My dear friends and gentle hearts,

As is our custom, it was earlier announced that we would be focusing our High Holy Day Thoughts on the theme: "LIVING THE PROPHETABLE LIFE." That's "Prophetable," spelled "phet"-a word play, of course.

The thrust of my intended message was that these Prophets of God (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Amos, Micah), these people who, in a miraculous moment of human history, gave birth 29 centuries ago to Prophetic Religion by their timeless insights and penetrating truths, still offer precious guidance to our world, our society, and each one of us for the worthy living of our lives.

And then came last Tuesday: "Darkest Day," as The Times-Picayune dubbed it. And it was! Our lives have been rocked as our eyes have witnessed scenes so surreal as to rival the most sophisticated of Hollywood's special effects. Only this was no product of computer graphics.

The agony we have witnessed has defied the mind to absorb and accept it. And so we have sat for hours and hours in front of our televisions, hardly able to avert our eyes, trying somehow to understand how it could be so.

Much which seemed so solid and forever has been shaken. We are not the same people, the same nation, the same world-nor will we ever be.

And now at this Holy Season, amidst all of our grief over this murderous violence and needless suffering of the innocent, more than ever do those values, lessons, and admonitions of our Judaism's Prophets need to be heralded within these walls and within our hearts.

Make no mistake. Our Jewish Prophets were no mental cases, con men, or religious kooks. They were called by God to be God's messengers, and believe me, they weren't looking for such grief. Isaiah was a Jerusalem Yuppie in a BMW chariot, Amos and Micah were agrarians and herdsmen, Hosea was preoccupied with a failing marriage, Jonah had a tendency toward sea sickness. And Jeremiah was already unpopular.

Mind you, the Prophets were instructed by God to inveigh against power gone insane and leadership gone corrupt. As we shall see, these Prophets condemned violence, human greed, and pious hypocrisy. And they prophesied impending punishment for their own fellow Jews every bit as much as the pagan nations. All are subject to God's laws and justice and mercy. And so the prophets correctly predicted our own defeat and exile in 721 BCE and 586 BCE. Do you know that two-thirds of our Hebrew Scriptures were written during our Exile in Babylonia?

The prophets taught us that Exile is a miserable part of life, but that sooner or later, there will always be a Homecoming. Did you hear that? From Exile to Homecoming! The experience of exile, collective or individual, is a major theme addressed by our Prophets.

Their defeat by tyrants and the traumatic dislocation which our ancestors suffered must surely have summoned within them much of the same dread, and despair, insecurity, confusion, and severe loneliness which people are feeling all over America right now. Let's face it: last Tuesday's terrorist attacks did not invent loneliness. Many of us suffered from that fiercesome malady well before Tuesday. Loneliness is an Exile. Thoreau was right: city life can be described as " a million people being lonely together."

To be in Exile is also to feel confused, bereft of comfort, attachment, and hope, and it has nothing to do with how impressive your stock portfolio is. Says City Bank: "Don't wait until someone says, 'Your money or your life,' to remember that they are two separate things."  And haven't we been reminded of that these past few days?

We Americans feel the cold winds of "Exile" and we're not at all used to it. Our sense of power and control has been suddenly and violently challenged. We have been violated. And, with continuing threats of terrorism and the promise of serious new limitations placed upon our casual attitudes toward safety and movement of travel, we find ourselves wondering, more and more, "What's next?" Upon what certainty is a life to be built any longer? "What's next?"

Well, dear ones, on this Rosh HaShanah Evening I have these suggestions, three strategies toward bringing us from this Exile to Homecoming. And the first one is Find the Other, because self-absorption poisons life.

I want to talk with you for just for a moment about our dialogue between the generations. We Jews are so proud to say, "L'Dor Vador," "Generation to Generation"-and then we ignore one another. We fail to listen. We can be so preoccupied!

I was reading where a Gallup survey of 1,400 adults reports how we "grown-ups" are overwhelmingly tongue-tied and find ourselves unable to speak with our own teenaged children about personal values, charitable giving, sexuality, and finances. And do you know why? Because we are afraid of being found out that we fail to practice what we preach. So, instead, sometimes silence and benign neglect obtain between the generations. And that is a tragedy. For a sense of loneliness and frustration sets in. These children have rooms full of stuff, but the stuff of life isn't stuff! The stuff of life is connection.

You see what lesson presents itself? Exile is overcome by reaching for and finding the other! And we mustn't let our insecurities or our foolish pride cut ourselves off from those older or younger than we. We're all the same, just at different stages of the journey: Listen to these impassioned words, titled "Written by an Old Crabby Woman":

What do you see, nurse, what do you see?
Are you thinking, when you are looking at me,
A crabby old woman, not very wise,
Uncertain of habit, with far away eyes...
I'll tell you who I am, nurse, as I sit here so still,
As I do your bidding, as I eat at your will.

I'm a small child of ten, ...A young girl of 16...
A Bride soon at 20 my heart gives a leap...
At 25 now I have young of my own...
At 40 my young sons have grown and gone,
But my man's beside me to see I don't mourn...
Dark days are upon me, my husband is dead;
I look to the future, I shudder with dread, ...
I'm an old woman now and nature is cruel,
'Tis her jest to make old age look like a fool...
But inside this old carcass a young girl still dwells,
And now and again my battered heart swells...
I think of the years gone too fast,
And accept the stark fact that nothing can last.

So open your eyes, nurse, open and see.
Not a crabby old woman,
Look closer - see me!

Someone told me just the other day about their mother and her friends down in Florida somewhere. And they were each complaining -

Said one, "My arms are so weak now."

Another agreed. "Yes, I know. It's my cataracts that make my crazy."

"I can't even turn my head because of the arthritis," said a third.

To which still another added, "It's those blood pressure pills that make me dizzy."

And an old man added, "I guess it's the price we pay for getting old."

To which, after a brief silence, still another woman added, "It's not all that bad. At least we can still drive!"

In "Finding the Other," it needs to go both ways. The young must see and respect the dignity of the older. But the older need to know that life's not always a picnic for the younger either.

David Hays is a world-renowned theatrical designer, founder of the National Theatre of the Deaf, father of two grown children - but he never became a Bar Mitzvah. So, living in a rural small town in Connecticut where his options were limited, he joined a beginner class of 12-year-olds and learned more than he ever imagined at their side. The result was a humorous, but often poignant journal, titled: Today I Am A Boy.  Listen as 66-year-old David Hays reflects on the trials and turmoil of those 12-year-olds with whom he studies the aleph bet.

No elixir salesman could lure me back to the pain of youth that now surrounds me... Thick armor is needed at their age: they bear what they rightly perceive as insulting criticism, sarcasm sometimes, from their teachers; they lose fights, verbal and physical, in the school yards; they are jeered... by schoolmates: they suffer overheard whispers that they are ugly, creepy.

...They are supposed to be serene at supper, and, asked how the day went, they say "Fine," and leave it at that.... Then they are instructed to do homework; then there's piano practice: half of them go to bed terrified their bosom will never grow... the other half worries that when the first half does indeed grow bosoms, they'll be left behind and insecure with their late changes, and they sense that they will be alone for the passage.... Bonding with my classmates to the small extent that I can, I feel distant vibrations of pain that are almost unbearable.

The Prophet Elijah speaks of the day when "the hearts of the parents will be united with the hearts of their children. And the hearts of the children with their parents" - even when they are old. And that's the way it should and must be. So that's the first thing in escaping our Exile of loneliness and alienation-Find the other!
 

Here's the second. I want to speak to those lonely husbands and wives who, though, living together under one roof, might not even be aware that they are in separate exile. A man arrives home from work. His wife, herself just arriving home. One or the other or both are then pelted with not a loving embrace of "Welcome home, Honey," but a machine gun inquiry of "Did ya?  Did ya?  Did ya do that?"

You see, we trade passion for function, and it's a rotten trade! Somehow, by punctuating our reunion at the end of a day with "Did ya," we're weighing one another's value by how much the other got done.  Says Noah ben Shea:

Almost all of us have stood under a night's sky and asked, "Where is our Juliet? Where is our Romeo?" But Romeo never stood below Juliet's balcony and whispered, 'Yo Juliet, did ya call the plumber?'

So cool it, won't you, with all this 'Did ya''!  Husbands and wives, lovers young and older.

George Eliot used to say:  "It's never too late to be what you might have been."
 

And finally, here's the bottom line. And after this week it's all the more obvious. We will live and manage and even thrive under most every circumstance and amidst life's uncertainties in this New Year and every other we are blessed to greet, once we know in our hearts and in our souls the answer to these two questions: "Whose are we?" and "Whom do we love?" Do you know those answers?

Some months back I shared with a few of you some powerful words which my good friend Reverend Morgan Roberts told his congregation one Sunday at the Shadyside Church in Pittsburgh, PA. I happened to be present on that morning and I'll never forget how he spoke of our earnest desires to escape our loneliness and our troubles in this world in which we are so often buffeted by uncertainty and confusion and left to wonder what's next. It's been 20 years since I heard that sermon and in some ways, I've never stopped hearing it.

Now don't daydream in the balcony, because we all need to hear these words, if our Exile, our loneliness, and our uncertainty are ever to be overcome. Morgan told us:

Six years ago this week, our David's dear boxer, Winston, died of cancer...Still, his memory is kept alive by the very active presence of his nephew, Churchill, who is my constant companion, and who sat at my feet as I wrote this sermon.

...Churchill is unceasingly at my side. He waits outside the glass door of the shower when I bathe. He exists to be in my presence. This does not mean that he understands what is going on in my mind, or why I leave him to go to work, or why I feed him in a certain way or take him for a walk at one time and not at another.

As with God and man, so it is with man and dog: my ways are higher than his ways, and my thoughts are beyond the reach of his thoughts.

Still, he probably thinks that I exist for the sole purpose of caring for him and spending time with him, just as I often think that God's principle business is that of listening to me and taking care of me.

Churchill has no answers about why I let certain things happen to him. I am sure he cannot understand why I let the veterinarian stick needles in him. Still, he jumps in the car with enthusiasm when I invite him to make that annual trip for the needle sticking.

He does not know it, but someday I will have to take him to the vet for the last time. He will not know what is happening to him, nor why it is happening. He lives without answers. However, his is the bliss of the eternal now, and on that last day, he will drive to the vet's knowing what he has always known: he knows whose dog he is, and he knows whom he loves.

Creatures who know that can live without answers -- without having to ask, 'What's next?'

So here we go-it's 5762-the New Year: Find the Other! Forget the "Did ya?" And be able to answer those two questions: Whose Are You? and Whom Do You Love?

LIVING THE PROPHETABLE LIFE-

Three Steps From Exile to Homecoming.