In their days and in our days, the High Holidays have always been and still are an occasion f or Jews to take to the road, to visit family and friends in other communities. In this way, we encounter customs, melodies and thoughts that are new to us, and have the chance to bring them home.
What we can't do, of course, is be in two places at once. So the traveller listening to the sermon in a synagogue that's not her own must miss her own rabbi's talk, and those of any number of other rabbis whose sermons she would like to hear.
Enter the Internet, which can expand the world even further than travel can, although not (yet) in real time. For those who wish they could do Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur over and over again, kind of like Bill Murray does in Groundhog Day, in order to take in as many sermons as possible, the JW has gathered several here for you. In a season that exalts honey, such cross-pollination seems only fitting.
In Los Angeles, Ikar rabbi Sharon Brous spoke on the first day of Rosh HaShanah about a prostitute, and her enlightening Torah.
Watch and listen to highlights of Rabbi David Ingber's High Holiday sermons at Romemu, which are available on LiveStream, YouTube, SoundCloud and iTunes.
Elliot Cosgrove, rabbi at Park Avenue Synagogue, takes the novel As a Driven Leaf as his inspiration, reminding his congregation that when life is rosy, connection to God and the community is easy, but that the opposite is also true.
Listen to sermons from the rabbis at Upper West Side mega-shul B'nai Jeshurun here, and from Rabbi David Wolpe, a beloved Jewish Week columnist whose pulpit is at Temple Sinai in Los Angeles, here.
