Rabbi Stephen Pearce spent several days crafting a searing, thought-provoking High Holy Day sermon. And then he spent several seconds tearing it into shreds and throwing it into the garbage.
“It was too pessimistic; I wasn’t leaving anyone with any kind of hopeful message,” said the senior rabbi at San Francisco’s Reform Congregation Emanu-El. “I’ve never delivered a sermon like that before. I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I’m actually quite stumped.”
The confluence of the High Holy Days, the one-year anniversary of Sept. 11, ongoing mayhem in the Middle East and an economic recession has left more than a few Bay Area rabbis staring at blank computer screens, wondering what kind of message to impart to their congregants.
“Things are very difficult in Israel, nobody knows the answers. It’s very frustrating and sad but it’s not going to be a sermon where I throw up my hands and say, ‘Oy gevalt! Let’s walk!'” said Rabbi Steven Chester of Oakland’s Reform Temple Sinai.
Rabbi Harry Manhoff of San Leandro’s Conservative Congregation Beth Sholom said he “won’t allow” his High Holy Day message to be a negative one.
While not implying that all is lost, other rabbis maintained that not every dark situation can, or should, be mined for silver linings.
“To just give a sermon dwelling only on happy faces and ignoring everything going on around us, you would not be serving your congregants well and taking their concerns and treating them poorly,” said Rabbi Jacob Traub, the longtime spiritual leader at San Francisco’s Orthodox Adath Israel.
“The world is an extremely negative place, and sometimes it’s important to impart that.”
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, Emanu-El’s scholar-in-residence and a best-selling author, echoed Traub’s sentiments.
“To try and put a rosy face on something that’s terrible and painful insults your students,” he said. “The meaning of painful things sometimes doesn’t become clear until years and decades later. That doesn’t mean there isn’t some larger meaning, but it’d be blasphemy to try and assign it too [quickly]. My teacher Arnold Wolfe said the only answer to tragedy is living through it.”
Rabbi Mark Diamond relives Sept. 11 a little bit each day. Of course, it doesn’t help that he lives near an airport.
“I see small planes landing about two miles from my house, and if it looks like they’re banking too steeply over the San Fernando Valley, my heart skips a beat,” said Diamond, executive vice president of the Southern California Board of Rabbis and former spiritual leader of Oakland’s Conservative Temple Beth Jacob.
Still, the experience reminds him “the sacred gift of life, the notion of the everyday miracles of life — we should never, ever take them for granted. We don’t know how long we’re going to be here.”
Kushner recently held a seminar with roughly three dozen local rabbis in which he touched on how a spiritual leader might treat Sept. 11 in a sermon.
He discouraged rationalizing the events of the day and urged, instead, recalling one’s own personal recollections and memories.
For example, Kushner remembered a train trip between Boston and Philadelphia not long after the attacks.
“You go out over the Hell Gate Bridge, make a U-turn at Astoria and heading into Penn Station, you have a spectacular 20-minute view of the skyline,” he recalled. “Everybody knew the skyline without the towers was coming. And every person in the car wept audibly. That, to me, is just a very searing memory. Sometimes just talking about that can provide some healing.”
Rabbi Avi Weiss of the the Hebrew Institute in the Bronx will also avoid a head-on confrontation with Sept. 11, and instead ask his High Holy Day congregants for a period of “nonverbal communication” of the sort marked in Israel on Yom HaShoah or memorial days.
No rabbi should expect to save the world with his or her sermon, however. As Eric Yoffie, president of the Reform movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations, put it, “There are no easy answers. In a 20-25 minute sermon, we’re not going to solve these problems.”
While some rabbis like Pearce and Chester struggled to write their High Holy Days sermons this year, others did not. Traub, for one, did not have a problem incorporating the dire news from around the globe because “if you open your newspaper from last year, you’ll see the exact same thing.”
That’s not to say the rabbi is having an easy time these days. Traub copes with news of ongoing terror in Israel by talking with friends, plenty of dark humor and “screaming a lot.”
Penning this year’s High Holy Day sermons was, if anything, easier than last year’s for Rabbi Mark Bloom. The spiritual leader of Oakland’s Temple Beth Abraham thought he had finished writing his sermon until Sept. 11 came around and forced him to start over completely.
“Baruch HaShem that will not happen this year, not for selfish reasons, but for the tragedy,” said Bloom.
As far as imparting a positive message, the rabbi seems to have found one in his personal life — his second child is due to be born on Sept. 11.
“First of all, it’s horrible for a rabbi’s timing. I don’t even know if I’ll be at the synagogue,” he said with a laugh. “But the idea of being born on Sept. 11, I find that very life-affirming. What better symbol is there, God willing, than the birth of a child?”
And while many rabbis — and, for that matter, many non-rabbis — have been sorely tested by the events of the past year, none seemed to be questioning his or her faith.
That would “only be a serious problem for someone who believes God is some kind of puppet-master up in heaven who makes things happen and runs the world like that,” said Kushner. “That’s something we Jews learned long ago doesn’t cut it. That’s not how God works.”