Rabbi Noah Farkas Sermons

It's a wonder that Jews from all over the world find their way to synagogue tonight. We all came here tonight because of many motivations. I know you all didn't come here just for me, as much as any rabbi might think that to be the case. We came because we remember our parents and grandparents coming to shul when we were children. We came because some unconscious part of us that says, "you should be here." We came because we believe that tonight matters. Our very presence at synagogue tonight is itself a statement of belief.

It is a belief that there is something special about tonight, that being here carries meaning. It is a belief that our community matters. It is a belief that our Judaism matters. Let me tell you how I came here and what I believe. I grew up in Plano, Texas in a synagogue that had no building nor did it have a rabbi. I celebrated my bar mitzvah in a storefront that seated less than two hundred people. I learned to read Torah and Haftarah from a cabinet maker. I learned how to daven Shabbat services from an accountant. On the morning of my bar mitzvah, I read my Torah portion on a folding table covered with donated table cloth.

When I was a sophomore in public school, I was awoken at three in the morning by the sound of loud pops and bangs in my front yard. When my father walked outside he found that several pipe bombs had been exploded in the front of our house, and our brick mailbox was sitting in the middle of street, broken into pieces. On my sister's car hung a t-shirt with swastikas painted onto it. They never caught the perpetrators, I'm not even sure if they tried.

The next morning, I went back to my high school. I was not sure if the other students sitting in my chemistry class could have been responsible for the hate crime. I never felt more alone and afraid than I did that day sitting in that desk. I had no certainty about the people who I thought were my friends and I lost my trust. I felt weird, other, and ultimately alone. The following Shabbat, our synagogue community embraced us, gave us comfort, and made us feel safe. They brought meals to the house, and kept calling to make sure we were ok.

It was my community who taught me to be Jewish.

It was my community who comforted me when others threatened my family.

It was my community that said I did not have to be alone.

The Torah teaches that God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden. Adam was given dominion over the plants and animals, as the head steward, totally unique and special in God's eyes. Adam was given the task of naming all of the animals and plants in God's creation, allowing him to give the world his own personal touch.

In modern times, we envy Adam's individualism. The greatest gift of the last 100 years was the birthing of the idea that each one of us can be a master of his or her own destiny. Individualism is the sacred hallmark of modern America. It allowed for the flourishing of businesses, and it gave energy and hope to each of us that we can make something of ourselves if we just try hard enough. For many Americans, however, the sense of individualism has created a sense of entitlement – to add our own personal touch to the world. We demand personal service. We demand that our cell phones have a unique ring tone. Or that our computers or iPods come in our favorite colors. That we craft our own facebook page, blog, or twitter account. We are each unique, says America, declaring, bishvili nivra haolam, the world was created for my sake. Just like Adam.

But just like Adam, the downside to this rugged individualism is the loneliness. Adam spent the first day of his life, naming the animals, asserting his persona in the world. But he found no creature to be his equal, to be his partner or friend. And as the sun faded from the sky and the land was cast in shadow, say the rabbis, a great fear gripped him. He had never seen a sunset, and this was his first. As light and warmth quickly left the garden, Adam was sure that his short existence was coming to an end and he was seized with despair, for he was going to die alone and his world was going to return to chaos. And he wept all night. (Avoda Zara 8a; Gen Rabba 12:6;)

We all identify with this part of Adam too. I remember the week I took care of my zayde before he died. Ten years ago after, returning from a trip to Israel, my zayde and I were sitting at the Shabbat Dinner table and he told me that he thinks he suffered a minor stroke, but not to worry. The next morning in services he seemed weaker. We went to the hospital where he was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. After the surgery he flew back home to Atlanta for chemotherapy. Because I was in school at the time, on my winter break I flew to Atlanta to spell my aunt and Bubbie and drive him to the hospital. For two weeks, I washed him, clothed him, and gave him his medication. He was a powerful force in my life, teaching me that the highest compliment anyone could give you was calling you a mensch. Every night I would lie awake in the next room listening to his labored breath through a baby monitor knowing that these are probably the last of his breaths I would hear, like a clock slowly winding down. Often, I wept for his pain, out of fear for his death, out of the fear of my own. That was my first "Adam" moment.

It was the existentialists who touched on these "Adam" like moments and found them to be the deepest truth of life. Sarte said human beings are haunted by the notion that we are driven to find a sort of completion in our lives. We naturally obsess over the material world, by building a framework for life that constructs meaning out of our choices. Freud relates to this by saying that psychologically, those who are compelled to collect objects, like candles, music boxes, or figurines, do so out of a fear that if the collection were ever to become complete, there would be nothing left to live for. Completion, in their eyes, means death, and so we hedge against it by surrounding ourselves with things. But when we strip away the materialism, we are left with a simple naked truth. That human life has no inherent meaning, that it is merely a futile project of escape from our inevitable deaths, and that when we have cast aside all of our conventions there is nothing but nothingness itself, and each of us is utterly alone, and we despair.

Yom Kippur brings us to this existential breaking point. We look backwards at the past year at all the hopes that we had envisioned for health and success, the resolutions that we made for ourselves to be better people, and the promises we made to each other. We wear white, to emulate the tachrichin, the burial shrouds. We refrain from eating, drinking, and merry making because the dead sing no songs. We recite the Vidui, the confessional, just as we will on our death beds.

On Yom Kippur we stare death in the face open and vulnerable. On Yom Kippur, we rehearse our deaths.

And we stand here tonight, and when we look in the mirror and see those we love – suffer, or when we see our own suffering. When we see our failure instead of our success, when we see our hopes thwarted, the resolutions that we made un-kept, and the promises we made to ourselves and we made to others – broken. We lay bare the ultimate question, "What is the point of it all?"

There is an answer to this question. Adam wept because he looked ahead and saw only a meaningless chaos. But God looked down upon Adam and saw the fear of the void, and God said, "lo tov hei'yot lavado" "It is not good for you to be alone." (Genesis 2:15). And God fashioned a partner for Adam, giving him someone to talk to, to be with, to share his life with, and to look to the future with hope. The sun rose the next day; warmth and light returned to the garden. And when Adam opened his eyes, he saw Hava, a partner looking back at him panim-el-panim , face-to-face. And together they wept. Adam had found his partner to share share his life. Giving him strength and courage to know that even if the sun sets again, and life becomes scary, and the thick of night returns, he is no longer alone. At the darkest moments of life, it is the embrace of our family, the embrace of our friends, the embrace of our community that gives us the strength to continue on.

Unfortunately, there are too many times that I have seen the lesson of this midrash is forgotten. When one of my former congregants in Mississippi, was stricken with diabetes after Hurricane Katrina, we looked together for months for a local doctor who provide the appropriate level treatment. But after the storm blew through, all the doctors left, and his state-sponsored health care would not let him drive the 60 miles to Louisiana or the 90 miles to Alabama to receive treatment. His circulation began to fail, and he lost one leg, and then the other. When we brought our complaints before the city, they said simply, that's a personal problem. There is nothing we can do.

"That's a personal problem."

Never a colder statement has ever been uttered. The down-shot of radical individualism is that world "personal" becomes dismissive. As if it has nothing to do with me.

When someone in our midst loses a friend, is that only a personal problem?

When the doctor utter the word, "malignant" is that only a personal problem?

When a business falters, and a family falls behind in a mortgage, is that only a personal problem?

When those Nazis bombed my house was that only a personal problem?

If we believe that all of our problems are strictly personal, then we are all doomed to be alone at time when we are in the greatest of need.

Judaism repulses the notion that human suffering need be private. When one of the Israelites becomes sick, says the Torah, the priest is commissioned to visit them every day to check on their progress and to pray for healing. Upon entering the room of the ill, the rabbis teach, we are to wrap ourselves in a tallit, like a priest, and sit patiently, panim-el-panim, face-to-face, with our host, for the presence of God dwells with the sick. Far from being a merely personal crisis, when one of us suffers, when one of us falters, it becomes a Divine crisis. If each of us is minted, as it were, in God's image, then every time we suffer, the image of God in the world suffers, and so God suffers.

The Torah teaches that when the afflicted are ready to reenter public life, they are brought to the center of the community to the mishkan, the Tent of Meeting where they are bathed and anointed with oil in the same manner that the High Priest is bathed and anointed on Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur the meaning is clear. Those who experience suffering are to be brought from the fringe of loneliness to the sacred center because we are a nation of priests, and we are expected to behave like priests.

Your suffering is not yours alone, for we are created in the same divine image.

Your despair is not yours alone, for we are created in the same divine image.

Your fear is not yours alone, for we are created in the same divine image.

Because the only godly response to the loneliness of being human, is to be in community, panim-el-panim, face-to-face.

Yet building a community is not easy. To be in community, a real community, says Martin Buber, we must begin at the lowest level with a personal conversation, panim-el-panim, face-to-face with your neighbor to share your life's story, your vulnerabilities, and your dreams. I hopefully started that process tonight by sharing a little of my story. But it cannot end there. It takes time and a great deal of effort, and above else it takes the courage and the audacity reach out beyond yourself and take the responsibility for your life by taking into your hands the responsibility for another's life. Like the priest who goes to visit the ill and brings him or her to the sacred center, so too must we. For God tells us all that we are all a nation of priests.

We want to build this type of sacred community at Valley Beth Shalom. It's the theme that each of our schools have adopted this year. But learning about community, again, is not enough. We can talk the talk but we have to walk the walk.

Here's how. VBS established a cluster of programs called the Healing Center. The stated mission is to promote the connection between Judaism and health through compassionate volunteerism, innovative educational programming, and spiritually meaningful services. Underlying the mission of the VBS Healing Center, though, is the idea that we can thread the lives of our community together by reaching out towards each other in times of our greatest need.

If you get sick, we will be there to comfort you panim-el-panim.

If you falter we will be there to pick you up panim-el-panim.

If you celebrate, we will dance with you panim-el-panim.

If you mourn, we will sit with you panim-el-panim.

Because we know in our hearts that it is not good to be alone.

Yom Kippur sets a choice before each of us. When we are stripped of our obligations, our conventions, and when come face-to-face with our own deaths can choose to seal ourselves to the path of death and despair or choose seal ourselves to the path of life. None of us can cast off this choice, it is each of our burdens, because it is basis of our free will, and it sits at the very heart of every human being. Choose life.

Learn about the nexus between Judaism and health with the healing center.

Choose life.

Volunteer to visit the sick through the Haling Center.

Choose life.

Let us know who is sick so the Healing Center, this community, can reach out to them . Choose life.

On Yom Kippur the High Priest, walks slowly with trepidation into the center of the holiest place on earth, the kodesh kodeshim the holy of holies. When he enters the chamber, with his head bowed he first prays for himself, and then his family, and then all of Israel and then the entire world. His eyes would then gaze upon the angels that topped the holy ark which houses the Torah, the book of life, and he smiles. Because the Levitical sculptors could have fashioned the angles as guardians of the Divine; with swords, facing outwards towards the entrance, but they didn't. The sculptors could have spread the wings of the angels upward, hinting at the transcendence of God. But they didn't. Instead, the angels were locked in an eternal gaze, panim-el-panim, face-to-face with each other, their wings reaching not upwards but towards each other in an eternal embrace. The Priest knew that like Adam and Hava, the throne of God is not up in heaven or in some far off place. The throne of the Holy One sits in between each of us, but only if our wings reach out for each other. This is the sacred mission of the VBS Healing Center. To make our community a holy place by reaching out, caring, and meeting each other panim-el-panim face-to-face.

And when the High Priest emerged from the chamber, all of Israel cheered for they knew and we know that God is amongst the people.

Gmar Khatima Tova

May we be sealed for life.

*Thank you for your interest in my High Holiday sermon. I hope you enjoy reading it. Please note that this material is under my copyright. You have my permission to forward it in its entirety, but not excerpted, as long as you include this disclaimer. Thanks again for your interest!