Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2002-5763

by Bob Osserman

Shabbat shalom! and of course, L’shanah tova! or Good yuntif, as I would have said, back before I started re-narrating my history. And a strange history it has been. I can’t tell you how honored I am to have been asked to give this talk, nor how utterly astonished I am to find myself actually up here, doing it. At any time during the fifty-odd years of my life, during which I had nothing to do with organized – or even disorganized – religion, if somebody had asked: on a scale of 1 to 10, what would you put the chances that at age 75 you would be delivering a High HolyDay sermon, I would have said, somewhere around –50. And yet here I am, and the reason I’m here can be traced directly back to the intersection of my own personal history with the history of Kehilla.

I remember vividly the occasion of that intersection. It was a Friday evening service at which Rabbi Burt gave a sermon that was so deeply personal and moving and meaningful, that it changed my whole concept of what a religious service could be. And so, partly inspired by his example, I’d like to start out by telling just a little bit of my own personal history.

One of my very earliest memories is of sitting with a book containing large Hebrew letters, and learning the names of the different letters. The story I had always told myself is that I had learned the Hebrew alphabet before English, which may well have been true. My sister tells me that we started to go to Hebrew school together when she was 5 and I was 3. We grew up in a kosher household so that I knew from earliest childhood that all kitchen utensils, dishes, towels and washcloths came in two species: milchik and fleischik, and one had to learn how to tell them apart and when to use which. My father went to Shabbat morning services most weeks, and from a certain point on, I would accompany him.

But somewhere along the way, when I must have been about 8 or 9 years old, I decided that I really did not believe in any of this. My mother was my confidant and rapidly became my co-conspirator, when she confessed that neither did she, but she just went along with it because it meant so much to my father, and she urged that I do likewise, which I did. I should also note that by the time I had my Bar Mitzvah, I was attending the Bronx High School of Science where the general attitude toward religion was that it was something dreamed up by primitive peoples that had somehow survived into modern times, but was unlikely to outlast the twentieth century. And, yes, religion was the opiate of the masses.

There is one other aspect of my childhood that always stuck in my mind. My sister and I, like loyal siblings, shared most everything, and in particular, any germs that either of us picked up anywhere else. As a result, we both went through pretty much all the childhood diseases, except for the scariest of them, scarlet fever, that I kept to myself. Now younger people here may not know of the curious practice in those days, that when a sick person, especially a child, needed to see a doctor, instead of the sick person getting themselves through whatever kind of weather, by any kinds of means, to the healthy one, it was done the other way around, with the doctor making what was termed "a house call." And so I have the memory, reinforced by recurrent visits, of my recovering from this series of illnesses, and our old reliable German doctor, Dr. Davidson, pronouncing me cured, always summing it up for me with the words, Unkraut verdirbt nicht, which translates roughly as "weeds are resilient;" weeds don’t wither away so easily. And something about that characterization struck a chord with me. Yes, I was skinny and scrawny, and not much to look at, but I could handle whatever came along. In any event, I studied and loved all the sciences in high school, and majored in mathematics in college. As it happens, a friend forwarded to me last week a quote of the day from the internet. It said:

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.-- M. Cartmill

Well, perhaps that overstates the case a bit. Here’s a story I like. A science reporter apparently went to a Harvard graduation a few years ago, and in order to get some sense of how much science the students had learned during their four years there, he went around and posed the following question: showing them an acorn he had in one hand, and a large oak branch in the other, he asked how the acorn grew into the great tree--where did all that stuff come from that constituted the branch? Well, I’m not sure how many, if indeed any of the students knew the answer. Most guessed that it must have somehow come out of the ground. But the answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind; the answer is blowin’ in the wind. The tree gets the stuff it needs to grow out of thin air. The chief constituent of the wood that makes up the tree is carbon, and the tree extracts the carbon from the carbon dioxide that’s in the air all around us. But the next obvious question is: where does the carbon dioxide in the air come from? Well, a good part of it comes from us; we manufacture it in our bodies, and breathe it out into the air. So the moral is, "trees are us." They are literally made out of the elements we provide. And to top it off, when they extract the carbon that they need from the carbon dioxide in the air, they release the oxygen back into the air, and so provide us with a key component that we need in order to live.

Now I don’t know how you react to this, but I find it all rather miraculous. It demonstrates in a most unexpected way the kind of interconnectedness of life that many religions had preached for centuries.

And that brings me to Kehilla, both literally and figuratively. Kehilla grew from an acorn planted by Rabbi Burt 18 years ago. And its growth into its present size and strength, partly visible in these very services today, has something almost equally miraculous to it, especially for those of us who were around and involved during a number of years along the way, when even its survival was not a foregone conclusion. On the other hand, Kehilla has sustained throughout its original vision and values, including its unwavering commitment toward fostering an active and caring and welcoming community. I might say along these lines, that one of the great attractions for me was that my weed-like quality seemed here almost more of an advantage than a drawback, and I recognized some of the same qualities among fellow members.

But since the theme of these High HolyDays is re-narrating our story, let me provide my own re-narration of part of Kehilla’s story. One of the worries I’ve heard expressed during the past year, as Kehilla has enjoyed unprecedented continuing growth, is that we risk losing the sense of intimacy and community that we had in the early days. I’m afraid that that version is already a re-telling. In fact, as Rabbi Burt was telling me, there was a period when there were so many independent groups each doing their own thing, with little or no communication between them, that there was a joke going around that Kehilla was a "virtual synagogue." If you permit me to switch metaphors in midstream, after the birth of Kehilla 18 years ago, the congregation went through its childhood, and then adolescence, sometimes behaving just a bit irresponsibly, or to put it more kindly, occasionally displaying more idealism than practicality, for example when it came to dealing with such mundane issues as how to pay the rent, to say nothing of paying our Rabbis. But I also feel that as we approach our Chai celebration, Kehilla’s 18th birthday, we have really reached an adult phase. We have been systematically going through a thorough strategic planning process.

One of the most encouraging aspects of the current engagement with strategic planning has been the recognition that the process of moving toward and implementing our vision has to be part of that vision.

To sum it up, in this approaching adult phase of Kehilla, we are not so much interested in growing bigger as in growing better and stronger. It is clearly a community where this particular weed will feel very proud, and lucky, and dare I say, blessed, to finally put down roots.