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אַשְׁרֵי יוֹשְׁבֵי בֵיתֶךָ עוֹד יְהַלְלוּךָ סֶּלָה

That’s the way we sang it here this morning, and it’s the way we sing it pretty much every Shabbat morning here.  But there are other ways of doing so.

(Demonstrate Call-and-Response Ashrey)

I have to admit, that setting sounds a little church-choir to me, but I really like it.  And it has wonderful harmonies that make it even more beautiful.

A number of years ago, I asked Nancy if she would be okay if I led Psalm 150 during these High Holiday Services כֹּל הַנְּשָׁמָה תְּהַלֵּל יָהּ הַלְלוּ־יָהּ  . . .  It’s thrilling for me to hear so many voices singing together, and the upbeat tune for me is like a little peek at the exuberant heart that Judaism can show outside its most solemn days.

If that sounds odd to you, think of the words.  כֹּל הַנְּשָׁמָה תְּהַלֵּל יָהּ הַלְלוּ־יָהּ - Every soul will praise God. 

Or these words from Psalm 96: שִׁירוּ לַיהֹוָה שִׁיר חָדָשׁ שִׁירוּ לַיהֹוָה כׇּל־הָאָרֶץ - Sing to Adonai a new song, sing to Adonai, all the earth!

Or the words with which we began: אַשְׁרֵי יוֹשְׁבֵי בֵיתֶךָ עוֹד יְהַלְלוּךָ סֶּלָה - Happy are they who dwell in Your house, they will continually praise You.  There's an exuberance in the psalms we employ in our liturgy, an exuberance that our voices need to capture.

For me, it comes down to that first word, אַשְׁרֵי - happy.  This synagogue can be many things to many people: a connection to their past, a place to gather and meet, a place to study and pray.  But in all these roles, if this synagogue is truly God’s house, it should be a happy place for all who dwell in it.

I know it is so for me.  On a Shabbat morning, there are two groups of people who come here.  There are the ones whom I first see face-to-face.  They get here before services start.  We talk and joke together while I’m getting the Meeting Owl set up downstairs and the cameras and mics working up here.  And then there are the ones whom I first see by silhouette.  They arrive after services start.  Because of  the sunlight streaming in through the front window, all I see is their silhouette as they come down the aisle. We talk and joke together later in the morning.  But whether they walk in before, during or after services, just for Torah study, every one who comes in here adds to my happiness.

And then - every once in a while to my utter delight - someone new walks in.  Maybe it’s one of you who decides to see what’s going on here on Shabbat morning.  Maybe it’s someone checking us out for the first time.  Whichever it is, the regulars pounce on him or her or them to let them know how happy we all are to have them with us.  

Is this a happy place for all these folks as well?  To be honest, I have never asked.  I’m not sure “happy” would be the first word to come to mind.  But if, by happiness, you mean something more profound than having fun - if you mean a sense of contentment, satisfaction and fulfillment - I do believe my happiness is shared by all.  Our prayers are filled with singing and sincerity.  They have an informality that is the mark of genuine closeness.  Our study sessions afterward are usually enlightening and often quite deep.  But more than that, there's a camaraderie around the table.  People genuinely care about one another, and when one of our number has been absent for a couple of weeks, folks want to know if they're all right.

There are perhaps two dozen people whom I might expect to see here on a Shabbat morning, and often our attendance can rival that of synagogues several times our size.  Of course, that's not the case every week, but this past year there was only one Shabbat when we didn’t have more than a minyan.  So though I have never asked, I feel confident in calling this a happy place on Shabbat morning, as it is for our Friday night dinners, our Sunday afternoon movies, and, I am told, for the monthly Rosh Chodesh group.

And what about on a day like today?  Because what got me thinking about אַשְׁרֵי - about happiness - was not the verse from Psalm 84 with which we began, but another passage, this one from the Mishnah.  It’s a quotation from Rabbi Akiva: אַשְׁרֵיכֶם יִשְׂרָאֵל, לִפְנֵי מִי אַתֶּם מִטַּהֲרִין, וּמִי מְטַהֵר  אֶתְכֶם, אֲבִיכֶם שֶׁבַּשָּׁמַיִם, Happy are you, Israel!  Before whom are you made pure, and who is the One who purifies you?  Your Father in heaven.

Rabbi Akiva is speaking about this day - this day when we stand purified by God and before God. 

I’m not sure how many of you think about Yom Kippur as a happy day, and yet to the rabbinic mind, it might be the happiest.  According to them, following Moses’s smashing of the first tablets of the Ten Commandments in response to the sin of the golden calf, he again ascended Mount Sinai to receive the second set on the first of the month of Elul - the time we set aside for the accounting of our souls in preparation for these high holidays.  He returned with those tablets forty days later - on Yom Kippur. Thus today is indeed the happiest of days, for on it we received atonement from God for our greatest sin, and became espoused to Him by accepting His covenant.

This is the reason behind a beautiful story in the Talmud.  There we learn that on Yom Kippur, the maidens of Jerusalem would go out into the vineyards in borrowed white dresses - borrowed so that no one too poor to afford such a dress would be put to shame - and there they would dance and call to the young men “please lift up your eyes and see whom you would choose for a wife.”  For what better day could there be to become engaged than the day God took Israel as His eternal?

But there is an even more fundamental reason why Yom Kippur is considered the happiest of days.  As I discussed on the evening of Rosh Hashanah, because Judaism is a religion of life, it is more focused on how we live our lives - that is to say, how we behave - than what we believe.  Ours is a covenant of commanded behaviors that touch all aspects of our lives - when and how we work and play, what we eat, where we live, how we make love, and yes, how we make war.   There is hardly an aspect of life that isn’t touched by Jewish commands regarding behavior.  Which means that for all but the rarest of saints, falling short of the mark is inevitable. So a means of gaining atonement is absolutely essential to living a thriving Jewish life.  Rules for atonement with regard to how we make things right with those we have wronged, and ceremonies of atonement when our failings touch our relationship with God, are essential if we are to avoid the despair that would come were we to see ourselves as sinners beyond redemption.

Which means that, for all the hunger, headache and discomfort we may impose upon ourselves, Yom Kippur should indeed be a happy day.  For on it, as Rabbi Akiva teaches us, we once again see ourselves as worthy to stand before the One who is the Source of all morality.  Finding happiness on Yom Kippur - finding a deep sense of contentment and satisfaction in its prayers, its rituals and yes, its afflictions - to me is the mark of a life lived as a sacred undertaking.

The reason I wanted to talk with you this day about happiness is that these are not happy times through which we are living.  They are, rather, scary in ways I never believed possible.  The explosion of antisemitism in the wake of Israel’s war against Hamas has left me dazed.  Even after nearly two years, I still find myself dumb-struck with incredulity when I hear that the UN is accusing Israel of genocide, or the UK is unilaterally and unconditionally recognizing a Palestinian state, or that the Spanish navy is guarding a Hamas organized publicity-stunt-of-a-flotilla led by Greta Thunberg to support those still holding 48 innocent Israelis hostage.  

But to be honest with you, it isn’t the antisemitism that scares me.  I am like Bonasera in The Godfather.  I believe in America.  I believe in the solidity of its civil institutions and in the basic goodness of the American people.  This fever through which we are passing will, I believe, eventually break.  No, what scares me is the idea that Jews will react to this explosion of  antisemitism by retreating from their Jewish identity.  This is something I could not conceive of before now.  And I think I know why.

I was born in 1963 - eighteen years after the end of World War II.  The reality of the Holocaust was just penetrating the world’s consciousness.  The Catholic Church, as part of Vatican II, was coming to terms with its own culpability in the scourge of Jew-hatred.  Israel was a new, poor country surrounded by enemies and a darling of the political left.  Perhaps my generation can be forgiven for believing that the antisemitism of quotas and restricted hotels and unspoken agreements to keep the Jews out, were a thing of the past.  After all, when I went to college almost every top school had a significant Jewish student presence.

The truth is, for most of my life, I have paid almost no price for being Jewish - not in exclusion from the things I wanted, nor in disadvantage by others knowing my identity.  Sure there was the odd antisemitic slur we have all had to endure.  But none of it amounted to a material or social impediment to me.  No path was barred to me, nor was any real stigma attached to me because I was Jewish.

Now all that has changed.  Think about it.  In a social gathering, do you identify yourself as a Jew as comfortably as you did two years ago? Are there people with whom you just won’t talk anymore?  If your kid got into Harvard or Columbia or Yale, would you let them go?  Would you even let them apply?  And what did it take to walk into this building today?  A few years ago, when I did so, I would, without a second thought, unlock the door behind me.  Not anymore. And did any of you wonder what a boss or a co-worker might think of you when they learned you were missing work to observe a Jewish holiday?

All of which is to say that, over the past two years, the cost of being Jewish has risen precipitously.  It's not what it was when I was growing up.  Back then, Judaism was just the box you checked on  the form that asked for your religion.  Now it demands so much more.  It demands that you believe that your Jewish identity actually matters.  It demands a real understanding of our values and our history as a people.  It demands that you think about what really brings you happiness, in the deepest sense of that word.  Thinking, believing and gaining understanding have never come cheap.  Now I fear that for many of us, it is too high a price to pay.  Here in America, it is very easy to just walk away. You can assimilate and be Jewish in a way that means nothing more than feeling a bump of nostalgia when you eat a bagel.  We have all watched people do it.

But for those of us here today, walking away will never be an option.  Whether or not we are observant outside this building, whether or not we even know why, our Judaism is too deeply etched into our identity for us to ever just walk away.  For us, we share the afflictions, but also the happiness of this day. “We few, we happy few.”  So let me share with you a verse of Torah that has ever intrigued me, but which I have not really understood until now: וְאַתֶּם הַדְּבֵקִים בַּיהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם חַיִּים כֻּלְּכֶם הַיּוֹם And you, the ones who hold fast to Adonai your God, are all alive today.   The verse appears in our siddurim and makhzorim as part of the Torah service.  In the Torah itself it appears as part of yet another exhortation to follow the behavior prescribed therein.  

In this precious community of ours, you are the ones of whom that verse speaks.  You - all of you - are the ones who hold fast to Adonia.  You are the ones who find happiness dwelling in this house.  And you are the ones who make this day Israel's happiest - the day we stand clean before God because we have done the hard and painful work of facing our flaws and accounting for ourselves.

You are the ones who know that, in these unhappy times, as in all times, happiness comes from holding fast to that which sustains life.  As we go out into this uncertain new year, a year in which we pray that those we love be sealed for life, I beg of you one thing: hold fast.  Hold fast.