I want to thank Adath Israel for the priviledge to talk to you today. Much has happened since our last Rosh Hashanah together, and I am thankful to have us as a community to process the sadness, madness and miracles of the past year.
Many years ago, I was a very young teacher at a Hebrew School, in charge of my first class, of first graders. It was a small class, only three kids, and I had a real blast with them. In Brazil, the school year begins in March, after Carnival of course, so our first big Jewish calendar moment is Passover, or Pesach. As befits the moment and the age group, I was told that I had to plan a mock seder. And so I did, with lots of games.
When we get to the four questions, I said to myself, I’ll ask the kids for their questions, of course they will ask about the seder, it will be fine. I had in my backpack something like “the Big Book of Jewish Answers” it weighed a ton. Surely, I thought, surely the answers I need, if I don’t know them, are there in that trusty book. I felt completely and absolutely prepared.
We got to the four questions. And a child named Glenda, which is an odd name even in Portuguese, throws me her question: “if I wasn’t born Glenda, but there was a different Glenda in my family, would I still be me?” To which the second kid, with the much more common name Julia, asked “yeah, Nelly, is there such a thing as reincarnation in Judaism?”
Of course the answers to those questions were not found in the book of Jewish answers, and I got my first moment, as a teacher, in which I had to just be, and dig deep to find my answer.
And my first lesson about never underestimate the depth of thought of a child – given the opportunity, children show you human greatness. Glenda’s question remains with me, Julia’s too.
Do we make a difference, they are asking? Do each of us have an essential part, or are we just pieces that can be replaced? When we die, what happens?
Reb Simcha Bunem of Prisuzha said that we have to walk around with two pieces of paper, one written “I am but dust and ashes” and the other saying “the whole world was created just for me”.
So what are we? Nothing? Or the center of the universe? Reb Simcha Bunem says – both. Living a meaningful Jewish life means toggling between those two extremes, finding balance.
One example of that is a letter in the Torah. If a Torah scroll is missing one letter, or one letter is badly written, or if the letter is in the wrong place – the entire scroll is considered pasul, invalid, you can’t read from it. You got to get it fixed. “But it is just one letter!” I can hear some of you think – what’s the big deal?
So yes, it is just a letter. And yes, it is a big deal. Let me tell you why.
Language is quite an amazing thing, because the alphabet is quite finite. The Hebrew alphabet has only 22 letters. Compare that with the English alphabet that has 26. And yet, with that finite number of sounds, the possibilities are endless.
It is a letter. And it is just one letter. How can a letter be so important?
Because one letter carries with it all the meaning – change one letter in a word and you have a whole different understanding of that sentence.
Now, when our tradition wonders how many Jews were there to receive Torah, the connection the sages make between the many population countings of the book of Numbers is clear: as many Jews as there are letters in the Torah.
So here is a secret: you, too, are one letter. You can make all the difference – in someone else’s scroll, in their story.
And you do make all the difference in our people’s scroll, our people’s story. And you are your own Torah, you came here to teach us. Rabbinic Judaism, what we call Judaism today, takes letters incredibly seriously. And vowels, the little dots and traces around the letters. There are many explanations of words and letters and vowels that never fail to amaze and enchant.
One of them, for instance, is the word EMET, which means truth, in Hebrew. Here it is [SHOW POSTER]
It begins with the alef, which is the first letter of the alphabet. It ends in tav, the last letter. Its middle letter is mem – the letter that is exactly in the middle, the 13th letter. The rabbis then say – truth has a beginning, an end and a middle, in the right order. Not only that, but if you look at the format of those letters they all have two points on the line, standing firmly, like a person who knows they are telling the truth and not moving. Compare that with the word for lie, SHEKER. The order of the alphabet here is all jumbled: kuf, resh, shin is the alphabetical order, and here we have the end in the beginning, the beginning in the middle and the middle in the end. Confused? Well, lies are confusing. Also, the word is made up of the ending of the alphabet – a lie is something thought only at the last minute.
Besides that, say the rabbis, look at the letters themselves: all have only one point of standing, just as lies do not stand up to scrutiny.
Why are the rabbis playing with the order and form of letters, you may ask? Because everything is Torah, they believe.
Humans come to this earth to learn and to teach, sometimes for a quick spell, sometimes for upwards of one hundred years.
How much meaning are we going to eek out from our stay here is up to us. What will we do with our own letter, it is up to us. What will be our story, who will cry when we die, what will they say when we are gone – that is all up to us.
Sidney Poitier, the famous actor, told an interviewer of his story in 2013. He was born in 1927, in Miami, three months premature, to parents who were poor and who already had six children.
Of course his childhood was a difficult one, with hardships we can barely imagine. He wore flour sacks, lived in a series of impoverished towns in Florida and the Caribbean, and attended school for only two years. At the age of 12 he left school to work, at age 14 his friends were kids that got into trouble and made trouble. His parents decided to send him to Miami, where one of his married brothers lived, in the hopes that the distance would shape him up. And he makes his mind up that he wants to be an actor, at age 16 he finds himself in New York auditioning for the American Negro Theater in Harlem. Ah, but they hand him a script. And he can’t read at all. The two years in school prepared him for nothing. He was making his living as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Sidney Poitier said in that interview, “there was one of the waiters, a Jewish guy, elderly man, and he looked over at me, and he was looking at me for quite a while. I had a newspaper, it was called Journal American.
And he walked over to me, and he said, ‘What’s new in the paper?’ And I looked up at this man. I said to him, ‘I can’t tell you what’s in the paper, because I can’t read very well.’ He said, ‘Let me ask you something, would you like me to read with you?’ I said to him, ‘Yes, if you like.’” And so they studied late at night in the restaurant, long after closing time.
The elderly Jewish waiter – Poitier described him as patient and bespectacled – slowly and deliberately taught Poitier the meanings of punctuation marks and how to sound out words, week after week after week. They used newspapers to sound out words. During the day, Poitier listened to the radio to expand his vocabulary and diction; at night he read with the Jewish waiter. Eventually, after about six months, Poitier was finally a fluent reader, his Caribbean accent less pronounced. The rest, as they say, is history.
Once he was a recognized actor, Sidney Poitier tried to find the waiter who’d helped him so much during his teenage years. To his lasting regret, he never found him.
But this unnamed waiter was a fundamental letter in Sidney Poitier’s story. Would Sidney Poitier become the great actor he was without the waiter? We will never know. Did the waiter know what he was doing, who he was enabling to live a life of greatness? I’m sure he didn’t, I’m sure he just saw a kid struggling with something basic, he saw someone in need and decided – because it is always a decision – to help in a place he could help. But we know who Sidney Poitier became because of the waiter.
This past year has been a difficult and hard year, beginning on October 7th and to this very moment.
To cope with all the loss I engaged in a project that an Israeli teacher of mine, Rav Avi Novis Deutsch, began. He studies one or two pieces of Jewish text in the memory of someone who was killed on October 7th and in the war that continues. He and others write about the life of that person in Hebrew. I translate it into English, together we study the texts. It is all on Facebook.
It is a great and humbling experience. Humbling because the victims are from all walks of life, from ultraOrthodox to completely secular, there are Jews, Druze, Bedouin, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, young, middle aged, old. Most times, you can see how much a difference someone did with their lives, even if they lived few years.
Some of the people who I wrote about did wonderous things before being killed.
One donated bone marrow, one wrote poetry, one had benches set up in beautiful spots, one helped kids with cancer, one helped people to get over their fear of water and learn how to surf, many helped animals, some used animals to help others with their traumas. Sometimes you just get a glimpse of what could be, as they were still children when they were killed: a Bedouin boy wanted to be a doctor, a Jewish girl was set to become a pastry chef, another boy was an avid camping enthusiast at the age of five.
And sometimes you don’t see it, particularly in the case of Chinese migrant workers that were killed and there is little or no information besides the age, the gender, the name and where they worked. But of course, we all know: they were all children of someone, someone’s spouse, parent, sibling. In those stories, they were a fundamental letter.
You have all received a Hebrew letter this morning. It is tiny. Maybe you know which letter it is, maybe you know the sound, maybe you can rattle words that have this letter, maybe you are a fluent Hebrew speaker. And maybe you don’t, and maybe you aren’t. Embrace the mystery. You received a letter. It is your letter, a reminder that you, too, have your own scroll, your own story, and that you play a part in other people’s story.
It is just a letter, just dust and ashes – but the story cannot be told without you, you are the center of your story – but other people’s story cannot be told without your story. The story of this community cannot be told without your story, without your letter, without your engagement and without your presence enriching and animating this story.
As Reb Nachman of Bratslav used to say – the day you were born is the day God realized that God’s dream could not continuing without you in it. You are a fundamental part of this, and your letter, your existence, is a fundamental part too.
And I know – you receive so many messages that say the opposite. So many ads telling you that your value lies outside of you, in the things you own. So many ads telling you that your value lies on how you look, or how the people around you look. But Judaism does not hold by that at all.
All of us, regardless of mental ability, finances, looks, physical and emotional challenges, all of us and each of us are a facet of the Life with capital L that animates this universe. And all of us has a Torah to learn and teach, all of us are a letter in the scroll of the Life of the Universes.
Now, that does not mean things are supposed to be easy. Or even easily understood. We don’t come here to write the perfect story – because we are not perfect. We are here to write a story of striving towards perfection, towards becoming better, towards growth and development. Towards kindness and reflection. The fact that we go back and forth, the fact that we have periods in which we feel we are making spiritual progress, and we have periods in which we feel we are stuck, and we have periods we even feel we’re falling to where we began – all this is a feature, and not a bug, in this human existence of ours.
We write our own stories, we help write other people’s stories. We are here as ourselves, as souls searching for meaning and growth. Just as we prepare ourselves before a difficult conversation, before exercising, before staging a play, before planting a tree or a garden – just as we prepare ourselves for any of that, we should prepare ourselves for growth and all that growth implies. That’s why we are here today – to remind ourselves of our own importance and of our non-importance, to remember to take the long view in things, and not to be discouraged if the story changes. We are here to be the best letter we can – with all its greatness, with all its importance, but still, just one letter.
Take your place in that. Take your letter. Embrace the mystery of why this letter got to your hands and not a different one. I am completely sure that you will find a message that will make sense to you. There are many books out there about the secrets and the power of the Hebrew letters. And as the sage Hillel told the person who wanted to become Jewish – the rest is commentary, go and study.
Grow into your letter. Become the best Jew you can. Write the best story you can. Help others with their stories. The goodness, the kindness, the raising others to their own greatness – all this will transform this world. May we make this a better year than last year.
This year we do not say LeShanah Tovah tikatevu, no, we don’t say may you will be written for a good year. This year we say LeShanah Yoter Tovah tikatevu – may we be inscribed for a better year.
Le Shanah Yoter Tovah tikatevu.