A mother goes into her son’s room one Saturday morning and sees that he is still in bed with the covers pulled over his head. “Allen, you’ve got to get up. It’s Saturday and you’re late for shul.” “Ahh Mom I don’t want to go to the synagogue, I don’t like it there.”

“Mom, I hate going there. They all talk about me behind my back and they aren’t nice to me there.”

“Well,” said his mother, “first of all, you are 46. And secondly, YOU’RE THE RABBI.”

Of course I had no trouble getting up this morning to come to services. Because every Rosh Hashana I ask the most difficult questions I can about the meaning of my life.

I have especially been asking myself those questions this year. Because this has been a milestone year for me as a rabbi – I was elected President of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California – a board which includes 250 rabbis from every denomination of Jewish life, including Orthodox. And in the Spring I was given Doctor of Divinity degrees from both the Hebrew Union College and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in honor of celebrating my 25th year as a rabbi.

So here are seven of the lessons I have learned (other than “what you say matters, what you do matters, and who you are matters), that I think might be relevant to your lives as well.

The greatest teachers in life are the women, and men, and children who struggle to find meaning each day in the pains, and joys, and sorrow of their lives. You who have shared your frustrations and fears with me as you faced the unfairness of love and loss, the quiet terror of illness, and the longing for some simple way to make sense of it all.

So second I learned that sometimes what matters most in life is just that – discovering that we are stronger in the broken places.

But sometimes we are stronger in the broken places. She and her finace have moved in with her parents while she undergoes radiation and chemotherapy. And when her parents realized that neither of them had been raised with any regular spiritual ritual in their home, they created one.

“Do you know,” Erika told me, “every single day we find one miracle after another!” And she means it.

And fourth, that we have an almost limitless capacity to transform our lives by transforming our attitudes about life.

It’s not supposed to be that way. This service is supposed to do it for us. “Zokhaynu lekhayim” we sing. It is the major theme of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy. It’s usually translated “Remember us for life,” but I believe it really means, “REMIND US HOW TO LIVE!”

And we seem to need that reminder more than ever. More mothers are killing their children, more children are killing their classmates, suicide bombings and plunging stock prices wiping out fortunes with no bottom in site.

I guess the fifth lesson that I have learned, is that in the end, the one who dies with the most toys, still dies. And no one looks back at the end of their life and says, “I wished I’d spent more time at the office making money.”

With bursts of gunfire in the background he calmly told the officer at the other end he was sure he was about to die. “Please tell my father I love him,” he said.

He wasn’t focused on a bank balance, or past achievements, or his failures. His focus was love.

But the seventh lesson is the most profound of them all. It is the power of ritual to transform lives. At birth, b’nai mitzvah, marriage, divorce, illness, miscarriage, life’s trials and tribulations, triumphs and successes, and even death. Ritual has the power to open our souls to experience the sacred in life.

It sounds simplistic, but it’s true. Celebrating SHABBAT – creating a sacred time to connect with the people and values that matter most has been the glue that held the Jewish people together for all these millennia.

So we are declaring this year: “THE YEAR OF CELEBRATING SHABBAT.” We are even introducing a new early Kabbalat Shabbat service from 6:15 to 7:00 PM one Friday night a month to allow you to come to services at KI and then go have Shabbat dinner together. With tapes, music, “how to” manuals, workshops, lectures, we will create every opportunity we can to make it easy for you to celebrate Shabbat both in your home and in the synagogue.

Watch it, use it, and take advantage of the weekly opportunity to bring spirituality, purpose, and meaning into your life through the simple, spiritual power of celebrating Shabbat.

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism once said that “Judaism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, it is “IF-IMISTIC.” It tells us what we can make of our lives, IF we are willing to act on our dreams.

If you want friendship, you must act like a friend. If you want life to have meaning, you must live it as if it does. And if you want to experience the sacredness of time, a family that shares deep moments of meaning together, a sense of belonging to a spiritual community that truly matters – then seize the opportunity that Jewish tradition gives us EACH AND EVERY WEEK. The opportunity called, SHABBAT.

Of course he loved his family more than anything and that was why he was working so hard in the first place.

“Dad, how much do you make per hour?” The father was a bit taken aback. “What kind of question is that?” he said.

“Well,” his father said, “I guess it’s more like $35 an hour.”

He put the jar on the table in front of his father with a small thud. “What’s this?” asked the father. “$35,” the son replied.

The truth is, your time with your family and those you love, is priceless. That’s the real gift of Shabbat. What truly makes Shabbat holy. It’s the gift of sacred time