“OPEN FOR INVENTORY”
September 10, 2004





Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana








    How many times do we go by places of business only to notice signs prominently displayed on their doorways “Closed for Inventory!”  Well if there is anything that the synagogue is not at this season of the year, as we approach our High Holy Day season and the time of the Cheshbon-ha-nefesh— the examination of the soul, is closed for inventory.  The very opposite, of course, is true.  It is the primal opportunity for us all to take a careful inventory and self-assessment of our actions, out attitudes, our ambitions, and our resolutions to do better in the year ahead. So, I thought I’d chat with you in an informal fashion for just a few minutes, because they’ll be so much preaching in these next thirty days, about being “open for inventory.”

    Some months back Joshua Hammerman, who is the spiritual leader of Temple Beth El in Stamford, Connecticut published an interesting article he titled “Ten Taboo Topics for 5764.”  This is what he said:
In a few days I’ll be standing before the nearly two thousand congregants and guests who will gather at my synagogue on Yom Kippur.  There is no more sacred and weighty task for a rabbi than to utilize wisely this annual opportunity to touch people’s souls. 

    Undoubtedly every rabbi will speak about similar matters, ranging from the timely (Israel in Iraq) to the timeless (repentance and renewal). 

But what’s more interesting than the topics all clergy share is the way we also choose not to speak about certain subjects without a single prompt from the outside.  This index of unmentionables is never sent, it is just simply understood as if handed down in some unspoken Jungian manner from place to place and generation to generation.  We never discuss The List among ourselves.  We just know.  There are certain sermons you’ll never hear.

Every few years I revisit this issue as part of my own soul-searching.  If I am to be truly honest with myself, I have to recognize that there are places in my preaching that I and most of my colleagues simply will not go (even though American Jewry could benefit immensely from a little more brutal honesty from their rabbis).  Why is that?  There are two answers.
I.

The uncomfortable response is that the uneasy relationship between many clergy and their boards leads to a dynamic that turns would-be prophets into patsies, watchdogs into high-end retailers, giants of the spirit into hawkers of mediocrity.  There is an idolatry of image over ideas, a façade of fury when all that is really coming from the pulpit is more of the same.
II.

Complicating matters, another role of the rabbi, especially on the Days of Awe, is to provide comfort.  After a year on life’s roller coaster, Jews see these days as a marker in time, a chance to regenerate one’s connection to self, family and community.  That regeneration is also part of the process of repentance and return.  No one wants to be a screaming, raging prophet at a time when people most need a compassionate touch.

I’d like to presume that the second reason is why I’ll not be dwelling on these taboo topics during my sermons.  But given the urgent needs of the moment, I feel the troubling tug of the first.  While the topics change somewhat over the years, the internal tensions they evoke remain a constant.

    And here rabbi Hammerman offers a list of some of his favorite taboo topics of this year. 

1.    “Gluttony Wears a Yarmulke: The American Bar Mitzvah Party” (Fortunately not a problem in our sane and reasonable city)
2.    The second “What if They Gave Us a Jewish State and No One Came?  The Betrayal of the State of Israel”
3.    “Why Judaism is No Better, Nor Truer, Than Any Other World Religion”
4.    “If Services are Boring, it’s Your Fault”
5.    (And remember he serves a congregation up north.) “Why the Heck Are You Wearing a Fur Coat?”
6.    “We Haven’t Got a Clue What God Wants of Us— Or Why We Are Here”
7.    “The Ludicrous Way Leaders are Chosen in Jewish Life”
8.    “Why Kosher is ‘In” and Ani-Semitism ‘Out’— Except Among Jews”

The list can be tailored to suit the taboos of each congregation Rabbi Hammerman notes.  A rabbi at a gay-lesbian synagogue, for instance, would be highly unlikely to extol the Christian Coalition for its support of Zionism, and a right-wing congregation is unlikely to hear accolades about Palestinian poetry.  High Holiday sermons were politically correct long before political correctness was invented.

As each community defines its values, each rabbi is expected never to question them, whatever they may be.  Yet the sermon has to sound challenging, or the rabbi is perceived as a leader who refuses to lead.  When a rabbi emotes from the pulpit, usually the congregant’s ideas are not so much being challenged as emphatically confirmed.  The artistry, then, is to take a pro-choice congregation and motivate it toward being more pro-choice, or to discuss the tax evasion of others without coming too close to home, and to make all that sound like leadership.  The goal is to be enlightening, informative and erudite.


Rabbi Hammerman continues—
Yet without true questioning of one’s presuppositions, there can be no authentic soul-searching.  Abraham Isaac Kook, the first chief rabbi of Israel, wrote in “The Lights of Penitence”:

As long as a person is being driven by the bad habits surrounding them, he is not so sensitive to his sins.

Breaking bad habits can be excruciating; ask any former smoker or recovering alcoholic.  If the goal really is for true repentance to occur, then the Days of Awe by definition must be uncomfortable.  The sermons can’t just sound challenging, they’ve got to be challenging.


    Well friends, it seems to me that for us to have a successful self dialogue at Temple Sinai this High Holy Days season, we need to consider some of the following subject matter.
1.    Teshuvah/Repentance Relationships
•    How am I a part of the problem in the following relationships of my life?  With my spouse/with my significant other, my children, my parents, my siblings, my friends, my co-workers.

•   How can I contribute to healing these relationships?

•    How can I act on that contribution immediately? (ought I seek a person out and ask for forgiveness, forgive their insults and slights against me)
2.    Care of My Body

•    How did I treat my body this past year?

•    What can I do to improve my health and physical conditions?
3.    Care of My Mind

 •    How did I enrich my knowledge and my mental capacity?

•    How did I increase my openness to new ideas and my tolerance for the ideas of faults of others?

4.    Care of My Soul

•    How did I care for or how did I neglect my soul during this past year?

•    What can I do to better care for my soul (prayer, religious meditation, reading, studying books, attending classes, additional reflective time)?

5.    Prayer Life

•    What is the quality of my prayer life?  Do I pray merely to get something or for answers?  Or do I seek to cultivate a relationship with God and to connect with the divinity which is in others?

•    What can I do to enrich the quality of my prayer life? (learn Hebrew, studying the meaning or the content of the prayers)



6.    Tikkun Olam/Tzedekah

•    How much of my economic resources have I given to worthy and needy pursuits?  Can I afford to give more?

•    How much of my time and efforts have I given to worthy and needy pursuits?  What more can I give?

•    What have I done to better the condition the world’s needy and impoverished in this year?

    When I have given up too easily on any one of these important areas of my spiritual and physical life, is there something I ought to be telling myself to prevent my quick retreat from the full height of my religious responsibilities?


    All for your consideration— I think that all of these are important questions for those of us who are entering the High Holy day season, and for whom the signs are already well placed at every entrance:  “Open for Inventory”
Amen