Dear Friends,
It goes without saying how heavy a toll this month has taken: on our souls, our spirits, our psyches—to say nothing of the direct devastation wrought on the lives and the communities in Israel and in Gaza. We feel it.
I continue to wrestle with it, and I have some additional thoughts I’ll share below.
First, though, I wanted to name how heartening it was to be in synagogue on Shabbat this past Friday night and Saturday morning, and how much I want to encourage you to do the same with one or both of those services. Not necessarily out of a sense of religious obligation (though, by all means, if that is compelling to you, great) nor out of a sense of guilt, at all, nor because synagogue is necessarily going to provide you with all the — or any — answers about how to feel about, or respond to, this war. But simply because they act of gathering—with Jewish community and with loved ones—heartens the heart; heartens the soul.
I can’t tell you how powerful it was to come together Friday night with over one hundred people in our sanctuary. This wasn’t a special service; no special guest speaker, no holiday. We did call upon our Kitah Gimel (third grade) and Kitah Dalet (fourth grade) students and their families to join us (we’ll do the same for other grades in succeeding months), and witnessed those 20-plus students lead us in the shema and oseh shalom, their voices serving as just about the most powerful antidote you can imagine for our weary hearts.
The following morning—again, no special service—another one hundred-plus people came through our doors for a Shabbat morning Torah discussion, a Young Families Shabbat in our social hall, and just davenning and being together in our sanctuary.
Even if you don’t find yourself religiously compelled by the words in the siddur, I have to say I found the experience of leaning into one’s Jewish identity like, in a communal way, to be profoundly uplifting and nourishing. I encourage you to try building in a practice of once a week, or even once a month sitting with fellow community members in synagogue as a means of feeling nourished by the communal expression of our Jewish connections and our human connections. It feels profoundly good for the soul when we don’t know what to *do* in response to this challenging moment.
I’m not saying it is a sufficient step—that we just show up in synagogue and all the world’s problems go away. Our Judaism calls upon us to do more than that. But it can be a profoundly (I’ll use that word one more time because it feels so relevant in this moment) grounding act to express our Jewishness and humanness in this way of communal gathering as Jews have always done, and to allow ourselves to respond further from there.