Temple Israel

Daytona Beach, Florida

ant some advice?  Avoid Heaven before ROSH HASHANA… not the thought, but the location.  You will not believe the congestion in Heaven at this season. 

SHOFAR blowing starts thirty days in anticipation of the New Year, and everyone blows a religious cork.  All of a sudden, it seems the world wakes up and prayer calls tie up the Heavenly circuits so much… you can imagine… that Prayer Waiting lines are probably installed to handle them.

Maybe the world today is now so complex, two Heavens are needed instead of one to handle all of the administration.  Heaven A can deal with normal concerns… like the girl or boy who prays the schoolteacher will give an exam that’s a no-brainer or at least mark on a favorable curve if it’s a mind twister.

Heaven B would administer the more complex issues like… if God is good and I apply for another year with decent health and a respectable amount of income to spend, what should I do to deserve it?

For once, if ever it did cross my mind, I would not want to be God.  Oh no… and decide who shall live and who shall involuntarily “pass on”?  Oh no… determine the fate of fate itself?  What kind of an egotist would yearn to press those kinds of buttons?

Somebody has to do it though… Correction, some Source of Energy, Power, Compassion…  Let me not even begin to compare the Almighty to a person!

Think of it…  On the scary side… Somebody has to do the job of clearing out one generation to make room for the next… or there will be a glut in the population.

On the awesome side…  Somebody has to coordinate the beauty and the majesty of a universe with secrets so engaging and sights so compelling we can’t get enough of it.

On the mundane side…  Somebody has to referee our pettiness and restore sanity to a humanity that, left to its own devices, would never master the control that’s necessary…

Look how we oversmoke, overdrink, overeat, overwork, overcompete, overshout, overmurder… the one thing we don’t overdo it, seems, is overpray!  All year except once a year.

NO, I don’t want to be God…  Make all those decisions… and have to live with my conscience afterwards.

I avoid Heaven before ROSH HASHANA… the place, not the thought.  I don’t have to act like God… all I need to do is act like a human being.  It seems to get tougher every year though… So I pray for the strength as well as for another turn of the calendar!

SHANA TOVA U’METUKA…from Heske and me to you and yours…

Here’s to a year, both sweet and good! 

Rabbi Gerald B. Zelermyer

Show me a place without rules.  I will make my reservations and move there tomorrow!  Tired of rules?  Governments enforce them!  Who dreams them up, who enacts them and gets the satisfaction of regulating the rest of us with them?  Rules… you can have them!

One summer, at leisure, I am on a boat with six other passengers for a scenic ride down a river.  Captain Jim starts his routine lecture with, “Let me spell out the rules.”  Rules! 

TISHA B’AV eve, the Jewish calendar day earmarked for mourning, I am in a Hassidic SHTEIBEL.  There are fifteen women on hand, but only eight men.  We should have begun twenty minutes earlier except… there is not a MINYAN of males to authorize MA-ARIV, the night prayer, yet.  I bite my lips to keep my mouth shut.  Is this a “when in Rome” situation?  How ironic… since Rome was responsible for one TISHA B’AV (9^th of Av) in history.  Ah, well!  The house rules here are different.  Rules!

Since you and I were two-year-olds who did not bite our lips when we issued our first defiant “No” to whoever laid down the rules, we have chafed at them or appreciated them or revised them or stretched them.

No matter what we do, there are rules… for drivers, for swimmers.  Wars have rules of engagement.  How often have you fought over rules in a simple board game?  Teachers have rules.. so does the boss… so does the TORAH.  Rules!

Who invents all these rules and manages to convince us they are desirable and vital, even sacred?  Then we are told we are deficient if we break them and to abstain from food and drink and pound our breasts for AL EHT on YOM KIPPUR to compensate for all that misbehavior?  Wow… is that a deal or is it, plain talk, hypocrisy?

Then there are the unpublished rules that get us off the hook… like, after your BAR or BAT MITZVAH, don’t be serious about doing Jewish anymore.  Neil Simon, in Conversations With My Father, portrays the twelve-year-old son of a saloon keeper, preparing for his BAR MITZVAH day.  He balks at all the work in this talk-back to his Papa… “You never step inside a synagogue… why make me cram for one day: a BAR MITZVAH?  Father reacts, “DO your BAR MITZVAH and then do what I did: Quit!  That’s the rule!”

In a lifetime, without committing them to writing, you and I develop conscious rules.  We do certain things in our certain way.  If somebody suggests an adjustment in the pattern, we may feel threatened.  You never said, “This is how I have always done it and I am not going to change now, thank you?”  Oh, so you made your own rules privately supreme and will not budge come hell or high water?  Good for you!

Jewish tradition spells out 613 rules.  But only three are unbreakable in a crisis: Murder, adultery and idolatry.  All others can be suspended in an emergency.  Rules!  Sometimes we can’t live with them.  More often, we can’t live without them!

There is a legend… if all Jews in the world decide to keep all the rules of SHABBAT for two consecutive weeks, the MESSIAH will appear.  Is that a safe bet because we bank on not living up to the rules?  Or is it a heart flutter we hope will govern our better natures?

The truth is: you and I get to decide what will rule in 2008.  That’s right: rules!

Temple Israel, Daytona Beach, FL. © 2006