Referring to Thursday’s tornado, Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim started out his sermon at the Kol Nidre service of Yom Kippur with the words “We almost died.”

Here is an excerpt from his sermon which included a prop. You can read the full text of his sermon at his blog, Water Over Rocks.

On the 8th Avenue sidewalk near Union Street I saw a satellite TV dish (Direct TV, RCA) that had blown off someone’s roof in the tornado and lay, neglected, on the ground.  In a moment of inspiration I picked it up and realized that I had a prop to begin the sermon.  I immediately ran into my in-laws, who remarked that they had seen it, too–I think if not blown off the roof it served to symbolize for many who walked past it in the storm’s aftermath as a kind of metaphor for our time–the dynamic between the human need for continual connectivity and God or Nature’s powerful potential to call the shots and “connect” at will…