Welcoming You (Rosh Hashanah Morning Service 5777)
On September 13th at 12:20 a.m., our fourth grandchild, Shia Wolf Perlin, came into this world. He came a little early, to fit into your schedule and mine. I suppose he knew that if he came on his due date, eight days ago this morning, his bris would have been today in Los Angeles, while I would have been here with you, missing a moment I would never have wanted to miss.
Sweet baby Shia, you are our family’s Rosh Hashanah baby. You prove the existence of a loving God, a God of life. We love you and we welcome you to our family, the Jewish people, and our world.
Know that welcoming you makes life worth living. Welcoming you reminds us to be hopeful in a world plagued by cynicism.
Welcoming you reminds me, once again, that birth is still the greatest of God’s miracles, filled with awe and wonder.
Welcoming you makes our lives more complete and our future more secure. For as a committed Jewish family, we didn’t just welcome you into life, we welcomed you into our covenant with God and the Jewish people, keeping the promise and upholding the lasting covenant established so long ago.
Welcoming you reaffirms the power of Judaism to sanctify life, love, time, family and faith unlike anything else on earth.
Welcoming you celebrates the blessing that the God of life helps us bring new life into the world. You are such a gift and a blessing, Shia!
And in return, as adults, it is our job to protect and nurture you, love and care for you, teaching you truth and justice, right from wrong, kindness and compassion. It is OUR responsibility to teach you to care for all of God’s creation and to take responsibility for tzedakah and tikkun olam, obligatory charitable giving and the repairing of our broken world.
But, sweet Shia, we cannot promise you a world without problems, heartache, challenges, fears, and failure. We cannot promise you a world of humanity, when inhumanity prevails too often each day.
What we can do is give you faith in God and faith in yourself, and we pray, faith in a humanity that has the potential to evolve for the better, as it seeks to learn from life’s struggles and stands up to those who fail to live up to the human potential for goodness, justice, and right. And to help you be a good person in a less than perfect world, we give you the Torah and almost 6000 years of traditions and values.
On this, your first Rosh Hashanah, the first Torah lesson I must teach you with honesty and transparency is that Abraham failed. Our Torah portion begins with a test: God tested Abraham, Elohim Nisah at Avraham – ovrct ,t vxb ohvkt. Our Torah portion describes a test for all humanity to witness. Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to prove his loyalty to God.
Shia, I have to admit that I believe that Abraham failed that test, and in some ways, so did God in creating the test. After 38 High Holy Days on the bimah as a rabbi, I see this more clearly with your birth, and more certainly, than I have ever understood this portion before.
I don’t believe in a God who would ask us to sacrifice a child, and I can’t give a pass to a man who loves his God more than his child. No more excuses. After 30 years of sharing my heart with this congregation, the reality for me is that I would fail you, my beloved new grandson, and this congregation I cherish, if I made excuses for God or for Abraham this morning. With this interpretation, I prove the resilient wisdom of Torah for every generation.
I love God with all of my heart and soul and might and I know in my heart and soul that God exists. But, my God is a loving God, a God of life and a God in death, an imperfect but powerful God. My God doesn’t ask me to do the unthinkable, or the impossible, even when what is asked of me tests the core of my being and pushes me to essence of my humanity. My God challenges me to do the extraordinary even on the most ordinary day.
In my rewriting of the story, as a rabbi and a Jew and a human being and your Savta, Abraham says, “NO!” – emphatically and unequivocally, when God asks him to harm his child. Abraham chides his God and says, “I know YOU, and YOU would never want me to harm this child or any child of God.”
Shia, my beloved grandson, I would die for you. I pledge on this Day of Judgment to never let anything or anyone hurt you, just as I pledged to protect your father and your Uncle Jonah, and as I promise to safeguard your brother Micah, and your sister Goldie, and your cousin Miriam.
“Take me, God,” I would have said in Abraham’s place. “If someone has to die, then let it be me. Spare this innocent child.” Yitzchak, Isaac in English, means “laughter,” so perhaps his name hints to the answer Abraham should have given to God. “Are you kidding, Lord? You can’t possibly be serious, can YOU?!”
God is. God was. God always will be — but, descriptions of God and the stories of God come from the human mind and heart and in every age new perceptions and understandings emerge. In Jewish history, the Biblical God was all-powerful/omnipotent, and heartless in meting out justice. The post-Biblical rabbinic/Talmudic God was all loving, filled with compassion and understanding. The Medieval God of Reason was all-knowing/omniscient and rational. And the Modern God seems to be different things to different people – not all powerful, or all knowing, but still loving and guiding and creating, if we let God into our lives, at all, even as we have come to learn from modern science that God has a place in the chemistry of our brains.
Shia, at your bris, on your eighth day of life, we welcomed you into a covenant with God that has been sustained, l’dor vador, from generation to generation, for millennia. The bris, like our Torah portion, has a knife and isn’t easy to watch, just ask your Pop and your father. Thankfully, you are fine, and healthy, and the bris is what made you spiritually whole, and one part of your anatomy decidedly Jewish. The knife Abraham held up was a very different knife. It is not a knife of covenant, but of blind faith. It is not a Jewish knife. That is why the angel stops him and the ram is substituted.
God forgave Abraham for failing the test — with Isaac’s life and with the continuation of the Jewish people. We are reminded to weigh all of Abraham’s actions and faith, not just this one moment of failure. For we, too, are flawed.
We forgive God every Rosh Hashanah for testing Abraham in such a cruel and heartless way. The shofar calls us to remember the ram substituted as sacrifice for Abraham’s beloved son. The shofar is blown this morning to wake us up to our responsibility as Jews to our God, to our people, and to our children. It teaches us that there is ALWAYS an alternative to hurting the one you love…ALWAYS an alternative to the dangerous seduction that taking a life in the name of God is ever a righteous alternative.
In welcoming you and naming you Shia Ze’ev ben Ya’akov Ezra v’Tzipporah -vrupmu vrzg cegh ic ctz vhga, your parents, renewed the covenant at Sinai between God and the Jewish people, and affirmed the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 22:17, in this morning’s Torah portion – “I will bless you greatly, and I will make your descendents as numerous as the stars of the heavens and the sands of the seashore…”
In welcoming you into the Jewish people, your wonderful parents promised to give you a life of Torah and tradition, Shabbats and holidays, mitzvot and Jewish values, second to none in the universe.
We all want the same things for the children we love. And what we want for the children of the world, we want for ourselves, don’t we?
It therefore behooves us to work faithfully each day to create a world worthy of every precious new life. Every child, and every person, deserves love, respect, and understanding; opportunity and education; health care and clean water; food, shelter, and peace.
Imagine a world that would exist if our life’s purpose were solely to make sure that every child was able to thrive, not just merely survive. Imagine a world where every person believed: “My child is as dear to me as yours is to you, and so is the child I have never met.”
Rosh Hashanah teaches us that the true test of life is enabling and ennobling life from the moment of creation. Hold a sleeping newborn, and everything in life seems trivial beyond making sure this precious gift thrives. Our children teach us the wonder of love and our children remind us that individual differences are woven into the DNA of life.
As we read at your bris, Shia, the words of the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber:
Every person born into this world represents something new, something original and unique. It is the duty of every person in Israel to know and consider that he is unique in the world in his particular character, and that there has never been someone like him before. For if there had been someone like him before, there would be no need for him to be in the world. Every single person is a new thing in the world and is called upon to fulfill his particularity in the world. (adapted from Martin Buber)
We are all called upon to fulfill our purpose in the world and to live up to our God-given talents and unique destiny. Rosh Hashanah comes to remind us of our sacred beginnings and beckons us to renew for ourselves the holiness of our purpose in God’s unfolding creation. We are each here on earth for a reason. What is yours?
After forty years of marriage, Shia, I realize that your Pop, my husband Gary, has been right about everything, even God. He has always said that he believes in God “when babies are born.” He is still the smartest man I have ever known, even if we haven’t always believed in the same God.
Babies are proof that God exists for both of us. God gives us innocent and miraculous life. Each newborn is perfectly loving and accepting, untainted by racism and bigotry, hatred and enmity. Each new born has a unique purpose for good and blessing in the daily unfolding of God’s creation. BUT,
We fail God when we don’t honor that role in creation. We fail our children and all humanity when we deny them the lessons of goodness and kindness, love and understanding, honesty and sharing. We fail one another when we don’t nurture our children to be accepting and welcoming to all humanity, when we don’t teach them to see the face of God in every face, and when we don’t foster in them a passion for always doing what is righteous and good. And just remember that it is wrong to allow or make excuses for “mean girl” behavior, gossip, ostracizing, harassment, and social media insensitivity, in our children … and in ourselves.
God endows us with free will and the ability to choose. We can choose to honor the divinity in every person, or we can let our eyes be blinded by prejudice. We can choose greed over giving, indifference over engagement, apathy over empathy, conflict over reconciliation, and ugliness over civility. And with each choice, we must also accept the consequences of our actions when we put self-interest and selfishness, avarice and arrogance over the needs of others, our people, and our world.
Two Shabbats ago, at Minyan Makers, we read a passage about how we see the soul as Jews:
“Judaism teaches that God gives each person a vruvy vnab(Neshama T’horah), a ‘pure soul,’ at the time of birth. Jews do not believe that human beings are born in sin or evil. The soul of every person can be good or evil depending on the way we choose to live. Our task is to develop our talents and our sense of right and wrong so that our souls may become beautiful expressions of God’s creation.”
(Rabbi Harvey Fields, B’chol Levavcha)
This Rosh Hashanah morning, I can’t dwell on a moment of failure for our God or our founding father, Abraham, as awful as it is to imagine a father sacrificing his son, because, we all fail the world’s children at some time in our lives. And we all fail God regularly, by not living up to our neshama t’horah, and by not doing enough to preserve our faith and our heritage, and our humanity.
But, instead of dwelling on the many failures, I choose to thank God for a new year and a new life. I choose to take responsibility for my actions, as you do for yours, to seek atonement and forgiveness, as I promise to start the year, renewed for life and with the best of intentions to be better and to do better as a human and as a Jew.
This Rosh Hashanah, I welcome new possibilities, new options, and new choices that may lead to a better year and a better tomorrow, not just for myself, but for those I love and for all the world. It is as if we all come here this morning asking to be reborn, or at the very least reminded, that when we use this holy day well, we are given the opportunity to begin anew.
This Rosh Hashanah, I welcome you into our world, Shia Wolf Perlin. I welcome you into our family and the loving Jewish family and community into which you are now covenanted for life, and I pray that we preserve a thriving Judaism for you to inherit, in which you will find your values and your spiritual path.
I pray that as Jew, you will find your sacred purpose as a child of God beside children of every race and nation, creed and faith, ability and challenge.
And I pray with all of my heart that we don’t let you down. I pray that we use every breath to pass the ultimate test — that we will work tirelessly in 5777, and every day of our lives, to give you a better world, a world of peace and caring, kindness and compassion, acceptance, love and welcome. Amen.