These are the words I shared with B'nai El Congregation on Erev Rosh HaShanah 5770. Please feel free to e-mail me with comments and feedback.

As we proceed through the autumn months, it is inevitable that we will begin to see lists and shows that attempt to recap the best and worst of this decade on the secular calendar, a decade without a name (the 2000’s? the zero’s?). These lists and recaps will be in every area of life – politics, sports, pop-culture, music, television and even in our religious life. It is natural that the end of a cycle brings about the need to remember that cycle and reminisce about it, whether it was good or bad.

The same is true as we approach the new year of 5770. While I am not about to do a full decade recap of the 60’s, it is natural as we look for ways to move positively into the New Year, that we reflect on the year that was.

There is no doubt that this past year was a difficult year. It was barely after the holidays last year that we watched the stock market begin its six month decline as a variety of business transactions turned sour. More personally, many of you have seen your retirement funds dwindle, or worse, you may be out of work, either unemployed or under employed. Even for those of you in good jobs, there is fear about how long it might last and whether you might be able to find another should you suddenly find yourself out of work.

With financial concerns and unemployment concerns come worries about how to provide yourself and your family with the necessities of life, not just food and shelter, but the modern day necessities of transportation, communication and access to health care. For many, these concerns may take you away from your Jewish community; you may feel scared or ashamed that you cannot support it in the same way you could in the past.

But know that not only are such fears or any attempts to withdraw regarding your Jewish Community unnecessary, but are counter-productive. When times are difficult it is exactly then that you need a source of community that the congregation can provide for you. If you find yourself in a difficult position financially, this community will still be there for you, this community is still your family. If you are fortunate enough to be in a better situation I hope you will hear these words as well, and consider how you might be able to make this a more welcoming and caring community for those who may not be able to give the same type of financial commitments that they once were able to give.

But beyond a sense of community and of family a congregation, be it this one or another, provides for you a place for healing. This is achieved in part through the support of friends and family as we come together for these holy days. More so, however, it is important to remember that as a community we are not simply a social club or a networking organization, but we are a religious community that as a group and as individuals within that group can turn to God – however you may understand God – as a source of support and strength at times of difficulty.

Especially at this time of the year, when our tradition tells us that God is particularly in tune with our cries and our prayers, we can turn to the prayers that we say and the songs that we sing to find that support and strength. The prayers of these days do have specific goals, turning our hearts toward repentance, self sacrifice and piety. But within those meta-goals of our prayers in general, the unique prayers of the High Holy Days speak to us about how we can find strength in faith and strength in community – no matter how weak we may feel.

Last year at this time (actually on Rosh HaShanah morning), I focused on the prayer Unetaneh Tokef – the prayer that tells us that God determines the fate of every person during the High Holy Days (also known as “who shall live and who shall die”). Ultimately, the conclusion I shared with you is that while this prayer for the most part speaks of things over which we have no control, i.e. when our days on this earth will come to an end, in its concluding words it tells us that we do have control over how our days are lived and that through inward searching – repentance, reaching out to God and to our community – prayer, and reaching beyond ourselves to those less fortunate – tzedekah, we can control how we live the days that we are given.

This idea is an important idea for these days, but in a time such as this, when so many of us feel a lack of control in our lives, it alone is not sufficient for us to find that inner strength and faith that will carry us through difficult days. Fortunately, Unetaneh Tokef is only one of many prayers unique to the High Holy Days, and by exploring some of those unique prayers we can find in our liturgy a reassurance that God is present for us and a reassurance that our faith on these days is not misplaced.

This evening, as I continue, we will look at a couple of these prayers along with the music of the day and see how they can provide us with a message of faith and hope at this time. On Yom Kippur Evening we will look at those prayers that are unique to Yom Kippur in particular, further understanding the power of that day and the liturgy that we recite.

The first prayer that we will explore is perhaps the most well known piece of High Holyday Liturgy: the Avinu Malkeinu. Feel free to look at page 40 to reference the prayer as I speak.

Avinu Malkeinu translates very directly to: “Our Father, Our King”. For reasons I won’t go into right now, it is one of the rare places in our Reform liturgy where we still refer to God through masculine metaphors in translation (although some of you with newer versions of Gates of Repentance may be able to find an alternate version in the very back of your book).

What is important is not the terms used for the metaphors, but rather the tone of the metaphors. Our father evokes a metaphor of loving care, that God is to us as a parent, near to us, concerned with only us, and dedicated to us. This father could never hurt us or betray us in any way. The other metaphor is God as King – a ruler. God is concerned with our entire people, trying to guide us in seeking out and obeying God’s will, and willing to punish those who do not obey.

Either metaphor alone is insufficient to describe God. What they describe together is the tension that has always existed in Jewish theology between a transcendent God, who is above all and is unconcerned with our individual actions, and an immanent God who cares deeply for us and relates to us when we open ourselves up to that relationship.

Avinu Malkeinu, then, is a reminder that both sides of God exist. On one level we are answerable to a distant ruler who will call us to account, but on the other side, that very same distant ruler is as close to us as a parent, loving us and caring for us. Being a support for us in times of trouble when the error of our ways has brought the trouble upon us, but all the more so is our source of comfort and caring when our times of trouble are brought on through forces we could not control.

It is the last line of Avinu Malkeinu that brings this all together. Originally it was the only line of the blessing, composed by one of our great sages of antiquity, Rabbi Akiva. This one line, attracted more and more lines, and in the traditional prayer book it is a rather lengthy prayer. In the Reform Movement, our prayer book editors have removed many of the lines, in particular some of those that do not stand the test of modern rational scrutiny. In either case the last line is still Akiva’s original (my translation is more literal than the one in your book):

Our Father our King, be gracious to us and answer us, for we have no good deeds, create within us Tzedekah and kindness and be our help.

Ultimately the message of Avinu Malkeinu is one of partnership with God. It is asking God for grace even if we do not deserve it, a quality that God shows to the undeserving on multiple occasions in the Bible. But beyond asking God to accept us despite our lack of good deeds (and ultimately it is a false humility, because even the worst among us have some good deeds), we ask God to partner with us in moving us to more good deeds: Tzedekah and acts of kindness being the two major categories of good deeds.

Therefore this prayer says to us, that all of the things we are asking God to do for us, end sickness, war, famine, oppression, to inscribe us in the book of life, have compassion on our children, and strengthen the people Israel, are all within our own power to do when we partner with God, and God is there for us as our partner and support in these tasks.

The other prayer, or really group of prayers, I will look at tonight is perhaps the most popular part of the Rosh HaShanah service that will take place tomorrow morning: The blowing of the Shofar. You can see the entirety of this ritual as we will conduct it from pages 138-151.

I do not have time to explore the whole of this liturgy; therefore I will look at the one piece that goes to the core of the purpose behind blowing the Shofar. This is the paragraph on page 139 that begins, “Awake you sleepers, from your sleep. Rouse yourselves you slumberers, out of your slumber”

The sounding of the Shofar, as described by this piece of liturgy is a non-verbal way of God calling to us. It tells us that God does not want us to live our lives in a stupor; God does want us to be aware of all our deeds, good and bad alike, so that we can learn how to partner with God. We need this day to remind us that there is more to our lives than the daily grind, that even if our ways do not qualify as evil (few of our ways really do), that we have it in our power to make our days something more significant than simply drifting through them.

It is a reminder to us that no matter what way we pursue our living, and even if we are temporarily unable to do so, ultimately the important part in our lives is to find meaning in whatever we do. When this paragraph tells us that we are wasting our years in vain pursuits, it is not the pursuits themselves that are necessarily vain. What is in vain is when our pursuits become the whole of our life; when, in modern parlance, we live to work instead of working to live.

As we hear the sound of the Shofar tomorrow morning it is completely non verbal. Even the calls that I make have no more significance than an orchestra conductor calling for a concert “A”. We listen to the Shofar then, not to gain some profound wisdom from words, but rather to wake our souls to the beauty and majesty of life that God has provided for us, no matter how challenging may be the situation in which we find ourselves.

At the end of the High Holy Days each year, I work with several different committees, in particular the Ritual committee and the Rabbinic committee, as we discuss how the holidays transpired and how we can strive to make them even better for the next year. The most common question that the members of these committees bring to me, often on behalf of a variety of members, is the question of why we don’t sing as many of the familiar melodies on the high holidays.

It is natural that the high holydays brings some unique music. The prayers that I spoke about earlier, Avinu Malkeinu and the Shofar Service do not appear during the rest of the year, so they naturally have melodies that we only hear on the High Holy Days. The same, of course, can be said for the prayers I will speak about on Yom Kippur, Kol Nidre, the Vidui confessional and a multitude of additional prayers.

However, on these days we say prayers that are familiar to those who come even occasionally on Shabbat as well: the Reader’s Kaddish, the Barchu and Shema, and the Amidah are examples of this. Why is it that for these prayers we often are singing a different version than we are used to? Or to put the question the way I usually hear it, “where are our familiar melodies?”

The reason that some of these melodies are different can be summed up in one word: Nusach. Nusach is a Hebrew term that refers both to the order in which prayers are said along with which prayers are said – Askenazi vs. Sephardi Nusach, or in modern times Reform vs. Conservative Nusach, but also the melody to which the prayers are said at different times.

As Reform Jews, we mostly come together on Shabbat and therefore we are most familiar with the Shabbat nusach. The opening strains of the Amidah (Dan sings to imoteinu), the Reader’s Kaddish (Dan sings to Sh’mei Rabbah) and the Bar’chu we most commonly sing on Shabbat (Dan sings a few La la’s from Nelson Bar’chu) serve for us as our Shabbat Nusach. But there are other nusachot. The weekdays has a more rushed feel to it (I sing weekday Reader’s Kaddish to Sh’mei Rabba) to indicate that on weekdays we need to move on to our daily tasks, whereas on Shabbat we have time to linger over our prayer. The festivals of Sukkot, Passover and Shavout also have their own nusach – it has a feel that is in line with the joy of those days.

So too do the High Holy Days have a Nusach all its own, although on some prayers, such as the beginning of the Amidah we use Shabbat Nusach so that more people will join in. The feel of the nusach is one of grandeur or majesty, in line with the tone of our prayers on this day. The Mi Chamocha is a great example of this nusach (Dan sings to Ba’elim Adonai), as is the Bar’chu (Dan sings first line). The best example, however is the Aleinu Gadol. This Aleinu is the same words as the Alienu we will sing to our familiar melody in a few minutes. But 2 times during the holidays, immediately after the piece of liturgy I highlighted in the Shofar service and near the beginning of the Yom Kippur Afternoon Service, we sing it to a different melody (Dan sing through La’adon ha kol). This melody alerts us that what comes next is of the highest importance – the sounding of the Shofar on Rosh HaShana and the recalling of our sacred history on Yom Kippur.

The need for separate nusach comes out of the idea that it is important to mark special days as special. So even when we say the same prayers, by using different music we remind ourselves of the specialness of the day. So if you miss the familiar Shabbat melodies, well, to be blunt about it, we have 50 or so of those between Yom Kippur and next Rosh HaShanah for you to come and enjoy those melodies. On these two days, Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, we have the opportunity to enjoy some music that is unique, beautifully written, and quite frankly sung as beautifully here if not more beautifully than it is just about anywhere. Therefore, if you do not know the melodies that Dan, Bob and the choir are presenting, I invite you to simply enjoy and let the spirit of the day that they provide infuse into your soul, as it so often does for me.

The Music and liturgy of the High Holy Days send us a message: These days are special. Even as the challenges of life in general and our times in particular weigh heavy on our hearts and our souls, the liturgy and music reassure us. It tells us that we are not alone, we are a part of a community, and that community is covenanted to God. While our prayer will not find a job for the unemployed, or relieve the stress of those facing challenges staying in their homes or providing healthcare for their families, our prayer can give us strength in its message: God is with us, God loves us, and God does hear our prayer. Within ourselves we know that we are capable of great things, within this community we are never alone and within our faith we can face any challenge with the strength in our hearts and in our souls.