Rabbi Fred Morgan AM 2025 YK sermon

Rabbi Fred Morgan AM

Temple Beth Israel

T’shuvah: Coming Home

Welcome to our Kol Nidre service.  This the first of five services over Yom Kippur, the other four take place tomorrow: Shacharit, Mussaf, Mincha and Ne’ilah.  Between Mincha and Ne’ilah there will be special Yizkor prayers.  But though these are separate services they’re not really seen as such.  Yom Kippur is understood by our tradition to be a single, long day of prayer.  The real impact of the day of Yom Kippur comes from staying through from beginning to end.  To be here through the day gives a remarkable feeling of spiritual fulfilment, refreshment and renewal, like having run a spiritual marathon.  I can tell you about it but I can’t capture the feeling for you.  You have to experience it to know it.  But you can ask anyone who’s done it, and they’ll tell you it’s worth the effort.  Like going to the gym, it doesn’t work unless we put in the effort!

The essence of Yom Kippur is t’shuvah – our machzor is called Mishkan T’shuvah, the Sanctuary of T’shuvah.  Linda explained beautifully to us on the evening of Rosh Hashana that t’shuvah is often translated as repentance, but a much better translation is “returning”.  Returning can refer to many things: restoring things to the way they were, going back to the source, restarting; but it can also connote “home-coming” – coming home again.  That’s the meaning that speaks to me.  Judaism is my home, it’s where I feel I can be myself, who I really am and who I’m meant to be.  Every year I journey into the world and become lots of things that are not authentic to my innermost being.  I go shopping, engage in social activities and enjoy concerts and films.  I go travelling and take walks along Gardiners Creek.  But these are not the focus of my being.  They are not the things that provide my life with meaning and purpose.  Yom Kippur gives me a chance to find once again my inner core; to commit myself to my heritage, to return to the place and to the community in which I belong, and where I can put my feet up and feel at home.  That – and not the fast, or the superb music, or the catchy story of Jonah, or the fashionable white robe I get to wear – is what makes Yom Kippur special to me.

I know in myself what it means to depart home, and to come home again.  I went into exile from Judaism my first year in university, and I came home exactly 13 years later.  That was almost like a spiritual bar-mitzvah, and it was much more meaningful than my original bar-mitzvah!

The year I was to enter university, my father passed away from a coronary.  If the coronary happened today he’d probably survive it, but medical care was different in the mid-1960s.  My father died in June, and I started university in September.  I was attending Columbia University in New York City and so I was far away from my hometown for Yom Kippur.  New York being a very Jewish city, the university chaplain, Rabbi Albert Friedlander (who many years later performed my rabbinic ordination), had no trouble setting the non-local Jewish students up as guests at various congregations for the fast day.  Off I went to my host congregation, which was in Washington Square in Manhattan.  From the moment I approached the ushers at the door I felt uncomfortable.  Not only was this the first time I’d ever been away from my home community for Yontif, not only had my father died just a few months before, but I didn’t know a single soul in this new place.  So I turned around and walked back into Washington Square.

And that’s where I spent that entire Yom Kippur day, sitting on a bench in the Square and watching the world go by.

It was only decades later that I discovered a poem by Yehuda Amichai that describes a similar experience about Yom Kippur, but with a much deeper resonance.  Whenever I recall my teenage experience, as I am now, I think of the Amichai poem.  It reads like this:

On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I put on
my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City of
Jerusalem.
For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop,
not far from the Damascus Gate, a shop with
buttons and zippers and spools of thread
in every color and snaps and buckles.
A rare light and many colors, like an open Ark.

I told him in my heart that my father too
had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.
I explained to him in my heart about all the decades
and the causes and the events, why I am now here
and my father’s shop was burned there and he is buried here.

When I finished, it was time for the Closing of the Gates.
He too lowered the shutters and locked the gate
and I returned, with all the worshippers, home.

Like Amichai, I guess I was looking for the proper object of my devotion.

At the end of the day, I went back to my dorm on the Columbia campus.  I didn’t set a foot into a synagogue again for the next 13 years.  That was my exile from Judaism.  I never denied being Jewish and I suspect that being Jewish played a pretty big part in some of the decisions I made over the intervening years.  But I didn’t in any way live as a Jew.  I made no Jewish choices.

It was on Yom Kippur that I left Judaism, and it was on Yom Kippur that I made t’shuvah – I returned home.  In 1978 I met Sue in Bristol, England, where I was working as an academic.  Sue had lost her father earlier that year and she had an urge to attend services on Yom Kippur at the local Liberal (Progressive) synagogue so she could pay respects to her dad.  The shul was quite small, much smaller than LBC.  It was located in a converted fish and chips shop, and if you used your olfactory imagination you could still smell the oil in the room where we met.  Sue’s family, who were a very secular bunch, had formed the habit of joining the Bristol Liberal community for the High Holy Days and Pesach seder, and Sue knew that there was a Yizkor ceremony during Yom Kippur.    The service was led by a rabbinic student from the Leo Baeck College in London.  He was doing alright but I felt pretty disconnected, until we came to the Sh’ma.  Suddenly, it all came flooding back to me.  I was reciting the words, stunned that they had remained dormant in my subconscious mind.  It was at that instant that I realised how much my Jewishness meant to me, that it was an expression – the most authentic expression – of my innermost self.  I felt like I’d come home.

It was an extraordinary feeling.  It was as though I’d been insistently, stubbornly denying a core part of my identity for many years, that I’d been frightened of acknowledging it, and now I was free to accept myself as I really was.  That Yom Kippur started me on a new journey, a journey of rediscovery.  It took a while to gradually re-enter Jewish life.  The journey started slowly.  We began to observe Shabbat, then attend Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat at the Liberal synagogue.  There were often just a couple of people present apart from ourselves, so we began to lead parts of the service.  We took a big leap into Torah study and I began to learn Biblical Hebrew grammar with a University colleague, a Baptist minister.  Eventually I decided that I wanted to learn much more about Judaism, and I figured the way to do that would be to become a rabbi.  Out of the blue I applied to the Leo Baeck College.  They took a chance on me and the rest, as they say, is history.

Some years later I learned about the great 20th century Jewish scholar Franz Rosenzweig.  Rosenzweig wrote a book called The Star of Redemption which shattered previous paradigms for understanding Jewish tradition by laying out an existential approach to Judaism.  This approach set Judaism on a new path, a path that we’re still walking today.  Rosenzweig was, in his way, the first non-denominational Jew.  An example will clarify what I mean.

The story is told that Rosenzweig was asked by someone, a fellow Jew, whether he laid tefillin.  His answer was, Not yet.  In other words, for Rosenzweig, everything in Jewish tradition was an option, a possibility, but to be meaningful it had to be taken on in an honest way, as a deliberate choice.  For him, laying tefillin wasn’t yet meaningful; but if he found meaning in it, it would become part of his personal practice and his expression of Judaism. This “not yet” approach is precisely the path that had led me back to Judaism.  It is the essence of my t’shuvah, my returning.  Today all Jews are “Jews by choice”; since everything is possible, we are all “not-yet” Jews.

Rosenzweig himself had gone through a period, before the First World War, when he questioned whether he would remain Jewish or convert to Christianity.  He had a Christian cousin, also a fine scholar, who was trying hard to persuade him to convert.  Rosenzweig was about to make the leap into Christianity but, the day before his baptism, he decided to attend synagogue for one last time.  It was Yom Kippur.  When the prayers reached the Sh’ma, Rosenzweig had an epiphany; he realised that, in his innermost being, he was Jewish, and Jewish he would always remain.  The God of the Sh’ma was his God, and the Jewish people were his people.  As Yom Kippur was for me, so it was for Rosenzweig: his moment of t’shuvah, of home-coming.  He left the synagogue that evening committed to putting Judaism at the centre of his life.  It was some years after this experience that he completed writing his epoch-making book, The Star of Redemption, which, as I said, has had a profound impact on the Jewish world in which we live, though few of us are aware of its contents.  He wrote most of the book on aerograms in the trenches during the War and sent them home to his mother, who compiled it for him.

This day, then, is a day of t’shuvah.  None of us knows in advance what the day will mean for us.  It could change our lives.  It could be the moment when we realise who we truly are, when we decide to choose a new direction in life, follow a different path; when we return home, when we make t’shuvah.  That’s why I encourage you to experience the day, all of it. Who can say?  Maybe this is the “not-yet” moment you’ve been yearning for, searching for, praying for.

G’mar chatima tova.