The Torah is Our Heart

The sounds of the shofar reverberating through the new Corwin Family Sanctuary were stirring and powerful.  Unfortunately the sound system was not working as well as it should have been.   As with any new construction, there are always a few glitches at first and as some of you sitting in the back section in the early Rosh Hashana service noticed,  it was hard to hear. The sound was appreciable better on the second day and in the b’nai mitzvah services on Shabbat. We apologize for the problem; we’re confident it will be better on Yom Kippur. Some of you had difficulty hearing my sermon which focused on “coming home” to compassion;  we are all grateful to the congregation for your compassionate response to the sound problems. The sermon is on the website if you’d like to read it.

In the sermon I shared a story:  “Not long ago, I visited with a congregant who had just had serious heart surgery.  In preparation for the surgery a social worker asked her what most frightened her about the impending operation. She responded: ‘the idea of doctors sawing open my chest.’ Then she told me that as soon as she articulated that fear, she was overwhelmed by a vision of the ark in our sanctuary. She saw the doors open, the curtains part, and her doctor’s hands reaching in and opening her heart.  That image made her feel safe…and at home."

What an extraordinary image;  the torah is our heart…the center of our communal home.

I felt that again in the family service where I talked about the mezuzah as a symbol of home. We talked about why it is always positioned on an angle: to remind us that peace in our homes requires compromise. And we talked about the words in the mezuzzah –the words of the Sh’ma that come from Torah - and how it is a promise to see the universe as ECHAD --- ONE, WHOLE, where every human being is connected to every other living being. That promise, that awareness of connection, leads to specific promises. So together we created a mezuzah by writing promises we wanted to make as individuals or families in the coming year. Among the promises families and children wrote were: “I promise…. ‘not to be mean to others and me;’ ‘to be a better friend;’  ‘to take my kids to volunteer somewhere’;  ‘not to withhold information from my husband;’ ‘to stop when my parents say so’; ‘to tell my family I love them every day’; ‘to make less trash’: ‘to not bully little kids like my friends do’: ‘to eat dinner as a family at least once a week’;  ‘to comprimise. (sic)’ 

These promises come from the heart. These promises make our homes holy places just like our new sanctuary.

G’mar chatima tova….finish with a good seal.

Rabbi Laura Geller