While walking in Central Park one day, Morris Cohen approaches another man and says to him, “Sam Kaplan, just look at you. You’ve had a face lift, muscle-building injections and all new teeth put into your mouth. Your nose used to be crooked, but now it’s straight. Your hair used to be snow white, but now it’s jet black.

Cohen then smiles sheepishly, looks into the man’s eyes and says, “I can’t believe it, Sam, you even changed your name!”

Most of the time we are just too close to the things that are really important to us to be able to see them for what they are. It happens in relationships, it happens in our work, and it happens with the philosophies that guide our lives as well. They are just too close to us to appreciate.

Cahill reminds us that we introduced an entire set of new attitudes that revolutionized humanity’s perceptions of the universe and itself: the idea of a cosmos regulated by universal law; the concept of time as linear rather than cyclical; the belief in the equality of all people before divine and human law; the accompanying notion of democracy; and the logical conclusion of all this – the faith in human betterment, in humankind’s ability to change and improve the world rather than merely endure it.

THE IDEA OF ETHICAL MONOTHEISM – that the world is not a multi-verse, but a uni-verse; that above the fragmentation and diversity and differences that we perceive all around there is a common creative power that all of life is part of. That there are fundamental ethical and moral laws in the universe that all human beings are subject to – that’s why the oldest and most important statement of belief in all of Jewish life is the SHEMA.

Just imagine what life was like before Judaism. Except for the nobility, most people had no rights at all. Like animals, they were herded and moved about under the lash of the overseer. Like animals, they were breeding stock for the kings and nobles. Like animals, they worked from dawn til dusk, all day, every day.

And the consequences were equally momentous – now the faith of the individual mattered; now the hopes, thoughts, dreams of the individual mattered. For the first time in human history in fact, each individual human being mattered. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan once wrote that “The background of an individual who relives his people’s past and lives in anticipation of his people’s future is infinitely vaster and fuller of human experiences than that of the individual whose horizon is limited to the immediate.”

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

And miles to go before I sleep,

What is left for us to do is to fulfill the promises of Jewish civilization – our commitment to social justice; our passion for championing the rights of the poor and the orphan, the homeless and the hungry that grew naturally out of our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every human being.

That’s us. That’s why we are here today – to renew our promises to ourselves and our promises to our ancestors. That is the main purpose of our High Holydays every year.

Our real challenge is to not drift aimlessly, but to plan consciously the kind of Judaism that together we will evolve to meet the demands and changes of the next millennium.





















What all this means, is that for Judaism to thrive and this synagogue to truly provide a place where you can discover what gives meaning and purpose to life it must be a place that lives up to its name – Kehillat Israel – a place for discovering what community is really all about.

The other eight heard the boy cry. They slowed down and looked back. Then they all turned around and went back, every one of them. One girl with Downs Syndrome bent down, kissed him, and said : “This will make it better.”