Nowadays it is our custom to sing the last lines of Avinu Malkeinu out loud. One of the versions has a special melody for the last line that everyone knows, Avinu Malkeinu, Choneinu V’oneinu…Ki ain banu ma-asim. Our Supreme Parent, be kind to us and answer us even if we, as usual, haven’t done enough to deserve it in the last year.

But in Eastern Europe the custom was to sing the rest of the Avinu Malkeinu out loud and then the last line was said in silence. The Dubner Maggid, the preacher of Dubnow was once asked why, and he explained with a story.

Once there was a village grocer. Every year he would go to the big city to order supplies and merchandise for the coming year. When he entered the warehouse he was dazzled by the amount and the variety of the merchandise that was on display there. And so he would say, “give me a little of this” and a little bit of that.” And then he would get carried away, and he would go down the aisles ordering everything in sight. And then, when he got to the cashier to total his bill, he was embarrassed and he would say in a whisper. “I am sorry but I don’t have enough money to pay for all these thing that I have ordered. Would you please give them to me on credit, and if I have a good year I will be able to pay for them all?

And so it is with us, said the Dubner. When we think of all the things we would like to have in the New Year, all the blessings we need, we are overwhelmed with desire. And so we call out: Avinu Malkeinu, give us health, Avinu Malkeinu, give us wealth, etc., etc. But then we come to the last sentence and we realize how little credit, how little merit we have, so we say in a whisper, have pity on us and give us all we ask on credit. Give us another year of life and we will try harder to be better and to justify Your faith in us and to pay You back for all You have given us.

With what can we pay? What is our life, what is our worth, as it says in our Machzor -- meh chayeinu, mah chasdeinu? Adam lahevel damah. Our lives are like a breath, a futility. Reb Nachman of Bratzlav, the Chasidic teacher whose teachings of joy and optimism we recalled on Rosh Hashanah in this dark year, helps us begin our answer with another story.

Reb Nachman was looking out the window of his synagogue facing the marketplace (reminding us of the need to have our eye on the world outside as we sit and pray and now can in fact see outside.) From the window of his synagogue Reb Nachman spotted one of his disciples rushing by.

Have you looked up at the sky this morning?” the Rebbe asked.

“No, Rebbe, I haven’t had the time.”

“Believe me,” said the Rebbe, “ in 50 years everything you see here today will be gone. There will be another fair – with other horses, other wagons, different people. I won’t be here then and neither will you. So what’s so important that you don’t have time to look at the sky?”

In 50 years only some of us will be here as well, and given the pace of change can we imagine what the marketplace of the world will look like in the year 2055? Some of can recall what it was like in 1955 and we struggle to recall what remains constant and what is fleeting like a passing shadow, k’tzeil oveir.

But particularly this year when we look up at the sky (as Rabbi Feshbach alluded to last week) we don’t only see permanence we see the winds of change, not a still small voice, the breath of God, but rather the hurricane of change. Perhaps once a generation some occurrence comes like a lightning flash, lighting up realities in our society that had been there all along, but hidden in the dark. Maybe in our generation, in our society Katrina/New Orleans could become that lightning flash.

As a teacher and friend, R. Arthur Waskow, Director of the Shalom Center wrote recently, “…this moment can light up the dark places in our souls and our societies. That applies even in the moment of urgent relief, compassionate caring for the victims, evacuees, refugees. The dark place just lit up for us is the degree to which those who control American life have been operating in a state of arrogant privilege, rather than practical compassion…arrogance toward the poor, toward the earth itself, even toward the future.”

It is not coincidental that Reb Nachman used the number 50 years. Fifty year cycles were mentioned in the Torah and marked with concept of Jubilee. The Jubilee was indeed a cause for jubilation, because it marked the end of the maldistribution of material wealth and led to the redistribution of the land. Land itself was returned to the poor and the vulnerable, who would then have the opportunity to liberate themselves from the burden of poverty.

This visionary concept derives from the Torah’s command to create a just society in the land of Canaan once the Israelites were to enter. The concept prevents the polarization of society into two classes: wealthy, powerful landowners on the one hand and permanently impoverished people on the other. In an agrarian society, a farmer who sold all the land to pay debts had no prospect of ever being anything other than a servant. Nor would a servant’s sons ever rise above that level. Anticipating the human misery and social instability that this would lead to, the Torah provides a plan. In the 50th year, land would be redistributed.

Behind this plan are two religious assumptions. Because all the earth and its inhabitants belong to God, human beings cannot possess either the land or its inhabitants in perpetuity. And no human being should be condemned to permanent servitude. In present day terms, no one should be trapped in an endless cycle of poverty, no family unable to find a place of God’s earth to call their own.

And when did this redistribution begin – what day on the calendar? Look in Leviticus, Chapter 25, verses 9 and 10: there it says, “Then you shall broadcast the truah sound on the shofar, in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, the Day of Atonement -- you shall broadcast its sound throughout your land. You shall make that year kadosh, holy, by proclaiming liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof. A Jubilee shall it be for you.” The text reads U’kratem Dror Ba-aretz L’chol Toshveha. Yovel hi tihyeh lachem”

The English phrase, “proclaim liberty throughout the land” should sound familiar to you as Americans (where do we find it? -- written on the “Liberty” Bell.) That bell is called the Liberty Bell because the King James translation of the Bible used the word liberty for the Hebrew word “Dror,” from the verse in Leviticus. But what does the Hebrew work Dror actually mean, and what can we learn today from the fact that the ancient Israelite tradition connected the announcement of Dror, with the sounding of the shofar at the conclusion of the Day of Atonement?

The connection of the Jubilee year with the sounding of the shofar is actually in the word yoveil itself, since although translated as Jubilee, it actually means a horn. But what is the connection of Atonement with Dror? Although we might try to imagine what the founding fathers, most of whom were wealthy landowners and some of whom were slave holders, might have thought of as liberty, more important is how would we achieve it today.

Dror is actually not the Hebrew word for freedom in the sense of political freedom or independence. Freedom is really Cherut and independence in Hebrew is Atzmaut (as in Yom Haatzmaut – Independence Day). According to the Biblical commentator Rashi, quoting the Rabbinic Midrash, the root meaning of the Hebrew word Dror is related to the word for dwelling, mahu lashon dror, k’m’daeyeir bei daera, what is its etymology, it’s like one who dwells in a dwelling. Dror is therefore related to access to housing.

Biblical scholars have recently learned about another possible source for the meaning of dror. The Hebrew is a cognate of an ancient Semitic word in Akkadian, “anduraru”, which was actually an edict of release, issued by the Babylonian kings, upon their accession to the throne, canceling debts and indentured servitude. So, in a parallel way, during the High Holy Day season when every year we acknowledge and restore God to the throne of judgment, God asks us to proclaim a dror in the land.

There are also two references to this understanding of dror in the prophets: In the book of Jeremiah, as the Babylonians approached Jerusalem, King Tzedekiah ordered the people to release their indentured servants to proclaim a “dror” and in Isaiah 61, the Judeans exiled in Babylonia are freed under terms of a “dror” as they are restored to their land. . Now that perhaps we can grasp what was the “original intent” of God’s insistence that we proclaim “dror” at the close of Yom Kippur, what ought we be doing after we sound the shofar tomorrow night? You may know, I hope, a tradition that as soon as you break your fast you go outside and hammer the first nail in your Sukkah, connecting your observance of the fast with another command, to dwell in a Sukkah. This custom reflects a saying in Pirkei Avot that “mitzvah goreret mitzvah,” a mitzvah tows along another mitzvah in its wake, or that “doing mitzvahs is habit-forming” (in a good way, of course!)

I don’t mean to suggest that you shouldn’t follow this custom and begin to build a Sukkah tomorrow night, but I have three other suggestions for concrete mitzvahs to attach to your observance of Yom Kippur beginning tomorrow night, to bring forth dror in our land. One mitzvah comes directly through the work of our Tikkun Olam Committee, which is leading an effort to involve congregations of all denominations in our community in working for affordable housing. Many of those congregations will be distributing cards at Yom Kippur and/or Sukkot services this year.

When you leave the sanctuary tonight I ask you to pick up one of these green cards at the table in the lobby and bring them back any time between now and Mitzvah Day November 6, and we will send them to the appropriate public officials in the County and/or the District of Columbia. It is in your hands on this Yom Kippur to proclaim a “dror” to the middle and lower income folks who cannot find housing in our area

The second mitzvah suggestion is to join other folks from our Tikkun Olam committee, which has begun an effort with the approval of our Temple Board, to bring another basic element of “dror” to our state and nation, that is, affordable and comprehensive health care. Two of our members, Lynda and Ron Honberg, will be leading a discussion on this theme tomorrow afternoon during our afternoon Yom Kippur “study break,” and look for another Social Concerns Shabbat discussion on this theme in the near future.

I hope it didn’t take a hurricane to remind you that over tens of millions of Americans have no health insurance and that the number continues to rise. Therefore you won’t be surprised to learn that in the United States average life expectancy has now fallen to 29th in the world, just ahead of Cuba, but behind such countries as Chile and United Arab Emirates, or that the infant mortality rate in Washington DC is higher than in some impoverished African and Asian countries.

So we can and we need to declare a “dror” as soon as Yom Kippur is over, a dror for affordable housing and health care. And if you appreciate irony in politics what do you make of the following?

“Article 30: Section 1 – The state guarantees social and health insurance, the basics for a free and honorable life for the individual and the family – especially children and women – and works to protect them from illiteracy, fear and poverty and provides them with housing and the means to rehabilitate and take care of themselves.

Do you know where this Article 30: Section 1 is from? So reads the draft Iraqi Constitution – our fellow Americans are dying there and coming back with injuries and health issues to a country which will not provide them with affordable housing nor guarantee them health insurance.

Finally, you will remember that last week we connected our Rosh Hashanah anniversary of creation in God’s image with some Jewish teachings on honoring God’s image through the abolition of torture. As it happens, while we were praying and studying, the US Senate rose up en masse on Rosh Hashanah and voted 90-9 for the McCain amendment that would go a good distance toward prohibiting US-sponsored torture. President Bush has threatened to veto the entire Defense Authorization Bill in order to make sure that this amendment doesn’t survive. Right now as we speak it is in the hands of a committee which has the capacity to keep this amendment or cut it out. It is a powerful moment of justice in the balance. Perhaps you may want to hammer a nail in the construction of a Sukkah of peace and justice tomorrow night and send one of the sample letters available with information on the tables outside.

There may be some of you who feel that these concerns and these actions I’ve suggested depart or detract from the real meaning of Yom Kippur as a day of atonement. And there may those who might be tempted to ask that while everything we spoke about this evening may be true, is this really what we should be focusing on during Yom Kippur, on this most spiritual of days? Were you listening last week on Rosh Hashanah when Rabbi Feshbach quoted Israel Salanter to the effect that my fellow human being’s material needs are my spiritual needs?

I have only three witnesses I can cite in answering this question: The Rabbinical Sages, Isaiah, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. It was those Rabbis who knew that they had to create a form of Judaism that could live and thrive in the world without the power of the sacrificial temple service in Jerusalem. They decided that on the most spiritual day of the year, a day on which we refrain from virtually every physical pleasure, to have us read the section from Isaiah about fasting that is our haftarah reading tomorrow morning: “On your fast day you think only of your business and oppress your workers. Your fasting leads only to strife and discord, and hitting out with cruel fist… Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To undo the fetters of bondage, to let the oppressed go free, and break every cruel chain? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and to bring the homeless poor into your house? When you see the naked to clothe them?”

Perhaps we Jews, who have inherited the prophet Isaiah’s calling, have an unusual notion of spirituality altogether, compared to our neighbors. Just a month ago Newsweek magazine reported some data on the spiritual life of Americans. Among the questions they asked was which purpose from the following list is the most important purpose of prayer? More than 90% gave one of the these answers: To seek God’s guidance, to thank God, to be close to God, to help others, or to improve a person’s life. But if they asked Rabbi Heschel about the purpose of prayer, Heschel, who marched with Martin Luther King for voting rights in Selma, Alabama in 1965, and reported that he felt “as if his legs were praying,” he might have answered as he wrote: “All true prayer is subversive, seeking to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods."

Yes, of course, in our prayers we seek guidance, we seek closeness, we seek both atonement and “at-one”ment. But this year and every year we must seek in our prayers during Yom Kippur, and in our prayerful actions immediately after the holiday, to connect our lives as Jews and Americans to the words from Leviticus inscribed on the “dror” bell in Philadelphia – u’kratem dror baaretz l’chol toshveha, you shall proclaim dror to all the inhabitants of our land.

May our fast on this Yom Kippur lead us to fulfill this our people’s task Tzom Kal – May the fast ease your burden and both lighten and enlighten you for this important task.

Amen Kein Y’hee Ratzon