This sermon was delivered on Yom Kippur 5785/2024.

It is great to be home at Temple Beth El for this service of healing. We all need healing. 

Judaism is built on questions. The rabbis of the Talmud love to debate critical issues to understand their limits. So, here’s my question: What does it mean to dance in the rain?

This May I’ll celebrate my 30th year as a rabbi. I have officiated at hundreds of weddings. The lead up to outside summer ceremonies can be a bit agonizing when thunderstorms threaten to dramatically change a bride’s or groom’s vision for their event. 

I can tell you that a wedding is not about the weather. Chip and I have danced at wedding parties with streams of water running through tents that ruined everybody’s shoes. Those weddings leave us with the fondest of memories.

What makes the wedding great is the couple who are happy to have found one another. Dancing in the rain is about having people to dance with even when the weather is not what we want.

What does it mean to dance in the rain?

One year ago this past Monday, my second cousin was one who was dancing down south in Israel at an all-night Nova Music Festival on Simchat Torah. Those hundreds of young adults could have cared less whether it was physically raining because they were enjoying their annual musical love fest. 

But antisemitic storms rained hard on their and our holiday celebration. Tomer Segev, of blessed memory, was my cousin’s name.

When do we refrain from dancing in the rain? When we are collectively grieving. This past year has been the hardest we have had as a Jewish world in my lifetime. The pogroms that some of us thought belonged to the past seem to be alive and well.

Too many have died in the year gone by – hostages, Israeli civilians, Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians. But the survivors of that festival who were tormented, and witnessed horrors beyond what language can capture, came up with their motto of resilience. “We will dance again.”

So what does it mean to dance in the rain? It means that despite the antisemitism that, at times, lies dormant and, at other times, emerges as a full-blown virus, we will live with pride and celebrate our faith.

I’ve recently asked people if they’d ever danced in the rain. A friend of mine who was raised as a Mennonite answered with a funny story. She explained that Mennonites are not allowed to dance, ever. They actually tell a joke that you can’t have sex because it will lead to dancing.

Can one dance in the midst of war?

For six months, one of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s sons, Yosef, had been planning his October 2023 wedding in his home city of Jerusalem. Yosef was a soldier in an elite combat unit. The IDF gives soldiers eight days off before the wedding so Yosef was on leave on October 7^th and not immediately called up.

Rabbi Boteach, upon landing in Israel, toured the devastation of the besieged kibbutzim and visited some of the hotels where the displaced survivors had been relocated.

Then came the wedding. The family moved the wedding to a hotel that had a bomb shelter large enough for their 300 guests. When the ceremony ended and the reception began, Rabbi Boteach noted, “It was the most celebratory wedding I’d ever been at. The crowd was on fire with joy and excitement for two IDF soldiers who are getting married.”

Boteach added in a most unrabbinic fashion (that I’ve adapted for the Yom Kippur sermon) that as he took in the celebration where almost all the people at the wedding were Israelis, most with children serving on the front lines, he said “I thought to myself this a giant ‘Forget You’ to Hamas. You will never stop Jewish weddings. You will never stop Jewish babies from being born. You will never make us afraid. And you will never push us out of our ancient homeland.”

Rejoicing with bride and groom is a great mitzvah, in Hebrew, simchat chatan v’kallah. No matter what else is happening in the world outside, we shatter the glass at the end of the ceremony remembering our historic pain and then we passionately celebrate. We exuberantly dance in circles encircling the newlyweds with our love.

So can we dance in the midst of war?

Never can we dance in the face of suffering of another.  But we can dance and we must dance in celebration of milestones.

When are other times to refrain from dancing?  When we are personally grieving. But then grieving has its limits. Judaism lays out a framework of mourning for our closest relatives – defined in Jewish law as our parents, our siblings, our spouse, or God forbid our child. For these four relationships we stay home for shiva, seven days. We don’t go to parties or dance for thirty days. And at the most observant levels, traditional Jews do not dance for a full year in mourning their parents’ deaths. 

What does it mean to dance in the rain?

It means that after our period of grieving has passed, we dance again. It’s a different dance for the ones we loved are not physically with us to hold us and lift our celebrations to the highest levels. But still we are meant to dance again. We are not meant to live in the past watering our loved ones’ graves with our tears. We are meant to seize the present and plan and plant for the future.

We are called to live the words of Psalm 31, celebrating God or celebrating the passage of time that turns our mourning into dancing.

Can we dance when our neighbor is suffering?

The storms our world is experiencing are increasing in frequency and intensity.

We are experiencing what scientists in 1990 termed “climate shocks” – unexpected environmental patterns of hurricanes and heat waves, droughts and floods that cause high levels of damage.

Day by painful day, the stories of the horror our neighbors in Western North Carolina experienced are being told – some literally watched their neighbors drown.

I was on an affordable housing call on Monday when I asked a Hurricane Helene refugee named Beth if there was anything uplifting she could share about the storm. 

She said, “Thank goodness Asheville has Asheville. There is a really strong social fabric – neighbors looking out for one another. Local restaurant owners immediately opened up their restaurants and turned them into distribution hubs – collecting donations and cooking food. There has been gentle kindness at every moment. Everyone is their kindest most generous self.”

Then her words revealed to me that she was a member of our tribe when she added, “At this season, we are asking the question of who gets to wander and who gets to be at peace for the next year.” 

Beth was referencing our Unetaneh Tokef prayer that speaks to a metaphoric book of life in which our fate for the coming year will be written and sealed asking “Who shall live and who shall die?” as we ponder our potential fates.

The answer lies in the final line – וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה, ut’shuvah, ut’fillah u’tzedakah maavirin at roah hagzerah – but repentance, prayer and charity temper judgement’s harsh decree.

Our return to our neighbors, our prayers, and our charity tempers the harshness of their reality. It is in our hands to help our neighbors heal so that they can celebrate again. 

Which brings me to my final question: Can one dance in the face of medical storms?

When we are breathless because of a frightening diagnosis, we can become paralyzed by the “what ifs” that imagine a worst-case scenario. But then we realize that life is too short to not live. So, we hope and with our hope we dance the dance of life holding fast to those we love with every ounce of our energy.

I met with Sandra Goldman who has been the most open person I know confronting a life-threatening illness. Many of you may know her. Sandra has been executive director of our Hebrew Cemetery for 15 years.

Sandra had her first encounter with breast cancer 14 years ago. 5 years later, the cancer returned and in 2020, it had metastasized.  

When I asked her how she dances in the rain in face of a fearful diagnosis, she gave me an hour’s worth of lessons.

“Cancer is a stumbling stone.” She shared, “I’m going to live my life to the fullest.”

Sandra thinks often about her legacy. She never misses an opportunity to do a mitzvah – to cook for a neighbor, to add one more guest to her already overflowing holiday table. She raised  $10,000 then $50,000 and now she has raised one million dollars for Project Pink to increase access to life-saving mammography for uninsured women.

“If I can make a difference, if I can help one person,” she says to herself.

Every year Sandra does something to get her out of her comfort zone. She rappelled down an uptown building. She sky dived from 13,000 feet. She describes it: “I jumped into the sunset. The freefall was cold but once the parachute opened, I could see the curve of the earth, and all was quiet. Every cell of my body said I am alive.”

Dancing in the rain means celebrating life even when our fate is uncertain – especially when our fate uncertain.

Like the Hurricane names that are alphabetized and come at us so quickly – from Helene two weeks ago to Milton two days ago – the storms of life keep coming: storms of illness, storms of grief, storms of antisemitism, storms of war.

As Jews we have danced from the start. We became a people when we crossed through the sea of reeds to freedom. Moses led the men in song and then Miriam, took a timbrel and led the women in dance.

They escaped Egypt departing so hastily their bread didn’t have time to rise, but they packed their timbrels?

Even the third century Rabbi Ishmael asked “Where did the women get their timbrels and dance flutes in the desert?” And he answered: “The women of that generation were confident that miracles would come, that better times would come, so they brought timbrels out of Egypt.”

As humans we are resilient. As a Jewish people we are resilient. We always have to keep our playlist up-to-date.

When can we dance in the rain? At every opportunity we have – at Bnei Mitzvah, at weddings, when we hear music that moves our souls.

Our Yom Kippur day of atonement is waning. The closing of the metaphoric book of life is nearing.  So we pray, in 5785, may our sufferings be miniscule and may our simchas be expansive. May our reasons for dancing be many and great.

Gmar chatimah tovah – may we be written and sealed be a good year. Amen.

Photo by Urban Vintage on Unspash.com.