Beth Hillel Synagogue
A Conservative Synagogue for the Hartford Area

RH 67 Day 1

L’shana tova! I’m taking a survey…how many of you think you pay too little in taxes? How many, pay too much in taxes? That’s what I thought! Wish we always had this kind of agreement around the synagogue! It may hurt to pay our taxes, but we do it anyway!

My wife Iris has a favorite joke…bordering too often, for many, on the truth..…. nothing hurts.

So now a second survey…how many of you have had a day where nothing hurts?

Hurting is part of life. We can hurt physically, emotionally, ethically, and / or religiously.  And one of the reasons for the existence of a synagogue, or when you call it a shul it becomes a more personal, intimate place, is that it can be a kind of bet holim, a place for healing. In many synagogues, healing services are popular. So are classes on Jewish meditation. The sermons of most rabbis – I know of this rabbi --  often aim at trying to promote or encourage mental and emotional “shlaymut”…. Wholeness and peace.  The most popular, I think, of our “Shmooze and Lunch” programs are when Norman Cohen invites a doctor or a speaker who addresses medical issues. 

The connecting theme of my sermons this new year is “bein shishim l’zikna“ or “being sixty years old is a time of maturity.” It’s part of a Mishnah of Chapter 5 from “Pirkei Avot” or Ethics of the Fathers, a book of the mishnah full of ethical teachings. It might be familiar to you… (quote first part). It is a favorite book for study; Rabbi Lazowski’s Adult Education class downtown on Tuesdays has been studying it, and indeed our Rabbi Emeritus will be publishing his commentary on Pirkei Avot, soon.  I asked him what he would be writing about these particular words, and he shared with me: “Sixty is not aged but rather worthy of inclusion among the elders, enjoying the ‘Late flowering of matured wisdom.’” Zakayn and Zakayna --  generally connote the dignity of prestige of the learned elder.”

Why this emphasis on, why am I using “60” as a theme? Well, there is a combination of personal and larger reasons….

The most important is that this year will be the 60th birthday of Israel. Not only do we celebrate it here…. There is a big push to celebrate it in Israel, hence our spring Israel tour. Also, my wife Iris had her 60th birthday in June, for which we sponsored a Kiddush at the synagogue.  Now we’re looking forward to a family gathering in November celebrating this milestone …and I actually had that figure roll over on my personal odometer in December of  2005.  So 60 is a SPECIAL NUMBER!

But if you talk to someone with a positive mental attitude she or he will say “I’m not 60 or 75 or 85 years old,” they’ll say they are “60 or 75 or 85 years young.” So the question is how do we apply this teaching, this learned wisdom, to our lives?

My oldest daughter, her husband, and their four children are in Taiwan as he spends a year or two teaching abroad at a university in Taipei… my oldest granddaughter recently emailed me how to count from one to ten in Chinese! We planned on visiting them in Israel  next spring during our Congregational Israel tour (more about that on Yom Kippur) and look where they go! But I was in Taiwan as an Air Force Chaplain 30 or so years ago, and the one thing I remember seeing most is the recognition and honor that their society gave to elderly people. In fact… the opposite of Jack Benny… people would, if they could, lie about their age by exaggerating it!

Yes, the ability to have learned lessons from life is a basic one, and a most important one! Over these HHDs we will be discussing some of the lessons gained by experience, and how they can make the measure of our days, the new religious calendar starting at 5768.000, the most meaningful possible. Part of this is that there will be a pattern, a sequence to my sermons, my sharing with you these HHDs. Maybe telling it to you will even entice you to attend an extra service or two!

Today we will be talking about taking care of our physical selves, so we can truly live out the good year we wish each other. Tomorrow we will talk about caring for our souls and our synagogue…. using the experiences we have gleaned from life. On Yom Kippur evening we will talk about caring for Israel, and challenging it to live up to its ideals on its 60^th birthday, and on Yom Kippur day we will talk about caring for the world…… on Yom Kippur using the insights our reflections during Rosh Hashanah will have given us.

As I enter my second year of being your rabbi, I want to share again that it has been, as I have said elsewhere, a very good year for Iris and myself as we settled into our new community. By all measurements of membership and optimism and involvement it has been a very good year for Beth Hillel as well. My primary personal goal at Beth Hillel this past year has been to try to get to know you. I’ve met many of you at services, some in the community, some in time of need, but some of you, unfortunately, I haven’t really met yet. Why unfortunately? Not only that you should know your new Rabbi --- although I don’t want to consider myself a “new rabbi” here anymore -- but that I want to know who you are as individual people and souls…. both because I like to and want to know my congregants, but also, if a time of need would come, I would already have a little bit of insight into your souls. Last Rosh Hashanah I talked about who I am and how excited I was to become your rabbi – and how I was responding to the challenge of reaching out and  making Judaism meaningful to you. Hopefully I have succeeded fairly well in that goal. Now I want to get to know you!

I remain dedicated to the ideal that the synagogue’s existence as a holy place, a place that has claimed your allegiance, membership and support … is that it can be, in addition to a holy place, a healing place as well. And if there is one thing we need more than anything else in the world, it is to be healed/ be whole/feel this sense of “shalaymut” that I mentioned earlier. But in a way that, contrary to that joke I shared at the beginning of my sermon, we are able to say, at least emotionally and religiously, both that nothing hurts and that we are truly alive!

When I was studying to be a rabbi, no one told my classmates or me that we would be involved in helping people who were suffering, in addition to death and illness, from the emotional and physical turmoil of rape, abortion, spousal abuse, miscarriage, or the death of a child. I guess we knew that such things existed, but no one taught us how to bring strength and comfort to those who suffered from them. Now we know better as clergy, and now we also know that the synagogue is not only meant to be a social and religious institutution dedicated to the survival of the Jewish people and the transmission of our heritage to the next generation; it is also meant to be a caring community that reaches out to the individuals in its midst who are in need of support. And that’s a mitzvah for all of us, not just for me!

For souls sometimes – or perhaps often – are hurting. Tomorrow we will talk extensively about mitzvot. Caring for the sick… or for ourselves.. is not a minor mitzvah. We realize more than ever before that a person’s mind and body are one…. And a person’s recovery depends in part on paying attention to his or her loneliness, fear, and aspirations… as well as blood count and temperature. And while there may be times when we can no longer cure, there is never a time when we can no longer care. (Repeat)

A contemporary Conservative Rabbi David Wolpe, in a wonderful talk entitled “Prayer and the Search for Meaning” quotes the poet John Keats that the ultimate purpose of our lives is “to grow in soul.” I’ll be further quoting Rabbi Wolpe over these HHDs…the essential idea here is that, if the synagogue is healthy and happy, then it is the best place for the gardening and cultivation of our souls to take place. Provide the right temperature, the right Ph, add some other ingredients, and I guess you can call me the chief gardener.  :)

Summertime is for many of us the opportunity to do some extra reading. A source of inspiration to me these past months has been books authored by Dr. Jerome Groopman, a well known oncologist in the Boston area. He has written several inspirational books on the connections of medicine and psychology, as well as a number of feature pieces in New Yorker magazine. Some of his recent books have been:

The Measure of our Days…. A Spiritual Exploration of Medicine

Second Opinions…. Stories of Intuition and Choice in the Changing World of Medicine ….and

The Anatomy of Hope…How People Prevail in the Face of Illness.

A common thread in all of them is his writing of how doctors are limited both psychologically and medically in their healing abilities…and therefore how much of the healing process is in our minds… and that we need to listen to the wisdom and insights based on our life experiences.

We must each therefore partner with our physicians and be an active part of the healing process. I don’t imagine any physician would take exception to this, and as the New Year begins, I urge all of us to take Dr. Groopman’s  wisdom, which I will begin to share with you, to heart.

In a chapter entitled “The Right to Hope” Groopman quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Beware how you take away hope from another human being….” And Groopman continues… “A physician should never sit like a judge over a patient and hand out a fixed sentence of days or weeks or months of remaining life, even when the patient expects it.”…. In other words, omniscience about life and death is not within a doctor’s purview! And, in example after example, Dr. Groopman recounts how individuals have not surrendered the fight…. And how not surrendering has changed / has prolonged their lives. When I visit someone in the hospital or at their home, this is the fundamental message I attempt to convey to them! For one of  his patients, when he had to tell her, “I know of no medicine that I can give at this point to help you,” she replied, “No Jerry, you do have something to give. You have the medicine of friendship.” And for this we can all be physicians!

At the conclusion of his book , “The Anatomy of Hope,” Groopman writes….”Now, when I meet a new patient, I am doing more than  gathering and analyzing clinical data. I am searching for hope. Hope, I have come to believe, is as vital to our lives as the very oxygen we breathe.” He writes so much more than I can share here, and I hope you will look at his books.  Indeed, “Hope, I have come to believe, is as vital to our lives as the very oxygen we breathe.”

Yes, when I go to visit a congregant or someone I am asked to see in the hospital, I talk with them, I look in their eyes and hold their hands and chant a mee-shebayrach prayer with them and any family member or friend who may also be there. But then I give out a small booklet with prayers that they can read on their own. And often I have been told that the most meaningful prayer in this little booklet is the one that asks God not directly for healing, but that God guide the patient’s doctors and give them wisdom in their healing work. And implicit in this is the intent to  give hope as well…..  although, sadly, we also know that there may come a time to give “permission” to let go.

In this path, Dr. Groopman continues in the tradition of thought pioneered by Dr. Bernie Seigel, who has also written several books on this theme. And some of us here now were also present at the Selichot lecture by Dr. Maria Sirois just a few days ago, when she challenged us to live a life where “every day counts,” that there are invaluable life lessons from the optimism and daily hope of even the most seriously afflicted children, as she writes in her book, which I purchased for our renewed library, _______________________.

Friends, the most familiar of all the psalms is Psalm 23. It is part of the Yizkor service; it is part of every funeral service I conduct… and when I ask those present to say it along with me, many of those present know it by heart. Now there are many psalms and prayers that could be said. Why does this one have such power and attraction to us? Well, part of the reason is its wonderful imagery and expression. But more than that….the psalm actually contains two different scenes. The first is an idyllic one: green pastures and still waters. The second is the harrowing one: the valley of the shadow of death. In the idyllic setting, God is somewhat distant and spoken of in the third person ”He” makes me ….. But then there is an abrupt shift… when the psalmist walks through that valley, God is “Thou” or “You”… God has moved close to us, become a companion/support. Faith is most powerful when God’s closeness is felt and real!

Many of us have probably heard the poem about “Footprints in the Sand,” wherein the writer says that, as he looked back on his life, he saw two sets of footprints in the sands of life…. But in times of trouble there was only one set of prints, and he asks “God, where were You when you were most needed?”… and God replies…. “When you were indeed in need of help…. That’s when I carried you.” Hence only one set of footprints….

In sum, as we talk about our physical selves on this first day of a new year we should have both hope and faith. They are, they provide  the best ways to live each of the 366 days of the secular year and the 380 days of the religious year (that’s right, in the year coming up they’re both leap years ). I cannot promise any of you that in your life or that of your immediate circles there will not be sadness, loss, or pain…. But in the midst of our synagogue community and with the always-present support of our God, we will be living the best lives we can.  Every day counts!

Tomorrow we will talk about how to  bring together caring for our bodies with caring for our souls… and then on Yom Kippur, as I stated before, we will transfer our concerns to Israel and the world.

Again, from both Iris and myself, may you be written in God’s Book of Life for a healthy, happy, and blessed year.

A friend wrote us saying – “I wished you that last year, and what do you know – it really came true!” I hope it comes true for all of you in this new year 5768!