The Stain in the Kittel

On my way home from dropping my son off at day care, I stopped to pick up my dry cleaning.  As I arrived, the woman who works at this particular dry cleaning (who always remembers who I am which always amazes me) told me that my "long white thing" came back with a stain still on it so she sent it back.  It would be back this evening. What she was talking about was my kittel, the long white garment that I wear over the High Holidays.   I said thank you and drove away, but couldn't help thinking about what an apt metaphor the stain on the kittel was.

Every High Holidays I appear exclusively in white symbolizing, among other things, my purity and spiritual cleanliness that holiday season.  What a wonderful statement it would make if I were to show up in my white kittel, but with a large noticeable stain.  As much as I would like to seem like I am entering the holidays pure and blameless, that stain is a reminder that none of us are coming before the Divine entirely pure.  All of us have stains, all of us have mistakes and flaws.  By coming before God with the stained kittel, I would be telling God that I am not blameless but instead asking God to accept me stains and all. 

I will pick up my kittel tomorrow and I am hoping that the stain will not come out.  I hope that I will be able to have the confidence and self-awareness to walk before my community and my God with a stained kittel, asking them both to accept me as I am, stains and all.

When A Sermon Won't Do

All too often, I feel frustrated by sermons and blogs.  They are cathartic for me, but then I become frustrated because as soon as the words leave my mouth or are deposited into the emails of our members they already begin to dissipate into the expanse of our all too busy lives.  I talk about something but we can't do anything about it right there and then.  Sometimes, moreover, the sermon I want to give, I can't. Whether it is because of our varied politics or simply because I can't bring myself to speak about a dead 3 year old at a family's Bar Mitzvah celebration, it simply isn't the appropriate venue. While I buy into Abraham Joshua Heschel's idea that prophets (and I'd add rabbis) are meant to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," how can I show this picture

 

and then welcome the Bar Mitzvah boy up to lead us in Musaf.  Sometimes sermons and congregational emails aren't the right place to express all that I have to say, which is why I am reclaiming this blog.  I hope that this will be a place where we can not only discuss important ideas, but also inspire meaningful action.  If we are mortified by the refugee crisis that our world is facing, perhaps the most significant since World War II, there are tangible things we can do.  So many of us cannot go on with our lives as usual having seen these photos, bringing the horrors home in gruesome ways, how can we even begin to make a dent?

The first thing we can do is look.  There was a debate in the New York Times newsroom whether to include the photos of the children washed ashore including Alan Kurdi, the 3 year old pictured above.  Was it wrong or necessary for people to see these images?  No one wants to see this picture and as much as we don't want to live in a world where atrocities like those in Syria occur, it is only by being willing to look and come to terms with that reality that will ever lead to any kind of change. As painful as this image is, we must look, we must cry, and we must acknowledge that these things are happening in our world.

The next thing we can do is learn.  Read about the refugee crises in Syria, Africa, and beyond.  Make sure that we call a refugee a refugee instead of a migrant if they are willing to risk their lives to leave the only place they had ever called home.  We can support and learn more about HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which was founded in the end of the 19th century to help Jews escape the Pogroms of Eastern Europe and now works to help all refugees who are in need, truly taking to heart the need to support all those in need for we too were oppressed and in need.

The final thing we can do is act. We can petition the White House to admit more Syrian refugees into our country using mechanisms such as https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/authorize-and-resettle-syrian-refugees-us.  If you are in Atlanta, New American Pathways (formerly RRISA) which helps refugees who are settling in Atlanta.  Under Barry Koffler's leadership, Congregation B'nai Torah collects supplies to furnish a home for a refugee family in Atlanta.  The objects being collected can be found at http://files.ctctcdn.com/305dad29001/12ed1185-ef1a-4ebe-b07d-7e3f092ecbe6.pdf with smaller items being collected at CBT and larger ones being collected at people's own homes. 

Facing such a global crisis, we can sometimes feel that there is nothing that we can do, but that is never truly the case and I am sure my list is incomplete.  What else can/should we be doing?  What projects are happening in other communities to make a change?  I would love to learn.

Shabbat Shalom