Rosh Hashanah 5774 (2013)
Don’t Outsource Your Judaism

Sermon by Rabbi Anna Boswell-Levy

The Torah portion we just chanted and experienced is well-known, well-worn, and tragic. It is sadly so relatable. Sarah feels insulted and threatened by another mother in her household, Hagar, and demands that she and her son be kicked out. Hagar, left out in the desert with her infant son, feels abandoned and is without hope. So, she in turn abandons her son under a bush, leaving him there to die. She walks a bow’s length away from him so she doesn’t have to hear his cries. But God hears the cry of her child, Ishmael. God comes to Hagar and assures her they will not die and shows her a well of water to sustain them. It’s not clear whether the well was there all along — perhaps Hagar, in her pain and hopelessness, just didn’t see it. How many of us have been in such a low place where we couldn’t see the resources that were right there?

The holiday of Rosh Hashanah is a not-so-veiled Jewish attempt to get you to wake up to all of the opportunity in your life. It’s the cry of the infant awakening you to what is clearly there if you would but see it. Rosh Hashanah makes us conscious that time is passing, a new year is upon us — we must shed what no longer serves us and grow into what we have the potential to become.

But there is the rub — how do we grow? Perhaps it is clear what we have outgrown (perhaps not) but it is often so difficult to know where life is taking us next, where God is calling us to next. We don’t want to shed old skin, even though it may be tight and confining. We crave familiarity and we resist the shock of the new. Most of us don't start over unless we have to. We don't like feeling like beginners. Feeling like a beginner can feel like being a child; it's a state we hope to grow out of as soon as we can. We want to become experts. We want to become blasé.

I see Rosh Hashanah, the teshuvah experience, and the Jewish experience itself differently now that I am a mother. Adar is a year and a half old today, so though I’ve gotten over the shock of becoming a parent, it’s still a new and exciting time. Now that we are getting a full night of sleep pretty regularly, I can reflect on what has changed me and why.

Words cannot describe how wonderful it was last Friday night, when, as I was about to light candles, Adar interrupted me by saying insistently “Daka! Daka! Pig! Pig!” We realized that she was saying “Tzedakah! We have to give tzedakah!” which is something we now do ritually as a family before we light candles. Adar loves to put coins in the piggybank. So we gave tzedakah together. When I covered my eyes and sang the blessing over the candles, I peeked over at Adar, who in her father’s arms was covering her eyes too. And then when Josh said Kiddush, she was fixated not on him, but on the challah, coyly hidden under its cover. She kept trying to look under it to see the challah. After Kiddush, she eagerly removed the cover and put her hands on the challah as we sang the blessing together. Adar calls every kind of bread challah, which for her is the golden standard. Clearly, the kid loves Shabbat, and I want it to stay that way.

So it was with great interest that I recently read an article about Jewish day schools — and how you don’t necessarily need to send your kids to one to have them turn out positively identified and educated Jews. The thrust of the piece was simply that day schools are great, but if you are allowing the school to be the primary source of Jewish learning for your child, you are outsourcing your kid’s Jewish education. The points the article made were simply:

1) Make Judaism the backbone of your time as a family. Take time each Friday night, to bless your family, your home. Go to shul on Saturday mornings, and then Saturday night light the Havdalah candle, smell the spices and drink the wine or grape juice. Make these things as much a part of the rhythm of your life as all the other rituals you have at home.

2) Put joy in your Jewish observance. Sing, read, cook, say blessings, invite friends and family to your table. If you build and decorate the sukkah in your backyard, do it with joy and creativity so that you give it your own stamp.

3) Find a synagogue, and become an active part of that community. A synagogue is a place for prayer and a place for community, as well — and you may find yourself surprised by either or both. Synagogues are not only places to pray, but also places to make friends, to grow and learn from others.

4) Home-school your Judaism. Schools are vital, but at the end of the day, real education can’t be completely outsourced. Instruct a child in the way he ought to go, and even when he is old, he will not depart from it.

So why do I share this with you? Because even though you may not have school-aged kids, this wisdom is true for each one of us. The first point I want to make to you today is: Don’t outsource your Judaism—to a synagogue or a school — make your home and your own learning the backbone of your Jewish life. If you live alone, invite people into your home and make holiday celebrations your own way. Light candles to start and end Shabbat, and offer a blessing of thanks when you sit down to eat. Start a book group. Explore the how-to’s and why’s of Jewish life through books like the Jewish Catalogue, or simply search Rabbi Google. And now you can build your own sukkah — because, you know, it’s fun!

In the most recent edition of Sh’ma, a journal that explores Jewish ideas, its editor Susan Berrin discusses the ethical issues surrounding parenting — parenting babies and children, parenting adult children, and even parenting our elderly parents. It got me to think about the ethical choices I make as a parent, and I realize that what underpins those decisions is my belief that I have an ethical responsibility to make myself into the best person, not just parent, I can be. Far from being a selfish decision, I know that if I am fulfilled and happy, I make better choices for everyone concerned. I want to be available 100% for her, and the only way I can do that is to take care of myself. And, when you model self-care and growth for the next generation, you show them what is possible and achievable for them.

The second point want to make is to take Berrin’s idea a step further — I want to suggest that we are also parenting ourselves. When we strive to be better each day, we show ourselves what is possible. We know that if we fall down on a given day, tomorrow we can try again because we have seen our own potential.

I have noticed, with all the Jewish parenting reading I do, that when we read about the future of Judaism (or the future of anything) often the focus is on the next generation. And that focus IS critically important.

But perhaps it is easier to look at the promise of the next generation rather than face ourselves, who are all growing older, have secrets and perhaps some shame, hurts that we can’t erase. But we must face ourselves, and if we can’t do it for ourselves, then we must do it as part of the legacy that we leave the next generation. But let’s not forgot that the “future of Judaism” starts with ourselves. It starts with us living every day consciously, rooted in our true nature, expressing our authentic selves to the world.

And that’s what makes my last point the trickiest of all.

During this season of repentance, I almost always talk about the power of community to transform the self. I believe in that powerful ideal. But today, I will be brutally honest here, most Jewish American congregations do not promote the intimacy that is needed for real self-transformation. In fairness, they weren’t built with that purpose in mind. These days, even the most active Jew goes to shul to observe holidays, be social and eat Jewish food, mark life cycle occasions, and maybe learn a bit. But inner-work and self-transformation? Not so much.

That why it’s important for me this year to focus instead on the individual — not community, not the next generation — but the here and now, the self before God. We have to own our identities, own our Judaism in real, practical terms. We have got to start with a kernel of something we can build on, maybe something small, but something real. One of the final portions of the Torah, Nitzavim, famously tells us, “For this commandment is not beyond the sea, that you should say: ‘Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it to us?’ Rather, the matter is very near to you — in your mouth and your heart — to do it.

My daughter is what is real for me. To see her outside at dusk, exclaiming “Bug! Dark! Grass! Car!” She hears birds chirping and gets excited. She hears the train whistle in the distance and gets even more excited. It’s a cliché to say that everything is new for her, but it really is. Being in her presence is powerful for me, and when she curls into me and quiets downs, I know that this is the place where I can begin. I see the world anew with her.

But each of us has that power within us too—call it your inner child. If doesn’t matter if you’ve never had kids, or even if you don’t like them. You simply begin with where you are. You begin with the flow of time, and the season. You walk outside, connect with the air, the sky, the light, the solid ground under your feet, the shapes of trees and buildings, color and shadow.

You begin with your breath, sensing the quickening of your heart and the ache in your knees. The Hasidic master, Reb Nachman of Bretzlav used to say, “The voice of the My Beloved — the pulse. If you want to know God, you need only to listen to the voice within you. You need never be lonely for Him or out touch with His inner spirit; you can always touch your pulse and say, “Oh, there you are.”

So you should tend to that pulse zealously and lovingly. Six days of the week we go out in the world, we go to work, run our errands, do chores — but one day of the week Judaism in its wisdom says STOP. Listen do that pulse. Rest from your work from one sunset until the next. The world can difficult and discouraging. Find some way to honor your inner dignity as a child of God created in God’s image.

When I lived in Pittsburgh, I lived in an apartment above a woman named Cathy. She was raised Catholic, though she did not belong to a church. Every morning at 5:30am I would hear her car pull out of the driveway. She would meet people at the park and go running. At 6:30 she would return, and in her sitting room directly below my bedroom she would pray. After her conversation with God, she would get ready for work and be out the door by 8am. You can see her practice as a very strict discipline, but she saw it simply as a response to an inner rhythm desiring to express itself.

Every religion has their particular prayer “technology.” Jews have tallit and tefillin, candle sticks and Kiddush cups, the Hebrew prayers in our siddur that have been honed over time, like a kind of history of prayer of the Jewish people. I will be the first to admit that Jewish technology is not always so user-friendly. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, in his little gem of a book called, “First Steps to a New Jewish Spirit” writes that Judaism “has gone a long way toward becoming an elite religion: highly prescriptive, over-verbalized and intellectualized, and under-experienced.” But both he and I would say that we as Jews have to overcome this. Because when use Jewish technology right—when we light a Shabbos candle, for example, the true light that emanates is not the light from the candle; it’s the light within us, and when we pray using the siddur, the prayers come from our hearts, not the pages.

I was studying for the semester in Israel when my grandmaman, my Swiss grandmother passed away. There, far away from any of my family who knew her, I struggled with how to make the loss real to me. Nothing had changed in my immediate reality except that in my mind, she was gone. I was close to her in spite of the fact that I never lived near to her, and we did not speak the same language. My secular Israeli roommate suggested that I light a candle — of course! And when I lit that yahrzeit candle she was there and my grief poured out.

When we use Jewish (or any) spiritual technology right, we use to locate ourselves beyond time and space as eternal beings, children of God, holy and whole. You have everything you need within yourself — the Jewish technology is there, as the yahrzeit candle was for me, to call out that inner truth. Use Jewish wisdom technology — its ritual objects, its holidays, its language of prayer — to help you connect to that part of yourself that is eternal and holy and pure. And conversely, don’t do something just because you feel you should, that will only give you the spiritually debilitating sense that you are somehow a “bad” Jew. Do it because it makes you happy or helps satisfy your curiosity. Perhaps ask yourself, “Will this bring out my inner child?” as a litmus test.

I realize I’m getting kind of preachy, which I suppose is what some of you want me to do… but let me let me let you in on a little rabbi secret — I write the sermon that I most need to hear myself. So what I “preach” to you now, I do not share from a place authority, as if I have figured it out and am laying out the answers for you — I share from a place of my own searching and yearning. How can I be a “good” Jew? I think we all wonder that. The world needs this kind of Judaism, you and I need it, and the next generation needs it. Now.

Shana Tova u’Mituka — May you have a marvelous, delightful New Year.