One of my uncles was in the schmatabiz. He worked for a company that made men's clothing. As a result, my brother and I got clothes, sometimes new shirts, but mostly hand-me-down pants, from him all the time. The progress of these traveling pants was as follows:

First, my oldest cousin, Mickey, Uncle Sam's son, would get them, new, from the clothing manufacturer my uncle worked for. Then Mickey would pass them to my cousin Jimmy, my Uncle Rex' son. Then I got them from Jimmy, and then my poor younger brother, Phil, got them last. After we grew up, my brother and I decided we would never wear hand-me-downs again. That was also one of the many reasons I did not wear bell-bottoms in the sixties: they felt as loose as hand-me-downs, and I wanted no part of anything that did not fit me, personally, ever again.

Many of you may have, by now, also read, in the Connections, my rabbinical school personal statement of how I saw Reform Judaism way back when. I was raised a classical Reform Jew in St. Louis, MO, and was fairly dogmatic about it. I was not into Jewish ritual much, mostly because I did not know much about it, and because my family did not practice it. That made Judaism feel, on me, as baggy as a pair of hand-me-down pants. It did not fit me very well.

Now, there was a Conservative congregation literally next door to my elementary school to whom a great many of my friends belonged, and I attended a lot of their Bar Mitzvahs. I am not being sexist when I say Bar Mitzvahs, because there were no Bat Mitzvahs at that synagogue when I was growing up just a little less than half a century ago. In any case, when I went to their Bat Mitzvahs, I had to put on a little black rayon yarmulke. You can imagine what it felt like to me: baggy pants. It did not fit very well, even on my crew-cut head. No matter which one I wore, it always pointed up: it would never lie flush on my head. Pop, it would return to its own idea of what it wanted to be, a lot like an unyielding Slinky™ toy returning to its rest state.

I hated the concept of standing out as a Jew, even in my neighborhood and school which were three-quarters Jewish. And worse, I hated the dorky-looking yarmulkes that I had to wear at these stupid Bar Mitzvahs.

I also hated the fact that though the word yarmulke was pronounced Yomica, it was spelled Yarmulke. The darn hats were ugly, did not sit right, and were not even spelled phonetically. The best joke we heard about them was to call them Yamahas, which, at that time, was only a motor scooter brand in St Louis, not a piano, or any other thing. But we felt as if they were "made in Japan," when that was a nickname for cheap and shoddy things.

Most of you may only have seen me wearing a Kippah, the Hebrew word I use for it now, and you may wonder what induced me to wear one all the time. And you may be thinking that this talk is about getting you to wear them. It is not. This talk is about wearing things that belong on us, and not picking up used clothing from a basket; about choosing how to present ourselves, and not relying on hand-me-downs and other people's definitions of style and meaning. But the best way to illustrate this, I think, is to show you how bad these Yarmulkes, Yomicas, Yamahas, or Kippot, look on my head when they don't fit.

I did not own my own Kippah until I was in Rabbinical school in Jerusalem, back 36 years ago. I don't remember which Kippah I bought back then, but I had, only months before, while still in college, decided to wear one when I was in services, but at no other time. I am fairly sure that I do not still own the first Kippah I bought, because I had a whole lot of Kippot stolen when my suitcase was stolen out of a car in Manhattan on my way back from New York following a Hillel Directors' Conference. But I own about forty of these tiny toppers, most of which I have bought, and I buy new ones every time I go to Israel. I own a few that I have picked up from Bar/t Mitzvahs, but I usually don't wear them, because they don't fit my head well. They are one-size-fits-all, and, like hand-me-downs, they are either too baggy, too pop-up, too small, or they don't really go with what I wear. When I buy myself a Kippah, I make sure it fits my head and my current wardrobe.

I remember when I first decided to don a Kippah on purpose. It was the Friday night, May 8, 1970 (Iyyar 3, 5730) following the shooting of the four students to death by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State on Monday, May 4, 1970. I don't remember why that event sent me over the edge of Jewish couture, but when I went to Hillel that night for services, I picked one up and put it on violently. At the University of Missouri Hillel, just like here, wearing ritual gear was optional. I did not have to wear it. But I did, in spite of the fact that it was bright green (for some reason I remember this) and that it did not fit my head well.It sat up on my head just like this stupid red one does. I don't know, but maybe I just wanted to withdraw a little from my country which had now started shooting students like me for protesting a war that we were not winning and not liable to win. I may have begun to seek a new identity for myself in a more ancient place.

In any case, by the time I got to Jerusalem, I was ready to choose my own headgear, and I have been doing so ever since. It was still a leap of gender when I began wearing bobbie pins to hold these hats onto my head. I was not used to wearing women's gear. That took some time, but, eventually, I got used to what all the guys in Israel were doing, and they certainly did not seem one bit the less manly for the clips in their hair.

It was during a similarly violent time that I decided to wear a hat all the time. It was in the early 1990's, when the Intifada raged across Israel. I don't remember the exact day or reason, but soon I was wearing a Kippah all the time, except when I go into restaurants that are not explicitly kosher or vegetarian, so as not to mislead people into thinking something about the restaurant that is not true. And I don't wear them while doing sports, etc. I just wear a variety of baseball hats on those occasions.

Why do Jews wear hats, and why can't we spell them correctly? No one knows when Jews started wearing hats for religious reasons. If you look at Christian-made Biblical pictures, the men do not wear Kippot. If you look at Orthodox Jewish versions of the Biblical past, the men are all wearing something like our modern recognizable Jewish headgear. We do know that by the time of the Talmud, about 1400 years ago, at least, there was a principle to wear a hat to keep the fear of G0d above you:

In Tractate Kiddushin, page 31a, Rav Huna son of Rav YehoShua said he would not walk four cubits (six feet) bareheaded in any direction, saying: "The Shechinah (the Divine Presence "Dwelling" among us) is above my head." This gave rise to the word Yomica.

Yomica is the mispronunciation of the Yiddish slurring of two Hebrew words: Yiras haMelech, or, Fear of the King, that is, Fear of G0d. How Yiras haMelech became Yarmulke is understandable, but how Yarmulke became Yomica I have no idea. Anyway, whenever I wear a Kippah, which is Hebrew for any dome, including the dome of the head, I am aware that I do it to show that I am not the biggest thing in the universe. It is to put me in my place. It also is an identifying flag I fly to show the world that I am a Jew, and that the world should be safe for Jews to wear these things. And, last, I like dramatic and colorful ways to explore my identity, as a Jew, and as a human. That is why I wear colorful Kippot.

There are Jews, however, who will only wear black Kippot, as a way of staying humbler than they would be if their way of Fearing G0d were also a fashion statement, as mine is. In fact, they wear black most of the time. I don't. I like drama and color. But that is why some wear only black and why others wear colorful knitted Kippot.

Of course, Christians and Jews are 100% reversed on this issue. When I was in Italy this summer, going in and out of churches, women cover their heads inside, and men are supposed to take hats off inside. So if I was wearing a Kippah under my baseball cap (which sounds as if it has the same root as Kippah, but probably does not), and a church guard asked me to take the cap off, I would still be wearing a cap. But sometimes I was not wearing a Kippah underneath, and that made my head feel genuinely naked. I felt like the Christian renditions of the Jewish men that decorated the walls of those churches, none of whom was wearing a Yomica.

Why did Rav Huna worry about the four cubits, which is a distance of six feet? This was the definition of person's personal space back then. For example, in the Talmud, tractate B'rachot 23a, Our Rabbis taught: "One who is about to enter an outhouse should take off his Tefillin at a distance of four cubits and then enter." Tefillin are objects of holy obligation, that is, items of mitzvah, over which one says a blessing, like the blessings we say when putting on a Tallit. It is not a mitzvah to wear a Kippah, only a tradition, so this is treated differently. But now you know that if you do have to go to the bathroom, be sure to take your Tallit off first, but you may leave your Kippah on.

Enough of the sidebar about what a Kippah is, when it is worn, by whom, and when not. I want to turn our focus from the head of one Jew to the Head of the Year, Rosh haShanah. This is the time of year that we look around at all the other people sitting in this room and, in some way or another, measure ourselves against them. Do they look healthy, happy, as if they know what they are doing here and why? Do I feel less sure of myself than these other people do? Why do they seem to more secure in their skin than I do, not to mention secure under those little random hats that they plucked out of the basket even though they don't fit their heads so well?

It is hard, if one grew up in a family or other context where Jews don't wear distinctive clothing, to accept all this Jewish paraphernalia as normal-looking. Whether you were brought up as a Jew or not, seeing people who do and don't wear these things makes us wonder whether or not we should. For example, last week in the first Bar/t Mitzvah Family Class, when I invited all those who wear a Kippah to services to wear one in class, a sizeable group of parents and students did wear one. But when the students got up to introduce themselves, and saw that they were in the minority, they removed their Kippah in order to fit in with their Jewish teen peers.

Also, though I have not been in this situation, I imagine that Jews who are members of their partner's churches instead of the other way around also look at the Christian people there who seemingly unselfconsciously wear crosses around their necks. It sets you apart. I imagine there is a bit of this peeking at each other going on in this room over these days.

But now, let me get to the crux of the matter, so to speak. You will never look your best in a hand-me-down, chosen by someone else, one-size-fits-all outfit. It will always look thrown on, not well-fitting on you. Our Etz Chayim basket Kippot are ragamuffin castaways of Bar/t Mitzvahs past. When I was at Stanford Hillel, and we needed lots of these things for the approximately four times as many people as come to our High Holy Day services here, folks used to come and dump drawers full of deceased relative's collections of these things into our baskets. Sometimes the rayon was so ripped and wrinkled that no needle nor iron on earth could fix it, so we would go through the baskets and toss the ones that were irredeemable. At Etz Chayim, most of the ones we have are leftovers of Bar/t Mitzvahs that actually occurred during the lifetime of our congregation. But every now and again we find a ratty ringer in the pile.

Why do we even have these baskets of harried headgear for you? Because not only are these holy days days of affirming who we are, they are days of trying out new identities, Jewish and otherwise. Reach down into the Kippah basket and see if there is an identity in there that fits you. Look at all the colorful ways other families have seen their Jewish identities clothed in living color, and try one on. It will look better in your imagination than it will on your head. Remember, unless you have a standard head and a sturdy clip, it wasn't made for your hat size, and it might just refuse to sit down on your head. This is especially true if you have a lot of hair, and if it's frizzy hair. It is also easier to fit a Kippah to a bald head, but it is really hard to clip it onto one. Though you won't see them in our baskets, there are hats for the balding, and hats for the frizzy-haired. But we just have hats for cooperative, mid-sized heads. But it is fun to fantasize about new identities, just like putting new hats on allows us to fantasize about the way we might appear to ourselves and others with them on.

Maybe you find yourself in a new place in your life that is good, or a new achievement which lets you see the world from a new mountaintop. Maybe you are in a sad or angry place, and you see the world from the bottom of a gully or of a trough. Maybe you are searching for a new way to interact with the spirit of the Y0universe. Maybe you want to distance yourself from a failed paradigm in your life. Maybe you need a new hat for your new head, or you finally decide that these hats are meaningless, and never did fit you anyway. Maybe all of Judaism is one big hand-me-down that feels too baggy to every be comfortable on you. Or, maybe, you find yourself tired of living out somebody else's baggy hand-me-down Judaism, and you want to move from the mispronounced Yiddish schmatas of your past to a better-expressed Hebrew cap of the future.

I don't know. I just know that people at this time of year are in spiritual motion, and we have a bunch of hats in the basket for you to try on, figuratively, as well as literally. Feel free to clip one to your head and take it home. See how it fits, how it goes with the rest of what you wear, and when you wear these outfits. Don't let the fact that men wore them first keep you, a woman, from wearing one, if it works for you. Don't let the fact that women wear hair clips keep you, a man, from wearing those. Besides, there are more manly and feminine options available at your friendly local Kippah purveyor in town. Treat yourself to a trip to bob and bob, and find a hat that is really right for you, the one that seems as if it was made not only for the shape of your head, but also for the ideas within your head. You might just find a new book that will give you new eyes to go along with your new head.