Dear Friends,
What follows are the remarks I delivered at this year’s Congregational Annual Meeting, reflecting back on an incredible year of contributions from, and on behalf of, Jewish community in general, and this community in particular. Thank you.
What a year it has been. I began my time as Rabbi of Society Hill Synagogue during the heart of the pandemic in 2020, and we hoped that that would be the last historic crisis we encountered, at least for a while. It turned out we — and the world — did not get much respite, if we ever do.
The tragic events of October 7, 2023 changed the experience of being Jewish in America (to say nothing of being Jewish in Israel). Regardless of one’s personal relationship to the State of Israel, or where one falls across the political spectrum — and we have a lot of diversity within this congregation — the horrific attack of October 7, and the subsequent war, put each of our relationships to Israel, whatever shape each of those relationship may take, right back at the center of our lives, calling upon each of us to ask what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century.
This congregation as a whole was no exception to confronting this challenge. While sometimes our response to that challenge meant engaging with the events in Israel directly — I still remember changing our entire Simhat Torah program within hours of the event, transforming it from its typical exuberant, celebratory spirit to one of somber commemoration. And, as you know, I write weekly now with my own divrei torah, words of reflection, on the State of Israel, the state of the world; something I never did before. Sometimes this means doubling down on, recentering, the timeless rhythms of what it means to be Jewish: gathering together for Shabbat, for holidays, for lifecycle moments; and the daily practices and expressions of being Jewish, the ritual and the moral, and feeling the joy, the connections, the holiness that comes from that experience.
Shabbat at Society Hill Synagogue
A few years ago I said that for this community to thrive, and for us to succeed in our mission of enriching people’s lives through the experience of Jewish community, we needed to revitalize our experience of Shabbat. Shabbat is the communal watering hole, the container of the Jewish soul, the holding space for how we engage with our Jewish tradition in a lived, sacred way. It’s the meeting point of three key elements of Jewish tradition:
(1) Tefilah: prayer, music, reflection, the experience of holding space for the soul to explore itself in connection with others, and with the Divine;
(2) Torah: sacred learning — engaging deeply and intellectually with what our tradition has to teach us, and how we might bring those values to bear on ourselves and the world around us; and
(3) Kehilah: community. Sacred togetherness. The experience of feeling connected to a fabric of people, strengthening us when we’re in need — and we’re always in need — and strengthening them in return.
Society Hill Synagogue has been a model for demonstrating the capacity of Shabbat in strengthening a community.
This is true across generations. For our youngest community members, Young Family Shabbat gatherings led by Micah Hart regularly brings in dozens, sometimes over 100 people to experience the light and joy and music of Shabbat. This year we expanded the program from a once monthly service on Friday nights to include a monthly Saturday morning service as well. Many people have joined as members from this program.
From there we have our Ann Spak Thal Hebrew School, for whom our immersive Shabbat Hebrew School experience is now a regular part of our learning. The students bring light and wisdom to our Torah discussion, and their families fill our social hall each Saturday afternoon for a life-filled kiddush lunch. Our weekly Friday night TGIShabbat services, from September through May, now incorporate two services per year partly led by each Hebrew School grade, bringing families out on Friday nights as well so everyone can celebrate through music and dinner.
And for adults, in addition to the intergenerational community and continuity of having younger families be present on Shabbat, we’ve also begun to invest more in expanded learning opportunities on Shabbat and beyond. This past year we held two Scholar-in-Residence weekends, with renowned Rabbis Michael Strassfeld and Simcha Raphael, leaders in their fields, helping us reflect on questions that confront as as we navigate the world today.
Jewish Learning
Synagogues should be a fount of learning across the generations.
We are confronted with so many challenging questions in the world today: what does it mean to be Jewish? What is the Jewish story and how does it speak to this moment? How can we live out this story’s — which is our own — values and intuitions, which includes our own values and intuitions, informed by the generations that came before us? How do we navigate the tensions, and complementary relationships, of being Jewish in a secular, universalistic, democratic society? What does Jewish history have to say about democracies being under threat? How do we understand a Jewish democracy being under threat, from without and within? How do we understand Zionism? What does that word mean and how do we relate to it?
The Society Hill Synagogue community has the capacity to speak to all these questions and more, both as a beating heart of Jewish engagement in Philadelphia and as a place that gives us the strength and the ballast to confront these challenging yet life-enriching questions. I aspire to see Society Hill Synagogue as a community that continues to be associated with depth, rigor, spirit, and joy. We’re shoring up the educational experience up and down the generational spectrum at Society Hill Synagogue. We’re continuing our partnership this year with the renowned educational organization Makom Community to help us rewrite our Hebrew School curriculum, built around the principles of the Jewish story, and the values and responsibilities that flow from it.
We’re also continuing to teach classes for our adult learners on everything from Zionism to our annual “Nuts and Bolts: a (Re-)introduction to Judaism,” to Hebrew language, and more. And this year, Hazzan Jessi and I our expanding our family education curriculum from one year to three years, so that parents have the opportunity to learn and build community with one another as they transition from the challenges and opportunities of moving from the pre-teen, pre-B’nei Mitzvah years, to the post-, and asking what that journey means for them and their children.
Telling our Stories
All of this would be limited in the scope of its success were it not for the approval by the Board of Directors first of the creation of a Communications Committee — with a number of you as volunteers — who crafted a new draft of marketing materials in partnership with an outside marketing firm, Greater Good Strategy, and then second, and more importantly, of the approval of what this work paved the way for, which was the hiring of our first full-time Communications Manager, LilyFish Gomberg, who has advanced our digital storytelling capabilities by orders of magnitude, working under the supervision of Sahar Oz. I am so proud of the work all of our communications volunteers and staff have contributed, spearheaded by LilyFish and Sahar. Thank you.
Our Holy Community
Speaking of storytelling, there is one moment from this year that, to me, tells the story of who Society Hill Synagogue is, at perhaps the most important place of a synagogue community: the home of a mourner. There we were at the home of longtime Society Hill Synagogue Religion Committee co-chair Marc Schwartz, Past President Staci Schwartz, and Hebrew School Gan Teacher Jamie Schwartz, sitting shiva for Marc’s late mother Gloria, Zichrona Livracha. We reached the end of our service, just before the closing Mourner’s Kaddish, when we hold space for family and friends to offer words of comfort and consolation to the mourners. The room was overflowing with people, many of whom are congregants, and one of them, Paula Ninerell, raised her hand to speak. Noting that she didn’t know Marc’s mother, she nonetheless wanted to offer love and support to Marc, observing that if it weren’t for Marc, who teaches the beginner’s Hebrew class here at Society Hill Synagogue, she wouldn’t have been able to participate in the very prayer service being held that evening in his home.
It was the confluence of those three key things that happen in Jewish community: prayer, learning, and community. That’s the one moment that, for me, most embodied the spirit of Society Hill Synagogue this year.
That’s if I had to pick a moment. If I had to pick a person — and there are honestly too many to choose — but if I had to pick a person who most embodied that spirit this year, it would be Carmen Hayman, about to finish her two-year term of service as President of this community.
There is so much you do and don’t know about Carmen. You likely do know she’s quick to tear up, but you do know that she’s present at so much of what takes place here at Society Hill Synagogue; you do know she’s given a lifetime of service to this community?
You may not know all of the skills she brings to bear on this role of president, all of the accomplishments she’s stewarded on our behalf, all of the quiet ways she shows up.
Carmen understands leadership, intuitively. All of the presidents I’ve worked with have faced steep challenges: Debbie Stewart faced declining membership; Harry Oxman, the retirement of our Rabbi and Executive Director; Jeremey Newberg, the Capital Campaign and pandemic; Carmen began the job as president and discovered that the contracts of the three top leadership positions at the synagogue—Rabbi, Executive Director, Hazzan—were all expiring, and managed to quietly, without fanfare, and with consensus and support from the Executive Committee, negotiate three long term contracts to keep the leadership in place and invested in the future of Society Hill Synagogue.
This year she took on the laborious task, which she demonstrated tonight, of bringing our leadership structure into the 21st century. No one asked her to do this; this isn’t the kind of work that gets your name on the front page of the Jewish Exponent or on a building. It’s the quiet work of making sure we remain organized and strong as we continue to grow into the future.
Now, if it was just these big ticket items, dayenu, that would be enough, but Carmen is also present on the small scale, the quiet moments as well: she’s the first to show up at the home of a sick congregant, the first to volunteer for an open greeter slot, or a food packing shift at Old Pine Community Center, first to reach out if there is someone who needs support.
With her family and with her community, Carmen shows up, time and again to embody the spirit of Society Hill Synagogue. At Friday night prayer. Tefilah. Saturday morning learning. Torah. And in community. Kehilah. We are grateful to her for her service. Thank you.
Thank you to all of you for the ways you embody the spirit of community here. Shalom.
Rabbi K
