Like all of you, I walk into the doors, the gates of our sanctuary, on Rosh Hashana every year with different needs. Sometimes I come in knowing what I am seeking, and other times, it is a prayer or a phrase or a word or a soaring melody or a feeling that helps me find the right gate for my prayers and my aspirations for the next year. And there have been times I have entered spiritually broken and desperate and other times in a comfortable frame of mind.

My personal experiences happen to align with a teaching three centuries ago by an early Chassidic master, Dov Baer, who was the successor to the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Chassidism. It is this teaching that inspired our High Holiday theme for Temple Shalom this year – Pitchu Lanu: Let us open the gates into a new year.

Dov Bar taught that there were thirteen gates to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem – one for each of the 12 tribes and one for those who did not know the tribe to which them belonged. So also, he says, there are 13 gates of prayer, each with its own manner of entrance. All individuals must choose their own gate and enter into prayer in their own way.

I absolutely love this reading. It gives me and every one of us permission to enter the gates of our sanctuary today to seek what we personally need, rather than sticking to a prayer regimen that might not fit us. Dov Baer’s teaching dovetails beautifully with the approach to prayer by our magnificent High Holiday prayer book, Mishkan Ha’Nefesh, the Sanctuary of our Soul. This prayer book is huge, with multiple prayers and so many options that we can all find our own gates and enter prayer here in our own ways. And this is why I often encourage you to let your eyes wander through the prayer book and find the prayers, the words, the inspirations that resonate within your hearts and your souls.

For so many of us, our High Holidays will focus on our actions. This is hardly a surprise, as Judaism itself is very much described as action-based. Rabbi Akiva was once asked to describe the whole Torah in one sentence. He turned to a single line in Kedoshim, in the very middle of the Torah for his answer – “Love your Neighbour as Yourself.” In his view, everything else in the Torah – our relationship with God or the rituals that we follow or the Holidays we observe all served that specific line in the Torah. His approach is simple and loving. If we act in good and loving ways towards our neighbours, it helps them, it helps the community, and it also a way for us to increase our love for ourselves. And in all these way we Honour God. And of course, the more we love ourselves, the more we can love others. And in fact, Reform Judaism quite agrees with Rabbi Akiva. Going back to around 1850, Rabbi Abraham Geiger, the man we consider to be the founder of Reform Judaism defined Judaism as “ethical monotheism,” an idea which underlies our movement to this day.

Rabbi Akiva’s ideas work wonderfully for many of us, and these can be our manners of entrance to prayer. And this is the focus of so much of our High Holiday liturgy. We get prompts in our prayers create honest lists of the harms we do, so that we can fix them and then commit not to repeat them again.

But for many of us, loving others (in our actions) is too distant a goal, and we come here in desperation trying to find ways to love ourselves first. Rabbi Selig Salkowitz offers an idea of human “shlemut” — the idea of wholeness as a fundamental goal of human experience. It is the same source word for shalom, peace. He suggests that one way of expressing this wholeness is through Ahavah – of love. He also turns to the same line of Torah as Rabbi Akiva – that Ahava is not only a feeling or emotion, but also the concrete behaviours we display toward God and our fellow humans. But then he goes further, that Ahavah implies “self-esteem,” the internal conviction that each of us should appear worthy in our own eyes. To be loved, one must consider oneself lovable; without regard for self, one can hardly care for others.”

And I suspect that this is why many of us are here today, and this is what our seeking – self-love. Too many of us struggle spiritually. We aren’t yet at the start line of loving others and have a sense that we must first work on our relationships with ourselves and our own spirituality, so that we can get to the world that Rabbi Akiva describes.

And so, we walk into our sanctuary seeking the gates of prayer aimed at healing our relationships with ourselves — confronting our internal world where our greatest concerns are existential, or where we wonder who we are, or do we have a place in the world? Or it might be about profound loneliness and isolation, or anger at God or rejection of a God-idea, or the numbing and chronic pain of our mental health issues coming out of depression, anxiety, trauma, any sort of addiction, or many other things. Or it might be about self-hatred – I am a bad person because of the bad things I have done. And as we enter prayer on these High Holidays, maybe we are simply seeking comfort and validation as a very first step. Or maybe looking for a gate of prayer into the world of Refu’at Ha’nefesh – the healing of our spirits or our souls.

Using themes that come up in the Torah, we might say that we are in a spiritual “wilderness” and maybe we are wondering if there is a “promised land” for us maybe just beyond the horizon and wondering if there is a way to take the first steps in that direction.

And so tonight, this sermon is for you.

I’d like to start with a powerful affirmation that comes directly from the stories of just about everyone in the Torah– that we are not alone and that our personal internal spiritual issues are almost universal in our Jewish experience.

Our Torah is filled with stories of hugely dysfunctional families and of people who grew up in dysfunction or who experienced trauma that shaped their lives. They would later face deep spiritual brokenness or challenges as a result, and find themselves outside the world trying to find a way back in. Most importantly, in these stories, the Torah teaches that spiritual brokenness is does not happen when we are born, but comes out of our life experiences.

Adam and Eve’s family is filled with favouritism and sibling conflict and Cain lashes out in an unspeakable act of murder. Noah cannot cope with the trauma of destruction that he lived through and his survivor’s guilt and he falls into alcoholism later in life.

Abraham and Sarah and Isaac – can you begin to imagine Abraham’s spiritual pain after Sarah orders Hagar and Ishmael out of their family home and into the desert to die? And can you imagine the state of that family once Abraham returned home after almost sacrificing their precious son Isaac to God? Sarah is never mentioned again after that story until her death, leaving us to consider how broken their relationship had become.

The story of Isaac and Rebecca’s family is deeply troubling — the favouritism of one son over the other and the destructive sibling rivalries of Jacob and Esau that got so bad that Jacob had to run away into the wilderness – to avoid being killed by his brother. Then there’s the huge mess within Jacob’s family with his 12 sons and one daughter, and his four wives all colliding with each other. And later, Joseph suffers huge early life trauma at the hands of his brothers who actually plan to kill him and instead sold him into slavery. And then there is Moses, who killed a man in a moment of rage, and had to run away into the wilderness where he spent decades as a simple shepherd.

But somehow, our Torah stories are not about their disastrous descents into spiritual wilderness. Instead, there is always a chapter 2 – on how they how they found their way out, invariably revolving around a new spiritual moment, and a chapter 3- how they each found their ways out of their own personal wildernesses and into their own promised lands, starting with a moment of spiritual awakening, a moment of prayer. And these moments are available to us as well, as we can each seek our own prayers over these High Holidays , as pathways, as signposts, as personal guides out of our personal wildernesses and into our own promised lands.

I’d like to talk about “wilderness” first. The idea of wilderness is not a singular idea and it appears in unique ways to each of us. In the Torah, some of our ancestors chose to enter the wilderness intentionally. Abraham at age 75, responded to a whisper “Lech Lecha” – go for yourself to a Land that I will show you — and off he went, well-prepared and with his family and followers and his possessions on an uncharted wilderness journey – with the simple hope that the land he would be shown would be better for him (physically and spiritually) than the one he left. And when he reaches his promised, land, he found what he needed. He builds an altar and makes a sacrifice, affirming that he has reached a good spiritual place. For Abraham his journey is an engaged and positive experience – of spiritual seeking, done with curiosity and open-mindedness, like a well-planned hike into the unknown but fully provisioned.

However, for most of the Torah’s major characters, the wilderness is thrust upon them, oftentimes unexpectedly – a physical and spiritual place that is unnerving and unmoored, directionless, desolate and scary.

Some of our ancestors didn’t make their way back from the wilderness. Cain, after killing his brother Abel, was ejected into the world from his family and also from God. He would wander the world unmoored, physically and spiritually for the rest of his days, with a mark on his forehead that would separate him from others, ensuring his spiritual isolation. For Noah, even with his early connection to God, he would in his later years slide into an endless spiritual wilderness of alcoholism that he would never escape.

But there are also so many stories of hope in the Torah, of people vaulted into physical and spiritual wildernesses and spiritual bottoms of their own, who made their way through those dark days and discovered their own promised lands, and gifts of life that they could never have imagined.

What I find surprising is that all these Torah stories all follow the same story arc. And we know this trajectory because it resides within the Passover story that we tell every year. It is a simple story arc — of personal enslavement then a descent into a spiritual and often physical wilderness. Then a pause, a moment when we discover our missing spiritual connection to something greater than ourselves. The glimmer of hope and the beginning, just the beginning of purpose and direction. Then small steps forward. And finally, finally a new promised land, where we continue to journey, but in a richer world.

This is our big Passover story: Slaves in Egypt for over 200 years, our ancestors are vaulted into the wilderness, the Sinai Desert, completely out of their league physically and spiritually in a world that they cannot fathom. For the Israelites, their pause, their spiritual moment is at Mount Sinai. For our ancestors, that prayer moment led to small steps through the wilderness over the next 39 years where they grew enough to enter their promised land. And once they entered, they would continue to journey, but with milk and honey now available, green forests and paths now visible before them to consider and follow. And it would be in that promised land, where we truly became Am Yisrael, the peoplehood of Israel, a light amongst the nations.

The stories of our Torah ancestors follow that same story arc.

Abraham, after his spiritual journey, reached a land that he was simply shown, and by stopping, he made a covenant with our unknowable God, and he later fulfilled the promise made to him by God much earlier: “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.”

Jacob, after ripping off his brother Esau one time too many, also runs into the wilderness out of fear of his life, with no belongings. This man, whose life was marked by conniving and self-absorption and no moral compass hits a spiritual bottom in the wilderness. Exhausted as night arrives, he finally stops running and he pauses. He uses a rock as a pillow, and his prayers show up in his dreams, the story of Jacob’s ladder, the angels climbing up and down, offering him a new spiritual connection but those angels also pointing out in their movement to-and-from how challenging, how much work it will take for Jacob to nourish his spirituality. And Jacob’s life does starts to turn. He lives differently, more humbly, and later in his life, and very connected to his spirituality, he is renamed Israel by a God-figure, and becomes the father of our 12 tribes, the father of our people. Again, a story of spiritual decline, wilderness, of prayer and the discovery of a new and unexpected promised land.

Then there’s Moses, who grows up in privilege and kills a man in anger. He runs away into the wilderness to avoid punishment but no doubt carrying that spiritual burden deeply, and perhaps wondering if he would ever be forgiven for his act. He spends decades in a distant land, a shepherd with his flocks, literally alone in a physical and spiritual wilderness. And when he was ready, his entrance to prayer and his spiritual turning point would happen when he paused at the sight of a burning bush. His story of no self-love that he tells at the burning bush is so relatable – even when Moses is told of his own potential as a leader and as God’s messenger, he can only see his limitations – the murderer and the stutterer, the former Egyptian prince who lost everything, who no one will believe. And even in God’s presence, he can only express his self-doubts and his fears of failure which he repeats time and again. Yet, he told something in that prayer moment, that conversation with God, that we need to hear for ourselves – that Moses would never, every walk alone. Moses is told that God will always walk beside him, and so will Aaron, and so eventually will the Israelites. And so, Moses starts his own spiritual journey one step at a time towards Egypt and towards a promised land that he could never have imagined, to become the greatest leader that we would ever have, the murderer and the stutterer still within him but no longer defining him.

Just think about it, the power of his story and what each of us can learn from it. Moses killed a man and God was still with him, loving and compassionate and supportive and affirming to Moses that he as a person was something far greater than a specific thing that he did, that Moses, like all of us, had the path of Teshuvah available to him. How powerful is that for us today?

And we are taught one more thing at the burning bush, and that is how we can find our own ideas of God today and throughout our lives. At the burning bush, Moses is told that God presents uniquely to each person, that the God of Moses was very different than the God of Abraham or the God of Isaac or the God of Jacob or the God of Moses’ father. So here, in this sanctuary, we are each empowered to find our own unique understanding of what God might be for us.

The key here, in all these Torah stories, is the idea that it was prayer and a new or deeper connection to the Divine or a higher power that got our ancestors unstuck in their spiritual wildernesses. And so it is that we are taught, that we can do the same here tonight, and simply start those small steps towards rediscovering the holiness within us.

These parables apply to us regular people as well. Later, we read about Hannah, a simple woman who was childless and lost in grief and tears and without a sense of purpose in her life – her answers would come at the gates of the Temple, her answers coming through the personal prayers that came from her heart and in her own words. For Hanna, out of her grief and hope and prayers, she would give the people of Israel one of our greatest prophets, Samuel.

And I am one of those regular people as well. As many of you know, I dealt with a serious drug addiction – to a street drug – in my past. 15 years ago, in 2009, I was still in addiction and dealing with huge personal losses and I was literally wandering aimlessly in a spiritual wasteland. And exactly 15 years ago tonight, in 2009, I came into Temple Shalom for Erev Rosh Hashana, hoping to pray for something, not knowing what. But here, just before the service started, a friend of sorts walked by me and whispered “Call me when you’re ready” without saying anything more, what he later described as just an intuition. I still wasn’t sure what I was praying for, but two weeks later, I finally took a very first small step – a phone call made in total fear, then a coffee with him the next day, and then reluctantly, a first recovery meeting that night. More small steps followed, some sideways and backwards over the years, with increasing hints of something changing inside me. And over time, I found the oddest and a quite unexpected promised land. On Erev Rosh Hashanah 2019, exactly 10 years after that first Erev Rosh Hashana, I stepped on to this bima here at Temple Shalom, my beloved spiritual home, as an ordained rabbi, to lead my first High Holiday services, to give back so much of what I had been given.

As I look back at all these stories, the central moment, the turning point is when each person realized they no longer had the answers themselves and had a prayer moment, the tapping into a spiritual source far greater themselves. And invariably, all their moments took place in quiet moments.

This is what we are doing tonight as our High Holidays begin. We have stepped away intentionally from the hectic pace of our mad, mad, mad world. And we have left our homes and chosen to enter this sanctuary, because within these walls, we have a sense of a safe wilderness, where we can settle into a physical and spiritual space that is open and silent and peaceful, much like a walk in nature, open, yet safe and bounded.

Our sanctuary is a place where there are no distractions, where we can embrace an opportunity to find ourselves, where we can shed the influences of our past and become present. It is a place where we can decide who we are and who we want to be and what is important to us, away from the decisions and judgments and preconceptions of others. It is a place where our prayers and our music, our readings and simply the shared experience of others can offer us maps, and signposts, and a variety of marked paths that we can follow or choose our own. It is a place of endless gates of prayer, evoking the images of Dov Baer. It is a wilderness that is alive and green with ample provisions always available to support us physically, emotionally, spiritually.

The wilderness simply “is.” And our sanctuary simply “is.” Everything else is on us. We can sit, stand, cower, or cover our eyes. We can roll into a ball with tears in our eyes and wish for the end, for the pain to stop. Or we can look around and take one small step.

It is a place of nothingness and it is a place of endless possibilities. The wilderness doesn’t have a voice. It is a place where life and death and everything in between can happen.

And it is a place where hope and despair both reside, each equally available to us. Today, let us choose hope, let us choose prayer as our ancestors did, each of us in our own unique voices, each finding our own gates. Let us seek sh’leimut or wholeness by seeking self-love, for as Rabbi Akiva tells us, the more we can love ourselves, the more we can love others, and the more we love others, the more we feel good about ourselves and love ourselves just a bit more. Love as an action, love as a feeling, self-love and seeking and receiving the love of others has always been our gateway back into life.

Our creation story tells us that God created us by breathing into our nostrils the breath of life. The Torah reminds us again and again that our connection with the Divine is immutable and never broken, so let us commit to come back to that profound spiritual connection that has always been there — through our words, thoughts and feelings, our prayers and actions. Let us let God help us, to breathe life into us once again and always and for us to breathe life out, ourselves, into the world. Ken Yehi Ratzon. May it be God’s will.