This past Shabbat, we celebrated all the new members who have joined this community in the last year or so. In honor of our growth as a community, I offered the following teaching on what it means to make ourselves—all of us—feel more at home in this congregation, and in this life:
On previous New Member Shabbatot, I’ve reflected before on the following text from the Biblical Book of Mishlei—Proverbs:
The loving person does good to their own soul: but the one that is cruel troubles himself.
(Proverbs 11:17).
גֹּמֵ֣ל נַ֭פְשׁוֹ אִ֣ישׁ חָ֑סֶד וְעֹכֵ֥ר שְׁ֝אֵר֗וֹ אַכְזָרִֽי ׃
About this, the ancient rabbis have a teaching:
“This verse refers to Hillel ha’zaken,” Hillel the elder, Rabbi Hillel, they teach, “who, when the time came that he was finished with his students for the day, walked alongside them. They said to him, ‘rabbeinu,’ our teacher: ‘where are you going?’ He said to them, ‘לִגְמֹל חֶסֶד’ — [there’s that phrase again] — ‘to perform an act of love to a guest in my house – עִם הָדֵין אַכְסַנְיָא בְּגוֹ בֵּיתָא.’
They said to him, ‘You seem to have a guest every day.’ You’re always headed home in the same manner. He said to them, ‘is not my poor soul a guest in my body, here today, gone tomorrow?’
In other words, “I need to make sure my soul feels at home in my body.”
There are a number of important implications of this text. Firstly, there’s the classic Jewish value of hachnasat orchim, of bringing in and welcoming guests and newcomers. This is one of the foundational values we learn about in Hebrew School. When Abraham sees the three strange men wandering in the hot sun, he rushes out to greet and feed them. When his servant Eliezer is looking for a wife for Abraham’s son Isaac, he says, “the sign for who is to be Isaac’s wife will be the one who offers to give food and water to my camels and me after our long journey.” Lo and behold, Rebecca, our future matriarch, does just that. When we start the Passover seder, we sing כָּל דִכְפִין יֵיתֵי וְיֵיכֹל, “Let all who are hungry come and eat.”
This foundational Jewish value is embedded within the story of Hillel the Elder: that we must affirmatively welcome guests, newcomers—that all who come through the doors of a place like this synagogue, old and new, should be welcomed with open arms, made to feel at home, made to feel like they are not a burden but a welcome presence.
You are all welcome, and it’s all of our jobs, all of our duties, to make one another feel welcome—to practice hachnasat orchim, the welcoming of those who are new to our surroundings.
But of course, the story goes far beyond that. Hillel sees that his own soul is in need of welcoming. Hillel identifies his soul as a guest, as transitory; as going into, and out of, his own body, and of needing to be made to feel at home—of treating his soul with chesed, with love and kindness, while it is present. I think this teaching is relevant to the conditions in which we find ourselves here at Society Hill Synagogue, especially if we are “new members.”
I know myself—I am often someone who sort of skirts around the edges if I am new to a place. How long will I really be here, I wonder? Do I really need to settle in and get comfortable? Do I need to set down roots?
What if I move? What if I decide it’s not really for me? What if I decide these aren’t my people? Now, that last question is off the table, we know, at a community like this one, but in general, those are often the questions that are on some of our minds as we enter a new space. How long will I be here; should I really get comfortable?
This story from Hillel the Elder to teach us is that, just because our presence somewhere may be impermanent, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make ourselves at home. We should.
We’re invited to say, “I don’t know where I’ll be in ten years, or in five years, or tomorrow, but I’m here now. I’m here in a community, and for now I can make this my community; or one of my communities—a space where I form sacred connections, where I root myself to daven/pray, or to schmooze/socialize. A space where I go through the rhythm of the Jewish year, and the Jewish life.”
I know that I have had to kind of coax myself into this experience. A couple of weeks ago when I talked about my sacred orientation to La Jolla because it was my home away from home, I mentioned how transient my upbringing had been: 14 houses in my first 14 years, six different cities; always bouncing around—you can find yourself keeping relationships and community at a distance under these conditions.
These and many other life conditions can cause us to act tentatively when it comes to new surroundings and new people. We might say, “why bother to get settled? Who knows how long I’ll be here or how invested I’ll get?”
Our most deeply rooted members— Carmen our president, Ric her husband, who’s birthday we are celebrating today, Jeremey, our immediate past president— all of them were new once and didn’t know how long they would be here.
Hillel’s point is that we need to help ourselves feel at home even if our presence here is impermanent. That part of our job is to let down our guard and open ourselves up to points of connection, and that it takes intentionality—every day he would go to perform an act of love to the “guest” in his “house”—to cultivate that orientation to the community.
And of course his other point is that all of our presences here are impermanent. That part of life is about figuring out what to do with this impermanence, at least on this material plane.
Rabbi Richard Hirsh teaches that “the awareness of impermanence can lead in different spiritual directions. It can become a motivation for tenacity and devotion, inspiring efforts at personal as well as professional accomplishment that almost defy the boundaries of life. It can help to mitigate disappointment as well as the inevitable distress of life—not by diminishing them, but by helping to keep them in perspective.”
Hillel’s conclusion about what to do in the face of impermanence is לִגְמֹל חֶסֶד—to treat his soul with chesed, with love and kindness. If we have a duty of love and kindness to guests, to newcomers, to those with a transient status, what’s more transient than our own souls? Who is more deserving of love and kindness than our own souls here on this physical plane today, gone tomorrow?
The implication for Hillel of the transience, the journey of the soul is chesed. Love. Expressing love towards one’s soul.
I invite each of you to extend love to the souls journeying around you, and to the soul journeying within you.
