Rabbi Julie’s sermon for Kol Nidre, 5785, October 11, 2024
Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six-hundred minutes.
How do you measure, measure a year?
In love, in seasons of love.
That’s how you measure, measure a year.
I once heard the Dalai Lama, the famous leader of Tibetan Buddhism, speak when I was the rabbi at Princeton University. What I remember most is that he giggled a lot, a joyful giggle unlike any I have ever heard, and that he said very clearly and simply that Buddhism is about Compassion. I remember sitting there wondering, what one single thing could I say Judaism was about? I couldn’t even agree with myself on one word. So how likely would it be that if you put one hundred rabbis in the same room, and asked them what Judaism is about, that they would all come up with the same one word? It didn’t even occur to me to say Judaism is about LOVE.
Rabbi Shai Held’s new book, Judaism is about Love, opens with these words:
JUDAISM is not what you think it is. Judaism is about love. The Jewish tradition tells the story of a God of love who creates us in love and enjoins us, in turn to live lives of love. We are commanded to love God, the neighbor, the stranger – and all of humanity – and we are told that the highest achievement of which we are capable is to live with compassion. This is considered nothing less than walking in God’s ways.
“If this seems new or surprising to you,” as it did to me, “this is likely because centuries of Christian anti-Judaism” succeeded in convincing us that Christianity is about love and Judaism is about law. But that’s a false dichotomy. As Rabbi Held passionately argues, “Judaism is a religion of love and law, of action and emotion.”
Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six-hundred minutes.
How do you measure, measure a year?
In love, in seasons of love.
That’s how you measure, measure a year.
I last heard this chorus, from the musical RENT, at a funeral almost ten years ago. My friend, Rabbi Vicki Tuckman, died of breast cancer when she was just 45 years old. I originally met Vicki at the Princeton Board of Rabbis meetings but we became friends at the gym, doing planks side-by-side after our spin class. She was the rabbi of a small Reform congregation and she left behind her beloved husband Rob who was her college sweetheart and three young kids, now grown, who all called her ‘mama bear’. When her aggressive form of cancer returned, Vicki knew her time was limited and perhaps because she was a rabbi, she planned every detail of her funeral very intentionally. It was important to Vicki that we not see her death as a tragedy, even though she died so young. She wanted her funeral to focus instead on the fullness of her life, ultimately measuring her life not in time or achievement, but in love.
The Torah doesn’t command us to love our family – perhaps because in healthy families, love comes naturally, certainly more easily than loving our neighbors, or loving strangers or loving God. But the hope is that the love we experience in our families, whether of birth or choice, teaches us the fundamentals of loving others. In our busy modern lives, with the demands of work or school or other commitments and the distractions of technology, combined in some cases with long physical distances, we don’t always make enough time or the right kind of time to focus on those we love. And that doesn’t take into account strained relationships where difficult personalities or disagreements or past hurts make it really hard to feel and express love.
For me, Yom Kippur is a reminder to take an accounting of how I’m prioritizing and connecting with those I love most and to course-correct if needed. As Rabbi Alan Lew writes, “Yom Kippur is meant to be a dress-rehearsal for our death. That’s why we wear a kittel, a shroud-like garment, on this day; why we refrain from life-affirming activities such as eating, drinking, and procreating.” We are rehearsing the day of our death to remind us that our time on this earth is limited and at the end of day, our gravestones are not engraved with our job titles or achievements, but rather with the relationships we hold dear. Yom Kippur is meant to force us to ask the question, if we knew we only had one more year to live, how would that impact our relationships with our parents, our partners, our siblings, our children, our loved ones?
Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six-hundred minutes.
How do you measure, measure a year?
In love, in seasons of love.
That’s how you measure, measure a year.
According to Rabbi Shai Held, at the heart of a Jewish theology of love is the idea that “none of us ever did anything – none of us could ever have done anything – to earn the gifts of life and consciousness.” Our very lives are a sacred gift, given to us by God as an act of love with the help of our parents. In return, we are asked to reciprocate that love by caring for our neighbors and for those who are most vulnerable. Every time we recite the Shema and the V’ahavta prayer, in the morning and the evening, we are affirming that God loves us with an unending love ahava raba ahavtanu and an unceasing love ahavat olam and that we in return will strive to love God b’chol l’vavcha, u’v’chol nafshecha u’vchol m’odecha, with all our hearts, with all our souls, and with all our might. He teaches, “God’s love is a gift, but it is also an invitation… We are created with love, for love.”
* * *
Here at Shomrei, one of the ways we express love within our community is through the mensch squad. Folklore has it that Toby Stein, z”l coined this name. Mensch is a Yiddish word meaning person, specifically a good person, a kind person, a person who inspires you. And a squad is a small organized group of people trained to work as a unit. With more than 65 people on its list, the mensch squad is called into action “to perform acts of kindness for Shomrei members in need.”
“Dispatched and coordinated by email”, the mensch squad cooks meals when a baby is born or a family is having a stressful time, they walk with people recovering from knee or hip surgery and make phone calls to check-in on people who live alone. The mensch squad offers rides to appointments or to synagogue and helps donated items find the right home. As I understand it, the mensch squad was founded around twenty years ago by Toby Stein after Judy Wildman brought her some food at a time when she was in need. Toby thought other people would benefit from these acts of kindness too and wanted it to happen on a more regular basis.
Some of the most powerful stories of how the mensch squad has helped people in the community can’t be told publicly because some of the mensch squad’s most sacred work is done anonymously. But one person told me “that the mensch squad made all the difference to me in perhaps the most challenging time of my life.” Tonight I want to ask not only that you consider joining the mensch squad, or volunteering to help if you’re already on the list but less less active. I also want to ask each of us to be vulnerable when we need something and to reach out for help. That’s how we create a caring community and fulfill the commandment in Leviticus, v’ahavta l’rei’akha kamokha, to love your neighbor as yourself. How appropriate that the head of the mensch squad, Dale Russakoff, will read that verse from the Torah tomorrow at our Yom Kippur afternoon services. To join the mensch squad or to make a request, you can email email hidden; JavaScript is required.
Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six-hundred minutes.
How do you measure, measure a year?
In love, in seasons of love.
That’s how you measure, measure a year.
I live just a few blocks from the Human Needs Food Pantry, the organization that is distributing all the cereal boxes we donate in our Project Isaiah Yom Kippur Drive. I went to meet with the Executive Director, Mike Bruno, a police officer who retired on a Monday and started his work at the Food Pantry on a Tuesday as another way to serve the community. Every Tuesday and Thursday, the Human Needs Food Pantry distributes groceries to 240 walk-ins. That’s roughly the number of people sitting in this room right now, coming every week to receive groceries to cook at home, to feed themselves and their families. He said most of the people he serves live right here in Montclair and Bloomfield. They are literally our neighbors. Mike told me about a brick mason who injured his back and couldn’t work anymore. He was crying, ashamed that he could no longer provide for his family. Mike asked him, ‘how hard was it for you to walk in that door.? ‘Brutal’, the mason said. And Mike responded, then you are working hard to provide for your family by coming here and taking these groceries home.
Increasingly, the food pantry serves migrants. One of the volunteers, Maura, told me about a three year old boy who traveled from Honduras with his family. He was suffering from trauma and not speaking. While he was shopping in the upstairs clothing store with his family, he put on a pair of sneakers that lit up when he walked. As he figured out how to make them light up, he laughed for the first time in weeks. He was puzzled, she said, about why everyone else was crying.
* * *
V’ahvtem et ha-ger, we are commanded in the Book of Deuteronomy, to love the stranger. We are told in the Torah “to cut away the thickening of our hearts” that make us callous to the needs of others. “For God…the great, and mighty, and awesome God…befriends the stranger, providing food and clothing. You too must befriend the stranger, you too must love the stranger,” our Torah says, ki gerim heyitem b’eretz mitzrayim, because you too were strangers in the land of Egypt.
When I asked Shirley Grill why she has gotten so involved with our adopted Afghani refugee family, she said “she’s paying forward the life of an immigrant”. She remembers growing up with Holocaust survivor parents who didn’t know enough English to write school notes for her teachers. That’s why she handles all of the school correspondence and meetings for the two girls at Buzz Aldrin, Asma and Sadya, and Usman at Edgemont, the schools with the best ESL programs.
It takes a village to help the Ebrahimi family, with Andy Silver, trouble-shooting and managing the donations and expenses and other volunteers driving carpool to soccer matches and helping to source and move donated furniture into a new apartment. It’s an incredible story, how the two brothers Sadiq and Masi came over alone, fleeing Afghanistan after the American evacuation. And how members of our congregation helped them sponsor their parents and four of their siblings to join them this past winter. But what moves me most is the love and connection that’s been formed – one where members of the Afghani family make shiva calls and where our volunteers host birthday celebrations. Because Sadiq and Masi came alone, before their parents, Shomrei’s refugee committee became their family.
Hours after landing in a completely foreign country, the father and mother, dressed in traditional Afghan garb stared in disbelief and joy as volunteers hauled couches and other donated furniture up to their second floor apartment. On the car ride home, one of our Shomrei teenagers wondered if the parents, newly arrived in America, had ever met Jews before. He talked about how in the moment when you help someone, none of the things people fight about matter. His father agreed, thinking, “Jewish. Muslim. Irrelevant. Here was a family in need and we were available to help.”
Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six-hundred minutes.
How do you measure, measure a year?
In love, in seasons of love.
That’s how you measure, measure a year.
This morning I emailed my friend Rabbi Shai Held to thank him for putting this Torah into the world. He teaches that “the Jewish people are called upon not to earn God’s love, but to live up to it.” This Yom Kippur, I want us to remember that Judaism is about love. In his conclusion, Rabbi Held writes, “Judaism is about building families that are “schools of love” and teaching our children to care. It’s about wishing others well and seeing them with loving eyes… it’s about seeing and struggling for the dignity of every human being we encounter, it’s about welcoming the stranger and learning empathy from our suffering…, it’s about being present with those who are impoverished, ill or grieving…[Judaism] is about showing kindness and compassion, even and especially in life’s hardest moments and darkest places. It’s about creating moments of redemption in the midst of an excruciatingly unredeemed world.”
My heart-felt wish for all of us is that 5785 will be a year filled with love, a year where we know we are loved intrinsically by virtue of being created in the image of God, a year where we will learn and teach love in our innermost circles, and a year where our love for every human being will extend to members of this holy community and to our neighbors in Montclair and beyond. For that’s how we measure a year, in love, in seasons of love.
Rabbi Julie’s Videos
An archive of Rabbi Julie’s videos is available on our blog
Video Archive
Livestreams and an archive of all Shomrei videos is available on our YouTube Channel at shomrei.org/video
- Kol Nidre, Sermon – Love - Wed, Oct 16, 2024
- Rosh Hashanah Day 1, Sermon – Breaking Our Hearts Open - Thu, Oct 10, 2024
- Rosh Hashanah Message From Rabbi Julie 2024 - Wed, Oct 2, 2024