$300.00
Two sermons for Rosh Hashanah.
Two sermons for Yom Kippur.
Sermon Overviews
Yom Hazikaron: The Life You Choose to Remember
Two people can live through the same year and emerge with two completely different stories.
Why?
Because we do not simply remember what happened to us; we choose, often unconsciously, which moments will define what happened to us.
Drawing on Daniel Kahneman’s groundbreaking distinction between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self,” this sermon explores a profound truth about the human condition:
We can experience a thousand blessings and allow one disappointment to become the story.
We can live inside a miracle and remember the bad Wi-Fi.
We can stand in an overflowing room and spend the night thinking about the one empty chair.
Rosh Hashanah, Yom HaZikaron, challenges us to reclaim the story of our lives.
Judaism does not ask us to deny the empty chair, the disappointment, or the pain.
It asks us not to allow them to erase everything else that is true.
That is why Judaism is so concerned with how things end: a meal ends with gratitude, a day with Shema, a week with Shabbat.
And this year, when Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, the Torah calls it Zichron Teruah—the remembrance of the shofar.
We may not hear the shofar, but that itself contains the message: the deepest sound is the one that remains after the sound has disappeared.
As we enter a new year, the question is not only, “What will I change?”
It is something even more intimate:
What will I choose to remember—and what story will I allow those memories to write about my life?
The Storm You Were Meant to Sail
We spend so much of life waiting.
Waiting for the crisis to pass, the family problem to resolve, the world to become less frightening, the sea to become calm—and then, we tell ourselves, we will become the people we were meant to be.
But what if we have it exactly backwards?
What if the storm is not merely interrupting our life, but forming us?
A calm sea never made a great sailor. There are strengths we discover only when we need strength, courage we discover only when we have something to fear, and depths of faith that emerge only when we cannot see what comes next.
Nearly 2,700 years ago, when Isaiah was still an unknown young man, he stood at precisely such a moment.
His world was unstable, his nation was in crisis, and he himself felt inadequate. Yet when G-d asked, “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah answered: Hineni. Here I am.
Those two words become the key to three great battles we still fight today: stop waiting for life to get easier; stop believing that everyone else must change first; and stop imagining that one ordinary person cannot possibly matter.
Through humor, unforgettable stories, and the remarkable true story of Morris Cohen—whose decision to help a stranger in a Canadian restaurant would echo decades later into one of the decisive moments of Jewish history—the sermon explores a fundamental Jewish truth:
No mitzvah ends where it begins.
We know where an act of goodness starts. We have no idea where G-d may allow it to end.
And beneath it all lies Isaiah’s extraordinary vision.
King Uzziah was dead. The earthly throne was empty. Everything that had seemed secure was suddenly uncertain.
Yet Isaiah looked higher and saw that another throne was not empty.
There is a throne above the throne.
Our lives are not accidents, our struggles are not meaningless, and the moment in which G-d has placed us may be the very moment that needs us.
Rosh Hashanah therefore asks us not only what we want from G-d in the coming year, but what G-d may be asking from us:
Hineni. Here I am. Shlacheni. Send me.
10% More Jewish:The Jewish Answer to Hate
What happens when the world makes you uncomfortable being a Jew?
Do you retreat, hide, apologize—or come home?
In 1878, a brilliant young Jewish painter named Maurycy Gottlieb was trying desperately to escape his Jewishness. Then an antisemitic attack changed him.
Instead of making him ashamed to be a Jew, it made him ashamed that he had ever tried not to be one. He returned to his people, to his soul, and ultimately painted himself back into one of the great Jewish paintings of Yom Kippur.
That is teshuvah: not merely repentance, but return. Coming home to the deepest part of who you are.
Nearly 150 years later, Jews again find themselves confronting hatred—this time from both right and left.
An extraordinary Midrashic reading of the splitting of the sea sees the waters surrounding the Jews not merely as chomah, walls, but chemah, rage: hatred on their right and hatred on their left.
Yet G-d's command was not to obsess over Pharaoh, analyze the hatred, or allow our enemies to determine the Jewish agenda.
It was two words: Go forward.
But how does a Jew go forward?
The Midrash gives a remarkable answer: Torah and tefillin. Know who you are, and live who you are.
The sermon brings that idea powerfully into the present through the extraordinary courage of Julie Kuperstein, whose son Bar was held hostage in Gaza, yet who refused to allow even a Hamas terrorist to dictate her identity or her faith.
Jewish strength is not allowing those who hate us to decide who we become.
And that leads to a striking challenge for Yom Kippur.
The answer to a world telling us to become a little less Jewish is not to become angrier or more afraid.
It is to become 10% more Jewish.
One more mitzvah. A little more Torah. A little more tzedakah. One Jewish choice we were not making yesterday.
We do not defeat antisemitism by allowing antisemites to occupy more of our minds.
We defeat its purpose by becoming more fully, proudly and joyfully who we already are.
