I've titled these remarks "Continuing the Journey," because for all that may or may not be brand new and innovative about the approaching new year, you and I will not be. We will bring our flawed and familiar selves to worship.

Our hands are calloused by life. Sometimes our morals and values have been tried, and yes, there have been occasions when we have failed the test. Our sense of wholeness has often been sustained by astounding good fortune and beneficence, but sometimes we have also fallen victim to bitter disappointment and disillusionment, and we have been hurt and bruised.

So our journey is not a new one, but a continuing one.  Our shine and patina of newness are rubbed off.  We are mostly whole, but still evidence upon our souls some "wear and tear" as we arrive at this margin of time where old and new year are seamed together.

The Prophets of our people -- Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, Micah, about whom we'll have much more to say throughout these High Holy Days --  I sense that they would want to send us off this Selichot evening with three general admonishments by which to wise us up as we continue the journey of our lives.

The first of these admonishments centers on a major preoccupation shared by all of Judaism's Prophets: our moral standards of behavior.  "For God's sake and yours, we must try our very best in the new year ahead to raise the standards!"  The Prophets would urge us to do so.

In the movie Grand Canyon, a wealthy attorney's expensive car stalls in a crime-ridden urban neighborhood.  The fellow calls for a tow truck, but before it arrives, five street toughs surround him, threaten his life, and brazenly prepare to steal his car right before his eyes.  Not a moment too soon, the tow truck shows up and the driver begins to hook up the car.  The thugs protest: "their bro" is intent on taking away their free meal. With lug wrench in hand, the driver proceeds to give this group an introduction in metaphysics. "Man," he says,

the world ain't supposed to work like this.  I'm supposed to be able to do my job without asking you if I can and that dude is supposed to be able to wait without you ripping him off.  Everything's supposed to be different than what it is.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan has given us this descriptive but depressing analysis of our society: "defining deviancy down."  With that he intends to underscore how what we are doing today is cowardly redefining "moral" and "morality" to fit what we are doing anyway; in other words, you first shoot the moral arrow, and then draw the bull's eye around it wherever it lands.

Look at our society's seeming acceptance of foul language, the vulgarization of manners, the obscenities which sometimes masquerade as "art."  Says historian Arnold Toynbee,

Today, my dear friends the underclass defines what the upperclass is to copy.  Underclass behavior, slang, modes of dress, tastes in music become the norm for the upper class to adopt, placate, and literally fear to challenge.  Codes of honor, personal integrity and old-fashioned manners are increasingly replaced by ethical relativism, and by a values vacuum which seemingly invites, "Take what you want, gloat when you win, despise common courtesy as weakness, and do unto others before they do unto you."

Yes, I know for a certainty, that the Prophets would insist that we do all in our power to raise the standards. But that's not all.

These great and perceptive individuals would also proceed to remind us in no uncertain terms that actions speak louder than words and that mere lip service to high ideals will get us nowhere. We have to actually remove the dirt from our own lives.

I haven't yet seen it for myself; many of you have; they began building it on August 9, 1173 -- I speak of the Tower of Pisa. No one intended it to lean, of course, but it did, and it still does, teetering on the edge of disaster for 800 years now.

The latest computer models have confirmed that this 32 million pounds of marble was headed for a fall-- sooner than later.  So a committee of engineers and scientists recently set about to save this tourist site, and now, centimeter, by centimeter, the Tower of Pisa is actually moving in the right direction.  Do you know how they are accomplishing it?

The engineers are removing bits of clay from beneath that tower through long, thin pipes, about one or two shovelfuls every day.  By removing these small amounts of dirt from the right places, the Tower is now tilting back toward stability, and yet, of course, it will still lean just enough to maintain its novelty!

Perhaps the Prophets would tell us, "Don't you think the time is right to run a soil-and-soul analysis on yourselves?  Aren't we overdue for a candid and honest check-up on the foundations upon which our own lives are founded and built?"  God told Amos to hold out a plumb line over a crooked wall, cautioning his people that corruption, individual, every bit as much as collective, would ultimately lead to their downfall and to catastrophe.  If the wall is out of plumb -- that is, if it is built on an illusion of stability and propriety -- it is doomed to collapse.

So at this season we search our hearts and earnestly attempt to remove the dirt, the unworthy, the posturing and the appearances of virtue, and in that way summon the courage to right our spirits, so we may honorably stand before our Creator and before one another.

A New Yorker magazine cartoon depicts a man kneeling at his bed in nighttime prayer, face up to the heavens, as he ill-temperedly says to God, " I asked You in the nicest possible way to make me a better person, but apparently You couldn't be bothered."

Well, our Judaism insists that the initiation of such self-improvement is a "do-it-yourself" proposition.  But having started the process, the Rabbis teach us, God will always help us to succeed.

Raise the standards. Remove that dirt. And finally, we must believe the heart.  Don't you think that some of life's deepest insights and truths surely lie beyond our reason and our intellect?  I mean, not a one of those Prophets would have answered God's calls if they had been only bottom line and rational thinkers. Amos would have remained a pruner of sycamore trees. Ezekiel's vision of the valley of the dry bones would never have imagined those bones coming back to life.  Isaiah would have glimpsed no vision of God's throne with the seraphim calling out, one to the other, "Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh-Holy, Holy, Holy."  Sheer rationalists do not hear calls to prophethood; they build up their 401Ks.

So, as we ponder the big questions of life during these High Holy Days-

Who are we meant to be?

What do our lives really mean?

Where can we make a difference?

What do we when we do what we do?

How do we begin again?

What is love?

What do we mean by eternal life?

Says the poet George Santayana-

O world, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.

. . . Bid then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the moral heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

I wonder if you've heard of the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach -- folksinger, storyteller, charismatic?  Shlomo Carlebach traveled everywhere -- here, Israel, the Soviet Union, Europe, Australia -- you name it, he was there.  Shlomo Carlebach is a guru of sorts for the emerging Jewish renewal movement, and once he told a story of a Shabbat spent as the guest of a small community of survivors of the Holocaust in their reconstructed shul in post-war Europe.  Here is how Rabbi Carlebach told the story:

To my dismay, the hazzan, the cantor, proved to be someone with a feeble, timorous voice and I could hardly distinguish his niggunim from empty murmurs. Worse still, his pronunciation of the Hebrew text was dreadful.

Rather than shame the man publicly, I concealed my annoyance. . . . Noticing how certain worshipers grasped the cantor's arms and guided him along toward the Bimah, I asked one of them the reason. . .

Can't you see that the man is blind. For many years he was the chief cantor of. . .Lemberg. When he conducted services there, his voice was as powerful as a lion's roar: it shook the very pillars of the synagogue and penetrated the heart of every worshiper.

Then the accursed Nazis laid siege. . . . The Lemberg Jews gathered around their hazzan, who chanted verses from the Psalms, but. . . Nazi thugs waded into the crowd, grabbed hold of him, and proceeded to beat him unmercifully.

They dispatched him to Auschwitz, where he lost his sight and had to endure forms of torture I prefer not to mention.

By the grace of God, however, he managed to survive the death camp and it is now our privilege to have him pray for us here. These terrible ordeals robbed the cantor of his voice and diction, but we are sure there's no one better qualified to lead our services, pouring out the anguish and supplication of Israel before the Throne of Glory.

Overwhelmed by my sense of guilt and shame, I waited for the old hazzan to carry the. . . Torah back to the Ark. Then, instead of kissing the sacred scroll, I kissed his saintly hands.

You see, the Prophets would urge us to believe the heart, and apply and practice some tender love along the way. Raise the Standards.  Remove the Dirt.  Believe the Heart. Here, then, are a few insights into how you and I might be able to immerse our lives with a dose of "Prophetable Living" as, on this Selichot eve, we go about "Continuing the Journey."