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Intro
Schedule
Simchat Shabbat
Sermons
Past Sermons
Dr John Lantos Sermon: Yom Kippur Morning 5770 - September 28, 2009
Rabbi Levin's Yizkor Sermon: September 28, 2009
Rabbi Levin's Kol Nidre Sermon: "The Possibility of Hope" September 27, 2009
Rabbi Levin's Sermon: "Compassion" Rosh Hashana Morning - September 19,2009
Rabbi Levin's Sermon: "The Main Thing is Not to Fear" Erev Rosh Hashana - September 18,2009
Rabbi Harris' Yom Kippur sermon, "A Shabbat State of Mind", 5769
Rabbi Levin's sermon, "How Long the War?" February 7, 2009
Rabbi Levin's Yizkor, Yom Kippur sermon, 5769
Rabbi Levin's Kol Nidre sermon, "Standing Idly By", 5769
Rabbi Levin's Rosh Hashanah Morning 5769 sermon, "Calm Living"
Rabbi Levin's Erev Rosh Hashana 5769 sermon, "Forgiveness"
Rabbi Levin's Yizkor, Yom Kippur sermon, "Living on the Edge", 5768
D'var Torah on the Occasion of Ryan Gale's Bar Mitzvah
Rabbi Harris' Yom Kippur 5768 sermon, "Get Your Feet on The Ground"
Rabbi Levin's Kol Nidre sermon, "Therefore Choose Life", 5768
Rabbi Levin's Rosh Hashana Morning sermon, "Judging Your Neighbor",5768
Rabbi Levin's sermon, "The Menorah" June 2, 2007
Rabbi Levin's Erev Rosh Hashana sermon, 5768
Rabbi Levin's sermon, "Thoughts on the Omer" April 13, 2007
Rabbi Levin's sermon, "Miracles in Our Own Time" March 31, 2007
Rabbi Levin's sermon "A Community Together" June 9, 2007
Rabbi Harris' sermon, "Living in Jewish Time", Yom Kippur 5767
Rabbi Levin Yizkor sermon 5767
Rabbi Levin Kol Nidre sermon, "Israel: A Present Reality", 5767
Rabbi Levin's Rosh Hashana Morning sermon, "Dignity",5767
Rabbi Levin's Erev Rosh Hashana sermon, "Training the Soul", 5767
Rabbi Levin's sermon, "Proportionality in War" - September 1, 2006
Rabbi Levin's sermon, "The State of the Jews" - August 19, 2006
Rabbi Levin's sermon on the Israel/Lebanon War
Rabbi Harris Sermon - Praying for Peace in Israel - July 22, 2006
Rabbi's Tisch Simchat Shabbat - April 21, 2006
Yom Hazikaron and Yom Haatzmaut Sermon - April 20, 2006
6th Grade Shabbat Sermon - April 15, 2006
Mythology and Religion: the Case of Prof. Paul Mirecki - December 3, 2005
Yizkor 5766 - October 13, 2005
Rabbi Harris YK 5766 The House of God - October 13, 2005
Rabbi Levin Kol Nidre Sermon 5766 - October 12, 2005
Rosh Hashanah Morning 5766 - October 4, 2005
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5766 - October 3, 2005
Holidays
Blessings
Music
Lifecycle Events
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Rabbi Levin's Yizkor Sermon: September 28, 2009
Yizkor 5770
Mark H. Levin, D.H.L.
The human experience is largely universal. All human beings think about what we must do when someone we love, someone to whom we have attached our lives, is about to die or passes away. We must take care of both the sick person or deceased and ourselves. We desire to honor and preserve the dignity of both the dead and the living. The experience is universal and timeless, but the way it plays out in our individual lives is all our own.
My father was dying for days, or weeks, or months, or years. He was determined to die slowly: piece by piece so it seems, body part by body part, until he wasted away to nothing, as if this were the last kindness of a man who lived to give kindnesses, to make sure that we who carry him to the grave would not have to bear too heavy a burden. His consideration surpassed his dementia.
At 80 my mother told me, "Your dad's mind is going." I heard it accusingly, as if he had failed at something; and because I loved my father and despised hearing anything negative about him, I denied it, as if to deny her reality, but knowing that she would not say such a thing if she were not convinced of its truth; and she could be insightful even when I refused her observations.
And when she lay in the hospital dying, my dad called me and said, "I need to talk to you. Why didn't you tell me your mother is dead?" And then I knew two truths: that he could not bear his suffering at her demise any longer, and that indeed years had taken their toll and his mind was slipping away.
DYLAN THOMAS
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light,
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
We are confused today about our grief. We have few shared rituals in our insistently ritualess society to express the depths of our sorrow. We retreat to our homes, embarrassed to grieve, ashamed of our weakness and our loss and what feels like our victimhood. There is much writing today about the shame of grief, even among those who ought to know better, who know how natural grief is; and yet we are ashamed of our vulnerability, our weakness, we who cannot admit our neediness, even to ourselves and certainly not to others.
And so we have, out of ideology, because we have failed to see the poetry of the ritual, cancelled our rituals that plumbed the depths of the ineffability of human loss. Humans have for thousands of years turned to ritual and poetry to express what must be said but for which words are too pale to capture the entire, implicit meaning. Instead of using words and ceremonies developed and tried over centuries we prefer our own, often empty words or vapid actions. We are the most impoverished of generations, living with the wealth of our material surroundings and shriveled souls.
We cast about for proofs of afterlife, or hell, or even better, that we will be reincarnated or rejoin our families in that blissful abode we call heaven, hoping against hope that this frenetic, insipid world is not all there is.
SANDRA M. GILBERT
November 26, 1992: Thanksgiving at the Sea Ranch,
Contemplating Metempsychosis
You tried coming back as a spider.
I was too fast for you. As you
climbed my ankle, I swept you off, I ground you
to powder under my winter boot.
Shall I cherish the black widow,
I asked, because he is you?
You were cunning: you became
the young, the darkly masked
raccoon that haunts my deck.
Each night for weeks you tiptoed
toward the sliding doors, your paws
imploring, eyes aglow. Let me in,
Let me back in, you hissed,
swaying beside the tubbed fuchsia,
shadowing the fancy cabbage in its Aztec pot.
And you've been creatures of the air and sea,
the hawk that sees into my skull, the seal that barks
a few yards from the picnic on the shore.
Today you chose a different life, today
you're trying to stumble
through the tons of dirt that hold you down:
you're a little grove of mushrooms,
rising from the forest floor you loved.
Bob saw you in the windbreak --
November mushrooms, he said,
off-white and probably poisonous.
Shall I slice you for the feast?
If I eat you will I die back into your arms?
Shall I give thanks for God's wonders
because they all are you, and you are them?
The meadow's silent, its dead grasses
ignore each other and the evening walkers
who trample them. What will you be,
I wonder, when the night wind rises?
Come back as yourself, in your blue parka,
your plaid flannel shirt with the missing button.
These fields that hum and churn with life
are empty. There is nowhere
you are not, nowhere
you are not.
Perhaps we have overlooked something. Perhaps death holds a secret for us that, like treasure hunters who overlook a map carved into the rock face before them, stares us in the face but we fail to recognize it as a guide, seeing only rocky barrier. Perhaps death itself is the answer to our question about existence.
Death tears the fabric of our lives. If you are sitting here then you know that, far beyond these words so monodimensional against the vivid portrait of your personal experience. You know the inexplicable pain, the chaos, the ripping of the world that goes by the name "loss" but is so much more. At times it is akin to fingernails tearing at our flesh, and at times more like a stomach ache, the result of an indigestible ball we have swallowed whole, that sits in our guts and seems to swell, causing more suffering with each new minute that passes. When a beloved is wrenched from the fabric of our existence our flesh may just as well have been torn. Indeed, it would have been easier, for then we could point to something and say, "Look; look at what happened to me!" And we would have a timetable to watch. First we would bandage the wound. Then it would scab over. Then scar. Then we could pronounce ourselves healed, even though the entire world, and we most of all, could still witness the gray-white scar and point to its place, and remember, as if we needed a reminder, what our lives had been like when we were whole, and there was no scar, and life was different than today. We live quietly with our scars, rarely mentioning them, yet touching them daily, a constant reminder of our grief.
I watched my father, what he had become, and I mourned his loss of memory, and his bodily decay. But then, I scratched his back, and he reached out to scratch mine, and through the grace of memory I recalled how, half a century ago, he would toss me on my bed and rub my back so hard that my mother would yell at him, knowing that I loved what he was doing but unable to stop herself, "Bob, stop! You're hurting the boy!" It was her way of acknowledging the inexplicable bond between father and son, a bond she longed for but could not have, but I think delighted that dad and I had it together. And through God's grace of memory the past lives in the present, and what was long forgotten comes to life again, and there for a moment 91 years old becomes 40, and father blesses son with love again. I hope you have such memories in the recesses of your mind, or perhaps your heart, and can see and feel them at will.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
The Last Words of My English Grandmother
There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed --
Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food,
Gimme something to eat --
They're starving me --
I'm all right I won't go
to the hospital. No, no, no
Give me something to eat
Let me take you
to the hospital, I said
and after you are well
you can do as you please.
She smiled, Yes
you do what you please first
then I can do what I please --
Oh, oh, oh! she cried
as the ambulance men lifted
her to the stretcher --
Is this what you call
making me comfortable?
By now her mind was clear --
Oh you think you're smart
you young people,
she said, but I tell you
you don't know anything.
Then we started.
On the way
we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,
What are all those
fuzzy-looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I'm tired
of them and rolled her head away.
Death renews the world. The human world is a fabric; we are but threads. Can a thread protest that it still can bear weight and color and texture, that it should not be replaced? Can a thread claim that because it has served well, the thread upon which it relies as it's neighbor should not be removed and renewed? Can a thread even witness its place in the fabric, and appreciate the role it plays? No, the thread only knows the comfort of those closest to it, and how they pass their time side by side or intertwined.
We experience ourselves as most real: our emotions, our insights, explain our world to us. We can only try to imagine another perspective, to stand outside ourselves where we are but a thread in the fabric, and our little existence contains its greatest meaning in the context of the whole, the cloth whose existence is important to our Creator. Because we can attempt to imagine that our individual threadness does contain ultimate meaning, we contemplate our importance in the Whole Fabric, and call it spirituality: feeling our place, imaging our place, contemplating our place as just a thread among the entirety of the family of threads that have their real meaning from the divine dimension.
Alas, we long for those with whom we shared the warp and woof of our lives. And so we have this ritual, and these prayers. The shiva that once brought communities together to share their grief, are largely gone from our diminished lives. The ritual of past griever sharing the heart of the newly bereaved, standing together uttering sanctified words that for thousands of years connected those who have lost with their loved ones, Jews united over place and time, is so often refused. Much of this ritual, so rich in its beauty, its ability to plumb to the depths of our loss, we have declared irrelevant and therefore destroyed. But these Yiskor prayers remain. Gathered annually, on the holiest day of the year, the day in which we ask that we be placed again in the Book of Life, together as a people with a single history and a single destiny, united in our finitude and our fraility, remember in our own ways that which was so special between us and our dearly departed. I have recited part of my story, in the hope that it will jog loose your own experiences. And in just a few moments, we will recite the kaddish prayer, that mysterious intonation that our parents recited for their parents, and so on back for generations, that all of our ancestors in their own way, and all of our communities, the same as we, mourn our solitariness, even as we acknowledge the unity of God's fabric and our place in its mystery. We sorely grieve those who shared our place in God's cloth of time and place. We cannot know, we are not allowed to know, the ultimate importance of our contribution. Instead, we grieve our losses, remembering those with whom we shared life, with whom we added to the fabric over time. Only our small part of the cloth mosaic is available to us. And so we focus on those most important: those whose loss matters personally in our lives.
The departed, whom we now remember, have entered into the peace of life eternal. They still live on earth in the acts of goodness they performed, and in the hearts of all who cherish their memories. May the beauty of their lives abide among us as a loving benediction. And may the Father of Peace, send peace to all who mourn, and comfort all who are bereaved.
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