"JOURNEYS NEAR AND FAR"
Part One

"GOODBYE, GLEN BURNIE:
OUR JOURNEYS THROUGH TIME"

Rosh HaShanah Eve 5764

September 26, 2003






Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana



My dear friends and gentle hearts,

Perhaps no one underscores the flight of life with more precision than Thornton Wilder's "Emily" in Our Town. Remember when Emily is granted her fondest wish to return to earth from heaven to revisit any day of her life. But what happens? She's overwhelmed:

I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. . . . Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anyone to realize you! Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?

To which Simon Stimson, who makes his home, too, in Grovers Corner's Cemetery, replies to the distraught Emily:

Now you know. That's what it was to be alive. . . . To spend and waste time as though you had a million years.


So my friends, here's what I propose. Let's flag ourselves down for a few minutes here tonight and ask ourselves :
To where am I racing and how shall I worthily live my life?
Remember that wonderful poem by Rabbi Alvin Fine?

Birth is a beginning
And death a destination,
But life is a journey,
A going, a growing from stage to stage.


How better to conceive of this life of ours than as a sacred Journey? What is our role here on earth if not as pilgrims in search? So fair warning, that will be my theme in variations throughout these High Holy Days we shall spend together: "Journeys Near and Far."

Just like our ancestors, the Hebrews, you and I lead lives of constant transit, Journeys Near as I call them, which, though perhaps predictable, still challenge. And we're each also engaged in the Far Journey -the existential search to stake out our place in the mysteries of our faith, our deepest values, and the riddle of our mortality. The "What's it all mean?" issues.

Here are some more examples.

A Journey Far: We're Jews searching for that special and unique way to link our souls to all of the Jewish past and to live in faithfulness with what that entails for the future.

Another Example of A Journey Far: Living a life of righteousness and worthiness. That first century scholar, Rav Yochanon, with his legend of the three great books open in heaven on the Rosh Hashanah evening, provides us with a Far Journey: we want life, and by the setting of the sun on Yom Kippur, we want to do all in our power to have our names inscribed in that Book for life.

How about A Few Journeys Near-There are some of us who have just decided to change jobs. Some have finally gotten a job. There are some who turned down new jobs, choosing to sit tight and stay put.

There are some here tonight who have recently decided to separate or divorce. Others are here who wish they had the nerve to do so.

And, thank God, there are also many wide-eyed, absolutely cute newlyweds and the happily-ever-after-weds, of 25-30-40-50-Plus Years, and the "we'll just live together and let's see what happens" couples, and individuals who have decided to "come out," they are courageous too.

Here are some other Journeys Near:
Intermarried couples who are creatively and lovingly determined to make a Jewish home which also honors their non-Jewish family and some of its traditions.

And we have college students here full of those raging hormones who are wondering how this campus life and academic routine are going to work out for them. Some of them are away from home intent on reinventing themselves. "Good-bye dork, hello cool me."

Let's end our incomplete list with a Far and Near Journey.
Some of us are here tonight with our dreams for the future in hand. We're the people with the plan for today and for 20 years hence.

Others of us are sitting here wondering whatever became of our dream and why we even showed up here tonight. I can help you with that one: you came because you are a pilgrim, and deep down you know it.

I don't remember if it was Celebrity or Royal Carribean, but a man fell overboard during a recent storm. Imagine the horror! The ship's captain shouted through his megaphone.

We're trying to save you, but cannot locate you. Tell us your position.
To which the hapless man shouted back:
I'm the senior president of a bank, a very big bank!

As Pilgrims we need to understand that our lives amount to so much more than what we do or how we make our living. Let's forget the ego-artifice on this holy night as we consider the Journey and its meaning.

Talk about "Journeys Near and Far," 5763 was far from my favorite year. I'll tell you why. By last fall it was painfully clear that my 88-year-old mom could no longer live alone as she had for the seven years since my father's death. She had been taking care of our wonderful 65-year-old, four bedroom colonial house-the only house our family had ever known. But now, all of her friends were gone or were themselves sick, and there was no one to take care of her. So we moved Mom here to New Orleans in the Poydras Home where she receives fabulous care, but the house in Glen Burnie would need to be sold, houses left empty never do very well.

It was clear that I had to make one last trip home in order to remove my personal belongings. In November I did just that, given a Rabbi's terrible schedule, I had only 18 hours to say goodbye to Glen Burnie.

I share this with you tonight because if you haven't yet had to make this emotionally wrenching "Journey Through Time," some day, because of similar circumstances, you probably will.

My brother's schedule was such that I was going to have to do my part all alone. Now here was all this stuff collected in my childhood bedroom which my parents had kept as a shrine to me-from birth (baby shoes) all the way through every year of school, marriage, every congregation served and of course, parenthood.

The attic was filled with my high school yearbooks and boxes of college textbooks and letters.

In the basement there were Club Scout Awards and soapbox derby trophies and any number of mementos of my past childhood years. The walls throughout presented framed reflections of my every year of aging. I spent a last night in that house-sleeplessly asking myself just what did I learn there? What, of all the living that had transpired under that roof, remained with me as life's basic truths?"

I.-Be Cautious of Conformism

Let me explain to you that our house was Glen Burnie's only Jewish home for most of those 65 years. The very thought of taking down that mezzuzah and closing the door for the last time was heartbreaking. I must have schlepped over 30 huge bags of discarded memorabilia to the curb. Keep this! Toss that! Tag this-some furniture, china, crystal, family tree, photo albums, etc. were to be picked up by the moving company and brought to New Orleans to save for our girls. But most would have to be thrown away.

Good-bye Glen Burnie and this house where, regardless of the fact that virtually everyone else around us was not Jewish, we proudly kept our Jewish traditions: Kosher meat market, Shabbat, holy day, life cycle-happy and sad. Yes, that's a lesson I learned and took with me from this house.

Here I learned the limits of conformism. I was taught the proud joy of not being like everyone else and how crucial it is that sometimes one remain out of school when everyone was in, that occasionally we eat foods that others don't even know about, and we delighted in our holidays even if we were the only ones in Glen Burnie celebrating them. Bringing my friends to temple in Baltimore was always a great joy for me, they had no idea what to expect

Here in Glen Burnie I had learned how conformism is so overrated. Being different by religion in the 1950s and early 60s, long before McDonald's began selling bagels, empowered me to learn to hold suspect the so-called "normal." Normal people can sometimes join together to do horrible things: witness Weimar Germany and the rise of the Klan in 1920s in rural Indiana where "normal" people sought to preserve their "normal" world.

Harvard minister Peter Gomes once asked a question which still haunts me:

Can you think of a "normal" heroic person in history? . . . Try to. . . name a "normal" person who has done something great and worthy of remembrance, and who was not at one time or another thought to be mad or crazy.

Growing up the only Jewish kid in my school, somehow Glen Burnie taught me a lesson perhaps our young students here tonight need to consider. The temptation is so great you know to conform, to be ordinary, normal, and just like the next fellow in every way, lest the fraternity or sorority or dorm in-crowd declare you crazy weird and different.

My God, I drive down Broadway and notice how, poor things, you all seem to look, dress, act and sound exactly alike. Break out of conformism! Wear a pair of socks. Become the person God dreamt you to be.

The song I came to sing [despairs the poet]
remains unsung to this day.
I have spent my days in stringing
and in unstringing my instrument.
That's the tragedy of conformity.


A friend called me from Boston some weeks ago, and reported how he'd spotted some philosophic urban graffiti on a downtown overpass. Only in Boston is graffiti philosophic! Scrawled in paint was:

Live to the point of tears.

In other words, put yourself on the line! Invest with passion! Commit! And those who so live, become! They do not conform.


II.-Embrace the Challenge of Change

Now, please don't think for a moment that I'm advocating anything here on this Rosh HaShanah Eve akin to a stubborn refusal to change. If the hunger to conform is an affliction of the young, surely resistance to change is the plague of the aging. When do we sense its onset? Are we 40, 50-certainly by the time we're 55! The hesitant acknowledgment of change was at the very essence of those 18 hours I spent in Glen Burnie, wasn't it?

Life does not permit us to freeze precious moments, to hold on to what we now have and love and cherish. But I've come to understand all the more, since that last trip home, that change we must, and we ought not despair-but learn. For, as a street vendor's T-shirt made so abundantly clear a few years back when the film Titanic was all the rage: "It sank. Get over it." I take comfort, nevertheless, in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes' insistence:

Where we love is home -- home that our feet
may leave, but not our hearts.

In all honesty, I knew deep down, as I waved good-bye to my parents and brother as they stood on the steps of the Glen Burnie house on that fall day in 1966 as I left for college, that my life would never ever be the same. I left that familiar home only to return to it many times, but somehow more as a visitor than a resident. The art of living inevitably comes down to the ability to relinquish. Listen: We define who we are by what we take and what we leave behind.

A rabbi friend of mine was leaving his congregation for one in another city. But before leaving he stopped to say his farewell to an older shut-in member. She told him, "The next rabbi will not be as good as you."

Flattered, he averred, "Oh, nonsense." And she countered: "No, really, I meant it.
I've lived here under five different rabbis, and each one has been worse than the last!"

No, not all change is good. It can be gratuitous and insensitive, but it is, by and large, inevitable and it is at the very essence of this night and the High Holy Days.

You think Abraham and Sarah leaving Ur of the Chaldees didn't have a lovely four bedroom colonial they had to sell? And for what? A leaky tent on a desert dune without even basic cable! Their willingness to risk and to look forward has brought all of us here tonight. Change or death is a fact of life. Absolute safety has terrible consequences. It's like practicing to be dead.

So, #1, Be cautious of conformism; #2, Embrace the Challenge of Change, and finally #3, Take Comfort in your Authenticity


III.-Take Comfort in Authenticity

As I went from room to room during that last night in the Glen Burnie house, you know I came across piles of letters, framed certificates, hundreds of photos and an oversized family tree tracing the Cohn family back to 17th century Germany. I have personally known three generations of my family preceding my own, and from what is commonly called "the school of the years", I think I've come to know myself pretty well.

Souvenirs of that sometimes painful journey were what I was frantically sifting through. Bittersweet reminders of my wonderful victories and rather magnificent defeats occupied every crook and cranny. But, there in that old house was the evidence of those forces of nature and nurture of which I am the result today. And I'll bet that you can point to the same for you as well.

Biologist and author of the book The Living Cell, Dr. Lewis Thomas, maintains that one of the most critical things you and I must discover before we die is to stop and recognize that there have been times when we have been useful in the world. There have been times when, for all of our foibles and folly, at sacred junctures in others' lives, we have been uniquely useful-and we must glory in that fact. We ought to promise ourselves to do such more often in this new year. Of course, authenticity takes a toll; living at the highest always does. You put yourself out for others and risk criticism. They say, "No good deed goes unpunished." But that's the route to authenticity: the real you!

Remember Margery Williams' classic story of the Velveteen Rabbit? It was once new, but it's now worn down by the love of its little boy.

One of the toys in the nursery asked the Skin horse, wisest of all the toys, "What is Real?"
And the Horse answered,

"Real isn't how you're made. . . . It's a thing that happens to you.
"You become. It takes a long time. . . .Generally by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose joints, and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.

Ah, yes, the claiming and comfort of authenticity. It's one of life's crucial lessons, don't you think? Be cautious of conformism - especially in youth accept the challenge of change as we age and take great comfort in your authenticity - sing your song!

Well, by now the old house was almost empty. Labels were carefully placed for the movers. The walls were now bare and the kitchen cabinets, too. Four empty bedrooms and an eerily quiet dining room in which through the years, so many happy voices had joined in singing "Mah Nishtaneh" and "Rock of Ages," at Chanukah time and where slices of apple always took a deep bath in golden honey with prayerful hopes for a sweet new year. Nothing was left now, but to loosen the mezzuzah from the doorpost and to tuck it in my pocket. All lights out. All doors locked. And as the cab pulled away, with one final look, a chapter closed forever.

Good-bye Glen Burnie. One door closes. Another opens!
Tonight - One year ends. Another begins.

As Strength, joy, hope and future are wed this evening, dear friends, as our private memories and personal histories all converge in this sacred place. What the scary world without and the sometimes bruising journey in time have taken from us, have taken from us, we still hold dear as we gather within these stout walls to greet and enhearten one another.

Do you know that here is our place to be quiet alone, to bathe in sacred memories of times spent with those now gone or to sit by beloved dear ones, or beside a new friend waiting to be met.

Here we come this Rosh HaShanah Eve to lean on others or to let others lean on us.

Here, on this Yom Tov, we come to meet ourselves, to be and become, without trying to be anyone else.

Renewed by faith, supported by friends, nurtured by generations of family, here sense your name being inscribed for the New Year in God's Book of Life! Do you know how lucky I feel to be the very first to welcome you home, here, with open arms and heart!

Amen.