Rabbi Howard Morrison

For many years, I have attended a five-day retreat for Conservative rabbis, called the Rabbinic Training Institute. It is held annually at the Pearlstone Retreat Center, a Kosher facility, located outside of Baltimore, Maryland. For a number of years, one of the faculty members, who excelled in Jewish meditation among other disciplines, was Rabbi Alan Lew.

Long before he was an educator and my being his student, Rabbi Lew was a classmate of mine at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. During our student years, he sat right behind me at daily services in the seminary synagogue. Rabbi Lew did not grow up as a religiously practicing Jew. He had actually experimented with Buddhism and other ideas before reclaiming his place in Judaism and subsequently becoming a rabbi.

At our annual rabbinic retreat, Rabbi Lew would go on a run by himself for about a mile prior to morning services. During the retreat of 2009, all the participants were summoned together to learn that Rabbi Lew had suffered a heart attack and dropped dead during his run. For the next two days, the participants, including myself, served as Shomrim, guardians of his body, until arrangements were made for his funeral. 

The author of many books, one of his most famous, written in 2003, is called, "This is real and you are completely unprepared - The Days of Awe as a journey of transformation." The book is his spiritual guide to the High Holy Days and other occasions. I was pleased to see that it is now required reading for those who take the Conservative Movement's Introduction to Judaism course leading to conversion.

In Rabbi Lew's memory and as a mood setter for this Yom Kippur, I wish to share excerpts from his chapter entitled, "The soul hears its name being called: Kol Nidre."

"When we recite the Kol Nidre, God calls out to the soul, in a voice the soul recognizes because it is the soul's own cry. You may have come to this service for other reasons. Nevertheless, here you are, sitting in your body, and suddenly your soul hears this music and it gives a jump, and it startles you. Your soul is hearing its name called, and its name is pain, grief, shame, humiliation, loss, failure, death - or at least that is its first name. That is the name the first few notes of the Kol Nidre service call out. 

Kol Nidre has an interesting if somewhat cloudy history. it seems to have been composed during the reign of Reccared I, a sixth century Visigoth king of Spain who ordered Jews to convert on pain of death. So, Kol Nidre was originally a cry of pain, an expression of overwhelming grief at having to commit apostacy. Spanish Jews chanted it when they gathered secretly to observe Yom Kippur. They did the same later under the Byzantine period of the ninth century, and again during the papal and Spanish Inquisitions of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. . . . the soul is in anguish because it has encountered a frightening obstacle to expressing itself. But it resolves to persevere, and in so doing finds its true voice.

We can hear all this quite clearly in the music itself. The chant begins with a fall, a descending minor tone, which goes on for two full phrases, but then there is a definite rise. There is the sound of pain and heartbreak, but after that comes a kind of rising emotion, a heroic, even a defiant persistence, and finally a kind of grim triumph.. . . This is nothing less than a picture of the journey the soul takes through this world. This is a picture of the soul's journey to express itself, to spawn, to create what it was put on this earth to create, and then to make a leap of great joy. And the soul makes this joyous leap in spite of the fact that as soon as it expresses itself, it will begin to die, it will begin to fade away. We rise up and we fall away. We express our unique and indispensable contribution to the great flow of life and then we pass on. 

Yet many of us are afraid to be who we really are, precisely because we sense this. We sense that once we have risen up, we will begin to fall away. Once we have spawned, we will begin to die. Many of us would rather try to keep our lives unexpressed, in potential, because we believe that if we don't express our lives, we can hold on to them. As long as we dream of that great novel we were always supposed to write, we never have to risk the unbearable tragedy of trying to write it and failing. Then where are we? Then what do we have? So, we never make that joyous leap. We remain weighted down by the burden of our unexpressed dreams.

The Kol Nidre expresses all this. Those first notes express this sadness, this impermanence, this heartbreak, this failure. But then there are the rising notes. Precisely because of this impermanence, the heartbreak, the soul expresses itself, expresses its singular onetime gift, leaps out of the water with joy, and then expires."

This is just a piece from Rabbi Lew's chapter on Kol Nidre - I would briefly add, based on other ideas he raises, that Kol Nidre focuses on speech, on how we use our words, on being genuine and authentic about the words we use to express ourselves. I would also briefly add, as I spoke about on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, that we are not expected to succeed on our own. Kol Nidre states that we are to pray with the "Avaryanim," meaning among other things, with those who transgress, because we all make mistakes, we are all transgressors. As Rabbi Lew concludes his chapter, "We are incomplete and imperfect and cannot survive without a spiritual community that can make us whole - that can give us what we need, what we don't have. Kol Nidre calls the soul to its community and to its rightful place in this great, shifting sea of life."

Rabbi Alan Lew did not grow up as a religious Jew but found his place in a spiritual community. His story reminds me of another perhaps not so well known person who rediscovered his Judaism through a spiritual community and on Kol Nidre night:

Franz Rosenzweig was born in 1886 in Kassel, Germany. He grew up in a home dedicated to civic responsibility and the cultivation of literature and the arts. Religious beliefs and observance were not evident in his home beyond occasional perfunctory participation. In July of 1913, Franz decided to relinquish his Judaism, which was barely known to him. His Jewish heritage simply did not matter. Franz decided that before converting to Christianity and undergoing baptism, he would attend synagogue services on Yom Kippur, a last hurrah as it were. He found a small traditional synagogue in Berlin. He intended for this to be his farewell to Judaism. But when he came out three hours later after Kol Nidre services, he was a changed man. It was no longer possible for Franz to change his faith.

The drama of the Kol Nidre service had a powerful effect on him. For the first time in his life, he saw a community of Jews who cared about their religious tradition. They had an intensity and a sense of spiritual engagement which he had envied when he saw it among devout Christians. Rosenzweig would go on to write several books on Judaism, the most notable called, "The Star of Redemption." He and the well-known Jewish philosopher of his time, Martin Buber, collaborated on the first Jewish translation of the Torah into German. Rosenzweig also founded the Lehrhaus, or, "House of Learning," an institute for serious adult Jewish study. All of his contributions to Jewish life took place in a short period of time. Tragically, he contracted ALS and died at the age of 42.

None of Rosenzweig's reclamation of Judaism would have taken place were it not for his fated decision to walk into that shul on Kol Nidre eve, just to taste one last time the tradition that he was on the verge of abandoning. Rosenzweig's experience in that Berlin synagogue teaches something very important. Judaism is not primarily an idea; it is primarily a religious community. Judaism is the Jewish people as much as it is Jewish belief. What ultimately "converted" Rosenzweig back to Judaism was the impact of the Jewish community - real life people turned on by the reality of their Jewishness.

Similarly, in a more contemporary spirit, Rabbi Alan Lew though raised in Brooklyn, NY, grew up in a secular Jewish household. In the 1960's, he experimented with Asian spiritual practices and eventually discovered Zen Buddhism. When preparing for ordination as a Zen Buddhist priest, he had an epiphany regarding his Jewish identity, which set him on a path to exploring Judaism. As a witness myself, I saw how he was transformed by the spiritual community he became part of at the Jewish Theological Seminary during our shared student years in the 1980's. He served congregations in upstate New York and San Francisco. There, he established the "Makor Or Meditation Center" - the world's first synagogue-based Jewish meditation center, akin to the "Lehrhaus-Learning Center" established by Franz Rosenzweig in the early 1900's.

We do not need to be a Franz Rosenzweig or an Alan Lew to claim or reclaim our place in Judaism. Each of them found his place with the safe support of an enthusiastic spiritual community. I hope and pray that Beth Emeth can be that catalyst for everyone here, led and mentored by myself, Cantor Noah Rachels, and all of you. All one needs to do is take the first step.

I dedicate my remarks tonight to the memory of my friend, classmate, and teacher, Rabbi Alan Lew, and to the memory of the early 20^th century German Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig.

May this Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur experience be as meaningful to you as it was to them.

Gmar Tov,

Rabbi Howard Morrison