[The version below is my final reading copy. The actual homily included some ad-libs and on-the-spot revisions for clarity, but I couldn't remember them all by the time I uploaded this. After the service - which also included participating in their water ceremony, singing 'Hava Nashira" and meditating on Jacquelyn Malone's "Summer's Last Tomatoes" (Poetry, September 2003) - a group of us went to Royal House of Thai and enjoyed "Squid on the Rock" and hot tea and assorted Sunday specials and conversations about wars and religion and dogs and building codes and "humor so dry it rustles" (a description of Prit Chowdhuri, a member of the congregation), and then I went back to Nashville for mincha and tashlich.]

As some of you know, today is the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of year 5764 in the Jewish calendar. When I return to Nashville this afternoon, I will be participating in a different kind of water ceremony, tashlich, in which Jews symbolically cast their sins away into a body of water. The sins are often represented by bread crumbs, and there’s even a popular Internet joke that goes into excruciating detail about the type of bread product appropriate to each category of transgression, ranging from pretzels for twisted sins and waffles for sins of indecision to bagels for being “hole-ier than thou,”and challah for excessive shouting.

Oh, and corn bread for telling bad jokes.

In writing about Tashlich, Canadian scholar Eliezer Segal has noted that “current custom does not attach too much emphasis to the objects that are to be cast into the waters, nor for that matter to the precise bodies of water that are to be visited. Subject to availability, I have seen Tashlikh performed at anything from a beach to a well to a bathtub. The residents of Safed would stand on their rooftops facing the Sea of Galilee, whereas the Kurdish Jews did not feel suitably purified unless they actually jumped into the river.”

In Wendy Wasserstein’s play An American Daughter, her character Judith Kaufman calls this ritual “The Festival of Regrets,” and describes watching old men and young tossing their crumbs of sorrow into the Potomac. She says:

At first, I remained silent. I stood there feeling my familiar distance and disdain. And then, almost involuntarily, I began shredding my low-fat cranberry-orange muffin. I wanted this God, this Yaveh, to know me. “Oh, Lord, my God, King of the universe, I have failed to honor my mother and father,” and that regret floats out to Maryland. “Oh, Lord, my God, I distrust most people I know, I feel no comfort in their happiness, no sympathy for their sorrow.” A tiny cranberry sits still upon the water. “Oh, Lord, our God, who is like you in Earth or in Heaven, I regret the men I’ve been with, I regret the marriage I made, I regret never having children, I regret never having learned to be a woman.” I pull off the entire top and a wad of muffin sails like a frigate towards the Washington Monument. “Oh, Lord, my God, Mighty of Mighty, Holy of Holy, I can’t make life and I can’t stop death. Oh, Lord, my God, the Lord is one, I’ve wasted my life,” and I jump in.

And after she jumps in, she finds out that the river isn’t very cold in September, that she’s still a very good swimmer, and, that “no taxi [will] stop for a drenched black woman who just crawled out of the Potomac.” She also finds that her best friend is far too immersed in her own troubles to help her cope with the immensity of such sadness. In my opinion, it’s an awfully good illustration of getting sucker-punched by a ritual, which I suspect happens more often than is spoken about. I fancy most of us know a cynic or two who can’t help crying at weddings or christenings, and I imagine some of us have also witnessed instances - funerals, holidays – even ordinary patterns of worship - when rituals have failed to offer solace to the devout. It’s quite a paradox: there is only so far that ritual can go, only so much that it can accommodate - but a ritual can also possess so much meaning that it pushes the person way way way out of their comfort zone. Judith starts out not taking Tashlich all that seriously, and that’s uncomfortable in itself – but then she finds herself taking it utterly seriously, and that’s really uncomfortable.

On the other side of the coin, there are Jews for whom Tashlich ends up being more the Festival of Feeding the Ducks. Bread crumbs, water, ducks! It’s a good family outing with the kids - and, as theorized in Judaism for Dummies, “Tashlich continues [as a tradition], perhaps partly because it's just so good to get outdoors after so many hours praying and socializing in the synagogue.” Some contemporary Jews also take joy in the fact that, as an outdoor event, the expression of their faith is visible to the world at large. To them, the contemporary practice of tashlich is a reminder that they live in a country where it is possible to practice their faith out in the open – where it isn’t automatically assumed that they’re out to get all Christians by poisoning the water supply. This is not to say that anti-Semitic crackpots are an extinct species by any count, but the fact that the four major synagogues in Nashville all have websites, all publicizing their High Holiday schedules, is I think a sign of progress.

An aspect of Tashlich that I find especially interesting is that it isn’t specifically prescribed in the Torah or Talmud, although chapter 7 of the Book of Micah is often cited, where God is praised for his vast and eternal capacity to forgive, and described as casting the sins of His people into the depths of the sea. Hence, “tashlich,” which is Hebrew for “to cast away.” It’s never been a universally beloved ritual – over the centuries, there have been rabbis who have objected to the practice as spiritually unsound, and for some Jews, the symbolism remains too close to outright superstition.

To me, it’s fascinating how much freight one seemingly simple custom can carry, but when I think about it some more, of course it’s complicated. Water is complicated. These days we have more kinds of water than ever – drinking water, distilled water, running water, rain water, sparkling water, purified water, reverse-osmosis water, fortified water, flavored water – it’s mind-boggling. So’s looking at water through the lens of a microscope – one seemingly simple drop of water from a lake or sea will yield you a world teeming with plankton and protozoa and other healthy squigglies. Water lends itself so readily to metaphor – when I was a kid, I remember corresponding with a Christian who tried to help me visualize the Trinity by comparing the three-in-oneness of water as liquid, solid, and gas to the three-in-oneness of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

But why he didn’t succeed - why I’m a Unitarian rather than a Trinitarian is the stuff of a different sermon. In the meantime, if you’re really into paradoxes, I invite you to ponder how many Unitarian Universalists you know of who are neither Unitarian nor Universalist if you match them against the traditional definitions, but who are nonetheless unquestionably what we recognize as “UU” in principles and practice. At this year’s General Assembly, the annual nationwide gathering of Unitarian Universalists, there were booths and programs sponsored by the UU Christian Fellowship, the American Humanist Association, the Covenant of UU Pagans, the Episcopal Divinity School, the Independent Christian Church, the UU Buddhist Fellowship, the Pacific School of Religion (which is affiliated with the Disciples of Christ), and, as you might guess, a host of interfaith organizations as well. This pin [which I had been wearing, but lost the backing somewhere over the course of the morning] features a chalice and a menorah, forming the logo for the Unitarian Universalists for Jewish Awareness. Next week my home church and many others will be acknowledging Yom Kippur – some with Jewish readings and music, and some with sermons inspired by its themes of forgiveness and repentance.

But that, too, is another sermon for another day. For this day, this second day of the year 5764 in one tradition, the 2003rd year of our Lord in another, 4701 on the Chinese calendar – and I beg your pardon if you favor a system I haven’t mentioned – for this day, whatever you choose to call it, what I hope for with these words is to add a layer of intensity to your own individual thoughts on the customs you observe and the rituals you celebrate. This bowl of water contains the mingling not only of the sources and experiences of which we have spoken and shared, but of silent influences and private reflections. It’s a relatively young tradition that we celebrate – the first water ceremony was organized just in 1980, at a UU women’s conference in Michigan. Some UU churches call it “water communion” – a term that carries quite a bit of baggage, but also a lot of evocative power For a number of congregations this ceremony marks the end of summer, and they name the start of the new season “homecoming” or “ingathering.” For me, what we now regard as a tradition resonates with connections to UUs in other places – to give but one example, I went to a service in Cambridge, Massachusetts this past July, where, during the coffee hour, I watched another visitor jerry-rig a pair of Dixie cups to carry some First Parish water back to her congregation in Wisconsin.

So now there’s some Massachusetts water in Milwaukee, and Nashville water here in Cookeville, as well as the water from Montana and Canada, and the Atlantic and the Baltic, and our own backyards, and the other places that have mattered to us, and while it’s almost mundane - we all know how water travels everywhere, there is I think a special pleasure in knowing our sources and acknowledging them - that we choose to blend together these souvenirs of special places. You understand that I am not talking about just water here. Our faith is not always comfortable – some might even say seldom – and the way it mixes different traditions and theologies, it doesn’t promise or even pretend to bear away our regrets or wash away our sins or to slake a collective thirst for knowledge and meaning. Like Judith Kaufman on the Potomac, the longer we gaze, the more we risk being pulled in and perhaps even drenched. The good news is that the water isn’t always cold, and that our faith is full of encouragement for people learning how to swim.

Individual medley, of course.

(Yep, definitely cornbread for this afternoon.)

Thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts with you this morning. Happy autumn and happy new year. Shanah tovah. Blessed be.