Twenty-five years ago today.

I had moved into the city that summer — July, August. I had left rabbinical school. Whatever I had been building had already come apart, and then the city came apart, and for a while it was hard to tell which grief was which.

In the days after, I kept going down to Union Square. I don’t know how to describe that park to anyone who was not standing in it. Candles the whole length of it. Photographs of the missing taped to everything. People praying, people arguing, people who would never have spoken to each other in their lives standing in the same circle. Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and people with no religion at all who were praying anyway because what else was there.

And I remember standing in the middle of that and thinking — and I mean this literally, this is the thought I had — the third temple is coming down out of heaven. Right here. Onto Union Square.

And then it didn’t.

Within weeks we were at war. And then we were at war again. And then we were at war for twenty years. Every single thing that park was praying for — none of it took.

Two years later I was marching against the war in Iraq, from Times Square down to the Village, and by the end of it I was screaming. People are dying. Don’t you understand that people are dying. And a police officer turned to me and said, not unkindly: we agree with you. But there is nothing you can do by shouting right now. Go home.

And I went home. And I mostly stopped.

---

Now. There is a cheap version of this sermon, where I tell you that the shouting was the problem and the quiet is the answer, and everyone feels better and goes to the oneg.

I don’t have that sermon. What I have is a question, and it is this.

Can people actually change?

Not can they mean it. We all mean it. Can anything actually move.

---

Shosh and I chose a theme for these days months ago. Kol demamah dakah — the still small voice, the sound of silence, the thin small silence, whatever you want to call it. And I will tell you honestly what I thought it was going to be about when we picked it.

I have been a meditator for a long time. So I assumed this was going to be a season about returning to your center while everything around you is chaos. Nice theme. Comfortable theme. I could have given you that one tonight.

Then I went back into the story it comes from. And the story is not comfortable at all.

It is about a man who does not get it.

His name is Elijah. He had just won the biggest fight of his life, in front of the entire country, and by the next morning nothing had changed — so he walked out into the wilderness and asked God to let him die.

And then he is asked a question. Mah lecha poh. What are you doing here.

And he answers. And then there is wind, and an earthquake, and fire, and then a thin silence — and notice, the text does not say God was in the silence. It says not in the wind. Not in the earthquake. Not in the fire. And then a thin silence. Not this, not this, not this.

And out of that silence he is asked the same question a second time.

And he gives the exact same answer.

Word for word. He has just been through the largest thing that happens to anybody in the entire book, and he does not change.

---

So that is the man we have been handed for these ten days. And set him next to everything happening in my own life and in the world, and the question sharpens. Is teshuvah really possible. And if it is, how do we actually do it. And can we be gentle with ourselves while we try.

And what I finally saw is that the answer is not in what he understands. It is in what he does next, and it is very small.

Because this is also just what happens when you sit down to meditate. You choose a place to land. Your mind leaves. You notice. You come back. And you do not punish yourself for having left.

That is shamatha. And it is also teshuvah. They are the same motion. Ratzo v’shov — running and returning.

There is a line in Pirkei Avot that it is not on you to finish the work, but neither are you free to stop. I have started translating it differently for myself. It is not on you to finish the practice. But neither are you free to not practice.

---

Tonight is the birthday of the world, and it has landed on Shabbat, which means that tomorrow morning we do not blow the shofar. So when we come to Unetaneh Tokef tomorrow, listen for what is not there. I am not going to tell you what to make of it. Just listen for it.

Creation does not run toward more effort. It runs six days and arrives at rest. The world is not finished by doing. It is finished by stopping. And the tradition says that on Shabbat we are given a second soul — neshamah yeteirah. Tomorrow we have no shofar and more soul.

I wrote a piece about all of this, and I read it a few days ago at a morning sit for the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. I would rather give it to you that way than as a lecture. It is how I am most comfortable handing something over.

It is the rest of what I have to say tonight.

Last night, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11 and on erev Rosh Hashanah, we remembered, and we welcomed a new year and a new chapter together.

Twenty-five years ago I was living in Manhattan when the towers came down. I stood in Union Square and thought: the third temple is descending out of heaven.

At the same time that America was facing disaster, I was beginning again after my own personal disaster.

I got married at twenty-four, to a woman I met on my junior year abroad in Japan. I would have gladly traded my own life for hers. I lived and breathed for her. We were one person.

We began to build our life together. While I started rabbinical school, she went to school for social work.

Then it all fell apart. My entire life that I was building — the career, and a woman I loved, and a way of looking at the world, and everything — it all came collapsing down.

I moved back into my parents’ house at twenty-six with no marriage and no career.

After three months, with some encouragement from my dad, I slowly began to live again. I woke up and I ate again.

Starting over can be a gradual process of just doing the next thing, and saying yes to an open hand offering you a meal.

I was grieving. And moving through grief is also a gradual process of doing the next thing, and saying yes to an open hand.

I found an apartment in the city. It was July of 2001. I re-enrolled in the local rabbinical school.

The first day was September 11th, 2001.

Everybody in this Torah reading is starting over

Leave it all, Abraham. And go.

That must have been hard. That is grief.

Can you imagine? He was seventy-five. He was seventy-five years old.

Abraham and Sarah’s lives are a journey of grief and starting over, each time.

He is told a great nation will come from him, and it does not come. So they figure out a new plan. And then the new plan turns around on them too, and they have to start again with different expectations.

Elijah has to do the same thing over and over. And he is still starting over every time he shows up at a bris, or a havdalah, or a seder.

Hagar is also in desperate straits, and she also learns that she can start over after doing the next thing. The simplest next thing. She drinks a glass of water. And she starts again.

We eat and drink at every shiva. That is not a bad thing. We wash our hands.

Eating and being together is the next thing after we bury someone we love. And it is not just the Jewish way. Everybody goes out to eat.

And in the immediate moment, when a tragedy happens, it is not even eating. It is just breathing. When Shosh’s father was killed, we could not eat. You cannot eat. But you have to breathe.

So sometimes it is just taking the next breath. And then the next breath. And then the next breath.

Vayishma Elohim et kol ha-na’ar — ba’asher hu sham.

In our Torah reading, God heard the voice of Ishmael (Hagar’s son), ba’asher hu sham — where he is.

Not where he was supposed to be. Not where his mother had planned for him to be. Where he is. As he is. In the middle of the worst day of his life, with nothing arranged, with nothing fixed.

That is where his voice can be heard. That is where response can happen.

Be who you are, with all that is, as it is. That is where you get met.

Be with one another as we are, and as things are. That is where something shows up.

What starting over actually looks like

Elijah does not get a vision first. He does not get an explanation, and he does not get a plan.

He gets bread. He gets water. He gets sleep. And then again — bread, water, sleep.

Then he gets up. He walks. He listens.

Eat. Sleep. Get up. Realign. Listen.

Reb Zalman taught that het — our word for sin, for missing the mark — is an archery word. You aimed, and the arrow went wide.

And the root of the word Torah is to shoot. Torah is words that aim us toward wisdom.

Which is what teshuvah is. Not repentance. Return again to who you are — to who you are now, after whatever has happened.

Our lives are not a line and they are not a circle. They are a spiral, a coil.

We come around to the same place again, and it is the same place — the same fight with your brother, the same thing you promised yourself in March, the same seat in this room. And we are at a different place on the coil.

The past is never actually gone, and yet we do not get to stop and repair it.

In the words of the weekday liturgy, every morning the world is created anew with compassion. Saying those words helps us live inside that truth. And today, on Rosh Hashanah, all of creation begins anew.

Gabriel

I want to tell you about my cousin’s son, Gabriel.

Gabriel is a pitcher. He was extraordinary in high school and extraordinary in college, and he thought he was going to be drafted. He was not drafted. He ended up in New York pitching for the Boulders, in the Frontier League. Professional baseball.

He had three bad starts. And then, just minutes after the third game, the coach called him into the office and told him he was being traded to the Valley Cats — one of the teams with the worst record in the league.

The next morning, his father Cris wrote him a letter.

He writes:

I know this kind of sucks, and I am not going to bullshit you and tell you it doesn’t. You had three starts that didn’t go the way you wanted. Then you got traded. That’s hard.

But there is something really important I want you to understand. Nothing about who you are changed in any way. You are still the same pitcher who earned the opportunity to play professional baseball. You are still a great and powerful force for good in the world.

The only thing that has changed is that you have finally encountered something you cannot immediately solve.

And honestly? That is good.

Because now you are going to find out what kind of pitcher you really are. Not when everything is working. When it isn’t.

You don’t need to prove anything to me. You don’t need to prove anything to the Boulders, or the Valley Cats, or anyone else.

Your job now is really simple. Go figure out how to get better. One pitch at a time.

This isn’t the end of your story. It’s literally the beginning of chapter two.

---

He is pitching for the Valley Cats again in the spring.

Cris wrote that letter the morning after the trade. Before any of it. Before anybody knew anything.

Words create worlds.

Nothing in Gabriel’s situation changed when he read that letter. He was still traded. The three starts were still what they were. And a different world became available to him, because somebody who loved him described the same facts differently and handed them back.

One pitch at a time is a spiritual instruction. It is also just what you do.

And this is the thing about baseball — and I say this as a Red Sox fan, which is its own form of spiritual practice and faith development.

The game is built out of starting over. Every pitch. Every at-bat. Every inning. You get another one, whether you have earned it or not.

And for some of you, none of that is a comfort

There are losses that a new year does not touch. A child. A diagnosis. A marriage.

If that is you, I am not going to stand up here and tell you this is the beginning of chapter two.

Here is what I have instead.

Do the next right thing. And then the one after it.

The angel with Elijah under the tree didn’t give him a plan, a reason, or a reframe. He told him to get up and eat. Sleep. And then, later, walk.

In November I am co-leading a grief retreat with my friend John, whose son died in the Pyrenees, hiking, at the age of twenty-seven. He is starting again by opening an opportunity for others to do so together, in community.

We are made by the coming back

We are not defined by where we missed.

Everyone misses. That is the premise of this entire season. The liturgy assumes it. The calendar is built around it.

We are defined by how we come back. And I would go further than that. We are not only defined by it. We are made by it. The coming back is where the person gets built.

Twenty-five years since 2001 have not been a straight line. For any of us.

For me, in the last ten years, I have started over five times.

Once was not our choice. When we left Colorado, where we had been building our lives as the rabbinic family of Fort Collins.

There were several attempts to restart my rabbinic career since then, before coming here to serve as your co-rabbi with Shosh. And one was my recovery — which was among the hardest and the most miraculous, learning to be with life on its own terms. And it is so much easier now than it was at the beginning.

Each start — the ones that are lasting still, and the ones that did not work — each one started with ba’asher hu sham. Where I was.

There is a children’s book called Something from Nothing. A boy has a blanket that he loves, and it wears out. And his grandfather takes it and says: I can fix it. And he makes it into a coat.

And then the coat wears out, and the grandfather makes a vest. And then a tie. And then a button. And the button gets lost — and the boy makes a story out of it.

Something from nothing. Which is exactly wrong, and I think deliberately so. Nothing in that book comes from nothing. Every single time, the new thing is cut out of the worn-out old thing.

We never start from nothing. We start from what is left of the old coat, and from the people who hand us something.

Elijah does not get it. He is asked twice and he says the same thing twice and he never changes. And the tradition does not throw him away. It sends him to every door we have — every brit, every seder, every havdalah — and his whole job, forever, is to show up at the moment a family is starting something and say: it is not over.

We end the seder with next year in Jerusalem. We do not mean a travel plan. We mean: we are not finished, and neither are you.

This morning

Unetaneh Tokef promises a great shofar. Today there was no shofar, because it is Shabbat. Let’s listen for what is missing.

Shabbat is the weekly version of what we are talking about. Once every seven days the world stops and begins again, and you do not have to earn it and you cannot speed it up. This year the birthday of the world landed on it.

So today there is no blast to wake anybody up. There is just this — a room, on the seventh day, at the start of a year, full of people who have all missed.

And that is enough to start from. It always was. It was never from nothing. It was from a sound of sheer silence.

How do you have a sound of silence? That is the paradox. The silence is no-thing. The sound is something.

What is the sound of silence? It is listening for what is there, and what is not there, and what this moment asks us to do. Whatever the moment is.

This is the question at the heart of Elijah’s story. Mah lecha po. What are you doing here? Who are you here, Elijah? What is here for you, now?

And the same question is asked of Hagar. Mah lach. What is happening to you? Given what is, who are you now?

That is what Cris asked Gabriel. Given what is, who are you now? You are the same. Take the next pitch. We are the same people, and yet we are not. We carry our mistakes, our wounds, our histories — and we have the capacity to grow.

Starting over can mean something as simple and as profound as doing the next thing. We learn from the mistakes we have made, and we try to do better. We listen for the next step.

Perhaps this is what the sound of silence asks of us. Not to become someone entirely new, but to become more fully who we are, right here, right now.

And it is not only who are you now. It is still silence. Still — as in quiet. And still — as in even now. Even after all of it, still.

And sometimes, we discover that we are not alone in that silence. We are held by the voices around us, by the possibility of healing, by the still small voice that reminds us that we can begin again.