One of my rabbinic colleagues shares with me the following true story. Late one night, after Yom Kippur, he received a frantic telephone call. As soon as he arrived at the home, which was already filled with family and friends, he was told the tragic tale. He had known the family well. They were in synagogue for Neilah services earlier that night. Their son Kenny, a teenager whom he had known from classes, insisted that he start out early for a post-Yom Kippur breaking of the fast with some friends down the coast in Malibu. His parents insisted that he should wait until the Neilah services were over. Kenny obliged them. As soon as the Shofar was blown he rushed off in his car and somewhere on a winding road, a drunk driver plowed into his car and Kenny was instantly killed. When the rabbi walked into the bedroom, Kenny's father was sitting on the bed, his head buried in his hands. He looked at the rabbi. His face grew pale and his fists clenched and he greeted him with a torrent of obscene curses. He cursed the rabbi and God and the synagogue and himself. Why in the world had he insisted that Kenny wait until services were over? As if God cared. It's all a lie. The rabbi was false, God was false, the synagogue was false. The whole thing was stupid a cruel.

The room filled with people. Kenny's father's rage continued, and everyone drew deadly silent. The rabbi sought to speak to him. He was unresponsive. Kenny's father was inconsolable. He pointed directly at the rabbi, and said "Get him out of here!"

His wife took the rabbi into the kitchen and repeated over and again "The whole thing is senseless. Kenny was a love, kind, sensitive, talented. It's not fair." She was embarrassed by her husband's curses and, seeing how upset the rabbi was, she apologetically urged him not to take it personally.

But, how could he not take it personally? Had he not taught on these High Holidays the words of the Mahzor, "On New Year's Day the decree is inscribed and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, Who shall live and who shall die?" And then the conclusion that "repentance, prayer, and righteousness avert the severity of the decree." However it gets twisted homiletically, we are left with a "decree." Is that how Kenny's death was to be understood?

I agree with my colleague, as a rabbi I must take this weightiest of vexing struggles quite personally.

And in the wake of the horrors perpetrated upon thousands of innocent people two weeks ago on September 11^th, I found myself wondering, while striving to consol the inconsolable families of those whose loved one's had just been killed on the United and American flights originating here in Boston, "Could I really ask any of these family members to recite the traditional prayer "Baruch Dayan Ha-emet" "Blessed is the truthful judge." Is the murder of their beloved the sentence of a truthful judge? Could the traditional Tziduk Hadin be invoked at the funeral of their loved one? "The sheltering Rock, perfect in all His works, for all His ways are just. Who dares to say to Him, "What are You doing?" Such words contain no comfort or consolation. Better say it in Hebrew, I thought, perhaps some won't understand. But I do, and it troubles me.

These liturgical passages contribute mightily, as they should, to the belief that many of us share deep down that nothing that happens in this world happens by accident; that nothing happens without someone being guilty of some transgression. The Prophets declared this as the basis for Israel being marched off into exile for their sins against God and virtually every page of the High Holiday prayerbook resonates with such a message - one in which the defense of God in the face of evil leaves bitter ashes on the tongue of the mourner. So I say, just like my colleague said to Kenny's mother, should I not take this personally?

The conventional defenses of God always trace suffering back to some Divine decree - suggesting that God deliberately visited this upon us. Do I believe that? Shall I repeat arguments that rub salt into their wounds? Shall I tell them that the suffering is meant to test their metal? That in the suffering of this world there are contained the treasures that they will be enabled to experience in the world to come. Or should I use the classic medieval silver-lining arguments which assert that without poverty there can be no impulse to charity; without illness, there would be no motivation to heal; without accidents, their would be no resilience; without the Holocaust, there would be no State of Israel.

I have heard this argument. But this has conscience against it; it has common sense against it; it is a perverse thinking that would justify every single aberration, every callousness, every evil, every deformity, as just in God's eyes. Of course some people some times can turn tragedy into a virtue. But would that justify God's hand in every calamity? This turns God into a miserable sadist and the bereaved into a masochist.

I could always become modest and assert, I don't know, I really don't know the inscrutable ways of God. "Look rabbi, now that I really need for you to answer a question that is important to me, you're going to become an agnostic, you're going to hide yourself in the sanctuary of ignorance?" Conventional theology fails me.

Yet I know that I am not alone in this struggle. Abraham faced it with Sodom and Gomorah, Moses faced it when God refused to forgive the Children of Israel for the sin of the Golden Calf, the sages of the Talmud faced it when they reminded God that, as He wrote lo bashamayim hi "The Torah is not in heaven anymore."

Judaism's insistence on theological courage, its rejection of blind faith, was one of the reasons why I fell in love with Judaism so many years ago. Belief in God is not delivered on a silver platter. As Jews, we are expected to wrestle, to struggle, to wring out a faith in God that must be earned...

Let me share with you, then, briefly, what I have come to believe about the relationship between God and tragedy as we know them in this world. I begin with the nature of the God of Israel. In Judaism there is one God. There is no devil that we can use as a scapegoat, no antichrist to blame for evil. As an ethical monotheism, God is one. Not by coincidence, throughout our prayerbook and throughout the bible there are two names for this One God which always appear side by side: we always recite Baruch ata adonai eloheynu - two names for God: Adonai and Elohim.

Why not have just one name? Why are two necessary? Because our tradition teaches that each is inseparable from the other, that both complimentary aspects of the divine are vital to be able to understand God's relationship with nature, with human beings, with the world, and with the problem of evil.

Elohim is the first name of divinity introduced in the first verse of the first chapter of the first book of the bible. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. It is the only name for God used through the opening creation narrative because is depicts God as the Creator of all of nature and the world as we know it. Animals, plants, atmosphere, Elohim is the God who affirms the profound logic of the universe. Elohim is the creator of mountains and valleys, light and darkness, floods and draughts, earthquakes and huricanes. Nature exists outside of morality. There is nothing ethical or unethical about gravity or barometric pressure. It is not midat hadim, and its not midat harachamim. It is neither a reflection of God's throne of strict justice, nor God's throne of boundless compassion.

Conventional theology affirms these two categories of justice and mercy alone. But this means that a category is missing, one that speaks to the elements in God's world which do not intersect with morality. In the Talmud in tractate Avodah Zara, we are taught: "If a man stole a measure of wheat and sowed it in the ground, Din hu, it would be just and proper that the wheat not grow. After all, it is stolen. But, say the rabbis, the world pursues its own course, and it grows. Further they ask, "If a man has intercourse with his neighbor's wife, Din hu, justice would say that she should not conceive. But nature pursues its own course and out of an adulterous relationship a child is born.

A new catagory that has been missing within God's name of Elohim. Minhag Olam, the ways of nature, means that not everything that happens in this world is a din, a judgment from a moral judge. DNA is not din, the DNA we inherit is neither praisworthy nor blameworthy. It is simply a fact. The shifting platelets under the surface of the earth that cause earthquakes, are not judgements, they are not moral decrees. An earthquake is not an act of God in the sense that it results from a decree. All of these things are traced to the God of creation, they are unquestionably linked to God in this way, but they are consequences of creation, not judgements. And consequences are not judgements and causes are not curses. When cause and curse and consequence and judgement are confused, then everything becomes a gezarah, a Divine decree. Then every accident points to a sin punished. Which is exactly the theology purported by Kenny's father.

Newton's law of gravitation, is not Moses' Law of revelation. Galileo had it right when he said, one tells you how the heavens go, the other tells you how to go to heaven.

We see two dimensions of God revealed again and again, even in the core affirmation of God's unity, the Shema Yisrael. We recite Shema yisrael adonai eloheynu, adonai ehad "Hear O Israel, Adonai, our Elohim, is one." We don't say Shema Yisrael Adonai Echad. Both Adonai and Elohim are present because neither sufficiently depicts the God of Israel, without one of them God cannot be Echad, God cannot be One. Elohim is the God of the real, Adonai is the God of the ideal. Elohim is the God of what is; Adonai is the God of what ought to be. When the Shema holds both aspects of God together, we are saying that is and ought belong together. Indeed one without the other, leaves God incomplete, not whole. This is because, although Elohim speaks to the Nature of God, it is Adonai that speaks to the Will of God.

And the truth is that Jewish theology is much less about the Nature of God than about the Will of God. The Bible can be understood of an inventory of those things that make God smile and those things that make God angry. God is not neutral in His appraisal of the elements of creation saying time and again "behold it was good." Until this point, we have only considered Elohim, the nature of God's relationship with creation, but this only suggests that God exists, I want to believe that God cares...In this High Holiday season, we direct our hearts to the Adonai dimension of God, whose Divine Will is most life-affirming "Melech Hafetz bachayim."

Elohim suggested what God doesn't do. Let's focus for moment on Adonai and what God does do. We have been taught that Adonai is God's preferred name, reflecting His true essence. Tomorrow night we conclude Neilah with the sounding of the Shofar, asserting Adonai, Hu Ha-Elohim "Adonai is our God" seven times. There are two dimensions to Adonai, two sides of a partnership, what we can do for God, and what God can do for us. We have spoken often in the past about our role as God's partners - striving to lend support, to purvey goodness, to heal the sick, and give strength to the weary. My entire Rosh Hashannah message was about how we engage that partnership through our capacity for being self-surpassing - a capacity which has radiated brilliantly through the pints of goodness and love that have been shared all over our country these past two weeks.

What about what Adonai does for us? Our partnership with God is neither limited nor silent in nature. How then is Adonai at work in our world? When we pray that a loved one survive a debilitating, terminal illness. We pray for a miracle, and sometimes, if we don't get the miracle we pray for, we don't notice the miracle that we get. The miracle may not be that the patient survives. The miracle may be that your faith survives. That your faith survives the death of a loved one who deserves to live longer. And that God gave you the strength to survive with both your faith and the rest of your family intact. We pray for a happy ending. But we also pray for the ability to cope with whatever kind of ending we are dealt in life. And we pray that God gives us the strength to accept the good with gratitude and the bad with courage.

If I could speak to Kenny's father, I would tell him "I understand your anguish and your grieving. But try not to be angry with me or with God, with the synagogue or with yourself. What happened to your son was a deep and terrible tragedy, but it was not a judgment, it was not a deliberate planned design. Olam K'minhago noheg. That does not erase the pain. I have no magic wand to wave, neither for you, nor myself. No miracles, no faith healing, no magic. The Jewish reality principle does not allow me to pretend that the pain in unreal. No matter how I desire it, I cannot erase the pain. But I can erase the guilt, the blame, the terror of a punishing wrathful God. My task is to move to accepting the tragic, but without the guilt or blame or shame.

As the numbness of that horrors of September 11 begin to recede and its unnerving implications begin to sink in, we find ourselves asking Why? As it says in the Kaddish, B'alma di vra kirutay "in a world that God has made according to His will" Why did so many innocent, good, loving people have to suffer such a horrific fate? I don't believe that this question is really in search of an answer. Why means woe. "Why me?" is not a cry for cognition, but for recognition. What is required is not some eloquent defense of God, or intricate justification. What is required is simply to be present; to embrace each other and to weep together. But is that arm around a shoulder really enough? Am I a grief counselor or a rabbi?

I must probe with you the anger we are entitled to feel over the fact that God has created a world in which evil is so possible. We can feel mad at God for having gifted to us the freedom to be able to choose a life of savagery and wickedness. Clearly according to the bible, God desires goodness, life, generosity, health, and fulfillment. Yet even in the Bible, when God is supposedly more interventionist, people perpetrate crimes that go against God's Will. From the Bible going forward, God makes it clear that God will not interfere to take away our freedom, no matter how destructively we intend to us it.

And yet, if God's primary relationship with the September 11^th terrorist attack was merely that of feeling extreme displeasure, disappointment, and sorrow - because it was against His Will - Is that all God, Adonai, the God of what ought to be, has to offer me?

Millions of Americans have converged around places of worship over the last two weeks. With our spirits perforated, our intellects fatigued by the incomprehensibility of the enormity of the loss, and our emotions saturated, we have come together to talk to God. It would have been totally understandable if this crippling attack would have broken our nation's spirit, if it would have driven a deep wedge between ethnic groups that would pit us up against each other, but it has done neither. We opened our hearts in prayer, facing a horrifying situation, and even though we didn't get a miracle during the search and rescue that would have averted more loss of life, we did discover people around us, and God beside us, and strength and courage within ourselves that we never thought we had. I offer this as an example of a prayer being answered.

Prayer is not only asking God for things. More than just petitioning, prayer is praise and appreciation. Even more fundamentally, though, prayer is simply inviting God into your life. I am reminded of how much our forefather Jacob matures in his lifetime in how he relates to prayer. When he is young and ambitious, Jacob's prayer asks God to protect him and bring him home safely.

The second time Jacob prays he's twenty years older and has a different perspective on the way prayer works. His second prayer in advance of his fearful return home, with news that has angry embittered brother Essau is approaching him with an army amassed and heading in his direction, goes something like this. "God, you don't owe me anything. You have already done more for me than I had any right to expect. All I can say is this: I am turning to you because I need you. Tomorrow I am going to have to do something very difficult and I am afraid. I'm not at all sure that I am up to the task. I've never been strong enough to do anything like it before. But if you'll be with me, I think I can pull it off." Jacob does not pray that God strike Essau with amnesia so that he'll no longer be angry with him or want to harm him. Instead, Jacob prays for the strength to do the right thing, and to be able to cope with matters as best as he can.

How has Adonai touched us personally this past year? If someone would have said to you exactly one year ago, that the following things are going to happen to you in the coming twelve months - a loved one's is inflicted with a terminal illness, the loss of your job or not getting that promotion that you've been working for for so long, the death of someone who was central to your life - most of us would have said, "Please don't let these things happen in the coming year. Please don't ask it of me, I don't think I can handle it." And yet those things did happen and we did handle it. Somehow we discovered resources within ourselves to cope and survive, resources we never thought we had. Resources we may in point of fact not had at all, until we were called upon to have to use them. Now is as good a time as any, to ponder, to wonder, and to appreciate, where those resources came from? My answer is, they came from God.

They tell the story of David Ben Gurion many years ago went on a fundraising trip to Europe to raise money for Israel Bonds. He had an appointment with the wealthiest Jew in Belgium. As he was ushered into this man's very opulent office and the man says, "Mr. Prime Minister, before you start, I have to tell you something. I consider myself a human being first, a Belgian second and a Jew third. Does that offend you?" And Ben Gurion said, "No, not at all. In Hebrew we read from right to left."

I think many theological assertions need to be understood reading right to left. It was once said "Life is lived going forward, and understood going backward." The same is true of encounters with God. When we look behind us, if we so desire, we can glimpse brushes we've had with Adonai.

This then is my confessional, and Yom Kippur is as good a time as any for confessionals. Whether or not each of you can believe in God and how that faith or lack thereof is manifested for you, My assumption is that you are not only comfortable with what it is that you believe, you are hopefully, rather proud of your beliefs. I assume this to be the case, unless you tell me otherwise. After all, if I am proud of my convictions. It would be rather Chutzpadic on my part for me to assume that you are not as proud of what you believe. What Tip O'neil said of politics - that all politics is local - I believe to be the case about religious sensibilities. All theology is local, and deeply personal.

When bad things happen to good people, a couple of important things are worth remembering. First, when it comes to theodicy, the reconciling of the interaction between God and evil in this world, know that Judaism does not take "yes" for an answer, that your religious tradition has cornered the market on theological courage.

And second, so much of what lies beyond our control in this world is treated most effectively not through cognition, but through recognition, less through philosophical proofs for God, and more through recognizing God when we've encountered God - as when a weak person has suddenly found herself to be strong; or when a timid person has found herself more courageous; or when a selfish person has found herself to be more generous. Cognition yielding to recognition - also has implications for the way we look upon human nature - rather than trying to analyze how sadistically evil people can be, how small-souled people are capable of becoming, instead we recognize the dilating, expanding souls of our neighbors.

May God prove a source of comfort, healing, and courage as we strive to make 5762 a healthier, sweeter, more fulfilling New Year for us, for our People, and for our entire world.