The children were lined up in the cafeteria of a Catholic elementary school for lunch. At the head of the table was a large pile of apples. The nun made a note and posted it on the apple tray: “Take only one. God is watching.” Moving further along the lunch line, at the other end of the table was a large pile of chocolate-chip cookies. A child had written a note, “Take all you want. God is watching the apples!”

But then I remember the difficult words that the prophet Isaiah put into God’s mouth, and I realize there’s no one coming to the rescue. For Isaiah has God proclaim: “I fashion the light and create the darkness, I make peace and I create evil.” Well I grew up thinking that evil was the absence of God in the world. I was taught that what we mean by God is the source of goodness. How difficult, and perhaps even terrifying to think of God as the author of evil as well.

They just couldn’t imagine having us recite every day that God is the creator of evil – they were afraid of the despair we would experience, day after day.

Synagogues are guarded around the clock not just throughout Europe as in days of old, but every synagogue in America as well, including our own. In Turkey Jewish youth clubs are closed down out of fears for security; in Australia Jewish schools are described as mini-fortresses.

There were the contemptible accusations of Jewish involvement in the World Trade Center bombing evidently still believed by millions of Muslims and others throughout the Middle East. And this year, recycled anti-Semitic stories appeared in the legitimate Arab press throughout the region including Egypt, America’s alleged ally, once again claiming to have “proof” that Jews use the blood of Christian and Muslim children in baking matzo for Passover and hamantaschen for Purim.

It was a ruling the UN General Assembly subsequently gave its overwhelming approval, with of course, not a mention in either forum of the hundreds of innocent women and children targeted and murdered by Palestinian terrorists on nearly a daily basis in Israel.

And the world itself seems to be turning increasingly ugly, day by day. There is a veritable orgy of hatred for Jews and Judaism and the words “Never Again” are beginning to take on a hollow sound. There are vicious anti-Semitic harangues tolerated on college campuses throughout the country; the condescending, oh-so-politically correct anti-Israel bias of the BBC and National Public Radio, and you can even read the comments of a Nobel Prize winner in Portugal comparing what is happening to the Palestinians to what was done to the Jews in Auschwitz.

It has been a hard year for those of us who love Israel and love Judaism. In fact it has been a hard year for all of us who love decency and hate violence, killing and the blatant compromising of human and civil rights as a public policy decision.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us...it was a time very much like our own.”

And we live in the most remarkable era in the history of the world. The explosion of creativity and astounding advances in science, medicine, and technology are almost a daily occurrence. We live in a world where our very lives are often a testament to the miraculous-ness of our age.

So why are we so afraid? Why is there so much collective anxiety? We are like medieval vassals living in the shadow of a terrifying, fire-breathing dragon…and in the silence of our own souls, we desperately pray for a dragon-slayer to save us. But even though the dragons seem oh so real and scary, the knights in shining armor seem relegated to myth and legend and fantasy.

Then we are told, Al Qaida is now possibly using women, or Caucasian men, or Asians…and they are living among us like the aliens we used to worry about in the invasion of the body snatchers. So now along with the Islamic fundamentalists, it’s our own government that has snatched our sense of personal security and seemingly thrown it away forever.

And I haven’t said a word yet about Abu Ghraib - what the Schlesinger report called “a scene of brutality and purposeless sadism” and the contribution that scandal has made to the despair in our own psyches. What kind of country are we becoming? Who are we who seem to so easily ignore the 3,000-year-old commandment from our own Torah, “lo ta-amod al dam rayekha” - “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor?”

“Interrogation practices used at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo?” I used to wonder how our government could have possibly rounded up and incarcerated all those American citizens just because they happened to have Japanese ancestry during WWII and placed them in camps with no civil rights whatsoever without loud protests and demonstrations from the rest of the population.

Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn once lamented, “If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Yet that is exactly why we are here today. To face ourselves, to look deeply into our own souls and find out “what we may be.” I keep reminding you that there was a reason that the ancient rabbis selected Isaiah as the prophet to be read on Yom Kippur afternoon each year. For in the midst of our worries about getting the prayers right, doing the rituals right, saying the words right, Isaiah practically screams at us “NO – THAT IS NOT WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT. IT’S ABOUT SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY – IT’S ABOUT FEEDING THE HUNGRY, CLOTHING THE NAKED, HOUSING THE HOMELESS, HEALING THE SICK – THAT IS WHAT THIS DAY IS ABOUT. That is who we might yet be. – a healer, a feeder, a clother of others. That is who we are supposed to be.

Can we sit here in good conscience reading the words of our own Bible and our own prayer book and not ask what that $239 million each and every day ought to be buying us? How about job training? How about child care? How about health care coverage for the uninsured which according to the Census Bureau grew in the last 3 years by 5.2 million people to over 45 million Americans?

That’s 95% of them who will stay out of our jails and out of gangs and find their way to a life of contribution to society instead. 95% for just 1 million dollars a class, and we spend $239 million a day having our young men and women killed and maimed and destroyed for life in Iraq – not to mention the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have met the same fate.

While the number of children living in poverty has increased by 11% over the past 3 years, the number of children receiving welfare has decreased by 10%. Not because they didn’t need it. Something just isn’t right.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote: “We do not know how to solve the general problem of evil, but we are not exempt from dealing with evils in the world which we can eradicate. At the end of days perhaps, evil will be conquered by the Holy One. In historic times, now, evils must be conquered one by one, by you and me.”

Alexander was surprised when his teacher said he would have to think about the question overnight.

One is enough because one is all we get. One life right now. One opportunity to think and feel and act and do the right thing. But even after last night’s sermon I want you to know that Judaism isn’t really about one – it’s about the many.