People are the Truth

There is a surprising custom of reading the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) during the holiday of Sukkot. It’s surprising because when we think about Sukkot, we usually think about joy, simcha . We refer to it as zeman simchatenu , the time of our joy, just like on Passover we say zeman cherutenu , the time of our freedom, or zman matan torateinu , the time of the giving of our Torah, on Shavuot. But Kohelet is not exactly an uplifting text.. One of its best-known teachings points out that the righteous, the wicked, the wise, and the foolish all end up in the same place. Its verses often seem more fitting for a funeral than for a joyous celebration. Kohelet itself even says that a house of mourning is better than a house of feasting, and there are verses from the book that are traditionally read at funerals in some communities. One of its famous lines is, “There’s nothing new under the sun,” another example of its bleak outlook. The logic behind it can be summed up as: “You’re not th...

In preparing for the High Holidays, I had the opportunity to watch a recording of the live-stream of some our services here from 2020, during the pandemic. I got to learn some of the traditions here, although of course there were many differences that were specific to covid era gatherings. As I watched, the musaf came along, and the video came to the aleinu prayer. If you’ve been to services with any regularity, you are probably familiar with the aleinu as the prayer at the end of services with that long bow when we say vanachnu korim umishtachavim , which means “we bend our knees and bow,” describing what we are doing. An interesting historical fact is that the Aleinu was not written for the end of services. It was actually composed for the high holiday mussaf itself, but was popular and was moved to the end of the regular daily services in the medieval period, possibly developing along with the custom of saying mourner’s kaddish. Anyway, I was watching and I became curious to ...

  Shanah Tovah, This Rosh Hashanah, it seems like the simple wish for a "good year," a shanah tovah, feels more complicated? I wonder if anyone else feels the same. At first, it was very hard for me to say it because I realized that when we said Shanah Tovah last year around this time, I don't think we could have imagined everything that would unfold in the year ahead. Now, I know some of you are saying to yourselves, "Rabbi, you’re overthinking it. It’s just a greeting. It’s just words." And you are right. The main point of saying these things is to get a response back, a smile from a friend or a stranger, a nod from a neighbor, a human connection because we share a bond. It’s to offer your best wishes, a blessing that we say to each other because, while we cannot control what happens, it can't hurt to send someone good vibes and let them know you care. But I think taking extra notice of even these casual blessings, like little prayers we say to each ot...

  Does anyone here recognize the name Solomon Holland? Solomon’s story is a tragedy—it ended before it could be told. He died in 1864 at the age of two and is buried in the old Jewish section of Cedar Park Cemetery here in Hudson. But his story lives on, not only in the weathered monument that’s survived 160 winters but also in the stories we tell of how our community began and how this congregation has thrived for 136 years, from South Front Street to Diamond Street, Warren Street, and finally here on Joslyn Blvd. I hesitated to talk about “our” stories because, I admit, I had to look up some of those streets on a map—I haven’t been here that long, and I’m still learning the neighborhood. But then, even though it’s Rosh Hashanah, I thought about Passover and the wicked child in the Haggadah, asking what all of this means “to you.” It would have been stranger if I said it was “your” Hudson story, not mine as well. One lesson of Rosh Hashanah is that how we tell our stories ...