israeli culture should not be taken as a sign of a society that does not understand the importance of seeking forgiveness. Far from it. Israelis, as a whole, tend to be very concerned with how their actions affect others. Most Israelis are quicker to say ani mitzta'eir/et, "I am sorry," and ta'iti, "I was wrong," than most Americans are. If you think about it, admitting wrongdoing and expressing remorse are more meaningful expressions than just brushing aside a misstep or an uncomfortable situation with a quick "S'lichah."

This Saturday night, we will prepare for the coming Days of Awe with Selichot. This is an Ashkenazic practice, more than a thousand years old, of rising in the middle of the night during the week before Rosh Hashanah to speak prayers begging God's forgiveness. The congregation I serve, like many others, has a special late-night service on the post-Shabbat Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah to recite prayers, sing High Holy Day songs, read poetry, and engage in reflection that helps provoke us into seeking forgiveness from God for the wrongs we have done. At the darkest time of day, we try to come out of the darkness of shame and guilt and into the light of a new beginning, clean of our past mistakes and faults.

The name, "Selichot," says a lot of what the service is about. The Hebrew word Selichot is a form of "s'lichah." It means "Pardons." Like the Israeli notion of "excuse me," though, Selichot is not about making excuses or indulging in self-focused navel gazing. As much as we contemporary Jews, especially liberal Jews, like to think of the High Holy Days as a time for putting ourselves on the therapist's couch – as much as we think of t'shuvah as an ancient form of psychoanalysis – it really is supposed to be directed outward, not inward.

In his Laws of Repentance, the great Jewish philosopher, Rambam (also known as Maimonides), emphasized that the confessional prayers of the Days of Awe are not directed just to ones own self. He says repeatedly that the confessions must be addressed to God and they must be said out loud. Selichot is not just about the self. It is about seeing ourselves as being part of something greater. Our offenses against other people and against God hurt us – certainly – but our focus should be on how they damage the world and how they damage our relationship with God.

In this sense, I think the approach to s'lichah that we see in Israeli society is closer to the Jewish ideal than the American version. The Selichot service – and, indeed, this entire season of repentance – challenges us to see our faults as being more than failures to "be our best selves." After all, who really cares that you feel like you need to be excused? On Selichot night, we begin to awaken to the idea that our failings have cosmic consequences. It is not just ourselves we damage with our unjustified anger, our petty jealousies, our lax attitude on ethical issues, or by acting on our selfish desires. We hurt the universe. We postpone our goal of repairing the world.

So, as you enter your synagogue on Saturday night, take a moment to say a bit more to God than just, "Excuse me," or, "I beg your pardon." Be prepared to dig deeply into yourself to acknowledge that your intemperate, ill-chosen, wrongful and hurtful actions have had a negative impact on all the world around you. Let that awareness deepen your resolve to change, not just for your own sake, but for all of creation.


Other Posts on This Topic:
For the Sin We Have Sinned Against You...
You are What You Choose to Be