I was raised in a large classical Reform congregation in Newark, New Jersey. The High Holidays, with its grand music and powerful sermons, were majestic and inspiring. As a child I remember Rabbi Eli Pilchik, of blessed memory, reading a passage from Amos. He read it as though he were the prophet himself. I knew it was a thundering indictment of all of us sitting in that magnificent cathedral like sanctuary in Newark, New Jersey surrounded by stifling poverty and racial prejudice. He spoke to a congregation of wealthy German Jews who were moving out of the city to the suburbs to escape from a growing African American population. The white flight and the Jewish flight would soon transform Newark from a vibrant commercial, educational and residential center into a city of decaying housing stock, empty stores and violent classrooms.

Woe, you who are at ease in Zion
And confident on the hill of Samaria,
Yet you ward off [the thought of] a day of woe
And convene a session of lawlessness.
They lie on ivory beds,
Lolling on their couches,
Feasting on lambs from the flock
And on calves from the stalls.
They hum snatches of song
To the tune of the lute-
They account themselves musicians like David.
They drink [straight] from the wine bowls
And anoint themselves with the choicest oils-
But they are not concerned about the ruin of Joseph.

The rabbi condemned our complacency and our indifference. "The ruin of Joseph" would soon be evident. It was racism, poverty, unemployment, hunger and crime. Yet we were surprised when riots turned the city into a ball of fire and Springfield Avenue looked like Dresden after the Allied bombing during WWII.

Forty years ago exactly Martin Luther King declared "I have a dream." In the shadow of the Washington Monument his words thundered across the landscape. The nation was confronted with a prophetic voice. The pages of the Bible were cracked open and the rhetoric about ancient Israel was about us. The speech helped to galvanize those of us who were thirsting for a better world. We were so hopeful. While the march on Washington is remembered for a single speech, it was in fact the culmination of a successful mobilizing effort of the Black Churches and civil rights organizations who brought the throng to Washington. Our own receptivity to its message was nurtured by our rabbis' sermons and Jewish participation was facilitated by the buses synagogues rented. We made no distinction between religious action and political action. We were called together by great leaders, by idealistic students, and good old fashion grassroots organizing. I long to recreate the energy, optimism and power of those days.

I deeply appreciate that the Free Synagogue gives me the right and responsibility to speak my mind, to support and to oppose actions, organizations and policies according my understanding of Jewish values. My goal tonight is ask us to do more. I hope the synagogue will become a breeding ground of dynamic controversy and passionate debate and a prophetic voice for repairing our society and our world. In 1999, The Central Conference of American Rabbis' Statement of Principles reaffirmed the centrality of social action.

We bring Torah into the world when we strive to fulfill the highest ethical mandates of our relationship with others and with all of God's creation. Partners with God in Tikkun Olam, repairing the world, we are called to help bring nearer the Messianic age. We seek dialogue and joint action with people of other faiths in the hope that together we can bring peace, freedom and justice to our world. We are obligated to pursue tzedek, justice and righteousness and to narrow the gap between the affluent and the poor, to act against discrimination and oppression, to pursue peace, to welcome the stranger, to protect the earth's biodiversity and natural resources, and to redeem those in physical, economic and spiritual bondage. In doing so, we reaffirm social action and social justice as a central prophetic focus of traditional Reform Jewish belief and practice.

Judaism is about making a difference. The synagogue itself has many worthwhile and important projects. Our soup kitchen and tzedakah fund make vital contributions to people's lives. Every Wednesday I am thrilled by the wonderful meals we serve, the energy and enthusiasm of our volunteers and the gratitude of our guests. I salute all of you who are doing this great mitzvah. Our tzedakah fund has given away more than 60 thousand dollars over the years. It is has extended our compassionate reach far beyond the four walls of this structure. It is one of our finest accomplishments and one of our most important mitzvot. Our support for the use of Fair Trade Coffee promotes worker justice and our own recycling efforts promote a healthier environment. Our participation in the Crop Walk, Mazon, and the food collection for Yom Kippur feed hungry people. Our social action committee is deeply involved in Project Hamotzi and has added fair housing to its agenda. I know that I have failed to mention some worthy projects in which we are involved. I encourage us to add to the growing list of worthwhile activities. However, the root causes which make these projects necessary are systemic and they cannot be solved through projects alone. We can ameliorate people's suffering but we do not have the capacity to change the underlying conditions without harnessing the economic and political power of both the private and the public sector.

In Leviticus 19 we learn the laws requiring farmers to leaving the corners of their fields and the gleanings for the poor and the stranger. This was part of the social legislation designed to meet basic needs in an agrarian society. Maimonides sets a higher standard for our tzedakah, "to aid a person in want by offering him a gift or a loan, by entering into a partnership with him or by providing work for him, so that he may become self-supporting, without having to ask people for anything. (Maimonides Eight steps of tzedakah Mishneh Torah Gifts to the poor 10:7) To implement this goal in our society will require the support and resources of both the private and public sector.

I am deeply troubled about the direction of our society. I am concerned about human rights and civil liberties. I am concerned about the way in which we use our power as the only remaining superpower to impose our will on other nations. I am concerned about the way we, the richest nation in world, lacks a just health care system. I am concerned about the way we despoil the environment. I am concerned that the religious right seeks to limit a woman's right to choose, and to deprive gays and lesbians of the right to have their relationships legally recognized, and to prevent new bio-technologies like stem cell research and therapeutic cloning from receiving Federal funding. The litany of my concerns is longer than our litany of sins. It is truly an alphabet of woes.

Over the past several years I have been involved with a group known as the Progressive Religious Partnership. It is made up of Jews, Christians and Muslims dedicated to ending racial, social, economic, gender, and sexual injustice. We have been in the vanguard of opposition to the War in Iraq. We believe that the national budget is a moral document because the budget defines our national priorities and our commitments to be a just, compassionate, and nurturing society. We believe that law is an instrument for assuring the dignity of every human being and therefore laws which promote discrimination are immoral. As part of our Statement of Conscience we wrote:

We call on our government to seek to become a moral superpower instead of merely the world's dominant military power; moral in the sense that we commit our resources to creating a society with health care for all, quality education for all, affordable housing for all, living wages for all and a clean environment. Only then, only with our destinies inseparably tied together across lines of class, race, {sic. gender, sexual identity} and color, can we truly proclaim, "United We Stand."

I also chair a Taskforce of the Joint CCAR-UAHC Commission on Social Action which is seeking to help congregations use social justice as lens to examine their entire program. We strive to help congregations become social action congregations rather than congregations that do good social action projects. Every thing we do must promote human dignity, compassion and justice, from the way we answer the telephone to the paper we use for mailings, from the products we consume to the vendors we use; from programs we support to the coalitions we join, from the way we treat our employees to the way we treat our congregants, from the way we invest our endowment to the stands that we advocate. The school and sanctuary must in word and deed be exemplars and stimulants of tikkun olam. I want Beth Emet to become a laboratory for developing a national evaluative instrument by which we might assess our synagogue as a social action congregation.

In the next year I want Beth Emet to become a place of debate and controversy on the great issues of the day. I want our goal to be to establish a procedure by which we as a congregation would take congregational positions of advocacy. I want us to join coalitions with others committed to changing our society.

Our tradition teaches that there shall be one law for the stranger and the citizen alike. The Patriot Act is a threat to our liberty. It violates our commitment to the dignity and rights of the stranger. Under the guise of protecting us from terrorism, the current administration seeks to restrict our liberty. What is today a war against terrorism can be war against descent tomorrow. One of the effects of the Patriot Act has been to single out Muslims and Arabs for special discrimination. There is now an attempt to create a second Patriot Act which is designed to even more severely restrict our liberty and to enable the government to spy on all of us. Our medical records, our financial records, our reading habits are vulnerable. Those of us who lived through the McCarthy era will remember when the Red Scare pervaded our society. I remember the Army--McCarthy hearings and the House un-American activities committee and the FBI surveillance conducted of antiwar protesters and civil rights activists. As frightening and as difficult as those years were, the potentiality for abuse now is even greater. We who are minority, we who have frequently protested government policy, we who have been subject to discrimination in this nation and throughout the world should be particularly sensitive to this legislation. We are not made safer by restriction of our liberty. We are not made safer by discrimination against people who are different from ourselves. We are not made safer by taking an open society and turning it into a closed society. Let us join with others in opposing the Patriot Act and make our voices heard in the Halls of Congress and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

As I mentioned above, I am deeply concerned about the current tax cuts, the billions of dollars to reconstruct Iraq, the war on terrorism, the rising deficits, and a whole host of other measures that will prevent the government from in the future having the resources necessary to tackle the real human needs that our society faces. Our tradition teaches us that a society is judged by the way it treats its weakest members. The widow, the orphan and the stranger are the litmus test for a just society. I call upon Beth Emet to select a series of critical issues, to study them seriously, to investigate the Jewish values which should motivate us to action and to establish courses of action to galvanize support for these values.

Separation of church and state is a fundamental principle of our democracy. Heartfelt religious values are part of the marketplace of ideas competing for dominance in the moral sphere. While I may disagree with moral stands of other religious groups, I believe in their right to argue for the merits of their positions. The debate over morality is important and healthy. Beth Emet should enter the debate.

However, government supported faith based initiatives will present us with a severe challenge. They will make resources available to religious organizations to provide social services. At the same time, they will remove resources from traditional vehicles. I wonder, "Will a hungry person have to pray before he or she receives a crust of bread? Will listening to a proselytizing sermon be a prerequisite for receiving treatment for drug addiction? How will these programs be monitored?" On the other hand, I wonder, "is it possible that faith based programs led by religiously motivated people and organizations will serve the needs of people better than secular agencies?" Is this a crack in the wall of separation of church and state? Or is it a way to better serve the whole community. We will need to debate our willingness to support these initiatives and to determine whether we would join with other religious groups to seek funding for social service programs. If Federal funds were available would Beth Emet seek them?

The death penalty is a scourge in our society. Many of you have read and heard my arguments against it. One innocent person executed is one too many. More importantly we know that the death penalty does not serve as a deterrent. People of color and poor people are subject to the death penalty in larger numbers than the affluent and white. Ultimately, however, the argument against the death penalty is a theological argument. Every time we take a human life we diminish the value of human life and we encourage others to do the same. We are the only Western nation that still allows the death penalty. It is time for us to ban capital punishment. It is a barbarism which is more about revenge than punishment, deterrence or justice. I call upon the congregation to condemn capital punishment and to actively support its abolition.

Judaism teaches that it is a responsibility of a society to provide health care for all of its citizens. A fair distribution of health care resources is part and parcel of all we mean by a just society. The current controversy over the high cost of prescription drugs is only the tip of the iceberg. The just distribution of health care is a Jewish issue and the synagogue is a place to address it. Saving lives, curing devastating diseases and repairing grievous injuries are a mitzvot. Who will determine U.S. policy on promising technologies such as stem cell research and therapeutic cloning? The Catholic Church and fundamentalist Protestants have no hesitation in expressing their views and lobbying for their position? We must express our views.

If we want to defend the family and uphold covenantal love as ideal, then we must recognize the right of gays and lesbians to legally link their lives together. We must learn not to fear those who are different from ourselves. It is painful to admit our homophobia. It is devastating to confront our racism. It is crushing to admit our sexism. Al chet shechatanu lefanecha: For the sin which we sinned before you we seek pardon and forgiveness.

There is a principle in Jewish law: Dina demalchuta dina, the law of the land is the Law. It is the obligation for Jews to obey all laws that are not immoral and do not prevent us from practicing our Judaism. This principle mandates that we participate in our government. It teaches that voting is a mitzvah, a sacred obligation. How we vote is a moral and Jewish issue? I know this is both controversial and filled with ambiguities. But nevertheless we must engage in vigorous and rigorous conversations with each other and with those who seek to represent us at every level of government. The synagogue cannot engage in endorsing candidates or in partisan politics, but we can be the place the candidates must come if they want to be elected. I call on Beth Emet to create opportunities for candidate forums and political debates. Isaiah proclaims:

Cry with full throat, without restraint;
Raise your voice like a ram's horn!
Declare to My people their transgression,
To the House of Jacob their sin.

Isaiah tells us that our sin is to believe that the prayer and fasting without justice are efficacious.

And then Isaiah proclaims:

Is such the fast I desire,
A day for men to starve their bodies?
Is it bowing the head like a bulrush
And lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Do you call that a fast,
A day when the Lord is favorable?
No, 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 clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.

Each of us is the product of the age in which we were raised. Our values are framed by great events which dominate our understanding of the world. The Shoah and the rebirth of Israel shaped my understanding of Judaism. The civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement are my models of activism. The rich rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets, the Torah's stories of the creation of humankind and of the Exodus from Egypt, and the biblical imagery of Martin Luther King's speeches tie politics and religion together with an unbreakable knot. The pulpit and the congregation are the holy place of tikkun olam (the quest for a redeemed world.) No sophisticated theological reflection has been able to shake my childhood faith in God who wants and needs us to be partners in the perfection of the world.

Foolishly I became a rabbi because I wanted to change the world. I am neither eloquent enough nor brave enough nor self sacrificing enough to do it alone. A long time ago I heard a rabbi say that every sermon he preaches is to himself. I pray that what I said here today will touch me and change me. If it does, perhaps it will touch and change you. I ask you to join me in the journey through the desert. Perhaps together we will reach the Promised Land.

Amen