Elie Wiesel tells the following story. One day the Hasidim came to inform the great Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav of renewed persecutions of Jews in the Ukraine. The Master listened and said nothing. Then they told him of pogroms in certain villages. Again the Master listened and said nothing. Then they told of slaughtered families, of desecrated cemeteries, of children burned alive. The Master listened and shook his head. “I know,” he whispered. “I know what you want. I know. You want me to shout with pain, weep in despair. I know, I know. But I will not, you hear me, I will not.” Then after a long silence, he did begin to shout, louder and louder, “Gevalt, Yidden!…Jews, for heaven’s sake, do not despair….Gevalt, Yidden, Jews, do not despair!”

As we enter the new year of 5767, this story could be our own. The trials of our world and the troubles of those around us appear overwhelmingly tragic. Our country continues to fight a war in Iraq that seems to have no purpose and no plan, and has brought death and trauma to our soldiers and to the people they came to liberate. 48,000 dead Iraqis is the official body count, and that is considered a very conservative estimate. Over 2700 American soldiers have been killed since the war started in 2003, and nearly 20,000 have been wounded, and there is no end in sight.

In Africa, the genocide continues in Darfur. After three years, at least 400,000 people have been killed; more than 2 million innocent civilians have been forced to flee their homes and now live in displaced-persons camps in Sudan or in refugee camps in neighboring Chad. More than 3.5 million men, women, and children are completely reliant on international aid for survival. Despite a peace agreement in May and the valiant aid of humanitarian organizations, the UN's top humanitarian official, Jan Egeland, stated that the situation in Darfur is "going from real bad to catastrophic."

Closer to home, the threat of hunger and homelessness looms over American families in cities and suburbs at a higher rate than ever. The high cost of housing and health care squeeze the middle class and the poor, leaving a surprising number of families with no money at the end of the month to pay for food. 14 million children in this country live with “food insecurity,” unsure what or when their next meal will be. In the wealthiest democracy in the world, the number of children who don’t have enough to eat is growing.

And if these problems seem to affect others, we cannot forget that our entire planet is in danger. This past summer, many of us saw Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which starkly demonstrated how global warming endangers life on earth. As we lose our glaciers and watch the ice melt at both poles, global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet, drowning coastal communities. We are seeing more droughts and wildfires, and more destructive hurricanes. All life on earth is threatened by this looming catastrophe.

Each of these issues could be the subject of a sermon in itself. Together, they constitute a torrent of tragedy.

The story of Reb Nachman is our story—tales of a world gone mad. What can we, as Jews, do in the face of despair?

In earlier times, when Jews lived under the protection, or the oppression, of majority power, the life of the Jewish community was in the hands of others. How did our ancestors respond to their problems? Some appealed to the authorities in diplomatic fashion, some used their money to redeem captives and bribe officials. Some picked up and left for better opportunities. Many prayed. Reb Nachman preached not to despair.

Unlike the story of Reb Nachman, who was bombarded with the truth of oppression and persecution of Jews in the Ukraine, our stories have a much wider scope. The Jew today has more individual power, and the Jewish community has more collective power than ever before. Not only do we have our own Jewish state with its own military power. We have the power of living in the most powerful country on earth. As a group, Jews today are financially more comfortable than any prior generation. With that kind of power, we can do more than pray. We can make a difference, not only for ourselves. So we have embraced the prophetic call to repair the entire world, not just our piece of it.

But what we can gain from Reb Nachman is a spiritual approach to social justice. Tikkun olam is not only a Hebrew word; it is a spiritual discipline. And it began long before our ancestors lived in Eastern Europe, long before any rabbi first used that phrase, as we read in today’s Haftarah from the prophet Isaiah, written in the 8th century BCE:

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Cry with full throat, without restraint; raise your voice like a shofar!
(Isaiah 58:1)

This is the fast I desire: To unlock fetters of wickedness,
and untie the cords of the yoke
To let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke.
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to offer clothing,
And not to ignore your own kin.
(Isaiah 58:5-7)

According to Isaiah, our fast today is not a spiritual act unless it leads us to action. A true fast would be not only to give up food for one day, but to sacrifice our time, our money, and our power for the sake of others. Not only on Yom Kippur, but every day.

And when I look at Tikkun Olam as it is practiced in our congregation, I know that we hear Isaiah’s call, and I do not despair.

In another teaching that I shared this past Shabbat, Reb Nachman reminds us to look for the nekudot tovot, the small points of goodness in our lives. Rather than focus on our faults, and lose ourselves to depression, he inspires us to pay attention to the small deeds we do, and to string them together like a necklace.

And so I say to you Gevalt, Yidden, Jews, do not despair!
Let us look at all the nekudot tovot, the small acts, the mitzvot, the tikkun olam that our community has been fostering.

As a congregation, we have made the spiritual practice of tikkun olam central to our congregational identity and mission. Just this past year, our congregation collected 110 bags of groceries for the Grow Clinic last Yom Kippur and we aim to collect 150 this Yom Kippur. Just ask Leslie Ajl, who makes sure we have the grocery bags every year, and follows up with the Grow Clinic to make sure they get every last bag.

The Grow Clinic is also supported by a grant from MAZON, the Jewish fund for hunger. We contribute to MAZON, today and at every bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, we give 3% of the cost of the food. Or we should. While we have promoted MAZON for years, our temple has yet to sign on as a MAZON congregation. I urge our board to vote to be an official MAZON congregation at the next meeting.

We have also delivered groceries to Family Table, Boston’s Jewish food pantry as a congregation every month for at least 10 years, and this past year our Hebrew School has taken a lead role in promoting the collection. Family Table is the only food pantry that provides kosher food to Jewish families in need, and does it with dignity and respect. Just ask the kids, like B’rouk Belay and Philip Mahar, who made Family Table their personal mitzvah projects, or Serena Shapiro, who makes sure that our peanut butter and raisins get to the pantry each month.

This year we launched Triple Mitzvah coffee, a fundraiser for our congregation and educational project to draw attention to the plight of coffee farmers in South America and to saving the rainforest. Just ask Cynthia Berkowitz, who doesn’t even drink coffee, but who made it happen and shows up every Sunday to serve and to sell coffee.

HBT took a lead role in GBIO’s push for health care reform, signing petitions, collecting signatures, attending rallies at the State House, holding house meetings and affordability sessions. The next stage of this ground-breaking law goes into effect today, as tens of thousands of uninsured can enroll in the new Commonwealth Care program. Just ask Ken Farbstein, who has been organizing our meetings and showing up at every rally (or my husband, Brian Rosman, who has worked tirelessly for a decade to make this happen).

This past year we opened new doors in interfaith dialogue and race relations by partnering with Union United Methodist Church in the South End. We attended a Sunday service there and hosted their members on a Friday night. Just ask Beilah Ross, who came up with this inspired idea and keeps fanning the flames to keep it going

We sent a minyan to the Save Darfur rally in Washington, D.C. in the spring and to the rally in New York City last week. We also joined delegations of Jewish activists in Boston to lobby the British and Cape Verdean consulates in June to talk about Darfur. In our small ways, we became more educated, we spread the word and we pressured world leaders to take action. Just ask Nechama Katz, our outstanding Tikkun Olam chair, who inspires us all to find a way to “walk the walk” as she does.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, writes, “hope does not exist in a conceptual vacuum….it is born in the belief that the sources of action lie within ourselves.” All of this work fulfills that definition of hope.

But even more hopeful are the seeds we have planted in our youth community. While many adults at HBT do hopeful work every day as doctors and teachers and organizers, it is not so obvious to children that they can truly make a difference. In fact, our children and our teens have become our teachers.

If you have been to a bar or bat mitzvah lately, you have probably hear some their stories. Each of our b’nai mitzvah students takes on a Mitzvah Project, and teaches us about some new corner of the world that they are working to repair. Last spring, Luke Burrows raised our awareness of orphaned boys in India and Sam Givertz taught us about the Heifer Project, which supports underdeveloped communities throughout the world.

Matt Spitzer, who will celebrate his bar mitzvah in November, is focusing on global warming for his mitzvah project. In his invitation, he sent out a letter about taking care of the environment, and will be sharing specific ways that each of us can lower our carbon dioxide emissions and slow down this dangerous trend.

Daniel Kunin, whose bar mitzvah is coming up in December, traveled to South Africa this summer and met children who lost their parents to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Botswana.

Our teens have also been busy repairing the world in a very literal way. Last December, two father-son teams from our congregation spent school vacation week rebuilding homes in the Gulf Coast that had been damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Rich and Isaac Moche and Ken and Neil Farbstein gave up family vacation time to work hard in unpleasant conditions to make life better for a group of strangers.

This past summer, Neil Farbstein, who is a junior in high school, spent 6 weeks in Nicaragua with Amigos de las Americas. He lived with a family with 9 children, ages 21 to six months old in a rural village in the mountains of Nicaragua. Gabe Gelbtuch, son of Madelyn Bronitsky and Sam Gelbtuch, who is now a freshman at the University of Michigan, spent six weeks during the summer after his junior year of high school, in a small village in the mountains of Honduras with the American Jewish World Service.
In that time, each of them saw a lot of poverty and did a lot of hard work, and felt the exhilaration of making a difference.

Each of these people can tell you stories about their work. The details amount to small acts. No one solved the problem of poverty. No one stopped global warming or prevented a war. And yet, the fact that they took these steps, the way they did them, and everything that each of these individuals has learned amounts to so much more than what they actually accomplished.

Abraham Joshua Heschel taught us,
“ The deed is the test, the trial and the risk. What we perform may seem slight, but in the aftermath is immense….If you were able to survey at a glance all you have done in the course of your life, what would you feel? You would be terrified at the extent of your own power….A single deed may place the lives of countless men and women in the chains of its unpredictable effects. All we own is a passing intention, but what comes about will outlive and surpass our power.”
(God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism., 1962, .p.284)

Let me share my own experience of the power of a single deed.

You may remember that last summer, Brian, Aviva and I drove south to spend a week in the depressed area of Cumberland, Maryland helping to renovate homes. This year, Yonah and I joined the Tikkun Olam Family Work Project again, and took our improved home improvement skills northward to Limestone, Maine. A number of temple members came along, including Dave Tabachnik, Shelley Stevens and their sons Sam and Nathaniel (who came along last year), Mark Horenstein, Roxanne Pappenheimer and their daughter Rachel.

I will leave it to them to tell you the stories in a special session this afternoon, so you can see the pictures and hear about the work we did from them. You might also take a look at yesterday’s Boston Sunday Globe article about the potato harvest in Aroostook County. That’s where we were.

I want to show you something: the “thank you” card here on the bimah came from Doria and Lionel, whose house we worked on. Of all the thank-yous I have ever received, I will treasure this one more than any other. Many times people thank me for doing things that come easily, that are part of my calling as a rabbi, and that give me intrinsic pleasure. I love to celebrate at weddings and baby namings, to help people in need with words of comfort. But I am rarely thanked for the hardest work, for mediocre accomplishments, for stretching beyond my comfort zone.

People often asked if I have honed construction skills through this project. The honest answer is no. I have a week’s worth of experience stuffing insulation around new windows. I overcame a fear of ladders and of spiders to sweep away hundreds of spider webs under the eaves so we could paint. I even got to use the power saw, once.

My son Yonah also learned a few skills, like how to walk across a roof and pull off old shingles, and how to stay on the roof when it gets wet. But in the end, the trip gave us so much more than home improvement skills.

For five days, we did a lot more balancing than just staying on a roof. We learned how to give to people without shaming them. Here we were, twenty-five volunteers, tramping through Lionel and Doria’s one-story home, where every aspect of their meager life was laid bare before us. The crumbling walls and fraying carpet, the family pictures and family pets, the overwhelming smell of the dog, the toilet that didn’t flush, the computer and the enormous tv, and the grandchildren with their rotting teeth, running around in the yard (forgive me that dangling participle!). We even saw the food in their refrigerator, since we put a birthday cake there in honor of Doria’s 52nd birthday. Yet we did our best to respect their privacy and keep our thoughts to ourselves.

We also learned to balance giving with receiving. The church community that arranged for our housing, and offered their kitchen and parish hall for our meals, sent us little gifts every day. Folks would show up with a mid-morning snack of granola bars, or leave fresh-baked brownies for our lunch, or bring Popsicles in the afternoon heat. By the end of the week, everyone in Limestone, it seemed, knew who we were. At the grocery and hardware stores, they stopped to talk to us. A local potato farmer gave us a tour of his state-of-the-art facility, where he supplies McDonalds with potatoes for French fries, and Quaker Oats with oats for Nutri-grain bars. One gentleman gave the pastor enough brand new Sacagawea gold dollar coins for us each to take one home as a souvenir.

Most important, we watched our teenage children grow, though they would never admit that’s what they were doing. They had a lot of fun, trying new skills, making new friends. But when our group prepared to leave on Friday, as we ate our final lunch together and went around the room, sharing the blessings and curses we had experienced that week, I was most impressed by what our kids told us. They told us how hard it was see the poverty in these people’s lives. They also told us about intangible wealth: the way a family sticks together and takes care of one another, and the way a group of strangers can come together as a community. They learned how working together is more effective than working alone, and how everyone has to do the dirty work sometime. And I think that they all came to a deeper appreciation of the blessings of their own lives in a way that will keep them coming back to this work every summer.

When I talk about how the spiritual practice of tikkun olam changes us, you don’t need to believe me. Just listen to some reflections that Gabe sent me about his time in Honduras:

“On one of our last days in Cuesta my friend Alex from Boston, my friend from the village, Yoanni, and I were sitting on the porch of my host family's house. The rain was coming down as it often did in the wet season there. As we sat there staring into the mountains trying to converse with Yoanni in our broken Spanish, something extremely powerful happened. Yoanni, a man with the physique of a body builder and the gruff tone and character that is typical of the macho Honduran man, began to break down into tears. Nothing prompted this outpouring of emotion, yet it was a moment that Alex and I had sort of wondered if possible the entire summer. These people who go through trials that are incomparable to anything I have ever experienced never would show sadness or let anyone know how they truly felt about their condition. But on that day, Yoanni did; and through the muffled tones that accompany tears, he began to express the pain that one would expect from someone who lives on 2 dollars a day. The entire summer never leaves my memory, but that moment with Yoanni is something I will continue to carry with me in the deepest parts of my soul until the day i die.”

What matters is not the house we build or the pipes we lay. What really matter are the changes we don’t see, the changes inside us.

But I would like to invite you to try to see those changes, to see what tikkun olam looks like. So, if I have named you today, I’d like you to please stand now. These are the faces of your friends who have made tikkun olam their spiritual practice. Thank you.

Now, if you have participated in any of the projects I have listed, please stand. This is what a community dedicated to tikkun olam looks like.

If you are involved in tikkun olam in ways I didn’t mention, please join the crowd. [at this point, 90% of the congregation was standing]

Reb Nachman also teaches us that we need to look for the nekudot tovot, the points of goodness in ourselves, and we will learn to see them in others. And he says that all of the nekudot tovot when strung together become a niggun, our own niggun. And when many of us join our niggunim together, what does that become? We are the performance of God’s Unfinished Symphony.

Look on this community, and be proud. And if you are not standing, I promise there are ways you too can make tikkun olam a part of your own spiritual practice. (take your seats)

The prophet Isaiah concludes today’s haftarah with a vision of hope:
“ You shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring whose waters do not fail.
From your midst shall arise rebuilders of ancient ruins,
You shall restore foundations laid long ago.
And you shall be called
“ Repairer of fallen walls,
restorer of lanes for habitation.”
(Isaiah 58:11-14)

To get from Reb Nachman’s cry, “Gevalt yidden” to Isaiah’s vision, to move from pain to promise is not so hard to do. Just listen to this final story, which I heard from my friend Rabbi Debra Cantor, who heard it from a Muslim teacher, Imam Hendi during an interreligious institute this past year.

“A little girl was constantly complaining to her father about everything. He asked her to get three pots of boiling water and a carrot, an egg, and ground coffee. He put each item into one of the pots of boiling water. Then he taught her: you can take your pain and put it in boiling water and like carrots, become limp and soft and eventually flavorless. Or you can put it into the water like the egg, and become hard and eventually tough. Or you can put into the water like the coffee and make something fragrant, flavorful and uplifting.”

May our cries be heard on this Yom Kippur, not only above, but deep inside, so that each of us, and our children, take on the spiritual practice of tikkun olam, to make our lives fragrant, flavorful and uplifting. Ken yehi ratzon.