High Holiday Sermons - 2024
We Are Not Doomed
Is this the beginning of the end? Hope is elusive, and despair threatens to overwhelm us. It seems as if everything is going wrong and falling apart. We must recall the simple wisdom of positive thinking: Can we fix it? Yes we can!
Has the Jewish world ever been this divided? Zionists vs. Antizionists, conservatives vs. liberals vs. socialists, the ultra-Orthodox vs. most everyone else, those open to the new Jewish diversity and those appalled by it. Israel is facing its most serious challenges in decades, both within and globally. And yet, have we ever been truly unified?
Technology and the internet promised to make the world smaller, smarter, and more open-minded (oops). Today the machines are always watching, listening, and learning. We have more knowledge and power at our fingertips than ever, and so does AI. Do we control our inventions, or will they control us?
People who are never afraid never have to be brave. Courage is a choice to face our fear and then act.
Can we live together any more? Individualism can create isolation and alienation, and secularism without a religion substitute can lead to nihilism. The generations are strained as change accelerates, and civility is losing to political and cultural tribalism. Jewish life may offer a way forward from dispute to discussion.
Campus protests, vandalism and threats against Jewish schools and synagogues, political uses of antisemitism, and judging “good Jews” vs. “bad Jews” - we may wonder if an American Jewish golden age has ended, or never was. Is it the best of times or the worst of times to be Jewish in America? Yes.
We do not have to accept everything as it is. And we also have to make realistic goals for ourselves.
With all of our challenges, this may well be the best time in history to be alive, as a Jew and as a human being. There is more work to do, and we have already come so far.