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Is There A Candle Lighting For Yom Tov?

Yes. As with all the major Jewish holidays, we welcome in Yom Tov, both the first and second night, with candle lighting. We put a few coins in the tzedakah box before candle lighting on the first night. Candle lighting for the first night takes place 18 minutes before sunset. Candle lighting for the second night takes place 42 minutes after sunset. We light at least two candles (of the Shabbat variety) though some families light a candle for each member of the family.

The candles are first lit. As if welcoming a long-awaited guest, make a circular motion with both hands, three times, just around the candles, and let your hands settle over your eyes, blocking the fire from your sight. A personal meditation, recited quietly or before the family, is certainly appropriate at this time. Then, recite the blessings. The dates and times for the blessings are as follows:

* The flame used to light candles on the second night must be obtained from and existing fire, like a pilot light or a candle lit before Yom Tov. This is because on Yom Tov, we may transfer fire, but we may neither create it nor extinguish it.

BLESSING # 1

,בָּרוּךְ אַתָה יְיָ, אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָוֹלָם
 אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשַׂנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָו וְצוָּנוּ להַדְלִק נֵר שֶׁל יוֹם טוֹב
Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha’olam,
asher kidishanu bemitzvotav, vitzivanu lehadlik ner shel Yom Tov.  
Praised are You, Adonai our God, who rules the universe, who makes us holy through mitzvot and has commanded us to bring light to this good day.

BLESSING #2

בָּרוּךְ אַתָה יְיָ, אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָוֹלָם
 שֶׂהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְמָנוִּ וְהִגִּיָנוּ לָזְּמָן הָזֶה
Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha’olam,
shehehiyanu, vekiyimanu, vehigi’anu, lazeman hazeh.  
Praised are You, Adonai our God, who rules the universe, who has given us life, and given us sustenance, and has brought us to this special time.

BLESSING #3

בָּרוּךְ אַתָה יְיָ, אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָוֹלָם
 אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשַׂנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָו וְצוָּנוּ להַדְלִק נֵר שֶׁל שָׁבּת
וְשֶׁל יוֹם טוֹב  
Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha’olam,
asher kidishanu bemitzvotav, vitzivanu lehadlik ner shel Shabbat
vishel Yom Tov.  
Praised are You, Adonai our God, who rules the universe, who makes us holy through mitzvot and to this good day.

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Rabbi Rank’s Yom Kippur Sermon

TWO PARKING TICKETS
By Rabbi Rafi Rank
Yom Kippur, 5770—September 28, 2009

Gut Yontiff, everyone, and shanah tovah, a good year and a healthy year to all.

Shmu’el, a life-long resident of Jerusalem, is on his way to court for an important trial and sadly, got a late start to his morning. By the time he gets to the court house, all the parking spots are taken. He drives around five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, and no luck. Twenty minutes pass and he’s beginning to get desperate. After 30 minutes of circling the parking lot and the adjacent neighborhoods in utter futility, the time for his court appearance fast approaching, he turns his head heavenward and shouts, “Ribbono shel Olam—Master of the universe. I swear I will give 10% tzedakah each year, daven three times a day, make my home a meeting place for Torah scholars, go to the mikveh before Shabbos each week, I’ll wait eight hours between meat and dairy foods, only just this: I need a place to park right now.” And just as he finishes this heart-wrenching plea, a guy pulls out of a parking spot right there and then, and Shmuel turns to God and says, “Never mind, I found a spot!”

You may recall from the biblical tales you have studied the story of Adam and Eve and their sin in the Garden of Eden. The two were forbidden from eating of the Etz Hada’at Tov vaRa, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but as we know, they both ate of its fruit and both immediately understood they had sinned. They were ashamed of their behavior and so they hide from God. Now it’s really difficult to hide from God, but they didn’t know this. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil imparts some intelligence to you, but in Adam and Eve’s case, it apparently wasn’t that much. And God, I guess conscious of the uneven playing field in this cosmic game of hide and seek, calls out, “Ayeka?—Where are you?” as if God really needed to ask where they were. And over the centuries, God’s question has generated much discussion. Why does God ask a question, the answer of which He obviously knows? One answer I like very much is the idea that God may have asked the question of Adam and Eve, but God really asks that question of us all. Where are we? Where are we parking ourselves these days? Do we know where we are?

Let’s begin that answer with a very factual and, let’s say—a somewhat scientific answer. We are here at Midway Jewish Center, 330 South Oyster Bay Road, in Syosset, which is a located in the Town of Oyster Bay, a town in Nassau County, which is a county in the great state of New York, one of the fifty states of the United States of America, which is a section of North America, which is a northern continent in the northern hemisphere of a planet called earth. Now earth is the third planet in a solar system that consists of a medium-sized star which is our sun, around which eight planets orbit (or nine—depending on how you classify Pluto and I guess the classification keeps on changing). Our solar system is actually rotating too, around the core of the galaxy in which we reside called the Milky Way, once every 250 million years. The Milky Way, you understand, is hardly the entirety of the universe, because it is only one of perhaps 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Our closest galactic neighbor is Andromeda, which is not that far, maybe two million light years from us. Andromeda and the Milky Way are two members of a local group of galaxies known as the Virgo supercluster, and beyond our supercluster lie countless other superclusters which will take many hundreds or thousands of years to identify and catalog, if ever that will be possible. And that’s where we are.

Now I don’t know how such a description of our location makes you feel, but I can tell you that it makes me feel very, very tiny. And forget about the universe—consider our solar system alone. The sun is hugely massive. It accounts for more than 99% of all the mass in our solar system. That means that the remaining less-than-one percent of mass in our solar system alone must be divided up among all the planets and you and me. All 6.8 billion of us on this earth, in mass alone, account for somewhere close to zero mass of our own solar system, so within the universe itself, in the whole scheme of things, we are essentially zeros.

You might think that the rabbis were either ignorant of or oblivious to such disturbing dimensions, but that’s not necessarily true. I refer you to Rabbi Simcha Bunim Bonhart of Peshischa (1765-1827), a Hasidic leader in Poland. He was someone who preferred no material gain from his rabbinic activities and so he supported himself and his family as a pharmacist. And as a pharmacist, as a man of science, he clearly understood the realities that lie beyond the naked eye, and the fact that in the whole grand scheme of things, human beings were insignificant. But as a committed Jew, that was a position that simply was not tenable. And so he directed his disciples as follows: Every person should have two pockets. In the one pocket should be a slip of paper that reads, “I am dust and ashes.” In the second pocket should be a slip of paper that reads, “The world was created for me.”

Is that delicious hutzpa or what! The world was created for me, for you, for us! From Reb Simcha’s perspective, not only have human beings some definite purpose, but the whole of the universe has been created for us.

I’d like to tell you a story about a man whom you probably have never heard of, but who is a true hero in every sense of the word. There are about six people in history who have managed to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the congressional Gold Medal. These are personalities like Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, or Elie Wiesel, but the person whom you probably never heard of to be accorded these three honors is Norman Borlaug. Dr. Borlaug died a couple weeks ago at the age of 95. He held his PhD from the University of Minnesota, which is a completely irrelevant detail, but I’ve slipped in it, nevertheless. He is credited with developing a high-yield, low pesticide “dwarf” wheat, which today provides millions of impoverished people, the world over, with their daily bread. As an example of how successful his wheat was, and how effective his campaign to teach people how to grow it has been, consider the following. In 1960, about 60 percent of people world-wide experienced some hunger every year. Forty years later, by the year 2000, that number had been reduced to 14 percent. Borlaug has saved literally a billion lives, malnourished, impoverished souls. He understood just how close so many of us are to being dust and ashes, but instead dedicated his life to saving others for the world may just have been created for them, too.

Living with our relative prosperity and the abundance characteristic of the west, makes us all a little over confident. The recession, terrible though it is, has actually reminded us in a very visceral way just how tenuous our lives can be. But Jewish ritual is designed to in someway impart these sobering lessons even during periods of prosperity. And so during this sacred time of year, we wear these white kittels, reminiscent of the takhrikhim, the burial shrouds with which we dress the dead. As part of the liturgy today and throughout the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance, we declare:

Our Father and Our King—remember that we are dust!

On this day we refrain from the simplest of pleasures—eating, drinking, physical intimacy—as if we were no longer among the living, in order to remind ourselves of our finite lives. Moreover, in the Yizkor prayers which will be recited within the next 24 hours, we will address God with a quote from the Bible that touches on the irony of humans having any kind of relationship with God:

O Lord, what are we that you should pay us any attention at all? (Psalm 144:3)

And yet, we cling to a God of whom we believe would choose us puny, sentient human beings over all the other stuff in the universe because 1) we alone can stand in awe of God’s tremendous creation, praising both Him and it and 2) if we so choose, we are capable of further developing and advancing the creation that God began as did Norman Borlaug, who gave great attention to humankind by creating a food that would sustain them, really all of us, by the millions.

Some believe that humans are a protoplasmic accident, that we are merely what you get after organic mutations are allowed to unfold over a period of 4.5 billion years, the estimated age of our planet. But for Jews who sanctify each seventh day by raising and kiddush cup and wishing each other, !ohhjk—To Life!—this life is no accident. We are the sacred handiwork of the Ribonoi shel Olam, the Master of the Universe.

Rabbi Moshe Benovitz, associate professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem, took a vacation this past year and went to Delphi, the religious center of the ancient Greeks. Delphi was for the Greeks as Jerusalem was for the Jews—the center of the universe. And in Delphi the two gods that reigned supreme were Apollo, the god of prophecy, inspiration, poetry and music. And for a few months during the winter, the ruling god was Dionysus, the god of chaos, wine, ecstasy and theater. Now there’s a god who could probably pack a house of worship! As a professor, of course, Rabbi Benovitz would have great affection for any representative of poetry or prophecy, like Apollo. And being a fun sort of fellow, he wasn’t above appreciating a god like Dionysus. But much as he tried, he did not feel the spiritual uplift in Delphi he had expected when contemplating the lives of these Grecian gods. And he suddenly realized why. None of these gods are defined in as ultimate terms as is the God of Israel. Apollo may be in charge of prophecy, but the wine is someone else’s department. Dionysus may be in charge of wine, but poetry is someone else’s department. Above all, neither god is responsible for creating the world. The God of Israel, on the other hand, is. The God of Israel is essentially that God who is responsible for all of created life, and as such, He is also responsible for having created our lives. To pray to God is to turn our attention to the source of all, the life of the universe and the life of every living thing in it.

How many of us actually think of ourselves as being God’s handiwork? We study biology, we learn about DNA, we ponder the intricacies of reproduction and in these highly secularized, scientific, well-documented narratives—the name of God does not appear. I’m not suggesting that it should in those settings. But we’re not in a classroom now. Now we’re in shul and I’d like us to consider the implications of a life fashioned by God. But first a story.

This is the story of Munish. Munish lived in a little European town named Moglinitz. He was a fine tailor and earned for himself a stellar reputation tailoring clothing for all the people in the town and surrounding areas. One day, the Poritz (a feudal Lord) shows up in his shop. The Poritz, a demanding and unkind man, had a taste for the finer things in life. “Munish,” he begins, “You are among the most talented tailors in the area. I have brought you fine wool from England and silk from the Far East. I want you to make of these materials an entire wardrobe for me and if you do well, I will reward you generously. Munish respectfully told the Portiz he would do his best. A week goes by and the Poritz returns to try on his new wardrobe. He loved his new suits; everything fit perfectly and true to his word, the Portiz made Munish his court tailor, and Munish prospered accordingly. He soon knew that he was not among the best tailors, but that he was, in fact, the very best tailor in the land.

Some time passes and the Poritz comes to Munish to say that a gala evening will be arranged in the court and Munish must make new clothing for the Poritz’s family and court staff. Many guests from around Europe will be in attendance and the Poritz wanted to look good. Munish sets to work and a week later finishes his tasks. The family and staff try on their clothing and much to their horror, the clothes fit terribly. Nothing seems right and the Poritz is livid. He comes to Munish outraged and demands that he fix the garments within a week lest he hang from the highest tree in the court.

Munish is heartbroken, depressed, and completely at a loss for what went wrong. His friends attempt to console him, but to no avail. Finally a townsman advises that Munish visit the wisest man in the district, a man who is known as the Seraph of Mogdilitz, a rabbi who works wonders. So Munish takes the advice and goes to the Seraph of Mogdilitz, explains the whole story and waits for an answer. The seraph listens, nods his head, and sits lost in thought for a minute or two. “This is what you should do,” says the Seraph.

“Return to your shop and carefully take a part all the clothing at the seams, then sew it up again just as you did the first time.”

“But I can’t do that,” explains Munish, “the clothes just don’t fit.”

“Don’t worry,“ retorts the Seraph, “just follow my instructions.”

So Munish returns to his shop, contemplating what death by hanging must feel like, and having no other solution other than the Seraph’s advice, carefully takes apart the clothing and resews them exactly as he had the first time around, only this time doing so with a sobriety fit for a man about to hang from the highest tree in the court.

He completes the task and the Poritz’s family and staff return to the shop to try on the clothing. And miracle of miracles—the clothing fits perfectly. The staff is happy, the family ecstatic, and the Poritz glows with pride. “I will be the best dressed lord in the land!” he exclaims. He again rewards Munish generously and exits the shop.

Munish is relieved, happy and completely bewildered. He runs to the Seraph, tells him the whole story and concludes his happy tale with a question: “What happened?” The Seraph smiles and says, “The first time you sewed with arrogance and the arrogance was sewed into the garments. The second time you sewed, you sewed with humility, and your humility was sewn into the garments. Your end product is completely dependent on your attitude.”

And this is the lesson that all of us need to take to heart because our attitudes about life have been forged by highly secularized institutions of learning. We are the recipients of high school degrees, bachelor degrees, masters degrees, professional degrees and PhDs from institutions where the name of God is barely mentioned. We ourselves often live our lives, not necessarily as atheists, but as people for whom God makes little difference. But since we are in shul, and since this is the holiest day of the year, a day suffused with God and godliness, I want to tell you not where you are but where God is. God is here, in this very sanctuary. God is so cool that He is in every shul throughout the world tonight/today. But He’s not only in every shul around the world He is in the very atmosphere we breathe. He is in the vacuum of space. He’s in the Milky Way . He’s over in Andmomeda, too. He’s in the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. And if we could ever make it to the very edge of the universe, that edge that seems to be expanding forever outward, then God exists even beyond that border as well.

It would be good to live our lives mindful of the presence of God and the hand He has had in our creation for once you do that, all the clothes you tailor will fit better. Well, I don’t mean your clothes literally, unless you actually are a tailor, but I do mean to suggest that God-consciousness elevates our everyday, mundane action to a new level of sensitivity, morality, and ultimately effectiveness. God-consciousness compels us to forget about the petty peeves that so often consume our precious time on this earth, allowing us to focus on the stuff that really matters. Imagine how difficult it would be to hate yor neighbor if you were in fact seeing that neighbor as God’s handiwork. A lot of Jewish ritual and tradition and literature presupposes a principle of faith that God is indeed within us, around us and beyond us, and when we live with that principle of faith in our hearts, every minute of life becomes a very powerful experience.

I heard a lecture recently in which physicists determined that individuals radiate heat, and that the heat radiated is the equivalent of a 100 watt light bulb. During the winter months, we could save energy by turning off the boiler and assuring 3-400 people show up on a Shabbat morning. The thought occurred to me that heat, in our tradition, is attributed to the rabbis, but light is attributed to God. This makes sense as the rabbis, predisposed to argumentation, would generate heat in the course of their debates. But God, who offers us pure knowledge, generates light. We refer to him as Yotzer Ham’orot, the “One who Creates the Great Lights.” When we are engaged in debate with a friend or acquaintance, are we respectful in our exchanges? Are we listening to the arguments or trying to impose our own views on them? What exactly are we contributing to that discussion—heat or light? As the handiwork of God, we should be as the Creator is, creating light.

If we only lived our lives mindful of how saturated the universe is with God, and how much a part of the universe we are, it would have a huge impact on our lives Each time we touch on some aspect of God we are simultaneously looking inward, urging ourselves to behave as would God.

In L’el Orekh Din, a piyyut, a religious poem we recite in the morning of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we review some of these aspects of God—

God is dover meisharim, one who speaks without exaggeration or cynicism, and so should we;
God is hoge de’ot, open to ideas, never dismissing a single one;
God is zokher berito, remembers His covenant, true to His word, as we all should be;
God is khovesh ka’aso, in control of His temper, as we all should be;
od is mohel avonot, forgiving of sins, as we all should be; God is oneh lekorav, responsive to those who call, and so we should be quicker to return phone calls and e-mails;
God is rahem amo, forgiving of His people, as we all should be, being particularly careful to not dump on our fellow Jews.
God is shomer ohavav, protective of His friends, as we all should be, never taking our friends for granted.

In other places in our prayers, we learn that
God is ozer dalim, the One who helps the poor, as we all should be;
God is mashpil ge’im, the One who humbles the arrogant, and we all should be sufficiently courageous to counter the arrogant particularly when their actions serve to hurt the vulnerable;
And finally, we learn that God is oseh shalom, the Creator of Peace, as we all should be, not by giving into thugs as if that were some cherished path to peace, but by demanding justice, for only a just peace is a lasting peace.

If God is the Creator, and thus the creator of us all, then we can certainly assimilate aspects of His divine character into our own. Actually, let me put it to you differently. I believe the God characteristics are already there. As an am kadoh, a holy people, evolving over a few thousand years, the holiness is already in us. I’m only suggesting that we uncover what already resides within us.

Today, I want you to think not only of cleansing yourselves but of completing yourselves as Jews, of being more conscious of your connection with the divine and the ways in which that connection with God’s divine energy can change the way you love your spouse, guide your children, conduct your business, interact with your coworkers, arrange your free times, or socialize with your friends.

Back in March of this year, a satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral. The satellite is called Kepler and its mission is to search for life in the universe. It’s not looking for human beings as such or martians, for that matter, but planets of a size similar to the earth which could contain or generate life. This may all sound “science-fictiony” to you but it isn’t. There is no reason to believe that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe, and following that presumption, this is the first time that a search for such life will have been undertaken in so sophisticated a fashion. In the mean time, it looks as if human life is the only kind of organic life there is at least within a radius of two million light years. We’re it. Again some look at that and say—we’re a fluke, an accident, a protoplasmic oddity in an empty universe. We are, for all intents and purposes, zeros in the universe. But people like Norman Borlaug inspire us to consider that within the zeroness of human existence is infinite potential for good and therefore we should always live with great deference for the miracles of our lives and the obligations we willingly assume to preserve and nurture the lives of others.

Anyway, there was this old Woody Allen bit in which he described his days at the university as a young man pursuing higher truths and a deeper understanding of the arts and sciences. And someone asked him what exactly was the most challenging and perplexing problem he faced on campus and he answered: parking. And this, I do believe is the answer to an ultimate truth which is just because a space is open doesn’t mean that it is an appropriate place to park. The spot shouldn’t be too far from where you need to be and you shouldn’t be overpaying. But for over a century, the Jewish people have parked themselves much too far from God and the price we have paid for that unlucky spot has been outrageous. And so I ask you, Ayeka? Where are you parking yourself these days?

We need to find a better lot, a little closer to God, closer to our families, closer to our immediate communities, closer to our synagogue, closer to our language (Hebrew), closer to our sacred literature and closer to our faith. There is not just one lot, there are multiple lots that offer this kind of parking and each of us has to find our own spot, but there is one characteristic that all these lots do share in common. In each of these lots, that automatic parking ticket dispenser thing that you draw your parking ticket from before the gate ascends will automatically dispense not one but two tickets, one for each pocket. One ticket will read—In the whole scheme of things, I am a zero. And the second ticket will read—I am a creation of God and possess infinite potential to discover, to create and to repair this universe, which was made for me, and which eagerly awaits the differences that I, and only I, and no one else, can effect. We need to carry both tickets in our pocket in order to fully appreciate our place in the universe.

G’mar hatimah tovah—May we all complete this Yom Kippur securely sealed into the Book of Life.

Shabbat Shalom and—Hag Same’ah!

Rabbi Rafi Rank
CyberRav

Shabbat Shalom Everyone!!

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