Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana
High Holy Day Sermons, 5764
Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
We love to travel, and we even enjoy reading books about
travel. Some months ago I caught up with Alan DeBotton's elegant and
entertaining hook, The Art of Travel. I was fascinated by one reviewer who
called it "the perfect antidote to those guides that tell us what to do
when we get there. The Art of Travel tries to explain why we really went in the
first place...."
At one point, Mr. DeBotton tells the story of a 19th-century
French aristocrat, the Due des Esseintes who, while reading a Dickens novel,
became uncharacteristically consumed with the desire to visit England.
He purchased Baedeker's Guide to London
and, on the eve of his departure, sat in as close to a real London
pub as France
had to offer.
Wouldn't you know it, at the last minute des Esseintes lost
his will. lie thought how wearying it would all be -- inconvenient, unfamiliar
beds, lines to stand in, uncertain climate. He left the pub, took a train back
to his French villa, and never left his home again.
And don't you know, he never came to understand the true
nature of a journey. He only knew it from books but never as an experience.
What a tragedy were we to miss out on the journeys of our lives, or, as Elite
put in "Dry Salvages," to have "had the experience but missed
the meaning." Hence. this series of sermons!
You and I take many kinds of journeys. They may be
classified as Near or Far. Near Journeys are moving or changing jobs or heading
off to college or even marriage and parenthood. Predictable? Of course! But
they each can carry an emotional wallop and our Judaism has so much that is
useful to say about change and transitions.
Every Jew is part of
a Far Journey. As members of one of the world's oldest faith families, we proudly
continue to identify ourselves and our destiny with the 4,000 year pilgrimage
of Abraham and Sarah. You and I need to ponder our place in that incredible
journey. There is incredible wisdom and strength to be drawn from it toward the
living of our own lives.
We need to explore the mysteries of our human nature, our
inclinations both noble and ignoble, our affirmation of the overarching kinship
of the human family, not to mention the riddle of our own mortality and that of
our precious dear ones - all of these are what I mean by "Far
Journeys."
I have never in 30 years of preaching been so forthcoming in
sharing the thoughts and feelings which arise in me from those journeys near
and far which have impacted my self-understanding and affected my personal
faith and Jewish identity. This is our 16th High Holy Day season together and
enormous trust and closeness exists between this rabbi and this Temple
Family, and for that I am profoundly grateful.
Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn