A year ago on Pat Robertson's 700 Club, Reverend Jerry Falwell offered a supernatural religious explanation of the meaning of September 11th. "God will not be mocked.  God continues to lift the curtain and to give us what we deserve."  Falwell shook his finger at the camera.  "I really believe that pagans and abortionists and feminists and gays and the A.C.L.U. and the American Way - well I point my finger in their face and say ‘you helped that happen.'"  Rev. Robertson agrees.  He adds "Jerry, that's my feeling.  We've just seen the anti-chamber to terror. We haven't even begun to see what they can do to a major population center."  Falwell was criticized for his statement, and later apologized for its "poor timing."  A year later, I am still not sure what he meant by such a qualification.

There is an odd but revealing kinship between Osama Ben Laden and Jerry Falwell theologically.  They share the same fundamentalist mindset.  Thus, for example, if there is a catastrophe or a tragedy, there is a ready made explanation at hand.  Tragedy is one of the ways in which God manifests His wrath and discontent.  Remember what Falwell said, "God will not be mocked."  September 11th for him means that the twin towers collapsed and the pentagon was ruined as a punishment for secularism, humanism, pluralism, suffrage, voting, freedom of expression and sexual orientation.  The fundamentalist mindset, whether acted out in the name of Allah, God, or Christ converges.  They would all remake the world in the image of their own theocracy.  Evangelists talk about Christian America, Islamic extremists speak of an Islamic republic.

You may be saying "Didn't the rabbi leave something out?  He didn't mention Judaism."  Well, Judaism is not immune from the fundamentalist mindset - except in one way - even our fundamentalists do not envision a remaking of the entire world as a Jewish republic.  Beyond this, however, our religion fares no better when it comes to extremist thought.  Even though we have proven much less violent than the 55,000 reported cases of physical threats to the lives of doctors who work at abortion clinics, even though it doesn't end up with the slaughter of thousands of innocent Americans on September 11th, it still rears it ugly head with ready made excuses like the one that attributes the collapse of a wedding hall to the sin of dancing without a mechitza separating the men from the women, or the teaching of Rabbi Avigdor Miller, a religious authority of many Yeshivas who teaches that the Holocaust should be traced to the secular assimilationist Jews of Germany who then contaminated the East European Jews.

Fundamentalist religion has dominated world events so much this year.  We recognize its face all too well.  By contrast, need clarify who we are as religiously serious community.  Religion in general has moved to the center of our public conversation over the passed year with an endless number of new books on the subject, with the Supreme Court taking up the question of vouchers, or lower courts determining whether the Pledge of Allegiance should include "under God." But I want to be careful not to reflect with you tonight on the questions of sociologists and anthropologists.  Instead, I am interested in addressing this phenomenon on a deeply personal level.  In the wake of the global emergence of religion as the major source, not for the sacred, but of the profane, Can Judaism help me feel better about who I am becoming?  Can Judaism help me discover how satisfying a truly human life can be?

The best way to explore the vital roles religion can play in our personal lives by telling a personal story.  The most important Yom Kippur story I know, is the one I told you seven years ago on my first Yom Kippur at Kehillath Israel.  It is the story of what happened to Franz Rosenzweig's on Yom Kippur in 1913.  His surprisingly favorable encounter with Judaism will help provide some refreshing reminders of what healthy religion does for us.

Rosenzwieg became one of the most important Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, a close friend and collaborator of Martin Buber.  And although today he is one of the honored names in modern Jewish philosophy, in the fall of 1913 he was on the verge of converting to Christianity.  He grew up in a nominally Jewish home, but like so many of the intellectual Jewish families of early twentieth century Germany, there was very little that was Jewish about it.  Nothing Jewish happened within his home, but annually his family would attend High Holiday services at their local Classical Reform Temple.  Rosenzweig had nothing against Judaism, it just didn't seem to matter to anyone he knew.

Then he went to college.  For the first time, he met deeply religious Christians, and he began to envy them.  They knew who they were and what they stood for.  They had a guide, they had a source of inspiration they could turn to when they were troubled.  The enlightened agnostic students, Jewish and Christian alike, if they had a personal problem they couldn't handle, either acted out their frustrations or else looked for an answer in the philosophical writings of Hegel.  Either way they woke up with a headache the next morning.  The religious students had a code, a way to follow, and young Rosenzweig was impressed by the degree to which these very religious Christians were at peace with themselves.  He contrasted their deeply rooted faith with the shallow pretense, the floundering inconsistency, the vulgarity and hypocrisy he had seen at home.  Finally, he resolved to become a Christian.  He would go to services one last time that Yom Kippur to say goodbye to his Jewish past and graduate to a higher religion.

Rosenzweig found a small, traditional Shul down the street from his dormitory in Berlin.  He went there for Kol Nidre services, fully intending to make his farewell to Judaism.  But when he came out three hours later, he was a changed man.  He found something in Judaism he never knew was there before.   Suddenly, as he later wrote to a cousin, it was no longer necessary, indeed it was no longer possible for him to change his faith.

What happened that night to change this man's life so completely?  What happened to make him see his Jewishness in a totally new light, to plant the conviction that Judaism was not only worth holding on to, but was worth devoting his life to?  I cannot believe that the liturgy was so compelling, the sermon so eloquent, the choir so good, the building so impressive, or the ushering so efficient that it changed his life.  What did he find there that he had not known before?

For the first time in his life, he saw a community of Jews who cared about their religious tradition.  He had never seen that before.  Not in his parents Temple, not among the other Jewish students at the university.  The people in that Shul had an intensity about them that he had sensed and envied when he saw it among devout Christians.  He had never known that Jews were capable of this.  And although he had not realized it, that was what he had been missing and seeking all along.

Well, if we almost lost Rosenzweig to Judaism some ninety years ago because he had never met a Jew for whom religion was the ruling passion of their life, how do you suppose young Rosenzweig would react today?  He might look around the world at all the destruction, death, and xenophobic hatred taking place in the name of God and conclude, not that religion didn't matter to anyone, but that it mattered much too much to too many.  He might look upon all of the perversions and aberrations of religious fundamentalism and choose to bathe in the pure waters of secularity.
Why would a Franz Rosenzweig of 2002 want to be religious?  What could there be in religion that would speak to him today?

Recalling the events surrounding September 11th 2001 we realize that religion played a peculiarly dual role.  It played host to the perpetrators of terror - convincing them they were committing their attack on America in the name of Allah.  Religion also played host to millions of grieving, shocked, shaken Americans as Churches, Synagogues and Mosques were filled in the weeks following the attack.  One would be tempted to conclude that religion's essential function is either to inspire or to sooth; to invigorate or to comfort; to arouse or to console.  Certainly these are important roles for religion.

But religion can also do some additional very important things for us.  It can offer us meaning and courage: meaning - by attaching ourselves to something grander than ourselves, and - courage - to release those things which keep us from reaching our potential.

First, as a source of meaning in our lives, Judaism can lend layers of significance to our daily deeds.  Heschel used to distinguish between ‘needs' and ‘ends.'  Needs connoted satisfying daily hungers for food, clothing, and shelter - bread and butter daily tasks.  Ends, on the other hand, represented the ultimate goals of humanity like world peace, justice for all, relieving suffering, fighting world hunger and poverty.  Heschel used to say that the purpose of popular advertising is to transform every ‘need' into an ‘end'- to convince me that my ultimate goal in life should be owning a Lexus or a vacation home or the latest gadget in wireless communication.  While the purpose of religion, is to transform all ‘ends' into ‘needs' - to make feeding the hungry a daily pursuit, to make striving for justice, relieving suffering and achieving reconciliation part of our everyday acts.  In this way, religion can remind us that we matter.  Our existence and our daily actions have cosmic, historic significance.

This idea is rescued from the abstract and personalized in the sensations we experience when we exercise our souls. It is a cornerstone of my religious thinking that, just as our bodies are made so that certain foods and certain ways of living are healthier for us and others harm us, in the same way, our souls are made so that certain ways of living are healthy for our souls and other ways are toxic.  I believe that human beings are meant to be truthful, helpful, cheerful, and generous.  When you do these things, it just feels right.  An hour of visiting a lonely person, helping a sick friend, volunteering for a cause we believe in, gives us the same high, the same rush of endorphins, as an hour's workout at the gym.  You deliver left-over food from a party to an organization that feeds the homeless, you attend a class, you say No to temptation and hold back an angry, hurtful remark, and you feel "Yes, this is the way a person is supposed to feel."

Moreover, nourishing our souls in the company of others, within a community, lends validation, motivation and encouragement, to our actions.  This is what touched Franz Rosenzweig so much that Kol Nidre night.  He was not saved by an inspiring sermon or by some innovative prayers or by a persuasive intellectual argument.   He was saved for Judaism by an encounter with a congregation of Jews who brought Judaism to life and made it real and powerful.

What had been Rosenzweig's objections to Judaism, objections that brought him to the brink of renouncing it?  Not that it didn't make sense.  But that it didn't matter.  It didn't seem to transform or deepen the people who took hold of it.

I don't know if at any point during his wavering flirtation with Christianity he ever sat down with a rabbi who tried to explain Judaism to him.  Maybe the rabbi tried to show him what a reasonable, intelligent religion Judaism was - how it harmonized so well with Darwin, Marx, and Freud.  And may Rosenzweig answered "That's all very interesting, but I am really not that impressed by the fact that Judaism makes sense.  If I want something that's intellectually profound and impressive, I know where to find it.  I majored in philosophy in college.  That's not what I want from my religion.  I am glad to hear that Judaism is not unreasonable and that it does not offend logic.  But you don't understand, that isn't enough.  I want my religion to excite me, to move me.  I want it to give me the courage to face darkness and illness, the strength to survive tragedy, the confidence and clarity to overcome doubt, the compassion to feel someone's pain as if it were my own.  And you sit there and tell me, "Well, maybe the sea didn't split; perhaps they walked across a sandbar at low tide."  That's perfectly fine, but it's not worth investing my life in."

Maybe his mother or father sat down with him before that fateful Yom Kippur and tried to talk him out of it, saying "Couldn't you just remain Jewish for our sakes, even if there isn't anything to it?  We are asking so little of you.  It wouldn't be a hardship.  We are not asking you to observe anything, to do anything, even to believe anything Jewish. We are just asking you to be."  And he might well have answered, "That's exactly the problem!  Why should I take seriously a religion that asks so little of me when I can find a religion that thinks enough of me, that takes me seriously enough to ask for my soul.  I want to be guided, I want to have great demands made on me, and you offer me a diluted diet of "Be a nice person and come back next year."

All around him Rosenzweig saw Jews who said "What I like about Judaism is that you don't have be any more Jewish than you want to be, and I don't want to be very Jewish at all."

A story is told about two shipwrecked sailors had been adrift on a raft for days.  Feeling desperate, one knelt and began to pray:  "Oh Lord, I know I haven't lived a good life.  I've drunk too much booze.  I've lied and I've cheated.  I've done so many things I'm ashamed of, but Lord, if you'll just save me I promise..." "Hold it!" interrupted his shipmate, "don't say another word!  I think I just spotted land!"

Rosenzweig, after all, took life seriously.  He couldn't see the point of a religion that did not ask to be taken seriously.  He had high expectations for his religion.  We almost lost him but for that fateful Kol Nidre night.
Yet the Judaism that we celebrate diverges dramatically from the fundamentalist impulse in its insistence on critical thought, moral scrutiny, and the encouragement of questioning.  We insist that faith is not handed over on a silver platter - it must be earned!   We don't only recommend wrestling with God as an intellectual exercise.  We do so because life is complex and cluttered, and there are no easy ready-made answers.

Another significant way that our approach differs so much from the fundamentalist mindset relates the second thing religion can do for us - providing the courage to let go, to release that which prevents us from reaching our potential.  Fundemantalists have a hard time letting go. They white-knuckle their way through life.  But God's most recurrent name in tonight's service is Eloha Selichot - God of forgiveness.

I have spoken before about letting go as something we do for ourselves - not as a favor we do for others.  I have urged us all to let go as an expression of our desire to rid our lives of ancient grudges and grievances that serve little purpose other than making us feel morally superior, as we maintain our role as the wounded party.  I have asserted that if someone did something terrible to hurt you, something selfish, even immoral, then they don't deserve the right to loom so large in your memory.  Precisely because what they did was so wrong, they don't deserve the right to define you as a bitter and resentful person.

I told you about Boston Globe columnist Linda Weltner who wrote about sitting in a park one day watching children play near the sandbox.  Two kids get into a fight and one says to the other, "I hate you, you're not my friend anymore.  I'm never going to play with you again."  And for a few minutes, they play separately.  Then they warily start to edge toward each other, and before long, they are playing happily together again.  Linda Weltner turns to her neighbor and says, "How do kids do that?  How do they be so angry at each other one minute, and friends again the next minute?"  The woman answers, "It's easy, they choose happiness over righteousness."

And I asserted that this is the choice we all can make.  We can choose to remember every injury, holding on to the moral high ground.  We can choose to revel in the injustices and unfairnesses of that which hurts, or we can choose to relinquish them as a favor to ourselves, not as an exculpation of the person who hurt us.  I asked, "What's the point of being angry at someone who has been out of our lives for years?  We can't change them; we can only embitter ourselves!"

Well there is a point - and only recently I came upon it in a conversation with someone who was struggling with letting go.  The point is that letting go requires the readiness to accept loss.  It may be the loss of resignation, when we resign ourselves to the reality that someone who owes it to us to say "I'm so sorry, you were right all along" will never say those words.  Confronting loss means that we reluctantly, even painfully swallow the truth that, as much as we deserve to, we will never, ever hear those words. Or it may be the loss of tragedy, when we give up the lingering hope that a parent who should love us unconditionally, will never stop being the critical, demanding parental figure whose will never understand what he or she continues to do to prevent our relationship from being what it should be.  In either case, having the courage to let go requires much more that choosing happiness over righteousness.  It requires a period of internal mourning of a loss - a loss of something we deserve, something we should receive, but never ever will.  I suspect this is one reason why so many people wait until after a person dies, to come to terms with what we should have reconciled years earlier when she was still alive.  Once she's gone, it is clear that we will never hear from her what we deserve to hear.

The type of letting go associated with the Yom Kippur ritual of sending the Scapegoat into the wilderness employs the Hebrew verb "Shalach" suggestive of the notion that once sent to a specific destination, that which was sent away will not again revisit us some time in the future.

Some of you may recall my telling you of a woman who came to see me the day after I first delivered this message. She described how difficult life had been for her as a single parent ever since her husband walked out on herself and their kids for a younger woman fifteen years ago.  She talked about having to work two jobs just to pay the bills, about having to tell her kids again and again that there was no money for them to be able to go to the movies.  She said to me, "You want me to forgive him for what he's done to us?" You may recall that I did encourage her to let go, not to forgive, certainly not to condone, but to let go of being defined as a bitter, wounded, resentful woman.

I recently met that woman at a social gathering and she took me aside to tell me that she had, in fact, decided to let go.  She decided that just as he had no right to live in her house, he had no right to continue living in her head.  She had decided that someone that that thoughtless and selfish didn't deserve the power to keep messing up her head and continue to define her as a rejected woman.  She told me that she had met someone and that she was getting on with her life.  We talked about how courageous an act that was. Of course it was wise. Of course, it made sense.  But it also required ‘mourning the loss' of any hope of ever getting even with her ex, of ever hearing him express remorse.  Yet she did it, because she was brave and courageous.

Religion can help us sort out messy, complex emotional problems and offer us the courage to act in our own best interest.  Rosenzweig perceived this truth and internalized an appreciation for it in his own return and later in his philosophy.

There is one last reason why I told you the story of Franz Rosenzweig's return.  It is because it is a story I am constantly telling myself.  Whenever I get up to conduct a holiday service I say to myself "What if there's a Franz Rosenzweig here tonight?  What if there's a bright, thoughtful person who wants to give Judaism one more chance before he gives up on it.  One more chance to show that's its not as vapid and superficial, or as fundamental and intellectually stultifying as he has always seen it to be.  One more chance to see if this year's holiday experience is going to go just the way it always has before.  How is he going to react?  What is he going to go away with?

If there are any Franz Rosenzweigs here tonight, I hope you leave appreciating how much our approach to religion lends meaning to life - inviting us to experience the dignity of commitment, it embraces complexity, and it offers us the courage to release that which is in our own best interest to release. These are some of the things Rosenzweig was looking for and found on that Kol Nidre night.  Having encountered a room full of Jews for whom Judaism was a ruling passion of their lives, he became one of them.  He did not become a fundamentalist - he embraced a Judaism that is accepting, wise, morally powerful, intellectually alive - one that embraces complexity, appreciates questions, and affirms life.

What can Judaism offer us in a world where religion has multiple personalities?  Of course it can offer us comfort.  Of course it can invigorate us.  Of course it can offer us hope.  Any religion worth its salt should be able to do that much.  But, even more, our Judaism can offer us meaning and courage - attachment to the grand, release from the bitter - taking hold and letting go.  May we, like Franz Rosenzweig, find among a community of Jews here at KI, the inspiration to become even more "Jews who trace our lives back to Mt. Sinai." And may we allow that fact to continue to shape our lives in the year to come.