I’m left still feeling the high of Friday night’s celebration of the generosity that led to our synagogue expansion. Members from every chapter of this community’s history came together displaying firsthand what intergenerational Jewish community looks like. Those who have been part of this community for decades and forged the legacy of the synagogue shared Shabbat serviceand a meal with some of our youngest members into whose hands the torch—l’dor vador, from generation to generation—will be placed.
What follows are the remarks I shared that evening:
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For this evening’s Torah, given that we are celebrating the expansion of our synagogue, I want to reflect for just a moment on what exactly is a synagogue? What is it? Where did this institution come from? And why does it mean so much that so many of you have contributed so generously in order to help ours continue to build?
Let’s start with the obligatory etymology. Where does the word come from? Synagogue comes from the the Greek “sun”—together—and “agein”—bring. Sun-agen. So synagogue literally translates to the “bringing together.”
And who or what are we bringing together? Well, us. The people.
Already we’re onto something pretty powerful but before we get too deep into that idea, let’s explore a little more about the terminology and history of the institution, because what better way to spend our Friday night, right?
The Greek is synagogue, and the Hebrew word for this institution is, most commonly, Beit Knesset. Beit, house, and Knesset, gathering, assembling. A House of Gathering.
And the word for “gather” in Hebrew connotes something more than an… informal social soiree. As many of you know, the word for the governing body of Israel, the unicameral legislature, the group of people who gather, sometimes chaotically, but with the fundamental purpose of being the representative voice of the people and make governing decisions, is… knesset. Gathering. The same word for beit knesset, our house of gathering, our synagogue here.
In fact, going all the way back to the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), thousands of years ago, the use of this word knesset, or kanas, the root from which it stems, whenever it is invoked, signifies a sacred purpose underlying the gathering at issue.
“Lekh” Queen Esther says to her cousin Mordechai, when she learns that Haman has decreed the obliteration of her people. “Knos” (from knesset) “Knos et kol ha yehudim.” “Gather all the Jews,” she says. “Have them pray and fast along with me. Because,” she continues, “I am going to go before the King to plead on behalf of my people, though it is contrary to the law to approach the king uninvited. And,” she says “וְכַאֲשֶׁ֥ר אָבַ֖דְתִּי אָבָֽדְתִּי.” “If I am to perish, I shall perish.”
Knos et kol ha yehudim. Gather all the Jews. Gather all the Jews in order to give me strength and in order that we may pursue holy work. When the word kanes, gather, is invoked in our sacred texts, it means something precious is happening.
So what is that special thing, what are we doing in a synagogue? What special form of gathering happens in a beit knesset, synagogue, house of gathering?
The origins of the institution are somewhat mysterious, but scholars agree that it surely has something to do with the destruction of the ancient holy temple in Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews from the land of Israel.
The temple had served as the exclusive space of Jewish worship, the space where the people brought their sacrificial offerings. That was how the people connected with their God, how they experienced that sense of divine security and protection and nearness. As is regularly taught, the word for sacrifice, korban, means to draw near, to feel the nearness of God at hand.
So when the temple was destroyed, as one author has written, it was an “earthquake in the soul of the Jewish people.” Their direct line to the divine had been cut off. The language through which they knew how to commune with the divine was destroyed.
So what did they do? Well, in a word, they gathered. They built battei kenesset. Houses of gathering. Not to offer sacrifices—that was prohibited without proper, informed oversight by the priests in the sacred precincts of the singular beit hamikdash, temple, that had been destroyed. But to gather. To learn. To pray. To study. To reflect. To be.
They were in exile. Feeling their way through the darkness of their newfound circumstances. And what did they lean on? One another. They built houses where they would engage in the same project their ancestors had been engaged in, but through different means. Like their ancestors, they engaged in the project of facilitating a connection to the divine; the project of yisrael, of wrestling with God, as the word yisrael literally translates to, wrestling with God. They engaged in the same project of learning the roots of their tradition so they could carry it out in new ways in the face of changing circumstances—the project of studying the foundational principles of interpersonal relationships they understood to be incumbent upon them through what we call the mitzvot, the commandments or higher callings, mitzvot which also included ritual practices designed to preserve their constant engagement with the holiness underlying the universe.
These activities were housed under the roof of what came to be known as a synagogue, a beit knesset, a house of gathering. In the face of exile, in the face of loss, they gathered. And the gatherings became for the Jews what the temple used to be. Ultimately another name for those gatherings became the m’kdash me’at: the little temple, the little sacred place.
But of course little did not mean insignificant. In fact it was those little gatherings that served as the sites of the people’s most profound experiences. הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא The Blessed Holy One, it says in the Talmud מָצוּי בְּבֵית הַכְּנֶסֶת is found in the house of gathering. Found right here in gatherings like this one.
While the idea that God might reside in a synagogue, in a house of gathering might seem to us like a conventional religious statement, at the time of their founding it was radical. For in ancient times it was understood that one’s God was strictly associated with one’s land. The backdrop to the experience of exile was the understanding that if one was not on one’s land, one was not with one’s God. You were cut off. Left without protection.
But that was not the Jewish understanding. The Jewish understanding was that wherever the people gathered, the divine presence resided among them. This understanding extended from any gathering in a synagogue, to anywhere ten people, a minyan, gathered to pray, to anywhere three people, a beit din, gathered to make judicial rulings, to anywhere two people, a chevrutah, gathered to study torah, to anywhere one person, enosh echad gathered oneself, and uttered the name of Hashem.
Jews understood that where people gathered, the Holy One was present. That though they were in exile, a seemingly heartbreaking notion that carried with it the heartbreaking possibility of being cut off from one’s divine source, there was the shechina, the divine, present in their gatherings, no matter how small, with them, a source of inspiration and comfort for a new chapter of Jewish life.
So where does that leave us, here at Society Hill Synagogue, here at a beit knesset, a house of gathering in the 21st century, some two thousand five hundred years after the creation of the first synagogue, here at a synagogue you here tonight have helped build, helped establish a legacy whose reverberations I hope, and, feel comfortable saying, could be felt for another 2500 years? What are we doing here tonight, what purpose does the synagogue still hold for us now?
Well I don’t know if you know this but tradition teaches that we are still in galut, still in exile. Not necessarily on a political level. Anyone here can buy a ticket on the next flight to Tel Aviv, to the land of Israel. Anyone can move there, make aliyah, if they so choose. And that’s its own blessing.
But while we may not be in political exile, the tradition teaches that we remain in a more fundamental version of exile. An exile from ourselves, from one another. From unity, from cohesion, from shalom, from peace. Life is lived in exile, the tradition seems to teach. Between the twin poles of paradigmatic existence—between the foundation in the Garden of Eden and the messianic age in the world to come—Jewish tradition essentially teaches that we live in exile—existential estrangement. A nagging sense of being incomplete, of not having or being enough. Of yearning. For something beyond and within. For wholeness and reunification. We have a sense of a fundamental brokenness to the world even while we recognize its underlying possibilities for wholeness.
And yet there is possibility even within the brokenness. As a teaching I often cite from Professor Nathaniel Deutsch reminds us, the Hasidim, the Jewish mystics, “teach us the virtue, even the necessity of being broken. (Tsubrokenkayt). Ayn davar yoter shalem me lev shavur, they teach. There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.” So “Is exile,” he asks, “a punishment that distances us from God or an opportunity to get closer to Him?” “Is it more Jewish to be broken than whole?” he continues, “Or is the point of Judaism the attempt to find wholeness in brokenness?” Exile, under this understanding, the state in which we find ourselves, is an opportunity, an invitation.
And what is the Jewish response to that invitation? If you’ve been listening closely, you know what I’m going to say: gather. Knos. If I may be so bold as to say, what we’re doing right now, this evening.
This is the playbook. In response to alienation. In response to a society that increasingly, if unconsciously, drives us deeper into exile—away from connection, away from community, through the increasing distractions of our phones and our Netflix queues and our twitter feeds and a virus that kept us holed up in our homes—in response to all this, the invitation is present, when we can, to gather. Thank you for accepting that invitation tonight. Thank you for your generosity. Thank you for enabling us to continue to extend that invitation to so many. Thank you. Shabbat Shalom.
