Shana Tova and Shabbat Shalom

This year's sermon is entitled "What I learned about life from reading Harry Potter this summer."

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Harry Potter is the young, fairly miserable, orphan boy created by author JK Rowling who discovers on his eleventh birthday that he is, indeed, not simply pathetic Harry forced to live in a cupboard under the stairs by his cruel aunt and uncle, but also a wizard.

Harry enters a world simultaneously mysterious and utterly familiar - it is a world in which the misfit is suddenly accepted and where the one who thought he was an outsider suddenly belongs. In his journey into and through this world, (now in its fifth installment) as well as his journey through adolescence Harry discovers more and more of himself and more and more tidbits of wisdom that we would do well to recall during this season of renewal and return.

Three of these tidbits I want to share with you this evening.

First: "The fear of a name increases the fear of the thing itself." (Book 1, page 298)

Harry's wizarding world is haunted by the shadow of a dark wizard whose reputation and powers instill such fear in people that they refuse to utter his name, referring to him instead as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. The mere mention of the name Lord Voldemort sends people diving for cover and shrieking. What Harry and his friends soon learn, however, is that Voldemort is himself simply a man - an evil one with evil powers - but a man nonetheless. In refusing to speak his name, the members of the wizarding community have increased Voldemort's power over them. Proving that indeed, "the greatest thing to fear is fear itself."

When we refuse to name our fears, or only whisper them under cover of darkness, we give them undue strength and power over us. Sometimes, refusing to name our fears paralyzes us. How many of us are afraid of something - of losing something or someone we love, of failing at what we do, of dying, of not being heard, of disappearing and not being seen for who we are? Of being alone? And how many times have we made the fear worse by not speaking it - not taking it out into the light and examining it? Naming our fear - and asking for help in combating it - is the oldest form of prayer that we Jews have. The author of Psalms declares that he fears no evil; God is with him, only after he acknowledges walking through the Shadow of the Valley of Death. When we lie down to sleep and place ourselves in God's care we name our fears of the unknown and ask for God's accompaniment. But only in naming the fear can the accompaniment be offered.

"Fear of a name increases the fear of the thing itself."

Let us resolve this season to name our fears and take them into the light. Let us finds words of prayer - tefila that both acknowledge our weaknesses and bring us hope.

Second: "The world isn't split into good people and death eaters."

This quote, from Harry's Godfather Sirius in book 5 (p. 302.) has a lot to say about judgment. In Harry's world, Voldemort's evil followers are known as Death Eaters. A very unpleasant and sadistic bunch. But his world is also populated with run of the mill not nice people, politicians out to keep their jobs at any cost, power hungry bureaucrats, and not very intelligent folk. When one of them becomes Harry's nemesis he is quick to think she may in fact be secretly working for Voldemort. She is not.

On the other hand, as Harry matures and learns more about the wizarding world, he learns that the long-dead father he idolizes wasn't always perfect and nor are his friends or even the great Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore. The world, it turns out, is much more subtle than black and white and although we can sometimes see who the really bad guys are, nothing else is ever that simple.

It is poignant to me that this argument for subtlety and complexity is placed in the mouth of a character long mistreated by the "blind establishment," a character who has motive for revenge and a personality that might lend itself to seeing the world in black and white. His name is Sirius Black after all. But he, Harry and their friends - the good guys - work strenuously to refrain from claiming that "You are either with us or against us."
Passing judgments from the side of merit - or caf zechut - in rabbinic terms, giving people the benefit of the doubt is an act of justice - Tzedekah - we would do well to emulate in the year ahead.

And the third lesson: "It is our choices, Harry, that show us who we truly are, far more than our abilities." (Book 2, p. 333)

This wisdom is offered to Harry by the kindly Albus Dumbledore after Harry learns that some of the powers of the evil Lord Voldemort transferred to Harry when, as an infant, he miraculously escaped death at Voldemort's hands, temporarily dis-empowering the villain.

Harry is concerned that as recipient of Voldemort's powers he would also turn out to be evil.

Clearly, Dumbledore reminds him and us, it is what we make of our lives that counts, not what we were given, denied, left with by others. And this is probably the greatest lesson of all the Harry Potter books. We have choices in our lives that have far greater impact and importance than any innate abilities or disabilities. Making the right choices, deciding who we want to be and aiming as high as we possibly can is the underlying goal of this Holy Day Season and is as best a description of Teshuva as I have ever heard.

May we to turn inward and have the opportunity to uncover who we really want to be, aiming as high as possible.

So - naming our fears through prayer, judging others in righteousness and making choices that reflect the best we hope to be - doing teshuva - are the kernels of wisdom I gleaned from encounters with an adolescent wizard in a world very different from our own.

It turns out that these three injunctions - Tefilla, Tzedekah and Teshuva - are exactly the three actions we are expected to engage in this season to ensure our place in a very different kind of a book.

Our liturgy tells us that between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur our fate for the next year is sealed in the Book of Life. Our fates may already in fact be sealed - except that Tefilla (prayer) Tzedekah (acts of justice) and Teshuva (repentance) can change the decree.

In opening our hearts in prayer and confronting that which most frightens us, in doing for others and having compassion on them, and in compassionately correcting our own paths, we may yet perform a greater magic than Harry Potter will ever know. May that magic be accessible to all of us.

Rabbi Elyse

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