Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation

Yom Kippur

Shedding of Skin (Yom Kippur 2025)

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By Seth Kopald

This is the year of the Snake in Chinese astrology, the wood snake actually. The Chinese Lunar New Year began January 29th, two days after my mother died. The year of the snake is a time of personal growth, transformation, and adaptability. 

I’m curious what comes up for you when I say it’s the year of the snake. Many of us fear snakes and think they are somehow evil or malicious. I’ve always felt they got a bad rap. I think snakes are love, like any other animal. They are animals trying to survive like the rest of us. In Shamanism, related to the four directions, the snake resides in the South and guides us to shed and clear limiting beliefs. We all have seen the medical symbol of snakes coiled around a winged staff. The snake represents healing. 

Upon hearing that this is the year of the snake, I thought to myself, perhaps this is an opportunity to shed my skin and to step into a new level of being, and this year, the snake has been knocking on my door. 

For instance, I invited Rav Gav to say blessings with our family at my mothers bedside, a few days before she died. We all gathered around my mother as she moved about in a dreamlike state. I looked down and saw Rav Gav was wearing a snake bracelet, and it fit the moment as 

she explained how we were cleansing and elevating my mother’s soul. I was like, “Ok Shaman Rabbi.” 

My mom was the root of much of my suffering in life. Her own suffering made her unavailable and even vicious at times. I truly never had the mom I needed and deserved. And during Ravs ceremony, she said we were offering my mother forgiveness and forgiveness for ourselves. Everyone in the family felt what happened there, and when days later my mother died, something in me released. The preparation for shedding my skin had begun. 

Prior to my mother’s rapid decline, I started my own forgiveness process. I read a forgiveness prayer for 32 days, as instructed. I learned in that time that forgiveness is not forgetting, or making it somehow ok that someone hurt you. It’s about releasing the charge of it all. It was the charge that caused me to hurt myself through anger, resentment, and even spite. Letting all that energy go, allowed me to stand next to my mother’s dying body and hold her hand. 

Since then, this year has been a year of healing. So much so, I started to outgrow my skin. I joined many healing circles and practices, and last June I went to Oregon and gave some of my grief to the Pacific Ocean. I don’t think you need to do all that to shed old skin, but for me, it was necessary. 

Snake has followed me throughout all of this. Of course there was Rav Gav’s bracelet. When I was in Oregon I went to a Tibetan shop and bought a few things and when I got home, I found

an earring at the bottom of the bag. It was a golden snake. And just last month while I was at my cranial sacral appointment I noticed my practitioner had a new tattoo on her arm. Can you guess? A snake. I see snake imagery everywhere. Over the last month it felt like my old skin started to flake off bit by bit and just a few weeks ago, while at authentic movement I laid on the ground and wiggled my body out of my old skin. 

So what does it mean to shed your skin? Is it Tshuvah? Returning to Self? This answer came through: in Tshuvah we are shedding old versions of ourselves that block access to our light, to our soul, to our essence, to our true Self. It feels like expansion because we release what doesn’t serve us, and there is more room for me, more room for you, to shine our natural light. When we release the negative thoughts about ourselves and our negative thoughts about others: we forgive and we can expand. 

Our skin holds our current belief system of who we are. If we think we are small, our skin stays small. So, if you feel comfortable doing so, please repeat after me: 

○ I am not what my thoughts tell me I am 

○ I am not what others have said I am 

○ I am not what I assume people think I am 

When we realize this, we start to expand, and our skin begins to notice. Then, it’s time to start to shed. 

Our false beliefs about ourselves and others, our hiding, our protection, our fighting, usually come from drops of bad experiences – over and over – filling our bucket with burdens. And luckily, healing can happen drop by drop too, at your pace. As you continue to empty that bucket, there’s more room for you, and as you emerge, your skin will be ready and will naturally shed. And perhaps, on this Yom Kippur – we can start by stepping into forgiveness. 

Thus, I would like to read The Forgiveness Prayer I mentioned above for all of us. So feel free to take this in if desired. 

If there is anyone or anything that has hurt me in the past, knowingly or unknowingly, I forgive and release it. 

If I have hurt anyone or anything in the past, knowingly or unknowingly, I forgive and release it. 

If I have hurt myself in the past knowingly or unknowingly, I forgive and release it.

Source: Akashic Records Consultants International (ARCI) 

May you Return to Your Self and have a healthy and easeful year. 

Shanah Tovah

Yom Kippur Sermon – 2025/5786

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Today’s Torah reading draws us into the ritual choreography of the High Priest—the one person permitted to enter the inner sanctum and stand face-to-face with Divine power. A relationship wrapped in mystery and inaccessible to the average Israelite.

But I ask you: is such intimacy really inaccessible? And if not, is such intimacy meant to be hoarded by a select few—by only adepts and elites—hidden behind the veils of some imagined Holy of Holies?

On Yom Kippur, we are invited to draw closer to that mystery—to what is true, to what is beautiful, to what is most meaningful. Only on this day do we proclaim aloud the second line of the Shema: Baruch Shem Kevod Malchuto l’olam va’ed. The rabbis say these words are spoken only by angels. But today—we are pure enough to say them. Today, we declare that the Kavod—the Divine Radiance—infuses all creation, here and now.   Our very aliveness itself is an expression of that Divine Radiance, of the Kavod.

The invitation of teshuvah is to work with that aliveness. Not in a far-off mystical way, but in a real, tangible way – that embraces the power of life within us, the power of life that every living being carries.

The architecture of creation is full of powers:

  • A plant has the power to turn sunlight into food.
  • A flower has the power to lure a bee with its color and scent.
  • Fish have the power to breathe underwater.
  • And humans? We have the powers of imagination, language, creativity, and choice—powers that give rise to ritual, community, culture and complex expressions of civilization.

Power is a sacred capacity. And like the High Priest of old, we are entrusted to use our power with intention.  

On this day, we ask: What are our powers? How have we used them? Where have we misused them—or left them dormant? 

Asking these questions is the work of cheshbon hanefesh, the accounting of the soul.   Such work is not only about working on ourselves and becoming better people. It is about coming into our fullness. About being alive, vibrant, magnificent and beautiful.   

We become better people, when we know who we are, when we are authentic, when we are playful, when we are expansive and experimental and dare to love with all our heart, our soul and everything we’ve got.  When we dare to walk through life with holy chutzpah.  

Our tradition tells of the Lamed Vavniks—that in every generation, there are lamed vav [ל׳׳ו] 36 hidden righteous ones whose quiet merit sustains the world. They wear no priestly robes. They walk among us, unrecognized—even to themselves. They remind us that holiness is not locked in a chamber; it is carried in ordinary human lives of compassion, humility, justice and the holy chutzpah to be loving, generous and helpful as a way of being, with everyone, not reserved for our families, besties or curated social circles.  The Lamed Vavnik is fueled by love, radiates love and expresses love.   

We need to fill the world with more than 36 such individuals, don’t you think?   

Maybe hidden in the lamed vav is an even deeper message.  Maybe lamed – which contains the Hebrew root letters for “learn” and vav, which functions as a grammatical conjunction and connector, which means “and” – just maybe the combination of these two letters holds the message that we have to LEARN TO CONNECT.  All of us, not just 36 people.  

And if we do that, if we really learn to connect, we can sustain the world. We need the holy chutzpah to believe it is possible to live such a life.  To love in the face of our fears, to love in the face of our grief and pain.  

This is a year to focus on love – to radiate it with every step and every breath.  To be unashamed in expressing it.  

Let love be the measure of our power. The world is calling for it, aching for it.  We see abuses of power large and small—in our own country, in Israel, in Gaza, and in so many parts of the world. We are fatigued by endless conflict, horrified by unspeakable suffering, overwhelmed by continual waves of information and misinformation. And many of us feel powerless, even in our protesting, petitioning, and activism.  

And yet, Yom Kippur asks us to tap into the powers we do have. To go inward—not out there, on the world stage, but here—[hand on heart]—in the holy of holies of our own lives.  To have the holy chutzpah to love our neighbors, warts and all.  To have the holy chutzpah to be authentic and love ourselves, warts and all.

The task is not to have it all figured out. It is simply to begin: to step into the power entrusted to us, to align our soul with love, to let gratitude and compassion ripple outward. This is teshuvah. This is tikkun hanefesh—the repair of the soul—which makes tikkun olam—repair of the world—possible.

We are commanded to love.    This is the essence of Torah, as Hillel taught: v’ahavta l’rei’acha kamocha, “and you shall love your neighbors as you love yourself.”  The rest is commentary.  Go and learn it.  

Lamed vav – learn to connect.

To love is the biggest mitzvah of all – the spiritual, ethical and moral imperative of our time.  To root every choice in love, in compassion, in justice. Everything flows from there. It is the very heart of Torah. It is the measure of our power, that pulses through each and every one of us.  

So, I say to you today: Step into the Holy of Holies of your own being. Claim the aliveness that flows through you. Let it be shaped by love—love multiplied, love abundant. The world is waiting. The world is depending on you. And maybe—just maybe—you are the one whose hidden holiness will help sustain us.    

G’mar chatimah tovah. 

Yom Kippur Sermon 5785

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The Torah Reading on Yom Kippur discusses the instructions to Moshe and Aharon concerning the priestly service of atonement for the Children of Israel on Yom Kippur.  The reading begins with the acknowledgement of the recent death of Aharon’s two sons, Nadav and Avihu who were consumed by Divine fire, an acknowledgement that Aaron is in the early stages of mourning and likely reeling from the shock of losing two children on the same day, in the same moment, in such a shockingly dramatic way.  

In an earlier chapter, we learn that right after the dramatic deaths of Nadav and Avihu, Moshe instructs Aharon not to mourn nor be distracted from his priestly duties and reminds Aharon that his job is to distinguish between the profane and holy.   Aharon has to be impeccable regardless of his personal circumstances.

Aharon responds to Moshe’s instructions with silence – vayidom – from the root DaMaM.  Aharon said nothing.  It is interesting to note that in biblical Hebrew there is another verb with the same root letters in the same order, that means “to wail,” which points to the possibility, or even likelihood, that Aharon had to wail in silence.   

Many of us know what that feels like, especially now.  To wail in silence.

Compare Aharon’s response with Moses’s grief after losing his sister Miriam, the story of Moses hitting the rock that many of us know so well.  

The Gemara tells us that Miriam’s well had sustained the Israelites in the wilderness.  After her death, the well disappeared, and the Israelites became thirsty and complained bitterly. As a result, God commanded Moses to speak to the rock to yield its water.  But Moses couldn’t keep it together.  He does not follow God’s directions; instead, Moses insults the Israelites and calls them “disobedient rebels” and hits the rock twice with his staff.  Moses allowed his emotions to take over, which took him off his game, and for that he was severely punished and could not enter the Promised land — even after dealing with Pharoah, leading the Israelites out of Egypt, crossing the Red Sea, after receiving the Torah on Sinai, even after leading the Israelites through the desert for 40 years.

Being impeccable, remaining centered no matter what, is hard enough at the best of times, when everything is running smoothly, but when we are upset, angry and especially grieving, it seems nearly impossible.

So, what can we learn from holding these two biblical narratives together?  

One thing is that life goes on, regardless of what we’re going through.  I remember how devastated I was when my father died, and then when my mother died a few years later, I thought I couldn’t feel any worse, but I was so wrong.  I cried and cried and cried, to the point that my husband worried about me and challenged me: “Do you want to go into the grave with your mother?  Is that what you want?”  

Although his words stung, they affected me deeply.  I realized that I couldn’t stop living because my mother died, because I no longer had parents.  Yes, I loved, adored and missed them, but I realized this is my time to live.   

In Torah, we are taught to choose life – bacharta bachayim l’maan tichyeh – “choose life in order to live,” while we carry the memory of loved ones, while we carry grief.  Both personal and collective grief, and this year we know about collective grief all too well.

Let’s face it.  This past year has been a living nightmare.   And yet we are here, in this sanctuary.  That, in of itself, is an act of hope.   This is our time to do the best we can, to do teshuvah, to live and to be together and find meaning in our tradition, in our lives.  

Another thing we can learn from these two stories in Torah is that we should not be expected to be perfect. Moses who the rabbis say was the highest prophet, the most adept, in closest communication with God, had trouble keeping it together.  He is the one who loses it and hits the rock.  Yet, he instructs his brother not to mourn, to carry on and be impeccable.  Moses did not go into silence.  Frankly, Moses was a bit of a kvetch.  He would complain to God and to the Israelites.  He did not keep silent.  But his brother Aaron, the high priest, did.  Vayidom.  He wailed in silence and carried on with his holy business in impeccable detail.  But at what cost to himself?  We can only imagine.

Uvshofar gadol yitakah, v’kol k’mama daka yishama – when the great shofar is sounded, when it cries out, a small quiet voice can be heard.

As the thunder of grief is screaming in our ears, let it not stifle that small quiet voice within.  Let it not snuff out our inner spark.  Let us not go into the grave with those we have lost, because WE ARE HERE.  Hinenu.  And as we step into hinenu, let us not carry the burden of perfection, as individuals, as a community, as a country, as Jews.  It is too much to bear and it is unattainable.

As we grieve, let us make room for hope.  We can do both.  We’re here to day to do teshuvah, to try to transform, to try to forgive ourselves and others, to try to be more compassionate, interconnected human beings in the midst of this ongoing hurricane.  We’re here to try to do this sanely, with compassion, generosity and hope.  

Within the extreme polarities that are battering us day after day, my teacher, Lori Lipten, tells us that we must “learn how to live within the paradox of embodying authentic power and vulnerability; hope and despair; birth and death; love and fear; wisdom and unconsciousness; resentment and forgiveness; trust and doubt; reaction and responsiveness; distraction and presence; calm centeredness and anxious control; us and them; mine and yours.”  

As we learn to dance within these contrasts, we can touch the beauty of something far different than we believed was possible. We do not need to war with either side of these contrasts to wake up and evolve.   

Let us not allow our grief to make us cynical.  As 20th century Talmudist and Jewish philosopher Rabbi Soloveitchik wrote, “grief and lament have their place, but they cannot, must not, be given the final word.”  The artist Nick Cave puts it a bit differently.  “Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us… Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.”  

So let us be warriors for hope that is fueled by love, generosity and compassion that is not undermined by the tyranny of cynicism, the tyranny of fear, nor the tyranny of perfectionism.  

G’mar Chatima Tova – May we all be sealed for a good and fulfilling life in the coming year. May we be safe, healthy, courageous and hopeful.

Yom Kippur Workshops

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Workshop #1: Deborah Dash Moore on Mordechai Kaplan 2:00-3:10pm

Workshop #2: Niggun Circle 2:00-3:10pm

In this “workshop” we’ll be calming ourselves down by chanting melodies and prayers that focus on healing.  Interspersed in this, there will be opportunities to share what you need to.  

There’s nothing I’d rather do on a Yom Kippur afternoon (or any other time, TBH!) than sing.  If you are so inclined, please join us. – Deb K

Workshop #3: Listening through Grief in a time of Middle East upheaval: Communal Yizkor 3:15-4:25pm

This is a listening session for anyone who has experienced grief (in the largest sense) related to the Middle East over the past year and wishes to process it as a community as a step towards tikkun olam and personal Teshuva. This will be a space to listen with respect and kindness. Our intention is not to discuss policy, to engage in debate or to challenge each other’s experience but rather to deepen our sense of community. Sign-up now, if you want to reserve a spot. Please arrive on-time. We will be starting promptly.

What is Evil

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Yom Kippur Sermon 2022, Rabbi Debra Rappaport

One of my teachers in rabbinical school used to say that all rabbis have basically one sermon that they continue to give in different forms throughout their rabbinate. Of course that made me really curious about what the essence of my one sermon might be. Sometimes I think it’s some variation on “be kind” and/or “be conscious;” it’s certainly about the importance and potential of community. I also believe what Richard Bach wrote: “we teach best what we most need to learn’’ – lest you think I come in with all this figured out. I share these perspectives on my sermon writing because I do tend toward practices for wellbeing and cultivating positive traits in ourselves for the sake of the highest good for our communities and world. 

But on Yom Kippur, I find the dark side compelling. Maybe it’s the scapegoat story we just read, prodding at my psyche, wanting to know – what are those sins and what does it mean to confess them onto a goat to sacrifice to God and onto another goat to send into the wilderness? The story raises the aspect of the numinous, the aspects of forces of wickedness or evil that perhaps defy neat categories of sin and confession and the possibility of teshuvah. The trends of the past several years have also forced me to do some rethinking of my theology, that godliness is in every one of us and we just have to make good choices. Because so many humans are making bad choices – ranging from unkind to harmful to cruel. Hate-based speech and actions are on the rise; violent gun attacks on crowds and schools are on the rise; Putin’s heartless war on Ukraine is the most Euro-centric example we’ve had of stunning, inhumane cruelty inflicted on fellow human beings. There are so many more ordinary instances of human evil, including domestic violence, limiting access to voting, banning books and curriculum topics. It’s harder to be in a state of mind in which I believe these are simply differences of opinion and I believe everyone wants the highest good. 

I don’t use the word “evil” much. It seems to evoke the demonic, like there is some force, the devil out there that might get us – which I don’t really believe. Yet our tradition uses the word “evil” rasha frequently, including in today’s liturgy and Haftarah. 

Here’s my question: According to Jewish sources, is evil a force in its own right, that we can annually send away on a goat to Azazel? Or is it in each one of us, something to reckon with and integrate? What, if anything, do our sources offer to help us combat the forces of wickedness, of cruelty? It doesn’t feel like my place to tell you which places of wrongdoing or the evil of collective negligence need your attention. There are so many to choose from. But it does feel like my place to offer up Jewish sources in the hope that they can inspire you to do your part. We’ll start with some of what we encounter directly on Yom Kippur, then I’ll offer a brief survey of Jewish teachings – which have a lot to say about it! 

Specific to the High Holiday liturgy, the Unetaneh Tokef poetic prayer talks about all the ways we could die, then offers: u’teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakah (repentance, prayer, and doing justice) ma’avirin et ro’at-ha’gezerah, lessen the evil of the decree. I think this use of evil refers to our human vulnerability, or the fact of death, more than to human wickedness. Bad things just happen in the world. This is the sort of “evil” in which children develop cancer, families die in car or plane crashes, a pandemic takes millions of lives. In these instances, our clear obligation is to respond, to call upon our spiritual and material resources toward healing, loving, resilience and choosing life. Asking “why” in these moments, while a natural place for our minds to want to go, is not fruitful because we can’t know. 

In the Haftarah we just read, Isaiah 58:6-7 “No, this is the fast I desire: To unlock fetters of wickedness – rasha, And untie the cords of the yoke To let the oppressed go free; To break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, And to take the wretched poor into your home; When you see the naked, to clothe him..” Here, rasha wickedness is equated with heartlessness toward the suffering of others. 

The Biblical story that involves human evil begins with the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. When Eve and Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, childhood innocence ended. Humans were now in a world of consequences, and even more importantly a world of self-consciousness, having to take responsibility for our actions. We have access to knowledge of good and evil, to a conscience. 

Satan, or HaSatan appears in the Hebrew bible not as a devil or evil incarnation, but as an adversary. The word’s root means to obstruct or oppose. In Job, HaSatan (the Satan, not a proper name) is translated as the prosecutor. In all cases, haSatan is one of God’s servants or angels. The notion of opposition is clear, he’s more like your partner “playing devil’s advocate” than the devil himself. Facing an adversary, we are then called to recognize that that too is God, and to bring our most exemplary selves. 

The rabbis following the Torah developed the idea of wickedness within each and every one of us. They called it the yetzer-ha-ra, the evil inclination, which we can imagine sitting on one’s left shoulder arguing with the yetzer ha-tov, the good inclination on our right shoulder, like in the Capra movie. Our job is to keep the yetzer ha-ra, our wild impulses, under the yoke of the laws of Torah. 

Medieval philosopher Maimonides understood both God and God’s Created world as essentially good. He understood evil as the privation or absence of God. “Evil in comparison with good is like darkness in comparison with light. It is not the contrast between one being and another being, but between a being and its absence. …For Maimonides, to speak of good and evil as two independent entities would have been as if we offered a child a partnership: come, let us bake a bagel: you supply the flour and water and I supply the hole. This example would face us with the absurdity of comparing a void and an entity, evil and good. The hole is not something which exists in its own right. It is merely the result, and accompanying symptom, of a certain structure of the universe, which is itself good.” (Shalom Rosenberg, p. 29) In Maimonides’ worldview, human evil is the consequence of stupidity, ignorance, blindness, and irrationality – all related to the lack of knowing God. Human evil stems from distortion of our subjective lens. Unlike God, we can never see the full picture. So in this model, because evil does not exist as an independent force or power but as the absence of God, humans have the obligation to learn about the way of the world and thereby choose good. 

Some early Kabbalistic theology actually saw sitra achra – the dark side – as a force independent of God. This dualism didn’t last. The dominant theology of the mystics emerged in a story of creation in which longing for companionship inspired God to create. Only Adam Kadmon, the original creation, could not contain God’s brightness – so sparks of God scattered throughout the world, encased in klippot, shards or shells which appear to contain evil but actually contain sparks of redemption. Our work is to free the sparks of holiness from their klippot through teshuvah, and bring more holiness into the world and thus to heaven too. In other words, in every negative encounter, every place that’s difficult or where suffering is experienced, there is a spark of holiness somewhere within that, and our job is to find and free that spark. 

Zooming forward a millennium, I want to share philosopher Hannah Arendt’s observations after covering the Eichmann trial in 1961. After living through the Holocaust, arguably the most radical evil in human history, and hearing the testimony of one of its most horrific perpetrators, she came away with the understanding of evil as banal – NOT trivial, she spent the rest of her life clarifying. What she meant by describing evil as banal is that it is not deep. Here I quote her: 

“It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical’, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the 

surface. It is ‘thought-defying’ as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality’. Only the good has depth and can be radical.” (The Jewish Writings, p. 471) 

“Precisely because these criminals were not driven by the evil and murderous motives we’re familiar with – they murdered not to murder but simply as a part of their career – it seemed only too obvious to us all that we needed to demonize the catastrophe in order to find some historical meaning in it. And I admit, it is easier to bear the thought that the victim is the victim of the devil in human disguise – or as the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial put it, of a historical principle stretching from Pharoah to Haman – the victim of a metaphysical principle, rather than the victim of some average man on the street who is not even crazy or particularly evil.” (p. 487-88) 

This is chilling. The worst human evil is perpetrated when people are being shallow, unwilling or unable to connect with the depth of our interbeing. It’s happening in our world. We can blame the explosion of social media, making everything about image and ratings. We can blame reducing communications and relationships to Twitter. We can blame late stage capitalism. But all the energy we might spend blaming is wasted. 

What Hannah Arendt said most succinctly, and all of our tradition teaches, rings true to me. Evil is simply not a force that we can sacrifice to God or send away with the scapegoat, as our Torah reading described. Rather, the story invites us to think about what wiping the slate clean might entail. We need to put our energy toward responding, and each of our sources points in a direction that supports a balancing and healing response. 

Adam and Eve brought us conscious awareness. Let’s not hide from it or bury it in business. 

Isaiah reminds us to tend to the suffering of others, now! 

Interpersonally, when we’re faced with wickedness or simple frustration, we have the choice to look for and lift up the presence God or of good, the holy sparks in husks of wickedness. I recently heard a story of a cab driver whose ride didn’t come out right away. It was a poor neighborhood, and he knew his fellow drivers would have waited the obligatory two minutes and left. But he decided to give the person the benefit of the doubt. He rang the doorbell; inside was a frail elderly woman; and all the furniture was covered as if no one lived there. He helped her out to the car. She shared that she was on her way to hospice care, and didn’t have any living relatives. He ended up taking her around to the various places that had mattered in her life; and he refused to charge her anything. That is lifting up the sparks. The driver himself was nourished, by having responded with love in such a tender moment. 

Maimonides taught that we should each consider ourselves as well as all the world half meritorious and half culpable all year long. And we should believe that if we were to commit just one sin, we would incline ourselves and the entire world toward guilt and bring about destruction; and, contrarily, that if we were to fulfill just one mitzvah we would incline ourselves and the entire world toward merit and bring about salvation and redemption. Every choice, every action can have that impact. I walked in Nichols Arboretum yesterday. I witnessed the difference made by a few people’s attention to the natural environment, generations ago. The biodiversity in there was remarkable. 

The Musar movement gives tools for practicing responding well in each moment, through cultivating middot, values. Musar acknowledges that all worthwhile values exist on a continuum. In the mussar worldview, “evil” and wickedness come from an extreme at either end of a virtue continuum. For example, at one end of a continuum of humility would be excessive pride, and at the other end, excessive self-effacement. Neither extreme is in service of the highest good; evil applies when one is off-the-charts in one direction or the other – megalomania on one end, or at the other end the kind of invisibility that leads to despair or violence. Musar, while not focused on evil, understands wickedness and harm as coming out of the extremes of good qualities each one of us has. It is our soul’s work to practice moderation where we tend to the extremes. Each one of us must find our own soul curriculum within the context of each value, like humility, patience, giving the benefit of the doubt, kindness, and so on.1 

Hannah Arendt offered this: “We resist evil by not being swept away by the surface of things, by stopping ourselves and beginning to think.” she adds, “the more superficial someone is, the more likely he will be to yield to evil. An indication of such superficiality is the use of clichés, and Eichmann, God knows, was a perfect example. Each time he was tempted to think for himself, he said: Who am I to judge if all around me – that is, the atmosphere in which we unthinkingly live – think it is right to murder innocent people?” (479-80) Again, a chilling example of what can unfold if we don’t stop some of the trends happening in the public square. 

Yom Kippur is the time to reflect on what we are mindlessly doing or colluding with. What are you willing to see and respond to you that you weren’t last year? What are you willing to speak out about? Where are you willing to put your time and other resources? As we progress through this season, may we be mindful of all the little choices that make the entire world tilt toward merit. As we are called by God, let’s Choose Life! 

L’shanah tova u’metukah! 

Fasting and Nourishment

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R’ Debra Rappaport, AARC, Kol Nidre 5783 / 2022 

I’ve been wanting to write this sermon for a very long time. It’s called “Fasting & Nourishment.” I’ve always been curious about why so many Jewish people, especially those who don’t observe the letter of the Jewish law throughout the year, take the Yom Kippur fast so earnestly. Tonight I’m going to reflect on the layers of significance of a 25 hour fast on the holiest day of the year. 

In full disclosure, I don’t observe a halakhic, pure fast of abstention from all food and water; and I understand the appeal, and it’s complicated. At its best, fasting on Yom Kippur gives us the opportunity to bring increased awareness to the true nourishment we receive from all we consume, food and otherwise. I believe that bringing conscious awareness to all of what we take in is an important aspect of honoring the godliness in each one of us, created b’tzelem elohim, in God’s image. When we honor our own bodies and souls, we are able to show up for others at our best, and do our piece of tikkun olam. So here are some teachings from our tradition and some reflections for today. 

Why fast on Yom Kippur? 

Where does the custom of fasting on Yom Kippur originate? The Torah commands that all the Israelites on this day are to practice self-denial, bring a holy offering, and not do our ordinary work. (Lev. 16:29 and Lev 23:27-32) The Hebrew for self-denial is: נּוּ֣ע ַתְּ 

כםֶ֗תיֵשׁ ֽ ֹפ ְנַאת־ ֶThe root, ayin-nun-heh, became a word for fasting. Literally, though, t-annu et nafshotechem translates to “afflict or humble your body-soul.” While the Torah does not define what is meant by affliction, it makes clear that if you don’t observe the command, you are to be cut off from the community. Karet, being sent away by your community, was the worst possible punishment for our forebears: one could not live without community. The threat was significant; people would observe. 

In the rabbinic era, the early centuries of the common era, the Mishna – also known as Oral Torah – elaborates on what the Torah means by self-affliction, saying: “On Yom Kippur, the day on which there is a mitzvah by Torah law to afflict oneself, it is prohibited to engage in eating and in drinking, and in bathing, and in smearing oil on one’s body, and in wearing shoes, and in conjugal relations.” (Yoma 73b) 

But, lest we think that simply following the laws of the written and oral Torah suffice, the prophet Isaiah, in our Haftarah we’ll read tomorrow, emphatically adds a moral layer to our fast: (Isaiah 58:3-7) Isaiah rejects the idea of our fast as some self-wallowing thing we do just to appease God. God says, I will be appeased when you not only feed the hungry and share your home with those experiencing homelessness, and make sure people have clothing. God says, I will celebrate your fast when you “unlock the fetters of wickedness… and free the oppressed” According to Isaiah, our fast must be accompanied by acts of justice to be meaningful. 

Our tradition also has other examples of fasting. Some fasts are the physical demonstration of atonement, of teshuvah. Tomorrow’s afternoon Haftarah, the story of Jonah, tells of the people of Nineveh’s fast of atonement. Another biblical type of fast is in supplication, a way of showing God you’re serious and humble about your prayers; Our Purim heroine Esther demonstrates this type of fast for three days before approaching King Ahashueros on behalf of the Jewish people. 

The fast of Yom Kippur evokes all these and more. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg describes Yom Kippur’s fasting from all bodily functions as a way to come face to face with our mortality. By denying all our physical needs, we enact a death within life, in order to embrace life all the more passionately. Writer Penina Adelman articulated the beauty of the Yom Kippur fast in these words: “Praying when fasting feels the way I imagine it to be when one who is facing death prays. Priorities become as clear as a finely tuned radio. Feelings are sharp and at times as overwhelming as a tidal wave. The senses are more vivid and vibrant. I am inside the birdsong, the flower’s scent, the fallen leaf’s changing colors. How ironic that on a day when we are denying our physicality, we may experience the physical world more strongly than ever.” 

To recap so far, Jews fast on Yom Kippur because it’s commanded, and we fast to remember all those among us who don’t have enough to eat and who are afflicted by those in power taking advantage of those with less power; to speak out, to identify with the afflicted and to take action to support them. We fast to to physically enact our teshuvah, to encounter our mortality, to focus so deeply on our prayers, as these all speak to waking up from our sleepwalking through life and really embrace what we’re here for. And we fast in solidarity. 

Complicating factors/Other Aspects 

All of these traditional reasons we fast on YK are powerful, and perhaps even more relevant today. Yet there are complicating factors. 

Some of us have a medical condition in which fasting makes you sick or does harm to our bodies or our mental health. Some of us have eating disorders, in which case an association of fasting with holiness can truly be life-threatening, not life-affirming. 

Fasting is a striking act of asserting agency over our bodies. It’s a powerful spiritual practice when having agency over our eating and our bodies in general is the norm, but it has often not been the norm – for women, for people who are enslaved, for people who live in poverty. Today is a day to appreciate that our fast is a choice. 

Moreover, as a society, we are less than healthy in our eating habits and in our relationships with our bodies. While some among us have serious eating disorders, most of us have some level of disordered eating. With endless access to food, we eat when we’re bored, we eat when we’re anxious, we eat when we’re sad – often our eating is not connected with our metabolism. We eat without paying attention, while we’re driving, or at our computers. Families give mixed messages about when to eat and when not to eat: you should eat if it’s dinner time even if you’re not hungry, you shouldn’t snack even if you are hungry and so on. 

In this room, I imagine everyone has ultimate agency over your own food consumption, and yet we are all impacted and distorted by our culture and our inheritance. If we are descendents of survivors of Nazi camps or other severe trauma from deprivation, that trauma is literally in our cells, perhaps triggered by fasting. And possibly healed by leaning into our actual agency today. 

Further complicating our relationship with food, we can’t help but psychically consume messages from our consumer culture about body image, how we’re supposed to look, what we should eat, what we shouldn’t eat. Commercials entice us with foods and beverages that would make our doctors cringe. And then we add gendered layers of the messages around eating. Women’s relationships with our bodies, I believe, have suffered more than men’s for all who are alive today. Even as there are now a lot of body-positive messages that counter the thin and fit (and let’s not forget white and blond) expectations of the dominant culture, more and more men and certainly non-binary folks are suffering from body image expectations completely disconnected from their embodied experience. Feminism has taught us to honor our lived experiences, and sometimes prioritize them over the dominant culture’s dictates. 

So where does all this leave us with regard to fasting? 

My intention is to raise awareness and thus intentionality about our choices around what we consume. I feel like this fast – whether you’re literally fasting from food or practicing humility and self-denial in other ways – can focus our attention on all the little choices that contribute toward more sickness OR more wellbeing for our world. Our individual choices are like stones dropping into a lake – the ripples reach far and wide. I offer a spiritual take on our personal relationship with our bodies, and then a bit of reflection on the ripple effects. 

A couple weeks ago, I learned a Hasidic text from my teacher R’ Jonathan Slater, from Likutei Morohan, a collection of teachings from Rebbe Nachman of Bretslav, the great-grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism. “Each of us must have great compassion for our physical body, to show it every illumination and each insight that the soul attains, so that the body might know, as well, of that insight.” R’ Nachman actually uses a passage from the Yom Kippur Haftarah to support this teaching. In our passage from Isaiah, which we usually read as “don’t ignore your kinfolk’s need” The Hebrew is לּםָֽע ַת ְת ִאֹל֖￾ ֥רְשׂ ָבּ ְמ ִוּ “‘do not ignore your own flesh’ (Is. 58:7). Precisely ‘your own flesh’! Do not turn away from having compassion for your own flesh, i.e., your own body. We must have great compassion for the body, to make it transparent, so that we can inform it of all the illuminations and insights that the soul attains.” When the body attains this state of good health and feeling cared for, “it is good for the soul, as she sometimes falls from her high estate. When the body is bright and shining, the soul can raise itself up and return to her state through the body. That is, through the delight of the body the soul can remember and return to her own delights.” This interdependence of our bodies and souls rings so true for me. What I like about the teaching is that Reb Nachman suggests that we need to tend to the health of both body and soul. And when we do that, either one can return us to balance with the other. Sometimes my mind gets so caught up in ideas that I lose my connection with what is really present in the moment. Then it’s my body, a physical experience, that re-integrates my body-soul. Fasting can bring us back to connecting with our physical selves. When your stomach is literally rumbling or your head aching, it is much harder to ignore. A reminder that, not only is my body here, but my body needs attention and care. This is about recognizing that tending to our bodies is also tending to the godliness within us. 

There are so very many implications of each of our food choices – on biodiversity, on global food distribution, on waste and greenhouse gasses, on local sustainability vs corporate profits, on animal welfare, organic vs cheap, and so much more. Jonathan Safran Foer, in We Are the Weather, intimates all these implications when he writes, “We do not simply feed our bellies, and we do not simply modify our appetites in response to principles. We eat to satisfy primitive cravings, to forge and express ourselves, to realize community. We eat with our mouths and stomachs, but also with our minds and hearts. All my different identities – father, son, American New Yorker, progressive, Jew, writer, environmentalist, traveler, hedonist – are present when I eat, and so is my history.” If you’re like me, you infer various food choices from each of these markers of identity. Each of us has our own identities and communities; and each circle establishes norms of appropriate eating. Which means that each choice we make influences others’ choices. 

Foer also speaks of the even wider ripple effect of our personal food choices: “Our food choices are social contagions, always influencing others around us – supermarkets track each item sold, restaurants adjust their menus to demand, food services look at what gets thrown away, and we order ‘what she’s having.’ We eat as families, communities, generations, nations, and increasingly as a globe. Individual consumer choices can activate collective action that is generative, not paralyzing. … We couldn’t stop our eating from radiating influence even if we wanted to.” (p. 201) 

What does this day’s fast mean to you? Are there other fasts you might contemplate, like taking the day off of your device? Or off of certain apps? The day is an opportunity to bring mindfulness to all of our choices. Does this nourish? Or does it make you sick? 

My prayer in the year ahead is that we grow in compassion for our embodied selves, and for the wellbeing of our neighbors. May this Day of Atonement increase all of our awareness of what and how we consume. May we discern what is actually nourishing for our bodies in real time as living organisms. May our choices have meaningful positive impact on the healing of our earth. I won’t wish you an easy fast. Wishing you a meaningful one. May you be inscribed for good in the book of life. 

For Further Study and Action: 

● AJWS From the Sources: Texts on Social Justice; Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: Bounty and Scarcity 

● Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger ● Hazon’s Jewish discussion guide to Jonathan Safran Foer’s book We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

Yom Kippur Community Kavanot

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This Yom Kippur brought more opportunities to learn from the incredibly wise members of our congregation. There is enough wisdom and perspective within this blog post to keep you thinking all year! Mazel Tov to our Kavanot team on your incredible insights, your contributions are deeply appreciated.

Green sprout in parched earth

Al Heit , Sins Against Our Future

By Joshua Samuels

When speaking of different transgression we should atone for on Yom Kippur an important  learning from the Mishna states:

Sins between a person and Makom, Yom Kippur atones for, between two people, Yom Kippur does not offer atonement until the wronged person is made whole. (Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah Mishna yoma Het Zayin)

I have left the phrase used for God in the Hebrew form, it is a less commonly used name, and also means place in Hebrew.

This teaches us those transgressions where we have sinned against the creator can be atoned through prayer, but those against our fellow person require us to make them whole again. 

If we take the word Makom in its simple everyday meaning, we can view this as sins against our place, our world can be atoned for on Yom Kippur. Unfortunately, the havoc and destruction we are wreaking on our environment is a transgression not only against Makom, in all its meanings, but against future people who will live on this planet, against our children and our children’s children.’

From those people of the future, as yet unborn, we cannot ask for, nor obtain forgiveness for the world we leave them.

While we cannot ask for forgiveness from the people of the future, we can strive for atonement through our actions.

There are many things that I do in my everyday life, that with a bit more awareness and thought would have less of an environmental impact.

It can be succinctly summed up as consuming less and producing less waste, but behind that lies a myriad of choices.

There are many things that I do out of lack of attention, quotidian things such as

I forget my reusable bags and use plastic bags from the store

I run the garbage disposal instead of collecting the scraps for the compost heap

I make multiple trips in the car when I could consolidate with some attention and so on, the list is long.

And there are changes in habits, such as changing what I eat to eat more local food and less meat.

Many choices are a question of changing habits or opting for a bit less convenience when the cost in resources is high, but some choices are far more challenging and there are things I am not willing to give up. Travel, particularly to visit family, is not something I am ready to forego. There is value in making these choices consciously, in weighing the global cost against the personal benefit

It is at times overwhelming when we feel that the actions we take are but a drop in the ocean, but the ocean is composed of drops, many drops.

So for this Al Het I will say in Hebrew:

Al Het Shehatanu neged Atid Olamaynu

For sins against the future of our world.

So let us strive to consume less, produce less waste, live with more disorganization and imperfection. Embrace entropy, it saves energy.

Releasing What Does Not Serve Us 

By: Seth Kopald 

We have finished the days of repentance when we asked our family and friends for forgiveness for our harmful deeds throughout the year. We have cleansed our actions. Yet, perhaps there’s more. Deep in our cells, our bones, our muscles, and our energy, our ancestors have transmitted to us many things, gifts and burdens. 

Our ancestors carefully crafted life rules to live by, ones that kept them safe, free, and prosperous. Perhaps these rules include: don’t shine too brightly, don’t advertise who you are, be the best at everything no matter the cost, or be alone because we get hurt when we are in numbers. Yet, they have also given us gifts. Like, the value of learning, community, singing and dancing, questioning authority, and having personal connections with G-d. 

Kol Nidre, the namesake prayer of this service, is an aramaic prayer revoking vows made before G-d and it is a call to reconnect with our ancestors. We were born into these vows and we are called to release them, the ones that don’t serve us. We are called to make a choice – to embrace life and live it fully. In order to do that, we must release the burdens that keep us from living. 

As we uncover burdens passed down by our ancestors, perhaps you may hear voices inside saying, “we can’t let it go, or we will lose connection”, or perhaps ”These burdens help us to never forget”. From my experience, when we ask our ancestors if this is true, they tell us, “You will always remember and we will always be here, but you don’t need the pain and these restrictions to life.” They want us to be free. 

We are now moving into the Amidah, a silent prayer, and in this place there is an opening, a moment to connect with G-d and our ancestors. I want to offer you a brief mediation to free us more deeply into that experience. 

So now I invite you to notice in your body any energy, beliefs, or unnecessary rules that have been passed down to you, ones that keep you from living and being your full Self. 

Now notice the gifts that have been passed down to you. 

Now, put them in two separate piles. 

See if it is ok to release the burdens. Perhaps you can send them back to your ancestors and they can be cleansed by sending the burdens over the horizon. Perhaps you need time to decide if this is ok and you want to temporarily put the burdens in a sacred container and save them, in case you do need them. Either way, you can experience what it is like to be free, to release the vows of our ancestors that no longer serve us. You can bury them with honor, like we would an old Torah that can no longer be used. You can step into a mikvah in your mind and allow the waters of Miriam to wash them away. See what, if any of this feels right for you. 

Now, embrace the gifts, and allow your natural qualities to emerge: curiosity, calmness, compassion and courage. Let them fill you up. With those qualities and gifts, let’s enter the silent Amida together, a chance to connect with G-d, one-on-one. As you do, if it feels right, invite your ancestors to be with you as we all turn toward G-d’s essence.

How To Approach The Process of Change

By Deb Kraus

Today is a day we afflict our souls.

It’s a day where we rehearse our own death.  Where we say over and over again all the sins we could have possibly committed, even ones that wouldn’t have occurred to us, and ask God to forgive them.  We beg to be written into a book of life that most of us don’t really believe exists.  We abstain from eating, from drinking even water, from bodily pleasures, from adorning ourselves.  We spend all day in shul.

In other words, it’s a day we can really “get our self-hatred on.”

So why, out of all the holidays of the year, is Yom Kippur my favorite holiday?

Possibly because I reject most of that.

Somehow, along with the orthodoxy I was raised with [which had me worrying one year about having turned on—and then immediately off—the light in my bedroom as I went to sleep after Kol Nidre (clearly I was more afraid of my mother than I was of God)] I was also brought up with the idea that to change, you had to really hate yourself.  As a clinical psychologist with 35 years of experience, I know that I’m not the only one to have gotten that message. 


But I also know that it’s not true.  You can’t self-hate yourself into self-acceptance or change.

Instead the radical notion, the one that actually works, is that we can love ourselves into changing.  I have three ideas about how we might do that:

First, if you are here trying to become a better person, in the sense of becoming someone other than you are, please be kind and know the impossibility of that.  As Nadia Bolz-Webber, the tattoo’ed Lutheran pastor of the House of Sinners and Saints in Denver says, “we can grow in wisdom but we still fundamentally remain ourselves.”  In other words, let’s try to stop being someone else or some ideal version of ourselves, and become, instead,  the best “us’es” we can become.  It’s the Rabbi Zuzya story all over again:  when asked what his main concern was in dying, he said “God won’t judge me on why I wasn’t more like Moses.  He’ll ask me why I wasn’t more like Zuzya.”

Second, we can take a lesson from one of my more self-loathing clients, who nonetheless parents very well. He says to his toddler daughter, “there’s nothing wrong with you that you can’t fix with what’s right with you.”  I love that, and I offer it to all of us.  “There’s nothing so wrong with us that we can’t fix it with what’s right with us.”

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I know we don’t believe in the actual book of life, but in case you do, I have it on good authority (that is, a podcast) that we come into this holiday already written in.  If we believe we need to be saved on this day, know that we already have been. 

What if we took these three ideas into our day of prayer?  As we take this deep-dive look inside ourselves, cataloging all the ways we missed the mark once again this year, what if we did it with the idea that together, with a combination of God, community and ourselves, we can fix it.  And become the best versions of ourselves that we can.

As Rabbi Ora said at this point last year,

 “…it is love – the love we receive, the love we transmit – that enables us and energizes us to change. It’s not that we will be more worthy of love if we change. It’s that love – being loved, and being loving – is precisely what enables us and energizes us to undertake the holy work of teshuvah.”

She concluded with an invitation.  “Let’s start from that loving place.” 

Yom Kippur Workshops 2022

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The War in Ukraine: Empire, War, Refugees, and us with Debbie Field 1:30-3pm

Our own family histories, and Jewish history in general, have been shaped by empires and their wars of conquest. In this interactive session, we’ll learn a little about the war in
Ukraine, its impact on civilians, and the creation of refugees. We’ll make some comparisons with our own experiences as Jews, and end by considering actions we might take as individuals and as a community.

Movement Workshop with Alison Stupka. 1:30-3pm

People will gain a reconnection with their bodies during their fast.

Jonah Workshop with Rabbi Debra, 3-4:30pm

During this breakout session, we will read the book of Jonah together, and share informal discussion about its themes and why the rabbis chose such a seemingly silly story for the Yom Kippur afternoon Haftarah.

Sing and Connect with Deb Kraus, 3-4:30pm

Deb Kraus will hold space outdoors if weather permits to sing together and connect.

Introducing Debra Rappaport, AARC’s Rabbi for the High Holidays

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The Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation (AARC) is delighted to announce that Rabbi Debra Rappaport will lead our High Holiday services for the fall of 2022 (Hebrew Year 5783). 

Rabbi Debra shares this warm greeting:

“Greetings from Minneapolis! My name is Debra Rappaport, I use she/her pronouns, and I share a home overflowing with plants with my husband Bobby Zelle and our fierce funny cat Ozi. I have served two wonderful congregations for seven years each since my ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2007, one in Vail, CO and one in Minneapolis, MN. I’m really excited to be with you this High Holy Days season! Though we don’t really know each other yet, I have been moved by the way the AARC values member engagement at every level.

I’m inspired by the way the people I’ve “met” (by Zoom) are approaching the High Holy Days, with active roles for as many people as possible. And I’m really excited to meet more of you!”

A bit more info on Rabbi Debra: she is co-chair of the Minnesota Rabbinical Association and she served as co-chair of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association Bi-Annual Convention in March 2022. Before becoming a rabbi,  she had a career in sales, marketing, and change management, earning  an MBA from the Wharton School in 1990. AARC Board Co-Chair Debbie Gombert shared that after a just a few conversations, she felt connected and thrilled that we will be sharing High Holidays and partnering with Rabbi Debra this year.

In addition to leading Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services for the AARC, Rabbi Debra will also lead several workshops around the high holidays.  The first workshop will be for a Kavanot (intentions) team on Sunday, July 31. Rabbi Debra will also lead three adult education/workshops via Zoom on these Thursdays: September 15, 22 and 29th to help us get spiritually ready for the holidays. Mark your calendars!

We are at this time forming a Kavanot (intentions) team for those who would like to contribute liturgy in the form of stories, poems or intentions to the High Holiday services. Here are details from Rabbi Debra:

The first opportunity I will have to meet some of you will be a
Zoom gathering on Sunday, July 31st, 1:30-3:00 pm ET with Deb Kraus as your local host.

This gathering of what will be the Kavanot team is for folks who feel moved to write and share something during our Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur services. Everyone is welcome! 

You don’t need to know what you want to write at this point; together, we’ll start to explore the themes of the services and the questions that inspire reflection. Please RSVP to Deb at drdebkraus@gmail.com by Friday, July 29.  

Alternatively, if singing, chanting, musical prayer, and making music in general suits you better, please be in touch with Etta Heisler at ettaqueen@gmail.com.
The “Davenning team” is beginning to convene this month as well. Likewise, everyone is welcome – it’s about bringing our voices together in prayer, not about performance.

Stay tuned as more information about plans for the High Holidays 5783 will be available in future blog posts and emails. As a community, we have a lot to plan and a lot to look forward to, and we are grateful to have Rabbi Debra Rappaport as our rabbinical leader for this season.

Take Part in This Year’s Participatory High Holidays Services!

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By Deb Kraus

This year the high holidays are later in the fall:  Rosh Hashanah lands on Sunday night, Sept 25 and Monday, Sept 26, and Yom Kippur will be on Tuesday night October 4 (Kol Nidre) and Wednesday, October 5 (Yom Kippur day).  We hope you are making plans to join us for the full time, but as always you are welcome to join for any part.  This gives us lots of time to plan.

We are proud to announce that this fall we will welcome Rabbi Debra Rappaport as our High Holiday rabbi for 5783.  One of the many things she brings to us is a desire to empower us to participate broadly—through music, poetry, storytelling and of course, torah and haftarah readings.

As her partner in this endeavor, I want to include everyone in this process.  Please read below to see how you can contribute your words, your voice, your presence.  I’m dividing this into four “teams;” please respond to as many of these suit your interests and abilities:

Musical team:  We will NOT have a cantorial soloist this year.  Instead, we will divide up those cantorial pieces (Kol Nidre, Unetaney Tokef, HaMelech, Hineni, Ya’aleh, some of the Kaddishes) to those who can take these on.  We will also have a group of singers with hopefully guitar accompaniment, who can lead us in communal song (all our old favorites plus some new selections).  Let me know asap if you would like to be in the group (our own personal “davening team”!) or would like to do one of the solos.  If you want to contribute with an instrument, let us know this as well, and because I don’t know where else to put this, please know that we are always looking for shofar blowers, both for RH day and for Ne’illah at the end of YK.

This team will be meeting to practice outdoors in Ann Arbor on:

Wednesday July 20
Thursday July 28
Wednesday August 3
Thursday August 11
Wednesday August 17
Thursday August 25

Kavanot team:  We will be looking for poetry, your own or something that you already love or that you find, stories and liturgy.  The initial meeting of this team will be July 31, from 1:30 – 3:00.  Please let me know if you are interested!

Torah/haftarah team:   We will have an opening for a Torah reader for both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, so let me know if you would like dibs on one of these.  And once again, haftarah for Yom Kippur will be done by the post B mitzvah teens.  Several of these young adults have also moved on, so parents, please “voluntell” your kids to do this?

Workshop team:  Once again, there will be workshops on Yom Kippur afternoon.  If you have something that you would like to present for discussion, please let us know as soon as you can, with a blurb that explains your goals, along with what format (discussion, lecture, etc.) you plan to use.  If there is competition for these slots, we might have a survey to determine which have the most likelihood of attendance.

We will also be needing our standard High Holidays Volunteers to help set up, staff the welcome table, and schlep the Mishkan to the Unitarian Church etc. Sign up to volunteer for these volunteer spots here.

If you would like to join any of the teams mentioned above, please email Deborah Kraus!