The ground has shifted under the feet of our Jewish People over these past twelve months in ways that few imagined could be conceivable.  Within Israel, more than five thousand terrorist attacks in the last year alone, which killed more than five hundred Israelis and permanently maimed hundreds of others.

And if that weren't enough, we saw a renewal of anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere on a scale not seen since the 1930s, not criticism for Israeli policies, not even hatred of Israel, but crude vicious Nazi-style anti-Semitism: destruction of a 500-year-old synagogue in Morocco; desecration of cemeteries in France, Germany, Italy and Poland; contemptible, totally loony accusations of Jewish involvement in the World Trade Center bombing, believed by otherwise intelligent people; the hijacking of the U.N. Conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, turning it into an orgy of hatred for Jews and Judaism; vicious anti-Semitic harangues tolerated by the liberal community in Berkeley; not to mention the condescending oh-so-politically correct anti-Israel bias of the BBC and NPR.  You read the comments of a Nobel Prize winner in Portugal comparing what is happening to the Palestinians to what was done to the Jews in Auschwitz.  You read the comments of British academicians and French intellectuals that Israel has forfeited its right to exist.  And you have to conclude that these are not statements of sane people.

For all that had been written about the diminution of Anti-Semitism, for all that we have achieved, we have learned something unnerving this year that we never fully knew before - and that is that we as Jews are a magnet for hatred around the world.  People who have never in their lives met a Jew, hate Jews.  As much as we have wished it weren't so, as alarming an affirmation as this is, we have become painfully aware of what our ancestors intuitively knew to be the case in different lands, that hatred for us as Jews needs no predetermined reason - that others will hate us, not for NO GOOD reason, not for SOME endemic reason, but for ANY reason at all.

 I must pause and tell you that I never, ever thought that I would be delivering a sermon like this.  I am part of a generation that began with the election of this country's first Roman Catholic President and culminated forty years later in the near-election of this country's first Orthodox Jewish Vice President.  Because I fell in love with Judaism so many years ago and have witnessed up close, the transformative power of the Jewish way on the lives countless people over the years, delivering a sermon like this one wasn't just something I'd dreaded or wished to avoid all my life - the need to do so never in fact dawned on me.  And yet, a global phenomenon and painful historic lessons of the implications of living in denial, dictate that we confront together a world order that is old, insidious, and inalterably real.

Columnist A.M. Rosenthal came out of retirement last week to open a call to action with the words "Jews, listen and you will hear the sound of breaking glass. Even if you squeeze your hands over your ears, you will still hear it.  Breaking glass, burning synagogues, and diplomats making filthy anti-Semitic remarks, mean that a sickening number of people around the world, many in high office, would have no great objection if the concentration camps arrived again, and would even take pleasure in their coming."

What message can I bring to you on this New Year?   Not wanting to define Judaism in defensive terms, I have struggled mightily over this sermon for several months now - to the point that having had root canal work done earlier this week came as welcome relief.  I hope in listening to it won't be as painful.

But the other night, my message came together when our daughter Avital was doing her homework after her first day of school at Schechter.  She was to translate and draw pictures associated with the different names for this holiday of Rosh Hashanah.  Balancing scales symbolizing justice were appropriate for Yom Hadin; a person blowing a shofar for Yom T'ruah; but when it came to making a picture for Yom Hazikaron, a day of remembrance which is the classical name for Rosh Hashanah, Avital asked me "is it for good memories or bad memories?" The answer, of course, "is for good memories." And I now had my message.

Because the commandment to remember in Jewish tradition ordinarily applies to our enemies embodied by the first haters of our People, Amalek.  And this is the memory that has the instrumentality of - not allowing our enemies to defeat us or change who we are.   But Rosh Hashanah's idea of remembering is different - from the zichronot section of the Musaf Amidah we realize that today memory isn't something we require to defy our foes, but to reclaim a devotion to our proud, historic heritage.  And this is the memory of devotion to what we hold dear in a life of learning, mitzvoth, and deeds of loving-kindness.

One of the great teachers of our generation, known to so many of us here in Brookline, was Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik.  He used to speak of a distinction between the Covenant of Fate and the Covenant of Destiny.  The Covenant of Fate signified an existence of compulsion, where undesired conditions are thrust upon us as Jews.  Covenant of Destiny, on the other hand, found us hammering out an existence that was freely and purposefully chosen by us.

The Covenant of Fate speaks to the inalterable conditions that the world thrusts upon us.  The Covenant of Destiny invites a liberating path to self-surpassing exaltation.  Fate speaks to an existential loneliness of what it means to born into a generation of Jews who will witness anti-Semitism in its latest manifestations - bad memories of Amalek.  Destiny speaks of consciously claiming Judaism as our own, striving to redefine and attain our limitless potential in life - good memories of Rosh Hashanah.

To oppose anti-Semitism is to deal with the Covenant of Fate.  To say a blessing over your food is to live the Covenant of Destiny.  To write a letter to the Boston Globe in support of Israel is Covenant of Fate.  To read a Jewish book that excites our discovery the joy of content-rich Jewish learning is Covenant of Destiny.

Within the realm of our Fate - that which the world imposes upon us - we meet hopeless scenarios with defiance.  Standing firm against the determination of our enemies to destroy us, we must remain defiantly faithful to our ideals and dreams.  We must continue to uphold Israel's proud standard of "purity of arms" that insists that IDF soldiers, often at great personal risk, do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties and innocent loss of life.  Israel's Declaration of Independence expresses the sincerest hope that arabs within Israel and throughout the region share in the achievements and take their proud place as full citizens of Israel, enjoying the highest dignity and inalienable rights enjoyed by any Jew.  Can it work?  Can sharing and coexistence be insisted upon when one of the would-be partners is dead set against it?  True defiance proclaims: Yes, it ultimately can.

 Defiance has produced some impressive incremental results which not only have sought to turn back the tide of terror, it has encouraged the formation of our Government's current policy which has dismissed Yasser Arafat as the most prolific, effective terrorist leader in world history, rather than reluctantly courting him as if a Statesman.

Defiance stepped in just when it seemed like the entire world wanted to place a badge of shame on Jews and the Zionist cause, with Kofi Anan asking aloud, "Is it possible that the whole world is wrong and Israel alone is right?" Defiance stepped in, inviting forth courageous figures of credibility like Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci to denounce the proliferation of Jew-hatred, mendacity, and hypocrisy currently thriving in Europe and the Palestinian Authority.  Last spring she wrote "I defend Israel's right to exist, to defend themselves, to not let themselves be exterminated a second time.  And disgusted by the anti-Semitism of my country and Europe - at best it is not a community of states, but a pit of Pontius Pilates.  And even if all the inhabitants of this planet were to think otherwise, I would continue to think it so."

 If defiance is what we bring to our Covenant of Faith to repel what the world forces upon us, then it is devotion that we bring to our Covenant of Destiny.  It can be so easy for us to lose ourselves, by reacting, by repelling attacks, by defining our Judaism in essentially defensive terms.  There has to be more to this year's High Holiday message than appreciating our capacity for resilience, our ability to weather storms, and our proficiency at fighting back.  We must claim an appreciation and a pride for our sense of self that is exalting and life-affirming.

 After all, Rosh Hashanah's remembering is not about bad memories, but proud, inspiring remembering of devotion.  Biblical verses from the zirchronot portion of Musaf on this Rosh Hashanah bring us back to our founding covenant between God and the Jewish People. They reconnect us with our People's founding Story of the Exodus from Egypt.

Let me ask you a question about something that may seem obvious.  Why was the founding story of the Jewish People one of slaves becoming free?  Why does our master story of the Exodus from Egypt find our People being born from a context of slavery?  Why couldn't God have founded His people from any entirely different historical reality like intervening at the last minute to save them from certain defeat on a battlefield or intervening in some other way like stopping them from going astray toward other gods, building a Tower of Babel or embracing licentious behavior as in Sodom and Gomorah?  Why did God's people have be born out of slavery?   Not merely to teach that all humans are created equal - that nobody's blood is any redder than anybody else's.  But primarily to remind us that God's greatest, most precious gift is the freedom to choose.  And it was only from a context of the absence of that freedom - in this case slavery - that a high appraisal of freedom can come.

 And this exalting of the freedom to choose has potent implications for these High Holidays.  There is more in common between the Passover's Exodus narrative six months ago and today's tone of confronting our mortality than meets the eye.  Imbedded within the very idea of human dignity that we bring to our encounter with God on these Holiest of Days is our freedom to choose to commit our lives to what matters most to us.

The highest form of free will, this season of the High Holidays reminds us, is the power of Teshuva.  And it is worth appreciating the fact that the Jewish People gave the very idea of repentance to the world.  In the ancient world, neither the Sumerians, nor the Egyptians, nor the Babylonians, nor the Assyrians, had a concept of teshuva.  Also the classical world lacked this concept of teshuva.  No matter how far Oedipus would have roamed, he still would have wedded and bedded his mother and killed his father, because four generations prior to Oedipus it was fated.  In these worlds there is "goral" fate - and you can't offset predetermined fate.  There is no repentance neither in the ancient near east, nor in classical culture.

Yet we don't often stop and think about how remarkable the gift of being able to change our priorities, our way of seeing the world, our way of being in the world, really is.   Sometimes I think that the word "repentance" makes a lot of us uncomfortable because it has connotations of beating our breasts and groveling, saying "I'm no good.  It's all my fault."  But that's not what Teshuva is about at all.  It is actually the opposite of that.  It invites us to say "Yes, I've done things wrong, as everybody does.  But that's not the essential me.  The real me is capable of being good and strong and brave.  This is the time of the year when I remind myself that I possess inner resources for renewal and growth that can make be feel a whole lot better about what I'm really made of."

Yet we don't survive based only on what we remember, but on what we affirm, believe, and are committed to.  By electing to learn and grow Jewishly, taking advantage of the KI's brand new unique member-only offering PSALM course taught by our own Rabbi David Starr.  It is worth recalling what the late Brandeis professor Ravidovich said:  that Judaism is the only religion in the history of the world that pictures "a God who studies" and as a way of elevating the supreme value of learning.

Throughout our history, whenever we've faced hopeless scenarios, devotion and defiance, Rosh Hashanah remembering and Amalek remembering have gotten us through.

 As we enter the New Year 5763, what a cruel paradox it is that the solution to the last century's Jewish problem - with the establishment of the State of Israel - has perversely become the inexorable Jewish problem of a new century.   Israel's 1967 War can be seem as a microcosm of the very same turnabout phenomenon.  That surviving an all out effort to drown us in the sea has yielded the post-1967 borders which demographically-speaking have come to be seen as a recipe for the destruction of the Jewish State.

A poignant passage in tomorrow morning's Haftorah, depicts the Children of Israel being marched off into exile, passing Rachel's Tomb.  Jeremiah the prophet pictures Rachel calling out to God from her grave, imploring God to forgive Israel's having turned to rival idols even as Rachel herself had been willing to share her husband Jacob's love with a rival in her sister Leah.  Rachel, who is inconsolable as we watches her descendents marching off to exile, earns God's promise that her children will one day return to their borders within the Land of Israel.

What is so twisted about Israel's current predicament is that being within her borders has not felt very redemptive lately to say the least.  Last spring following what seemed like an unending spate of terrorism bombings, I reflected on the fact that in our Grace after Meals we ask God's mercy on behalf of two populations: both the Jews in the State of Israel and those Jews who are besieged, oppressed, and in danger. One day it dawned on me that both of those prayers are addressing the same population.  Simply, the Jews who are in Israel are the Jews in the world today who are most besieged, oppressed, and in danger.  It is as if we are in exile in our own land.

One of my recurrent dreams, involves my walking on the Mall on Ben Yehudah Street in the central Jerusalem intentionally avoiding clusters of people, believing that by avoiding crowds, I am less a target for a terrorist bomber.  Each morning, I awaken and wonder to myself, "How strange to be a Jew and to feel safer and better off, all alone, without being in the company of others, isolated from a community."  As is the case with the redemptive promise that comforts Rachel, reality for our People has become inverted such that community represents the possibility of danger and death, rather than comfort and life-affirming holiness, even as returning to our historic homeland has produced bewilderment and despair.

Because the loss of hope is the greatest loss we can know, it contains the greatest lessons. Lives can be most powerfully changed at vulnerable moments.  A life can take a turn at any time, but there are special times - what sociologists call liminal moments - which open wide the door to transformation. Trauma leaves us in a fluid state.  Soon our outlooks, like heated glass, become pliable and ready to assume new shapes.  This is one of those liminal moments for the Jewish People.  This New Year's urgent task, as much as any time in our past, is to remember that even when our lot as Jews seems ill-fated, our glorious heritage comes to remind us that we are well-destined.

Will things turn out alright for us as a People?  Will it get worse before it gets better?  Some would claim that it's really not that bad, that the terrorists win headlines and the bigots and haters make a lot of noise, but there really are only a finite number of them.  Even though they are very dangerous, the police and governments and the weight of public opinion in the civilized world is heavily on our side.  As Leon Weisseltier sought to claim in an essay last spring, Jewish leaders have a proclivity for panic that leads them to predict the dire end of the Jewish People in every generation.  Well, I must tell you that I think it is in fact as bad as it seems.  I asked a Holocaust survivor recently how he felt about the resurgence of anti-Semitic fervor in Europe, his simply said "it never left."  But I know in my heart that God didn't grant each of us the opportunity to be alive at the best time in the history of our People - with the highest levels of wealth, freedom and power - for us to not use all of the resources at our command to oppose, defy, and turn back the current wave of Jew hatred.  I know that God did not grant us the inestimable privilege of being alive during an historic Jewish renaissance, not to feel the refreshing dignity of commitment that goes with exhilarating Jewish learning that dazzles the mind and quickens the heart.

Somebody asked me a trick question about the Torah the other day and I got it wrong.  He asked "what command is repeated more that any other in the Torah?"  I told him I thought it was the commandment to help the poor.  He said, "No, the command that occurs most often is "Fear not - don't be afraid."  God said it to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to Moses, to the Israelites at the Red Sea, and to the Israelites as they prepared for battle.  And God says it to us this morning, as we begin a New Year.  The very last words with which we will conclude this morning's service - as every Shabbat - at the end of Adon Olam are "The Lord is my God and I will not be afraid."  To be a Jew is to be aware of the dangers and choose not to be afraid.

When the war in Afghanistan began, a reporter asked an American general if he would ever be able to forgive Osama bin Laden for what he had done to us.  The general answered "Forgiving bin Laden is God's job.  Our job is to arrange the meeting."  In the same way, we might say, Bringing about the downfall of bigots and terrorists is God's job.  Our job is to live as Jews were summoned to live, not because it makes our lives easier, but because it will make our lives more meaningful.  Our job is to live as Jews were summoned to live, because we can't escape the fate of being a Jew - generations before us have tried and failed - but we can claim the destiny of being a Jew; because when we do that, we discover how satisfying a truly human life can be.

I paraphrase Gustave Niebuhr's often-recited prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference between my covenant of fate and my covenant of destiny.  To recognize as a Jew, that I possess both the vulnerability to spend my entire life being defined, as well as the capacity to define with dignity and pride my destiny as a human being and as a Jew.  And to commit myself with all the resources at my command to defiance in the face of the covenant of Fate, while striving to claim anew a devotion to that which is precious and self-surpassing in the Destiny of my People as I begin penning a new chapter in that Book of Life this day...u'va l-tsion go-ayl...May Zion be soon fully redeemed.  Amen.