UNIVERSITY SYNAGOGUE A Reconstructionist Congregation Irvine, California High Holiday Supplement Readings Prepared by Rabbi Rachlis Rabbi Arnold Rachlis Cantor Ruti Braier To be who you are is to be enough. To share who you are is to share enough. To do what you love is to do enough. There is no race to win and nothing to be proven, only dreams to be nurtured, a self to be expressed, and love to be shared. Donna Newman The moon is dark tonight, a new moon for a new year. It is hollow and hungers to be full. It is the black zero of beginning. Now you must void yourself of injuries, insults, incursions. Go with empty hands to those you have hurt and make amends. It is not too late. It is early and about to grow. Now is the time to do what you know you must and have feared to begin. Your face is dark too as you turn inward to face yourself, the hidden twin of all you must grow to be. Forgive the dead year. Forgive yourself. What will be wants to push through your fingers. The light you seek hides in your belly. The light you crave longs to stream from your eyes. You are the moon that will wax in new goodness. Marge Piercy 1 Our true home is in the present moment. To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now. Peace is all around us – in the world and in nature -- and within us – in our bodies and our spirits. Once we learn to touch this peace, we will be healed and transformed. It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice. Thich Nhat Hanh Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It's too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came, and we pushed, And they flew. Christopher Logue 2 Maggid The courage to let go of the door, the handle. The courage to shed the familiar walls whose very stains and leaks are comfortable as the little mole of the upper arm, stains that recall a feast, a child’s naughtiness, a loud blattering storm that slapped the roof hard, pouring through. The courage to abandon the graves dug into the hill, the small bones of children and the brittle bones of the old whose marrow hunger had stolen; the courage to desert the tree planted and only begun to bear, the riverside where promises were shaped; the street where their empty pots were broken. The courage to leave the place whose language you learned as early as your own, whose customs however dangerous or demeaning, bind you like a halter you have learned to pull inside, to move your load; the land fertile with the blood spilled on it; the roads mapped and annotated for survival. The courage to walk out of the pain that is known into the pain that cannot be imagined, mapless, walking into the wilderness, going barefoot with a canteen into the desert; stuffed in the stinking hold of a rotting ship sailing off the map into dragons’ mouths. Cathay, India, Siberia, goldeneh medina, leaving bodies by the way like abandoned treasure. So they walked out of Egypt. So they bribed their way out of Russia under loads of straw, so they steamed out of the bloody smoking charnel house of Europe on overloaded freighters forbidden all ports. Out of pain into death or freedom or a different painful dignity, into squalor and politics. We Jews are all born of wanderers, with shoes under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours raining down. We honor only those Jews who changed tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage, 3 Who walked into the strange and became strangers and gave birth to children who could look down on them standing on their shoulders for having been slaves. We honor those who let go of everything but freedom, who ran, who revolted, who fought, who became other by saving themselves. Marge Piercy Hold on to what is good even if it is a handful of earth. Hold on to what you believe even if it is a tree which stands by itself. Hold on to what you must do even if it is a long way from here. Hold on to life even when it is easier letting go. Hold on to my hand even when I have gone away from you. Nancy Woods The Summer Day Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean – the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down – who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver 4 Allow There is no controlling life. failures, and success. Try corralling a lightning bolt, When loss rips off the doors containing a tornado. of your heart or sadness veils Dam a stream and it will your vision with despair, create a new channel. practice becomes simply Resist, and the tide will bearing the truth. sweep you off your feet. In the choice to let go of your Allow, and grace will known way of being, carry you to higher ground. the whole world is revealed The only safety lies in to your new eyes. letting it all in - the wild Danna Faulds and the weak - fear, fantasies, The religion I invent makes use of evolution: An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning, by infinitesimal steps, complex living beauty out of inert matter driven on by random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, the tragedy of forms, continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities, and the unprecedented bonus of being demonstrably true. I cry tears of sea water, and bleed with the cycles of the moon. My bones are of calcium phosphate, the clay of earth molded into human shape. 5 I share my genes with every organism the world has known, traced back to the rays of the sun igniting the compounds of the sea. And the whole world, the whole organic world, of which I am an integral part, constitutes a single great web of life. And I and you are not so much on the earth as of the earth Anonymous A Call to Prayer We who have lost our sense and our senses - our touch, our smell, our vision of who we are; we who frantically force and press all things, without rest for body or spirit, hurting our earth and injuring ourselves: we call a halt. We want to rest. We need to rest and allow the earth to rest. We need to reflect and to rediscover the mystery that lives in us, that is the ground of every unique expression of life, the source of the fascination that calls all things together. We declare a Sabbath, a space of quiet: for simple being and letting be; for recovering the great, forgotten truths; for learning how to live again. Anonymous The Paradoxical Commandments People are illogical, unreasonable and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. 6 The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need to help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway. Dr. Kent M. Keith A Letter To His Daughter Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations to waste a moment on yesterdays. Ralph Waldo Emerson The gods we worship write their names on our faces, be sure of that. And we will worship something – have no doubt of that either.