Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman
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Yom Kippur 5782 - Lifer Bakery

9/17/2021

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When we think of the concept of teshuvah - repentance, return, change - we think of Yom Kippur, and the idea of reflection and apology. This kind of teshuvah is special and exceptional, in that we as Jews are afforded the opportunity to wipe the slate clean but once a year. Even though we can always say we are sorry; even though our daily Amidah prayer includes the words סלח לנו אבינו שחטאמו, מחל לנו מלכינו כי פשנו - forgive us father for we have sinned, pardon us sovereign for we have erred - the tradition teaches in the Talmud that the real atonement happens just once, and then we are clean.

But there are places in the world where teshuvah is not a fleeting idea that a person indulges in for one day, but rather is an everyday thing. One somesuch place is prison.

Prisons and jails of course serve many parallel roles, in theory, for those that are incarcerated there. They serve as a bulwark of safety and isolation for the rest of society - a place where people deemed too dangerous to live responsibly with their fellow human are sent so that they do not terrorize, disrupt, or destroy the lives of those outside any longer. Prison is a place for punishment - an experience of the deprivation of freedom and leisure time and comfort meant to exact a toll on a person that will remind them of their ill doings. Prison is meant to be a deterrent - a way to keep folks with large chunks of morally grey area in their consciences from stealing ipods at target and boosting cars when the opportunity presents itself. Although prison is likely some kind of deterrent against illegal behavior, studies suggest that it isn’t nearly as effective in that respect as one might think. California is now beyond its 25th year in an experiment with a so-called three strikes law, a law that once imposed a mandatory life sentence on criminals who commit a third felony. Studies have been unable to show that this three strikes law actually deterred crime in any measurable way. The law put away some folks that might otherwise be deemed irredeemable, unwilling to change, and incorrigible. But it also incarcerated thousands of addicts and non-violent offenders and folks who just made bad choices at a down and out stage in their life. In at least a partial admission that the three-strikes law isn’t really a deterrent, the statute was amended in 2012 to make the mandatory life sentence for a third strike apply only to those that commit a violent felony. 

Prisons are also supposed to serve as a place for rehabilitation, repentance, and change. Whereas in Pennsylvania the authority in charge of prisons and prisoners is called the Department of Corrections, in California it is called the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Although different prisons in different places achieve the goal of rehabilitation to varying degrees - some offer the opportunity to get a college degree while others literally offer little more than a striped uniform and bread with cheese and water - the idea still fundamentally exists that in prison, a man or woman has the opportunity to reflect on their mistakes, change their trajectory, and emerge from prison reborn.

I want to add an important and related addendum here: the Jewish legal tradition doesn’t really believe in the notion of prison. Punishment in Judaism in biblical, rabbinic, and medival times took one of four forms - capital punishment for the worst offenses; banishment to a city of refuge - a kind of internal exile - for another category of cases; monetary compensation for most cases of personal injury or theft; and finally, indentured servitude in cases where a person has done personal or monetary injury but cannot pay restitution. One thing to note about all these punishments is that they are relational - the person that wrongs another doesn’t go away to some hidden place where they are forgotten. They must to some degree make right the thing that they did wrong. In the old days, if a guy stole your horse and sold it, then blew on the money on silly things before his arrest, he worked off his debt to you. He lived in your barn or a farm house and plowed and sowed your field for months or years to compensate for the loss. The Western invention of the modern prison was about punishment. The Jewish concept of what we should do to a person that has committed a criminal offense is that the offender must make it right to the person they have wronged. This idea is, of course, an important one for us to consider in thinking about how we partake in Yom Kippur.

Prisons are a fascinating case study in the concept of teshuvah - repentance, return, change - on a lot of levels. For one, they ask questions about whether a person can change themselves, or whether they can be forced to change externally. For another, they introduce and subject individuals to specific circumstances of reward and opportunity in order to encourage the possibility of change. And third, they introduce a specific element into the mix - time. Prison sentence length implies that the amount of time one is sentenced behind bars is related somehow to the amount of time it takes a person to change that behavior. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the time behind bars is only about punishment - crime X is heinous, so we give that person 25 years; crime Y is bad but not so bad, so they get 8 years. 

Of course, one might ask - does the length of a person’s time in prison make it easier or harder to reform their behavior? Does a person behind bars for 20 years regret their choices, adjust their life’s trajectory, and produce meaningful change? Or conversely, does time away from free society alienate folks from what it is to be a productive and well-adjusted member of society, and therefore make it harder and harder as the years go on for an ex-con to readjust to our society?

The simple answer, based on a study done by the federal government, is that prison sentences longer than 5 years result in slightly lower rates of recidivism, and terms 10 years and longer sharply reduce the rates of recidivism. But we all know that ‘person does not go back to jail’ isn’t a wonderful or precise determinant of human success. A person could be homeless, or dead, or barely eking out a living on the margins of society, but as long as they hadn’t gone back to jail, that would be enough by this metric. We all know that there’s a big difference between surviving and thriving; between being truly remorseful vs simply going through the motions. There is a big difference between floundering through life without direction and living intentionally, with joy and purpose.

There are hundreds of programs around the country meant to help transition formerly incarcerated individuals back into society in a way that is meaningful and productive. I myself have spent a week at one such program in Los Angeles, a halfway house and addiction recovery program run by a Jewish organization called Beit Teshuvah. I got to know residents who were in drug addiction recovery and residents who were fresh out of prison after stints that ranged from 2 to 12 years. I remember one resident telling the story of his struggle. How, one day, he was out working his job in the community as a mover, and he was moving something into a restaurant. And they had left him alone in by the counter to put stuff away, and the cashier had left to get something out of the back, and had left a $5 bill sitting on the counter. And our friend knew he could take it - could take this $5 bill - and nobody would know. And he said no - that was the old me. If I stole this $5, I could go back to jail. But that wasn’t what stopped him. He had resolved after prison to change his ways. The old ways were ways of criminality, and even if he could get away with it, he wasn’t that guy anymore. He had changed. Or at least, he was trying to change. When the cashier returned, he said ‘hey, that $5 belongs in the register.’ The cashier thank him.

That story reminded me almost exactly of a story in the Talmud.
In Sanhedrin 25a, we learn the following:
What is the remedy [for a butcher who sells treifot (non-kosher meat)? It is in accordance with the statement of Rav Idi bar Avin, he says: One who is suspected of selling treifot to others [must] go to a locale where they do not recognize him and return a lost item of substantial value that he finds.

Our Talmudic story mirrors my story from Beit Teshuvah - in order to prove to others, and himself, that he could be a trustworthy individual, a man changed locations and took it upon himself to return something demonstrating that he was changed.

These stories of regret and remorse and change are something that fascinates me. As my congregants, I think you all know me well enough to know that I am an optimist in regards to humanity. I fundamentally believe in the capacity for humans to overcome and improve, and that the future will always be better than the past, if we work at it. I also believe that anyone - ANYONE - has the capacity for change and for good. This interest in human redemption stories has lead me to become a fan and devotee of a podcast about life in San Quentin prison called Ear Hustle.

Ear Hustle is a podcast started as a project of the media lab inside San Quentin. For prisoners with a long record of good behavior, they have access to recording equipment that they can use to make music or talk shows. Volunteers from outside the prison also assist from time to time in teaching the skills that will help the inmates produce the audio. The podcast is by Earlonn Woods  and Nigel Poor. Woods began on the podcast in 2017 as inmate, but was released from prison in 2018. The show was a 2017 nominee for a Peabody Award, and a 2020 nominee for the Pulitzer prize. It covers all aspects of prison life, from jobs and food, to the experience of the guards - from the history of the prison and its reforms to what it’s like to be a regular family visitor at the prison. 

In a recent episode, they covered the release experience. As you can imagine, getting released from prison can be really challenging. There are special transitional programs, but not everyone qualifies. Some folks leave jail with a little money to start over and perhaps a support system like a mother or an uncle, but others emerge with literally nothing. Jobs on the outside, of course, are hard to come by. Although many states have quote unquote banned the box - the line on a job application that requires folks to state if they have been convicted of a felony - almost every employer will notice the lengthy employment gap on a persons resume and ask about it.

In San Francisco California, in a funky stretch of town just south of downtown near market street is Frena Bakery. The Israeli owner of the bakery, Isaac Yosef, bakes traditional Israeli delicacies, both savory and sweet (forgive me for discussing food on yom kippur) like the cheese and potato filled fillo pastries called borekas, or the Israeli-version of the calzone, the fluffy pita stuffed sambussak, in addition to the more well-known treats like chocolate rugelach and pillowy soft fresh pita bread and of course, challah. When he started it, it was just your average kosher bakery, certified by the Vaad of Kashrut of Northern California.

Then one day, in walked Carlos Flores. Flores had just been released from San Quentin after 21 years in prison. At the age of 18, he was the lookout for a friend in a robbery gone wrong. The friend held up the clerk at gunpoint, and during the robbery, the gun went off, killing the clerk. Carlos was sentenced to 15 to life. While in prison, he read, a lot. He taught himself math. He took college classes. And he taught himself Hebrew. And that’s where the bakery comes in. Shortly after his release, looking for a job, he heard about the bakery and that the owner spoke Hebrew. Carlos went in cold -he’d never worked in a bakery in his life, had never really held any job outside of prison. Isaac interviewed him and hired him on the spot. 

Carlos was a great employee, and a few months later, when another formerly incarcerated San Quentin resident was released, another fellow with a long sentence for a serious crime, he asked if there was a job at the bakery for him. Isaac hired him too. And so it went and so it went, until the bakery, at the time of the podcast, had hired a sum total of 25 formerly incarcerated individuals. They went from crime and punishment, to challah and pizza rolls. The bakery has so many formerly incarcerated individuals, men and women, working there - most of whom were locked up on long prison sentences - that it has earned the nickname ‘the Lifer Bakery’.

One of the more incredible things about this story is that Frena Bakery is not Beit Teshuvah - the addiction recovery program I mentioned earlier. Beit Teshuvah is a social services agency that was created to help reintegrate struggling folks back into society. Frena Bakery is a bakery. It wasn’t created to solve social ills or to repair the world. It was created to make tasty borekas and turn a profit. And yet - on the way to that goal, they decided to become San Francisco’s bakery of second chances. Why?

The owner, Isaac, explained it in a way that I think we all can understand. He said this:

...


Isaac: Why? First of all, we as Jews... we have a kosher bakery... kosher, not just the food, kosher needs to be everything: The way you conduct business, the way you treat your workers. Kosher is a way of life. Just, you know... eating kosher food and be a bad person. It's everything. So, the first fundamental rule in Judaism is that everybody deserves a second chance. It doesn't matter what you did. If you regret and you change
your ways, you deserve a better chance, a second chance, you know? You can't judge people for things they did when they were young. Or they were heat of the moment and nobody stopped them. If nobody stopped us, most of us would go to jail, too. You know? Many times.

​...


Isaac Yosef here sums up the dual nature of Yom Kippur better and more succinctly than anything. If you regret and you change your ways, you deserve a better chance, a second chance, you know? An ex-con spends years - decades even - analyzing the deeds that got them the way they were. Godwilling, the incarceration experience is also an opportunity for teshuvah - repentance, return, change . Corrections AND rehabilitation. Carlos decided to get up every morning at 4 am and combine flower and water and yeast, and push and pull and beat and twist it into shape. To work hard and make something out of raw potential and turn it into something wonderful. And obviously here, I’m not just taking about turning flower into bread, but also Carlos’ twist in changing from a dumb wayward kid that did an awful thing into a hard working upstanding human. 

That’s half of the dual nature of Yom Kippur. Carlos’ half. The story of repentance and change.

The other half is Isaac’s story. The story of a man who sees another human and says ‘I will give you a chance.’ 

Because really, all of us own metaphorical bakeries in our lives. There are folks that have wronged us - maybe once, maybe more than once. There are folks that we pre-judge or evaluate to be unworthy of our time, of our love, of our forgiveness. Yom Kippur is a dual time for us - a time for us to reevaluate our deeds and ask forgiveness for our wrongdoings, but also a time to reevaluate the deeds of others and be forgiving. To be a little more tolerant. To have a little more hesed - lovingkindness - as I spoke about on Rosh Hashanah. We do this interpersonally with the people we love - we forgive our wives and our husbands; our children and our parents; our neighbors and our co-workers. But we must also remember that Yom Kippur is the holiday of second-chances. It is our time to ask for a second chance from each other and from God, but also a time to give second chances to those we have judged for ill. 

It is a time to be open minded and broad thinking. 
A time for new starts and clean slates. 
A time for corrections and rehabilitation.
A time for reevaluation and change.
A time for forgiveness and openmindedness.
A time for Carlos and a time for Isaac.
A time for ex-cons, and a time for bakers.

Shanah tovah and Gmar chatimah tovah - a happy new year and good and just sealing in the book of life for the year 5782.

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Chesed 5782

9/8/2021

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Calligraphy by Alissa Swedlow


We got to Disneyland’s California pretty early that day. It was a weekday in January, and my father had had the presence of mind to drive down the night before and stay in a motel nearby - me, my step-mother, my father, and my two kids, Iggy and Etta. I remember the motel had a pool and it was sort of ‘indoor outdoor’, which sounded cool, but really this pool was sort of an undersized mini pool in a partial concrete garage overhang thing next to a major thoroughfare, so it wasn’t really quite ‘California tropical vacation with daiquiris and chaise lounges.’ It was still fun.

Anyhow, bright and early the next day, we get to the park. Disneyland’s California Adventure has lots of incredible rides, but with little kids, one of the most exciting things about Disneyland is always getting to meet the characters. Once upon a time when I was a kid, the characters would be randomly strolling through the park and maybe if you were lucky you’d catch one you really liked. But today, especially for the most exciting characters, there are set times and locations to meet them.

For Disney’s most exciting characters, they literally have their own ‘ride’ where the ride is ‘wait in line, meet the character’. And a few years ago when this story took place, there was no more exciting character than Anna from the Disney movie Frozen. Even if you have never seen the movie, you would have to be living under a rock to not be aware of it. From the come-to-life snowman Olaf to the big Idina Menzel aria ‘Let it Go’, from the backpacks and lunch boxes to the fast-food happy meal tie-ins, I am fairly certain you are all familiar with Frozen. And so soon after we arrived, I knew it would be smart to take my daughter to meet Anna from frozen, because I’m clever and I knew the lines in a few hours would take forever. And so we lined for the attraction, entitled ‘Anna and Elsa’s Royal Welcome.’

Etta and I waited briefly, and then entered a hallway decorated to resemble the nordic-style palace on Arendelle. And then we were invited into a small room decorated to look like a grand hall. And there were just three people in line to meet the princess herself, younger sister of queen elsa, Anna. And as we waited our turn in line, I witnessed something amazing.

The boy in line in front of us was probably 14 or so, which is automatically something of interest, since the target demographic for Frozen fans is pretty much girls ages 3 to 7. He was skinny. He had blond and pink streaks in his longish hair, and a frozen t-shirt, shorts, and dock martins. He had on bracelets and rings.

As he approached Anna - or really, the Disney performer playing Anna - she burst out a greeting and said ‘Oh my it is so good to see you again how are you?’ Which one might immediately dismiss as one of the stock lines they are supposed to say, but when you stop and think - “good to see you again?” - how does she know that? It’s a bit strange. You should know at this point that the hallway that we came down had 6 different doors - and behind each one there are several annas or presumably Elsa's doing a meet and greet with other Disney guests. There are probably dozens of young women from Anaheim and Tustin and Huntington Beach who play Anna or Elsa. How is it possible this boy is that familiar to this particular Anna on this particular day?

They started to speak, and it began to become clear. The boy spoke with an affect in his voice often associated with gay men. As he started to speak, he told Anna all about his morning and his week and what school was like. But also, he took pains to mention to Anna all the chocolate he had eaten - chocolate for breakfast and chocolate with dinner and a chocolate snack. All that might sound either innocuous or strange to a casual observer, but for a dad that had watched Frozen 15 times with his young daughter, I knew exactly what was going on. In the movie Frozen, Anna and her sister Elsa throw a banquet - and express great excitement at all the chocolate that will be out for everyone to eat. Our young queer friend was trying to bond with Anna over their mutual love of chocolate. Anna, of course, played right along, discussing all the chocolate she had eaten and how great it would be to have another banquet in the grand hall of Arendelle where they could eat chocolate together. Our young friend excitedly gushed forth yet more mundane details about his life, and our Anna paid rapt attention. As their 2 minute meeting wrapped up, she expressed great joy and excitement that he had come once again to visit, and she gave him the biggest hug. Our friend walked out of the hall, bouncing with joy. And our Anna pivoted from that lovely but complicated interaction to meeting one of her more common royal subjects, my daughter Etta, who was 6 at the time, and was a lot quieter.

What I had surmised from the events that had just transpired was this: our young 14 year old boy visiting Anna is not only likely queer, but Autistic. Having had several friends and colleagues with autistic children, I knew that an attachment to fantasy and cartoon characters, a need to return again and again to the same comfortable places and things, and an inability to differentiate real from fantasy are all common characteristics of those with autism. A teacher of mine from rabbinic school with an autistic son once lamented to me that her boy was 16 years old and still obsessed with the smurfs. She knew he was always going to be autistic, but also deeply wished that he could mature into liking a cartoon more age appropriate than the tiny cuddly blue men that were marketed for little kids. 

Our 14 year old boy seemed to express a familiarity with the cast - and they with him - that implied he visited a lot. Which probably means that he lived in Southern California, and owned a seasons pass, allowing him to literally come every day. But the Disney staff not only dutifully played along of course, but even leaned into the act.

This story stays with me as a strong memory for two reasons - first, the sudden manner in which I became aware of a boy that might otherwise be treated as an oddity or outsider in our society - a gay, autistic teenager - who likely struggles to fit in or be understood by anyone in his world. Here he was, right in front of me, being himself, and I could only assume from what I witnessed that being himself was awfully confusing for everyone else around him most of the time. I imagined that in so-called normal society, this boy would have been the object and target of ridicule. It’s hard to be a gay teen. It’s hard to be autistic in a world where people just don’t understand how your brain seizes onto things and makes sense of the world. It’s hard to be a fan of a movie for little girls when you’re a teenage boy - other people will think that you’re weird. 

And second, I was absolutely stunned by how well the Disney cast member handled the situation. She treated him like family, or an old friend. She listened to him. She played along with his love of chocolate. She was compassionate and loving. She made him feel not-other, but instead made him feel special. And just 30 seconds after he was gone, she pivoted to talking to my 6 year old with no trouble at all. She went from giving all her attention to him to giving all her attention to Etta, transitioning the different modes and needs of those two individuals completely seamlessly.

This quality of radical compassion is a value in Judaism we call ‘Chesed’. It is a value that appears often in Jewish texts, and early. One of my favorite examples occurs in Psalm 89, and a commentary that follows it from Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel , the Alter of Slabodka.

In the psalm we read:
Olam Chesed Yibaneh - a world of lovingkindness will be built (Psalm 89:3). 

Rabbi Nosson Tzvi comments on the verse thusly:

The Holy One Blessed Be created human in order to do good alongside God. And God blew into the nostrils of human with the breath of life - this is the great spirit of God - from the mouth of knowledge and understanding, for this breath to the nose afterwards it gave human its soul (in the language of Ramban). And on account of this human which was created in the image of the Divine, was fashioned all the creations of Chesed; a world filled with enjoyments and delights. The shefa - Divine Flow - of Chesed and goodness is such that one is able to merit the eternity of pleasures and delights that emanate from the Shechina - and to cling to God.

And by what does a person become able to merit this elevated state, that which is otherwise unseen? What is the task of one that grasps hold of the Highest State of all creation - that one is created in the image of God?

To mirror one’s maker - “Just as God is, so too you.”

Just like in all creations, in the creation of human, in the creation of the universe, the creation is according to it, the innermost point of essence is the Chesed of Hashem Yisboroch, The Holy One Blessed Be, with human: Human was created in God’s image, its being is the highest of all the creations, greater than the wise angels were they differentiated, and crafted on behalf of God’s enjoyment and pleasure - “so too you” - the human is obligated by being a mirror of its Creator; its purpose is a world of Chesed, only Chesed. That is its most lofty purpose. And only by its fulfillment under human forces will they elevate themselves to the highest level.




I think over the past few years in America, as individuals and as a collective, we have been drawing on our reserves of chesed, of lovingkindness. Our politics have become fractured, as the moderates and the reasonable ones have dwindled and been replaced by the angry shouting voices at the extremes. Our nation has been shocked by a pandemic that was not immune to this politicization, as folks battled over opening up or not opening up, going to school or not going to school, masking or not masking, and now vaccinating or not vaccinating. I read the newspaper or check in my friends, and I see hospital beds filling with unvaccinated people. I read of doctors and nurses who are exhausted with treating patients, but it’s not just medical personnel. Restaurant managers are exhausted from trying to keep their businesses afloat with no customers. Parents are exhausted from trying to manage online learning. All of us are exhausted that the pandemic, which we thought would be over after the discovery of a vaccine, drags into its 18th month. We our tired. And our capacity for compassion is exhausted as well.

I hear the rage that fills folks as they react to the hospitals filled with unvaccinated individuals. I not only hear it and read about it, I feel it too. When I see a segment of the population throw caution to the wind or ignore the advice of science and doctors, my gut reaction and my base instinct is to reply “good. They get what they deserve.” This response is of course borne of a certain rationality - actions have consequences. Poor choices have results.

However. I also know that the reasons why people do not get vaccinated are many, and complex. Yes, there are the anti-science extremists - the modern day flat earthers and faked-moon landing conspiracy theorists -who, in the face of literally thousands of expert scientists and doctors telling them the best thing to do is vaccinated have instead decided the vaccine could back you magnetic, or that it’s a plot from Bill Gates to implant microchips in us or some such other nonsense. But according to most estimates, the vast majority of unvaccinated Americans are not fanatics. They’re unsure of the science. Or they’re afraid of the side effects. Or they’re really busy and just haven’t put in the effort to figure out where to get it. Or they lack an understanding of what a vaccine or how it works. Or they somehow just think that all of this doesn’t apply to them. They won’t get sick, or if they get sick, they won’t die.

I bring up these folks because it seems entirely rational to be angry at the estimated 39% of Americans over the age of 18 who are yet to get the vaccine. It is easy to paint them as some kind of fanatics, and easy to throw up your hands and say ‘actions have consequences’. The challenge of that worldview is that it can become easy to make us callous souls to the world around us. We grow this protective shell of anger and frustration. And then we say to ourselves ‘I don’t have time for chesed. I don’t have a need for chesed. They don’t deserve chesed.’

This works on the personal scale, but it also works on a national scale. A baseline principle in America, and truly in all governmental policies around the world, is the balancing of individual liberties against the greater good of society. Another way of saying this: we are debating the extent to which we as a society are responsible for doing chesed for our fellow human. When a portion of our tax dollars goes to building a homeless shelter, that’s chesed. When I sacrifice a day of my time for jury duty so that we have a functioning legal system, that’s a small act of citizenship-based chesed. And when I wear a mask, that is an act of chesed. A recent article in the Atlantic by Silas House can be simply summarized by the title: ‘Some Americans No Longer Believe in the Common Good.’

The complex problem that is revealed is that on a micro-scale, I can say ‘we need more chesed, more self-lessness, more commitment to the common good’, and I might even convince you to believe more in chesed. But the broader problem is that chesed is in short supply nationwide. Most Americans are vaccinated and most Americans when asked will mask because they believe in doing what is in the best interests of their fellow Americans. But not all of us. And so we turn on the tv, and we see grown men and women at school board meetings, frothing at the mouth that their children, their unvaccinated children, will be required to mask. We see videos of screaming fights in grocery stores of folks refusing to mask. We see op-eds in newspapers like one in the New York Times by Sarah Smarsh entitled ‘What to do with our Covid Rage.’

Smarsh writes:

Many vaccinated Americans are tired, disgusted and eager to assign blame. Public health experts and government officials, including some Republicans, have shifted from sensitive prodding to firm condemnation of those forgoing vaccination. Private conversations among the inoculated take an even less diplomatic turn: “We were so close, and these stupid, unvaccinated jerks ruined it for the rest of us.”
Fatigue and outrage are appropriate emotions, considering all that has been lost to Covid-19: lives, jobs, experiences, money, physical and mental health. But those feelings, if not properly channeled, can themselves take a heavy toll. What do we do with our anger?

Our whole society is on overload. We’re like the driver that sits in a traffic jam for 3 hours, nerves frayed, emotional balance out of whack. We are a nation that went from divisive politics to a divisive pandemic to a divisive recovery.

I am hesitant to pull one of the most familiar lines from our High Holiday liturgy out, for fear that you all might think I’m reaching for the proverbial low hanging fruit. Bu there’s a reason certain lines in our liturgy roll off the tongue with ease. Mostly because they have been set to gorgeous music. But they get set to gorgeous music because the words are so powerful and so central to who we are and who we must be.

Avinu malkeinu, our God our sovereign, channeinu v’anneinu, have grace and answer us, ki ain banu ma’asim, although we are unworthy; aseh imanu tzedakah VA’CHESED ; do us the favor of treating us fairly and extending lovingkindness to us ; v’hoshieinu. And save us.

But this act of asking God for mercy and love is a two-way street. As the Alter of Slabodka taught us earlier: ‘ What is the task of one that grasps hold of the Highest State of all creation - that one is created in the image of God? To mirror one’s maker - “Just as God is, so too you.”’ If we truly want God to grant us mercy, fairness, patience forgiveness, and lovingkindness, WE must extend mercy, fairness, patience forgiveness, and lovingkindness to everyone around us. Anger and judgement will not solve what ails us, personally or nationally. We must love bigger, be more patient, forgive more.

It is not easy. Just last week, after a series of calamities at the other synagogue I staff in which the water went out, four staff went out with Covid (I was tested - I’m fine), two rooms were damaged by a leak, the phones and internet went out, our outdoor tent was hit by an Uber driver, I was locked out of the building and maintenance left a box of prayer books out in the rain, I lost my temper at the Executive Director and expressed my total frustration at our endless predicament of woe. Yes, I apologized, but I should have been better. Literally, living with chesed is easier said than done, but we must do it.

The woman who played Anna at Disney’s ‘Anna and Elsa’s Royal Welcome’ was mostly certainly on the job, staying in character, in the moment I witnessed in which she was practicing chesed. And yet that moment - watching this woman extend infinite non-judgemental love and kindness to this 14 year old boy - will stay with me the rest of my life, because it was still true. He felt loved and accepted, and thus he was loved and accepted. I submit to you, my friends, that God wants to love us for who we are, like Anna did on that day for that boy. And God wants us to love in that way to - with patience, and tolerance, and abundant lovingkindness. Even when we have to act. Even though it’s hard. aseh aleihem tzedakah VA’CHESED v’hoshieihem ; do them the favor of treating them fairly and extending lovingkindness to them ; and they will be saved.





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