This website may not work correctly in Internet Explorer. We recommend switching to a more secure modern web browser such as Microsoft Edge which is already installed on your computer.

View this website in Edge.

Rabbi Jeffrey B Kamins OAM 2025 RH sermon

Rabbi Jeffrey B Kamins OAM

Emanuel Synagogue

Cries and calls: Rosh Hashanah 5785
This is the season of crying; this is a time of tears.  The Torah refers to this day as Yom Teruah, the day of sounding – the sounding of the shofar – whose calls of tekiah, teruah and shevarim the ancient sages have likened to the different sounds of sobbing, weeping and wailing.  Each of us has entered this sanctuary to weep, to wail, to shed our tears, to find solace from our pain, for all our different reasons, for all so many reasons.

We have sobbed and wept and wailed so much this last year.  We have come through one of the most difficult, challenging and painful years for our people – and for many of us in our lifetimes.  Only those elders amongst us who went through World War II or survived the Shoah have lived through worse, and thus feel the tragedy of these times even more deeply.

5784 was only days old. At the height of Z’man Simchateinu, the season of our joy, we as a nation experienced the slaughter of the innocents and the taking of hostages.  Those few hostages who remain alive today languish in tunnels of unimaginable terror. The war wages and expands. And those events of October 7th immediately unleashed the genie of antisemitism from its bottle.  And sadly, despite our machzor’s teaching that “true peace comes through the expression of many perspectives, each offering a partial view of the truth”, conflicting opinions amongst us have led to long term friendships disintegrating, families no longer sitting together at the Shabbat table, or even bringing in this New Year together.  This must change.

We have so much pain this last year amongst us, between us.  As enormous as is our pain, we cannot, we must not, be indifferent to the pain others have also felt. It was just one week after October 7th that this country rejected the Voice, a deep wound for the First Nations of this land, 75% of whom had voted Yes in the referendum.  Over this last year, tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed in Gaza, in the Ukraine, in Sudan.  Nations, communities, individuals experience grief and loss, shed tears and feel sorrow.  Loved ones have died, relationships have broken down, loneliness affects far too many. We despair for the world in which we live, we sense our world is crumbling.  We fear for the future of our children, our grandchildren, the generations to come.  I cry, you cry, we cry – the shofar cries.

But the shofar is more than a cry, it is a call. It is a call to change, for that is what these ten days of repentance are all about.  This is Judgment Day, and as we hear in U’nataneh Tokef, none of us is innocent.  All of us have work to do to heal ourselves, each other, our world. Today, here in this sanctuary, the exquisite music amplifies the shofar’s call to change, while the wisdom of the ancients with teachings of Torah, emotional insights from our psalms and the evocative poetry of our prayers guides us through our collective trauma.

The Shofar service consists of three sections of teachings, psalms and prayers, each a call for us to amend our ways. First, Malkhuyot, or God’s sovereignty, calls us to humility. Enthroning “God as King” is meant to teach us that there is a life force, a power beyond us, in which none shall wield power over another, but all shall be empowered.  Each of us is a divine creature, with our unique thoughts, feelings and experiences, deserving dignity and deserving to be heard.  Just as we yearn to be heard and held, so too do our fellow creatures, the members of our families, our friends, this community, our people, all people.

The second section of the Shofar service is called Zikhronot, similar to the name given this day, Yom HaZikaron, the day of remembering.  This section calls us to keep perspective. Our ancestors have passed along this road of tears and travail before us.  It has been hard, and we have survived to carry on our mission in life. These days, we remember the cries of Hagar seeing Ishmael dying of thirst in the wilderness; of Rachel weeping for the exiled children of Israel; of King David, crying tears of personal agony as his enemies surround him and his family falls apart; and of the anonymous psalmist whose voice captures ours: “Out of the depths I call to you, O God; O God, listen to my cry, let your ears be attentive to my plea for mercy.” (Psalm 130:1) One cry does not have privilege over another.  Our collective tears empower our transformation.

The third and final section of the Shofar service, known simply as “shofarot”, triumphantly calls us to keep the faith, to hold the vision of redemption, of ultimate human freedom, dignity and peace. We are on the long journey of a faith people. It’s thousands of years since our ancestors heard that first shofar at Sinai and committed through Torah and mitzvot to acknowledge the unity of all diverse creation in the one Creator.  Over thousands of years on that journey there have been periods in which our people have suffered badly, there has been much weeping, wailing and sobbing.

Yet our ancestors never stopped dreaming of hearing that ultimate “tekiyah g’dolah”.  They never stopped dreaming of the shofar that will herald that messianic time when swords shall be beaten into ploughshares.  Neither can we stop dreaming.  That is what faith is all about, living “as if”. As if we can create the world of which we dream.  We all deserve better.

The shofar’s three calls to humility, perspective and faith come together in the one powerful prayer of U’nataneh Tokef.  It establishes the essential aspect of this Judgment Day:  that teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakah will transform the harshness of our destiny.  Year in and year out we come back to these core themes of these Aseret Yamei Teshuva, these ten days of repentance, themes more important than ever in this year when the wounds we have suffered, the scar tissue we have developed, impede our ability to access our empathy. Humility, perspective and faith enable us, as it says in our liturgy, “to circumcise our hearts”, to access our deepest self.  Our tears can cleanse us and this world.

But not just our tears alone. We have hard work in front of us if we truly want to turn our world around.  We have to turn ourselves around first. Teshuvah is that demanding, exacting process of turning. How can we expect God to hear our pleas, our cries, our sobs if we cannot hear the cries of the other? How can we ask God for mercy and compassion if we do not have the ability to demonstrate that toward others. It is all about hearing the cry, the grief, the wounds of the other.
Tefillah is hard work too – it’s not just about praying toward God, it’s about internalising the words we recite with self-judgment and self-criticism.  It means remembering all the things we have said that we should not have, and all the things we did not say we should have.  It means remembering all the things we did we should not have done and all the things we should have done we failed to do.  Tefillah, our prayer this day, compels us toward self-realisation.

Tzedakah is the call to action. For thousands of years, we have cried out, “Avinu Malkeinu”, our parent, our sovereign, answer us with grace, for our deeds are insufficient; save us through acts of justice and love.  A wise person once said, pray as if everything depended upon God, but act as if everything depended upon you. Our liturgy, our music, our shofar, is ultimately a call to our action.

In this 21st century, with so much pressing in on each of us, on all of us, we cannot simply rely on God’s grace, await God’s redemption.  This day calls us to take personal responsibility and act as the creatures of God we are, we who share this sacred life, on this sacred planet, in this sacred sanctuary, in this sacred time.  With our deeds so far so insufficient and the time so urgent, there is no time left for us to rely on the merit of ancestors who lived thousands of years ago; the time has come for us to provide the merit for those who will follow us.

We do so with our acts of justice and love. We have come to this sanctuary to weep, to be heard, to be held and to be healed; may the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts enable us to go from here into the New Year ready to hear, hold and heal the other as well.

Find more Parashat Hashavua