A year ago, I was a student and an intern, with no idea where I might land at the end

of my final year of school. We don’t know one another all that well right now, but I
definitely feel blessed to be here today with all of you, and I can’t wait to get to know each
of you in the coming year.
Life rarely turns out the way we expect. This point was brought home to me a few
weeks ago at a close friend’s wedding, where we saw a number of people my wife knew
from summer camp. That night, after the wedding, Rebecca remarked on the unexpected
turns each of their lives had taken in the fifteen years since they last saw one another. They
were all raised in typical Jewish homes, with a shared vision of how they imagined life
would unfold: a happy marriage, a good job, three or four kids, holidays around their
parents’ table in the communities where they grew up.
But a decade and a half later, no one’s life resembled what they once imagined. One
woman divorced after two years of marriage and still struggles to find her place as a single
mother in the Jewish community. One of the men lost his parents in a house fire. Another
woman, after living abroad for years, finds herself newly married, back in New York – and
living down the block from her parents, so she can support a teenage brother as he battles
cancer.
A lot has happened since last Rosh Hashanah. A few of my friends fell seriously ill,
and one passed away; others found their soulmates, married, had children. What has your
year been like? Where were the surprises, the good ones and the not-so-good ones? How is
your life different now than what you expected at this time last year?
This morning’s Torah reading gives us the final chapter in Sarah’s life, a life that also
took unexpected turns. Let’s go all the way back to the beginning of the story. Imagine, for
a moment, that you are Sarah. You’re sixty-five years old, living comfortably in Haran,
married to a successful man from a well-respected family. Then, one day, your husband
tells you that God is sending him to an unknown land, where God will make him – seventy-
five years old and still childless – into a great nation.
OK, you’re willing to go along with this. You get to Canaan, and there’s a famine,
and you need to head down to Egypt – not the friendliest of places – where they have food
available. Still, you’re game.
In Egypt, you and your husband get on Pharaoh’s bad side and he kicks you out, so
it’s back to Canaan; but this time, your husband divides the land with his nephew and gives
away all the good pastures. But you’re still doing all right, so you stand by your man. God
keeps pushing this “great nation” business, and what’s a girl to do? You offer your
maidservant, Hagar, as a surrogate, to move the master plan forward. By the time three
mysterious strangers show up at the door, unannounced, and tell you you’re going to
conceive a son, all you can do is laugh. How do you explain all the ways your life has
changed over the years? The way you have revised your dreams, shifted your expectations?
When life didn’t go your way, you improvised, and kept moving.
Who among us has not been in Sarah’s position? Is there a person here today who
has not needed to improvise in their own life?
I love music – pretty much any music – but I particularly love Jazz and Blues, and
without a doubt the attraction for me is their dependence on improvisation. Take George

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Gershwin’s classic song, “Summertime:” I have six different versions of this song on my
iPod, and no two are quite the same. John Coltrane’s aggressive swing. Sam Cooke’s
alluring voice over a bluesy shuffle. The bubbling flow of Booker T.’s organ. Miles Davis’
clear, sharply defined notes. Willie Nelson’s gentle croon. Janis Joplin’s breathless wail. It
is the same song and yet completely different, because the space to improvise allows each
musician to own the song completely.
Even after I took up the guitar, I thought of this as some sort of black magic beyond
my mortal comprehension. Then I enrolled in a Jazz course in college, where the professor
walked us through the following exercise. He put on a CD of a well-known Jazz standard,
but just as the band finished playing the opening melody and before their improvised solos
began, he would rewind to the beginning and play the melody over again, until we had
learned the melody well enough to sing the notes together over the recording. Only then did
he let the song play through, and we continued to sing the notes of the melody over the solo.
In that moment, I understood the magic: there was a relationship between the
melody and each band member’s solo. The musicians were improvising, but under the
apparent spontaneity there was still order.
So it is in life. If we rigidly stick to the score, we cannot adapt to new circumstances.
If we completely abandon the melody, we lose the song altogether. The challenge Sarah
faced – the challenge we all face – is to constantly play new notes that are grounded in a
consistent foundation. How? I can’t tell you the answer to that question – and I don’t need
to. You already know. You are here, today, in this moment; each of you has experienced
trouble in the past year, but you have made it through to this day, in your own way, your
own style. When life took a sudden turn, when the music shifted unexpectedly – you
responded, perhaps slowly, tentatively, but when pressed you came back to the basic values
that are your foundation, your score, and continued playing.
A moment in music that consistently takes my breath away comes about ten minutes
into the Jimi Hendrix song “Voodoo Chile,” when the guitar, bass, drums, and organ are all
pulling in different directions and the song itself seems about to disintegrate completely; the
band pauses for a split second and then, as the last screech of feedback fades, Hendrix’s
guitar sounds two crisp chords and the musicians lock back into a tight blues pattern.
In life, we know this moment all too well: the sense that, in times of trial and crisis,
we stand on a knife edge, utter chaos threatening on one side; a rigid, formulaic existence
on the other. When I look around the world today, I see it everywhere. Thousands killed
from floods in Pakistan, hundreds of thousands from the earthquake in Haiti. Genocide in
Africa, terrorists in the Middle East, nuclear ambitions, God save us, in Iran. A faltering
economy at home, voices of hate and mistrust in the street and on TV, deep-seated fears of
what the future holds. And here we stand, trembling, uncertain, peering over the brink.
When I was younger, on family vacations, my uncles taught me and my cousins to
boogie-board. Those are some of my fondest childhood memories, so it was a thrill for me,
on this year’s family vacation, to begin teaching one of my nephews. Time and again, we
took our boards out, just past where the surf was breaking, and floated there waiting for just
the right wave. Some passed us by, barely lifting us as they sped to shore. Others crashed
over us, flipping us over and throwing us, feet, arms, head in all directions. But, once in a
while, we caught a wave that was just right and rushed with it up the beach.

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 No matter what happened, however, there was always a instant of suspense. I knew
that each wave would go one of those three ways, but the second just before it happened felt
the same each time. The pull of the undertow. The swell of the wave. There is a push
upward, and only then can I feel where I am headed – if I have missed my moment; if I am
seconds away from a mouthful of seawater and my face planted in the sand; or if this is the
wave that will carry me, with a rush of adrenaline, back to land.
The key, as I tried to teach my nephew, lies in knowing how to wait. Move too
soon, and the wave will crash over you and send you flying. Stop paying attention, and you
won’t feel the wave’s approach in time to catch it. The challenge is to wait actively, staying
patient while keeping your mind alert and focused on whatever is coming next.
This is the razor-thin line we walk in life. If we lose our focus, chaos will overtake
us. If we lose our patience, if we lose our nerve, we stifle opportunities for creativity and
growth with an overbearing urge to control. We can only improvise when we wait actively,
ready to act when we feel the time is right – and not a moment sooner.
Waiting for a wave, I couldn’t tell my nephew which ones were the good ones, and
he couldn’t see them, either; he needed to develop a feel for when the moment was ripe. In
my best guitar years, when I jammed regularly with other musicians, I reached a point
where I no longer needed to think about what or how I was going to play. My left hand
knew where each note in the scale was, and deftly avoided the notes that were out of key.
My right hand sensed the tempo, fast, slow, straight ahead or shuffling. And we, who live
in this uncertain time, must wait to feel which notes to play next.
Rosh Hashanah can fill us with dread of the future, and the prayer which is perhaps
most chilling is Unetaneh Tokef. Please open your Mahzor to page 143 and take a look. Let
us speak of the sacred power of this day – profound and awe-inspiring … On Rosh Hashanah it is
written, and on the Fast of the Day of Atonement it is sealed! – How many will pass on, and how
many will be born; who will live, and who will die.
But our Mahzor offers us an alternative vision of what this day can be about. If you
look to the far left side of the page, you will see a poem that reinterprets Unetaneh Tokef.
Where the traditional liturgy asks, “Who will live and who will die,” the poet asks a
different question: “Who shall be truly alive and who shall merely exist.”
If we tremble at the awesome majesty of this day, at the prospect of taking stock of
the year that has passed, we should also revel in the new horizons that are just coming into
view. Our tradition teaches that the universe itself was created on this day, and that each
new Rosh Hashanah is not merely a commemoration of that first Creation but an
opportunity for us to create our own worlds. In a little while, after each blast of the shofar,
we will recite the words, hayom harat olam, “Today the world stands as at birth.”
Hear those words, hear the shofar differently today than you have heard them in the
past. Hear the power of Creation – Light emerging from Darkness, Order rising above
Chaos, Life born out of the Void. You have the power, in this moment, on this day, in
every moment of every day, to be reborn.
Ask yourself: what world do you want to create in this moment? What matters most
to you in life? What do you need so badly that, no matter how many obstacles you face,
you will keep improvising until you find a way to get what you need? The shofar is a wake-

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up call, a challenge to break free of the bonds that have held us back and to look in new
directions for a way forward.
And you, who have come here today, who have brought with you your sorrows and
your joy, your love and your pain, it is your time to answer that call. “Who shall be truly
alive and who shall merely exist.” What do you want from this year?
Sarah laughed. She laughed when she was reminded, after remaking her life so
many times, of her original hopes; and she laughed again when those dreams were realized.
Her life was not easy, and the road was rarely straight or smooth, but through it all Sarah
kept moving forward. Today, let us hear her laughter not as the bitter, cynical laughter of a
broken woman, but as the amused chuckle of a woman who has learned from experience
that when it comes to life, well, you just never know. A Yiddish proverb says, “Man plans,
God laughs,” but it would seem that Sarah – always improvising – Sarah got the last laugh.
We have no idea what the new year has in store for us, but one thing is certain: a
year from now, when with God’s help we stand in this room once more, our lives will have
twisted and turned in ways we could never have expected.
In a few minutes, we will stand before the Master of the World in silent prayer.
What support do you need this year to be able to improvise? Where do you want to bring
laughter into your life? How can you ensure that, this year, you will truly live, and not
merely exist? These are the fundamental questions of Rosh Hashanah, and the time has
come to answer the call of the shofar. Today the world stands as at birth.

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