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isten please to the powerful words of the Midrash Shocher Tov on a pasuk in Dovid Hamelech’s Tehillim (102:18) “Panah el tefillas ha’arar v’lo vazah es tefillasam — He has turned to the prayer of the lonely one and has not despised their prayer”:

Rabi Yitzchak said: This was said regarding the generations that have no prophet and no Kohein and no Beis Hamikdash to atone for them. All that remains with them is one tefillah the one that they pray on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Hakippurim — so do not deprive them of it.

Imagine having inherited a piece of 3000-year-old cloth an authentic remnant of the lashon shel zehoris the string which as the sa’ir la’Azazel hurtled to its death over a desert cliff turned suddenly white Hashem’s signal to His children that their sins were forgiven. Or imagine being a direct descendant of a righteous Kohein Gadol whose service on Yom Hakippurim had brought selichah and mechilah to the entire nation.

Yet while such direct connections to a glorious but distant past might have some subjective personal meaning they don’t actually bring about atonement. But the Midrash teaches there is in fact another very direct and deeply meaningful connection to that past that every one of us possesses.

When we hold the machzor in hand and take three steps forward into Hashem’s presence to recite the tefillos of the Yamim Noraim we are utilizing the very last remaining connection to — more than a mere connection an actual remnant of — the era of prophecy of Kehunah Gedolah of the Beis Hamikdash. I can’t think of anything else we do throughout the year of which something similar is said and we ought to make the most of it.

One might say that these tefillos are something like the Kosel Hamaaravi which too is a lone and lonely remnant of long-departed greatness over which the Divine Presence stills hovers nonetheless. Yet that analogy to the Kosel carries an unfortunate and ironic contemporary relevance. Ha’aretz reports that

Reform and Conservative Jews from around the world will be bombarding Israeli leaders with emails…. Their message: Give us back the Western Wall that you promised.

This lobbying campaign jointly organized by the major non-Orthodox Jewish movements is meant to apply further pressure on the Israeli government to follow through with its decision to create a special egalitarian space at the Jewish holy site where men and women can pray together. Last week Supreme Court President Miriam Naor lambasted the government for dragging its feet on the matter…

The email campaign… is meant to coincide with the first night of the Selihot prayers of repentance. It will last throughout the period of the Jewish High Holy Days. Conservative and Reform rabbis around the world will be urged to encourage their congregants during their High Holy Day sermons to sign up.

“It’s time to stop the disenfranchisement of the majority of world Jewry in Israel” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs president of the Union for Reform Judaism…. “That’s why we are calling on all those who care about Klal Yisrael [the Jewish people] to join us in this campaign to tell Israeli leaders: ‘Enough is enough.’ ”

When I first saw the midrash about the tefillos of the Yamim Noraim it occurred to me that perhaps its description of the tefillos of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Hakippurim helps explain the seemingly inexplicable: How it is that even this late in the day for non-Orthodox American Jewry with the intermarriage rate now over 70 percent Jews far far from Torah are still drawn to prayer on those three days. What exactly they hear and say and do in their houses of worship is beside the point; that there is something impelling them to be there is the point.

I wondered whether their neshamos sense that here is a link to something so real so deeply Jewish that it can’t be dismissed and ignored. Here is an actual remainder a still-glowing ember of a time and a place where Jews — their own zeides and bubbes — would enter sullied by sin yet emerge pure and uplifted. And their neshamos tug at them yearning for the same and willy-nilly they follow that tug to prayer services. The place they go to for that purpose even goes by the name “temple.”

But now the heterodox clerics who have sole custody of our American Jewish brothers and sisters have decided that even the High Holiday prayers that one little remaining spiritual connection to the real Temple cannot be left undisturbed. And for what? Ironically so that their congregants can be weaponized to create havoc and intra-Jewish warfare over the one remaining physical connection to the realTemple.

For some Jews these are the few hours in the entire year that they spend in prayer and an attempt to commune with G-d but now those too must be taken up with sermons about (in Rick Jacobs’s words) the “stranglehold” that “stifles a vibrant living Judaism and ostracizes significant numbers of Jews inside and beyond Israel.”

From the clerics’ perspective it’s all a gift. Conservative historian Jack Wertheimer addressing why “tikkun olam… a commitment to left-wing causes marching... in the name of ‘Jewish values’ ” has been so avidly embraced by the Reform movement wrote recently in Mosaic that

[s]peaking off the record Reform rabbis offer straightforward answers. “It requires so little of people and is so non-threatening” says one…. To another it enables rabbis to “avoid waging battles the synagogue cannot win” — namely the battle to deepen congregants’ religious observances.

And the very same could well be said of the issue at hand. Heterodox clergyfolk much prefer to deliver sermons on the evils of the Israeli Rabbinate and Orthodox Jewry and whip their assembled flocks into a self-righteous frenzy over a battle across the world that is almost entirely irrelevant to them than to present sermons that actually make their listeners uncomfortable by raising the indelicate matter of Jewish belief and practice. It’s hard to think of something that “requires so little of people and is so nonthreatening” as hitting “send” on an e-mail to the Israeli prime minister.

Rabbi Pesach Lerner contends that we need to mount a counter-campaign of e-mails to Israeli politicians and perhaps he’s right as a matter of hishtadlus. But I take my cue from Supreme Court President Naor (the Enlightened One) who intoned so jurisprudentially last week about the Kosel “Enough is enough!” I agree.

That’s why on Yom Hakippurim that day of pure love of Hashem and His children that day on which in the Jubilee year the slaves went free we need to send messages in the millions to Heaven pouring out our hearts: “Enough is enough. Give us back not the Western Wall but the Temple You promised us. And free the millions of Jews who through no fault of their own are in spiritual bondage to alien belief systems so they may return to You.”

LESSONS FROM THE BIG LEAGUES Let me tell you about a young man named Fernandez Jose Fernandez. A Cuban immigrant who made good here he pitched for the Miami Marlins. Not just pitched but starred; this year the 24-year-old right-hander’s stellar stats were a 16-8 record an ERA of 2.86 and the second-most strikeouts in the major leagues.

I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t this the Yom Kippur issue? Yes I know.

Jose came to these shores as a defector at age 15. He’d made three previous attempts to escape and was imprisoned after each one treated he said “like an animal.” On the boat over a woman fell into the water and Jose dove in to save her — it turned out to be his mother. They ended up inTampa where he met a pitching coach named Orlando Chinea who had worked with several Cuban stars. He looked at the tall skinny Jose and wasn’t sure what to think.

Chinea says Fernandez “couldn’t pitch. He could throw.” But he decided to mentor the young prospect. He excelled in the minors and was the Marlins’ first-round draft pick in 2011.

A 2013 article describes the beginning of Fernandez’s journey:

That summer they worked. Eight a.m. to one-thirty p.m. “Monday to Monday” Chinea says. “No breaks.” For a month Fernandez never touched a baseball. He’d spend an hour a day stretching then a few more hours working out — plyometrics some weight training swimming throwing medicine balls and of course flipping tires and chopping trees.

He did on occasion complain. But he stopped himself. “I thought about how many people there are in America” Fernandez says. “Out of all of those people a lot of them are baseball players. Out of all of those baseball players a lot of them are pitchers. And then I would think are any of those pitchers out there working out right now? Probably somewhere yeah. So I couldn’t quit.”

Chinea said that Fernandez “loved the baseball. I’ve never known anybody who loves baseball as much as Jose.” Could it be that his love of the game didn’t precede his hard work but was the result of it because we come to love that in which we invest part of ourselves that into which we put our sweat and tears?

Fernandez’s story teaches us about how change happens lessons we too can use for the things we consider important and the things we want to love: It takes hard work sustained and consistent and getting an early start to the day; it may take weeks of getting in shape before you’re even ready to begin doing what you really want to do; use self-talk (in his case about the other aspiring pitchers out there) when you feel like complaining or giving up.

And there’s one more thing to learn from Jose Fernandez: Take every shot at greatness you’re given because you never know when you’ve been given your last one. Last week you see Jose Fernandez rising baseball great died in a boating accident inMiamiHarbor.