Erev Rosh Hashanah Little Sermonette (aka, my personal prayer for 5768)-Wednesday evening

I grew up in this funky, hip synagogue in the suburbs of Boston. We were cutting edge for our time. A small Reform Jewish shul focused on education and ritual. We kept kosher, we built a sukkah, we prayed every week, we studied, we played, we grew. For Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, members of the congregation, in an effort to personalize the High Holy Day experience, were asked to share personal prayers. What lessons had they learned from the year gone by? What were they praying for in this moment right now? For the year ahead? People would share their greatest triumphs, their greatest sorrows, their greatest joys, and their greatest struggles. They often were moving, funny and poignant conversations with God which they shared out loud with their community. Every year, I think about what my personal prayer is. This is mine for this year.

Hello God. When I pray to you, I pray for strength. It is my prayer. That is all I ever pray for. Yes, I say the words of the liturgy and I ask for many things like peace and abundance, wisdom, healing, and for You to hear our prayers. But the prayer in my heart, when I am alone-either alone or alone with You- what I pray for is for strength. I pray for the strength to bring about peace and decency to ever uglier world, I pray for the strength to balance the abundance I have with the humility I desire, I pray to be strong enough to find wisdom, strong enough to heal and strong enough to live as if everything depends on me while waiting for You. Really, I pray to be strong enough to carry all that You and life send me, to be strong enough to live with the joy and the sadness, to be strong enough to grow and learn every day from both. I am not praying for this for myself. Dear God, I pray you can bring strength to everyone; to those I love, the strangers on the street, my new friends, colleagues and acquaintances here and all over the world. Today I stand here and I pray that every person here has the strength to find their own prayer.

This time of year, I hope all of you are seeking out your own personal prayer. What do you long for in your heart? When you get lost in your own thoughts, when you complain to your friends or family, when you talk to God, what do you say? Fill in the blank: I wish that …, I hope that… I pray that…

You have some time now, during this evening’s service to think about what you really want in this world from yourself, from those around you and from God. And, since I was brave enough to share my personal prayer with you, I am going to ask you to do the same. At the end of this evening’s service, after the Amidah, before we do the concluding prayers, I will ask you to share some of your thoughts with one another; your own personal prayers.