Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite. We know him for his prize, the Nobel Prize, for chemistry, for peace, for literature, for physics, for medicine, and economics. But, listen to the story of this remarkable man. One morning he woke up and found his own obituary in the newspaper. Can you imagine? It was his brother who had died, but the journalist had made a mistake and run Alfred’s obituary instead. That would be disturbing for any of us, but Alfred Nobel was horrified by what his obituary said: “Dynamite King Dies, the Merchant of Death is Dead.” He made a resolution, and was resolved at that moment in his life to create the Nobel Prize.

What an incredible legacy he has left. A man who saw in his obit, written by a journalist, what he did not want to leave his family, nor the world. So he made a change. He did something about it. He created a legacy that truly is bigger than life. We know many Nobel Prize winners. We’ve had a few of them here in our sanctuary on this bimah: Elie Wiesel, Rabin, many, many people who we highly regard.

But in order for Alfred Nobel to create this legacy, he needed to come face to face with his own mortality. Now, it is true, if you open the paper and there’s an obituary of your life, you come face to face with your mortality. But he made a choice. He made a choice to change what he saw and change what he would do for the world.

That’s really why we’re all gathered here on Yom Kippur, isn’t it? To come face to face with our mortality. Judaism tells us that on Yom Kippur, we have to examine our lives and understand that we are all mortal and that we will all die. That’s why we wear white, it is the color of the kittel, the traditional burial shroud. We don’t eat and make sure that our physical needs are ignored in order to look at our spiritual quest – our spiritual needs are what we hunger for on Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur is truly about building a legacy. And so, what I want each one of us to do, from this service of Kol Nidre to tomorrow evening at Neilah, is for us to take these twenty-four hours to build one hour of a legacy in the coming year. We have many people in our congregation, in our community, who have built a legacy. There are people whose stories we can take with us in our hearts and truly model ourselves after.

One family is the Joseph family. There is a Joseph Prize in memory of Roger Joseph. Many of you sitting in this sanctuary knew this remarkable man. And when he died, his family, is siblings, Burton Joseph, and Betty Greenberg, created a national prize called the Joseph Prize. It is given out at ordination at the Reform seminary, at Hebrew Union College, the Jewish Institute of Religion on the New York campus. I knew about the Joseph Prize years before I came to this congregation, I knew about Temple Israel in Minneapolis and I knew that the people here reached out to support those people who worked tirelessly for humanity, and humanitarian purposes. The Joseph Prize, while I was in school, was given to Rosa Parks. The recipient speaks at ordination every year. It was truly a highlight in my life to hear this woman speak. The award was also given to Daniel Pearl; his father, Judah Pearl, received it. To the Children’s Defense Fund, to the New York Fire Department after 9/11, and in 1978, the first prize was given to Victor Kugler, who saved Anne Frank and her family in the Netherlands. Remarkable people.

Like the Nobel Prizes, people within our community have created a prize to support the national and international work of others. Families have extended their names in order to make sure others have the ability to do the work to make this place, this world, better. Within our own little Temple Israel community, we reach out to create a legacy.

The Jefferson School Project: over the years there have been many volunteers, who have gone over for an hour or two every week sitting with at-risk children, children who are immigrants to this country, or whose families are immigrants, and who need the extra help. We provide that help. We sit with them week after week. When Rabbi Glaser’s mother, Agathe Glaser, may her memory be for a blessing (she died this past Hannukah), heard that Temple Israel was going out and sitting with families and children who are from immigrant families, she was so proud.

Agathe was a Holocaust survivor. She received reparations from the French government because her own parents were interred in France. She lived through Kristallnacht, she came to this country on a child transport, all alone, separated from her family. And so when she heard the work we were doing, the first thing she did was she went right over to Jefferson School. She told those children her story of immigration, she told those children to hold on to their hope and their dreams, she explained that education would bring give them hope for their future. And then when she received the reparations, she knew exactly what she was going to do. She sent those monies to Jefferson School. She bought them a piano and musical instruments. And all of us understand the power of music in the Glaser family. This woman, a Holocaust survivor, survived child transport. Her story is powerful enough in and of itself, but she didn’t stop at survival. She gave more, she gave her story, and she gave the hope for the future to these children.

Margie and Charlie Ostrov from this congregation, along with many others who grew up on the Iron Range, believe in restoring B’nai Abraham, the last synagogue standing on the Iron Range. They believe that it is up to us to make sure that this place of history and story of Jews on the Iron Range is told and that we don’t forget. That beautiful sanctuary has been restored because of their hard work and their belief that this is crucial and important. A Jewish community once was there and vibrant, and now it is the non-Jewish community on the Iron Range, and the Jewish community from all over the state, who will come to remember that history, to remember the importance of that Jewish community. Marilyn Chiat wrote a letter recently about that amazing sanctuary of B’nai Abraham. She said, “All of us, we so often go everywhere in the world and we stand in synagogues wherever we are, and we feel the power of the story that is there.” We must go to the Iron Range, stand in the center of that sanctuary. That is a legacy that continues, that is broad and big. If that building was gone, it would have been a news clip. Today there were volumes written about it in the news, and we need to journey there to know the story and to tell the history.

There are people in our congregation who died over this year, and many who died previously and left powerful legacies. There are two people I would like to speak about today, personally, to remember a legacy born and a legacy lived. Merle and Jill Rosenberg, mother and daughter, stricken with the same disease of ovarian cancer. But that didn‘t stop them. They might have been petite, but tell me, anyone who met either one of them, knew they were both powerhouses with a stature that was big and huge. These two women took their diagnosis and gave to others. It was difficult, and within the year of one another, just shy of Merle’s yarzheit, Jill died.

Both of these women gave so much to our community. I don’t know if you know, but Merle created Kol Isha for our Sisterhood in her kitchen she created Staying Connected, reaching out to our college students. There was a lot created in that kitchen. And then, when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she moved her belief, her volunteerism, and her idealism to MOCA, Minnesota Ovarian Cancer Association, where she built that organization from the inside, as Merle built every organization from the inside. She gave hope to others who were stricken with ovarian cancer, and to their families. And she sat at the bedsides of many who died from this disease.

Jill followed in her mother’s footsteps. The two of them created Toast to Life, a fundraiser for ovarian cancer research. But Jill, in her own right, did so much to create a legacy even at such a young age. She created a young survivor’s group that had never been known before. She helped women move through their diagnosis, their treatment, and even the hope of creating their own families, when she herself knew that that was impossible in her life. She was selfless. These two women truly left a legacy.

There are so many who did the same. Debbie Eisenberg, in research for pancreatic cancer, and just last week, under PanCAN, the PurpleRide in her memory. Barry Schneider, who recently died of colon cancer, leaving a young family. He, too, will be remembered, as there is an endowment for research for colon cancer. And I look out and I remember Jamie Marks, in whose name we have an incredible healing fund that continues to help people heal in every aspect of the word. Through tragedy these people created a legacy. They took the difficult and somehow turned it around to give us blessings. Those are legacies that truly are remarkable.

Tonight, we consider our own mortality. Not to be afraid - don’t be afraid of looking and knowing that our time has an end, but rather, like Nobel, like all of the examples I have given, look beyond your fear and create something more. Because, through that energy, we ourselves find a blessing in the most remarkable way. On this Yom Kippur, let us take these twenty-four hours and create one more hour of a legacy. Spend an hour tutoring a child, spend an hour telling the history of the Jewish community – your history – to someone who can latch on and make something for themselves. You take an hour and make sure that even in the midst of tragedy, you create hope, that you create healing. That is the legacy that we all can leave.

Eli Wiesel, the 1986 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, ended his remarks as he accepted that prize, and his words, as always, are stirring. He said: “Human beings must remember that peace is not God’s gift to us; it is our gift to each other.” A legacy – it isn’t God’s gift to us. It is our gift to one another. It is our gift to the hope for a better future. It is our gift that our children, and our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren will bequeath. If not now, when? Shana tovah.