1445270446 living%20the%20torah

Rabbi Joel Nickerson Yom Kippur 2015/5776

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The Torah of Our Lives Our entire life is a series of moments, some are painful, others are joyous, some have left us scarred, while others make us so full we wish we could relive them every day. Each and every time we take ownership over one of those moments, we gain power in our lives. Some people like to capture these moments on their phone and save thousands upon thousands of pictures on their computer. Others are more private and decide to hold on to those moments by writing them in a journal or a diary. As a people, we have our own collective series of moments that we’ve gathered in a collective diary, our people’s diary, the Torah. It takes us an entire year to read the Torah and maybe the only time you’ll hear a portion read this year is today. But it’s hard to own your story when you only look at one moment. Each instant builds on the next and to isolate them prevents us from a true appreciation of our history. We read this book, this diary, every year because it takes time to hold a true understanding of who we are as a people. So today, I want us to take the opportunity, as a community, to start owning our story, our Torah, and connect it to our lives, because when we do that, we can truly live a year and a life of meaning.

Accepting parts of our story isn’t always easy. Here are some great moments that some of you shared with me:

His nickname was Animal. That was me in high school.


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This is Amy Martinez and she told me that her way of conquering fear was through courage and laughter.


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Thank you, Steve Ambers, for sharing this picture with us and declaring this as your ‘inner Weird Al’.


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Here is a picture of Geri and Gary Rosenberg as Fred and Wilma Flinstone on Halloween in 1964. I’d like them to wear those outfits again this year for Purim.

There’s something that happens when see your own awkward picture. There’s a split second where you start to deny that it’s you. You have that brief discomfort, but then something amazing happens Then you own it. You say, “Yeah, that was me back then. Yeah, I wore that.” And there’s a power you gain when you start to accept who you were and what helped make you who you are now. That is the very instant that you begin to become the master of your story. Today I’m going to teach you the essence of our story, our people’s story. I’m going to teach our entire Torah in the next 15 minutes so that you’ll be able to walk out of here knowing all five books, a major theme from each of them, and recognize how owning our story as a people is going to help you come closer to wholeness in your own life.


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There are five books in the Torah and five letters in the word ‘torah’. Each letter represents not only a key theme of that book, but also a significant way that you can find meaning this year.


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The first book of the Torah is Genesis. And T stands for Truth. Genesis is about telling the truth and searching for your own truth. In the very beginning, Adam and Eve begin that search for truth. They yearn for it so desperately that they can’t help themselves from eating from the tree of knowledge, the tree that provides truth as its fruit. And with their decision to open their eyes to the world around them, they’re forced to leave the Garden and spend the rest of their lives figuring out, on their own, their purpose on this planet.

Later, we meet the master of deception, Jacob, who dresses up like his hairy brother, Esau, goes in front of his blind father, Isaac, and through lying and trickery, steals the birthright and blessing that was rightfully owed to his brother. And because of this, Jacob has to run away and spend the rest of his life trying to figure out who he truly is, always struggling with his external and internal identity, even leading to the point where is goes by two names – Jacob and Israel. This book, the book of Genesis, is about pinpointing the key moments in a person’s life – it’s about those moments of significant decision-making where you start to understand who you are and what you’re supposed to do with your time on this planet. Abraham makes the decision to believe in one god, to go against everything during a period in history when there was a different god for every aspect of life. The brit, the covenant, which Abraham literally cuts, with God, is a moment of truth – a moment where he declares his commitment to a new worldview; the moment when he enters into a partnership with God and gives birth to monotheism and an entire people.


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Genesis is about the search for truth. It’s about trying to find true intention behind the false façades. It’s about searching for a spiritual truth, the oneness of God, and our connection to something beyond the physical realm of this world. It’s an investigation into the meaning of our existence. We must seek out truth this year, and that means we need to start by telling the truth. It also means we need to explore our spiritual truths – our true purpose and intention on this earth. What were you meant to do in your life? What is your inner truth? And what do you have to do to make sure you’re living that truth every day of your life?

The second book of the Torah is the book of Exodus and it’s the foundational book of our people – the story of our transition from slavery to freedom.


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I saw this as I was driving the other night and it made think about what it must have been like to leave Egypt; taking all of our belongings from our old homes that we thought we’d need in the Promised Land - because if we needed it in Egypt, we’d probably needed in Israel too. But then we start traveling through the desert and we ask ourselves, do we really need that raggedy old zebra-print shmata? Really? We need that? Maybe they have some better options in the Holy land. Because the truth is, all that stuff from Egypt just weighs us down, and if we want to enter the Promised Land, we’re going to need space for new things.


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O is for Openness. Exodus starts with the Jewish equivalent of rock-bottom. We’re slaves in a foreign land and then we’re led across a sea into the middle of nowhere. Now you’re in the desert where you have no roof over your head, no food, your kids are complaining and tugging on your pants, you have no cell reception, and you have no idea where you’re going. So are you going to spend the rest of the journey crying and stewing in your misery? Well, actually, that’s what the Jews did. But it definitely didn’t get us there any faster! This whole book is about going towards a new place, but we get so stuck on the way it was and stuck on the way it is right now, that we don’t allow ourselves to be filled with hope and open to what could be coming our way.

If you want to walk from Egypt to the Promised Land, to transition from slavery to freedom – and we all want to be free – it requires an openness to change. We all know that change doesn’t come easy. “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.”1 said Woodrow Wilson. But the only way we can move from a slave mentality to an enlightened state is to be open to new possibilities and new perspectives. It means that the way you’ve been doing it all this time may not be the best way and you might have to actually adjust a few things.

The book of Exodus is the book that led us to walk arm and arm with African Americans during the civil rights movement. Exodus is the book that inspires us to fight against poverty and homelessness, raise

1 http://carltons-quote-corner.weebly.com/funny-change-quotes.html


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our voices for equal rights and healthcare reform, the book that requires us to create a strong safety net for those who are the most vulnerable. The reason we are able to do this is because built into the fabric of who we are as a people, is an ability to recognize that change is not only important, it is necessary. It is a requirement – it is our duty.

We’ve reached the middle book, the book of Leviticus. This is every b’nei mitzvah student’s worst nightmare. The majority of this book focuses on the details of animal sacrifice and when it’s not providing those details, it is usually talking about skin diseases and bodily discharges. I love watching these thirteen year-olds as they start reading their Torah portion out loud at our first meeting. Their voices usually start out strong and loud, but then, as they start to realize what they’re reading (in front of their parents and the rabbi), their voice slowly trails off and a look of confusion and disbelief takes over. It’s so great!


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The book of Leviticus begins with a small ‘aleph’ at the end of the first word. Very rarely in the Torah do you find a letter smaller or larger than all the others and it’s not an accident – everything written on a Torah scroll is done deliberately. So the rabbis came up with an interpretation about this small aleph. “The custom is to teach small children Leviticus first, rather than begin with Genesis. The reason is that the little children are pure and the sacrifices are pure. Let the pure ones deal with purity,”2 they said. And Leviticus is about purity. It’s about striving for a pure society, a society based on a set of rules and responsibilities for each member in a community.

2 Leviticus Rabbah 7:3


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R is for Responsibility. In the middle of the Torah, in the middle of Leviticus, we find one of the most profound and challenging mitzvot. In the middle of Chapter 19, also known as the Holiness Code, we find the command, v’ahavta l’rey’acha ka-mocha - “love your neighbor as yourself.”3 And by the way, nowhere in the Torah do we find a command to love your parents., but you need to love your neighbor. Because, as we learned from the 10 commandments, the world does not revolve around you. You have to care for and take responsibility for your neighbor, whether you know him or not, whether you agree with her politics or not, whether you agree with how he’s raising his children or not, whether you understand why she wouldn’t want the Iran deal to go through or not, whether you understand why he spends money the way he does or not, whether you think her priorities are in order or not. It doesn’t matter, because you still need to love that neighbor. I officiated at a bar mitzvah this past Shabbat and the bar mitzvah family is part of something they’ve coined “the Village.” It is a group of families who first met when their children were in preschool at Isaiah, and for the past ten years they’ve gathered together weekly, have supported one other through thick and thin, and they happen to knit some incredible tallit bags and challah covers when each of their children becomes bar/bat mitzvah. There aren’t many villages like that anymore. It’s sad. But

3 Lev. 19:18


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Leviticus demands that we try and build villages because you can’t have a holy society by yourself. You have to be with the people, you must be with others. You must not be alone.

This is why I believe that we need to stop using the phrase ‘social justice Judaism’. We’re not a social justice synagogue – we’re a “love your neighbor as yourself’ synagogue – a “my joy should be your joy and your pain is my pain” kind of synagogue. Repairing the world is not going above and beyond – it’s just what we do as Jews. It is weaved into the fabric of our beings and into the threads of our Torah, our handbook, our history of moments.

The fourth book of the Torah is SO good and yet SO neglected. That’s what happens when you’re the book read over the summer. The Book of Numbers is such an excellent book, full of rebellion and infighting, the defining moments of leadership and the challenges that come when a group of Jews wander through a vast desert for forty years without their favorite foods readily available. But, it’s also wonderful because it’s where we learn why we’re wandering for forty years and why Moses will never enter the land of Israel. It is our book of why and how. The Jews are complaining (as they always do) about not having any water, so Moses gets frustrated and asks God to help because Moses would rather die than deal with these people any longer. God tells him to hit a rock once with his staff and water will flow forth from it and the people will have their water.


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But Moses doesn’t exactly do that. He hits the rock multiple times and adds the phrase, “Listen, you rebels, you want us to get water for you from this rock?!”4

Well, God isn’t so happy that Moses didn’t listen to the exact instructions because Moses 1) takes credit for something that wasn’t his doing and 2) because he loses his temper and crosses a line with the people he’s leading. He is punished. Moses can never enter the Promised Land. This is a sad but perfect story to teach us about the impact of our attitude.

It’s like this glass of water. hold up a glass of water5

“How heavy is this glass of water I’m holding?” Any ideas? How long can I hold it? If I hold it for a minute or two, it’s fairly light, even if it were filled to the brim. If I held it for an hour straight, it might make my arm ache a little. If I held it overnight, my arm would probably cramp up and feel completely numb and paralyzed, forcing me to drop the glass to the floor. In each case, the weight of the glass doesn’t change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it feels. This is also true with anger, stress, and negativity. The longer we hold on to these feelings without addressing them, allowing them to guide our lives, the more we ache. And when they become all consuming, we become completely numb and paralyzed – incapable of doing anything else until it shatters and spreads its ugliness all around us. There is a lot of anger in the world right now; a lot of painful statements being thrown around and a seeming disregard for the impact of those statements. I’ve seen a lot less use of a certain finger on the road because we now have a genuine fear of how someone could react. We praise the ‘undo send e-mail’ function on Gmail because you now have up to 30 seconds to re-read the angry message you just composed, think about what you’ve written, regret it deeply, and then save yourself some trouble by un-sending it.6 To live by the message of Numbers, we must shift our attitude. It is essential that we recognize, nothing changes until you change and everything changes once you change.7

4 Num. 20:10 5 http://www.marcandangel.com/2013/05/21/4-short-stories-change-the-way-you-think/ 6 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1284885?hl=en 7 https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/40/86/56/4086564240676c3ee443f5e309f07078.jpg


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The final book of the Torah is Deuteronomy, which comes from the Greek word, deutero-nomos, meaning ‘second law’. In other words, it is the retelling of everything that came before. As Moses stands with the Israelites looking out over the Promised Land, he reminds them of everything they just went through and then gives them advice and warning before they enter their new homeland. When Moses recalls their journey up to this point, he does so with little censorship. He doesn’t ignore the embarrassing, destructive, rebellious, and uneasy parts of their journey. He offers an honest retelling. Our tendency is to gloss over some of the more unsavory elements of our past, to try and ignore them as though they never happened or weren’t that significant. But, we’re just lying to ourselves when we do that.

When I was in 7th grade, my house burned down in the Oakland hills firestorm. It was one of about 3,000 homes that were destroyed that day, along with 25 people killed and at least 150 injured. The economic loss was estimated at about $1.5 billion8. It was a day that changed my life forever. My mother and I lost everything that day except for the few basic necessities we were able to take with us when we were being evacuated. That day shaped me – it redefined what it meant for me to own something, it taught me that anything can be taken away from you at any time, and it taught me the power of a caring and compassionate community. It took me a long time to realize that the fire gave me

8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_firestorm_of_1991


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much more than it took away. Once I understood that, I was able to own a piece of my history that has only helped me to grow and understand the world in new ways.

It takes us a whole year to read the Torah, and when we’ve finished, we close the book and start all over again. It is a never-ending cycle. Why? Why must we read and reread the same journal, the same moments, the same stories again and again for the entirety of our lives? It is because with each retelling, with each reexamination, we may find something new. A new word sticks out to us, a new phrase becomes more meaningful, and we are in a different phase of our life. Every year we have new knowledge that we’ve gained from our own life’s experience which allows us to see the Torah with new eyes. We can see our photo, our embarrassing moment, our painful time, our incredible triumph and own a bit more of it, in turn giving us more power over our own lives. Each time we read, we have an opportunity to obtain new understanding of another bit of our history as a Jewish people and by connecting those lessons to our own lives.

We need to live by the message of Deuteronomy – we need to tell and retell our stories, come to terms with them, embrace them, and use our stories to move forward in our lives.

The Torah teaches us 5 lessons in 5 books. To live by the book of Genesis is to live by Truth.

To live by the book of Exodus is to live by Openness.


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To live by the book of Leviticus is to live by Responsibility. To live by the book of Numbers is to live by Attitude.

To live by the book of Deuteronomy is to live by History. We call the Torah a tree of life. Whenever we return to the Torah to the ark at the end of the Torah service, we sing out, “It is a tree of life for those who hold it fast, and all of its supporters are happy.” 9 Like a tree, it grounds us, supports us, protects us, nourishes us, inspires us. It provides us with the keys to a meaningful life.

And just like those pictures, we need to take ownership of our past. When we own our own history, we become a more whole person. Torah is wholeness. Torah is life. We, our people, have been given a great gift. Let’s own the story of our people this year and let’s live a life of wholeness, a life of holiness, a life of Torah.

Gmar Chatimah Tovah – May you be inscribed in the book of life for goodness.

9 Proverbs 3:18

1445270446 living%20the%20torah

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