L’Chayim: 18 Jewish Touchstones to Help Navigate the Years Ahead
Rosh Hashanah 5783
It’s been a rough year. Years? Decade? Century? We’re weary. How much longer is this pandemic going to last, we wonder? How many times do we have to turn on the news and encounter another attack on our democracy, or our personal autonomy? How many images of a planet on fire do we have to see? Racial injustice, anti-semitism. עַד־אָנָה יְהֹוָה “How Long, O Lord?” How long must existence go on like this? We’re weary.
And yet, I am not breaking news when I say that this is not the first time in our history we have weathered adversity; in each generation humanity in general and the Jewish people in particular have experienced trauma and tragedy. I needn’t list the examples. You know them.
And yet we endure. We persist. Even finding moments to flourish. As the popular saying goes, “they tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.”
So the question I’d like to ask today is, how? How have the Jewish people managed this time and again? What have been the spiritual, communal resources that have led us to navigate these storms, that have helped us traverse the wilderness? What have been the points of light that have helped show us the way.
For this sermon, I’d like identify to 18 (for what is a Jewish list if not 18, eighteen representing, chai, life, the life pulsating through every corner of existence)—I’d like to identify 18 d’varim, 18 Jewish experiences, manifestations, touchstones that have helped and, more importantly, can continue to help us navigate life’s travails; resources that have served us, and can continue to serve us if we but let them in.
Number 1: Aseret hamakot, The ten plagues. Yes, The ten plagues and, more specifically, the ritual of dipping our fingers into our wine each passover seder, spilling ten little drops on our plate. The ten plagues moment shows the power, and the capacity, of ritual, to teach, to instruct, to imagine, to reflect.
First, there’s the visceral experience, the coldness of the wine, the drops staining whatever else is on our plate, one of many ritual moments that help make pesach so memorable, that cause it to stick with us, and that prompt the question about why we do it, which makes the answer so much more enduring.
And second there’s the answer itself, the explanation for this ritual that has become so popular: the citation of the midrash that, upon the drowning of the Egyptians at the Red sea, the ministering angels wanted to chant songs of praise, but the Hakadosh Baruch Hu, the Holy Blessed One,said, “the work of my hands is being drowned in the sea, and you sing songs of praise?”
Nevermind that the original source of this ritual probably came about in tenth century Germany during another period of Jewish persecution when the removal of the drops of wine from our cup probably symbolized a desire that future plagues strike our enemies and not us. Nevermind that. Ritual is susceptible to evolving interpretations over time, and today the ritual serves as a vehicle for the teaching that God is pained upon the sight of the death of God’s creations, no matter the circumstances. It’s a teaching on the sacredness of life, even while recognizing that life isn’t simple. The ritual has the capacity to prompt us to make space in our hearts to reflect on how we relate to our own adversaries, our own demons. And it has us take note of the pathos, the capacity for sadness within God, imagining God’s heart breaking.
Which brings us to item no. 2 on our list of inspirational jewish touchstones: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Perhaps today best known for his leadership as a Jewish voice in the Civil rights movement, marching arm-in-arm with Dr. King, Heschel was born in Poland, and moved to Germany in the 1920s. In 1938 he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported back to Poland. His mother and two sisters were murdered by the Nazis and a third was killed in a German bombing. He eventually managed to escape to the United States where this orthodox jew spent his career teaching t at the Reform and the Conservative Rabbinical seminaries, training generations of rabbis and writing what, for me, have been among the most beautiful and formative spiritual treatises I have ever encountered.
I say the depiction of God’s pathos leads us to Abraham Joshua Heschel because in some ways this concept, God’s plight, embodies one of the central tenets of Heschel’s teachings as encapsulated in the title of his magnum opus, God in Search of Man.
One of Hechel’s central moves was to invite us to reflect not just on our own experiences of God, but on God’s experience of us.For Heschel, God in search of man suggests that God is yearning for us, pining for us, longing for us, if we would but let God in. “God is waiting for us to redeem the world,” he writes. “God is waiting constantly and keenly for our effort and devotion.”
Heschel brings us to number 3 on our list prompted by the title of his most popular work, The Sabbath. Number 3: Ner shel shabbat—Shabbat candles.
I have long had an ambivalent relationship to Shabbat. I still struggle with what my Shabbat observance looks like, to this day, and yet I recognize in it what Heschel called a “palace in time” — “a day” he writes, “on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time. To turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.”
Shabbat candles inaugurate, consecrate, the palace. Regardless of your Shabbat observance, I am going to suggest the weekly lighting of Shabbat candles. Rabbi Nathan Martin teaches that the shabbat candles can be thought of as bringing forth a piece of or haganuz, the mysterious hidden light of the divine stored away after the first days of creation, that will be used in olam habah, the world to come. As Heschel writes, “When all work is brought to a standstill, the candles are lit. Just as creation began with the word, ‘Let there be light!’ so does the celebration of creation begin with the kindling of lights…. ” Continuing, “Refreshed and renewed, attired in festive garments, with candles nodding dreamily to unutterable expectations, to intuitions of eternity… the world becomes a place of rest. It is a moment of resurrection of the dormant spirit in our souls.”
A picture adorns my office of little one-year-old Lila covering her eyes during Shabbat candle lighting. Someone snuck it without my knowing. I can only wonder what and how she sees when she removes her hands, the candle flames flickering in front of her.
What happens next is number four on my list. Birkat habanim, the blessing of children, also known as birkat hakohanim, the priestly blessing—that moment where we extend our hands towards the next generation and channel our experience of blessing towards them, feeling ourselves connected to them like links in a chain, the chain stretching back and forward generations, as we ready to pass the torch.
According to Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman it is the single benediction offered most often in Judaism—and possibly even in the western world. Rabbi Nelson Gleck offered it to President John F. Kennedy during his inauguration.
The rhythm of its words evoke a sense of infinite blessing, each line flowing slightly more than the previous. Y’varechecha Adonai v’yish’m’recha, Ya-er Adonai panav eilecha vichuneka, Yisa Adonai panav eilecha v’yaseim l’cha shalom
May Adonai Bless you and Protect You.
May Adonai shine His face upon you and act with grace towards you.
May Adonai lift His face towards you and grant you peace.
The blessing’s symbolism of channeling the blessing of our Jewish inheritance is profound. We are stewards right now. Judaism is in our hands: your hands, my hands, each of our hands. The future is not predetermined. We shape what Judaism looks and feels like with our choices, both having the humility to wonder how this tradition might influence us, altering our course, while also bringing our authentic selves to the encounter, empowering ourselves to thoughtfully shape it, as previous generations have done. Each generation is the trustee of the Jewish spirit, and right now it’s us. How are we carrying out the responsibility with which we’ve been entrusted?
This brings us to number 5—shevirat ha’kelim, the shattering of the vessels.
One of my favorite midrashim, rabbinic teachings, in Judaism, this one is an interpretation of the story of creation that I referred to in a Rosh Hashanah teaching a couple of years ago. It says that in order for God to create the world, God had to withdraw, had to contract or else God’s presence would overwhelm the created world. To make room for creation God first drew in God’s breath, inhaled, contracting God’s self. This produced an empty mass, for how could there be anything else without the presence of the Divine? So, in order to complete creation, God sent forth God’s light. But, soas not to overwhelm the space in which God was creating, God encased this light into vessels, casks. God sent forth these vessels towards the empty mass, “like a fleet of ships, each carrying its cargo of light.” And when these vessels arrived at their destination, the space of creation… they shattered. Shevirat ha’kelim. The shattering of the vessels. Creation was effected through the resulting combination of ingredients, shard of vessel, spark of light, shard of vessel, spark of light. Sparks of Light were scattered throughout the newly created universe, “like sand, like seeds, like stars,” covered by shards of vessels.
This is the universe we now know today—eons later, sparks of light hidden in broken shards—and our task is l’taken olam, tikkun olam, to repair the world through the elevation of these sparks and the subsequent repairing of the fragments.
How broken will the world still be when we pass it to our children? In what condition will it be?
This leads to number 6: the shofar. The blast of the shofar represents, and can represent, so many things, but prominent among them is the stirring it causes in our spirits, in our souls. Judaism has a prophetic streak. Famous are the words which say, let justice roll down like the waters, righteousness like a mighty stream, spoken by the Israelite prophet Amos. In ancient times Judaism said that ritual, while significant, is not enough. Fasting, prayer, Shabbat and Holiday observance is a powerful way of facilitating our engagement with the Holy but it is ultimately insufficient if we don’t heed the call in our midst to redress the unequal circumstances experienced by the proverbial widow, orphan, stranger, and poor. If we allow a society to continue that facilitates injustice, racial inequality, deprivation of bodily autonomy, planetary harm—we are not heeding the call, represented by the shofar, l’taken olam, to repair the broken world.
Which brings us to number seven, another word for that call, Mitzvah. Mitzvah doesn’t just mean good deed. As we know, Mitzvah is often literally translated commandment. There are understood to be 613 mitzvot, commandments in the Torah.
Now, many contemporary non-orthodox Jews do not experience mitzvot that way; we might not experience ourselves as formally commanded by God to observe the various pieces of Jewish minutiae present in Jewish life. Commanded not to press a button on an elevator on Shabbat, for example, but permitted to ride an elevator that stops on its own. Commanded to wear tzitzit fringes everyday, We might not feel commanded in that way.
And yet, I lift up mitzvah as one of the 18 touchstones because I understand mitzvot as callings, invitations—the Jewish peoples’ translations, interpretations, of God’s calling out to humanity to facilitate the entryway of the sacred into this world. God, as the Jewish people understand it, calls out to us in countless ways as we go about our daily lives. Whether these are callings of profound moral urgency, as, for example, we are called, it is a mitzvah וְגֵ֥ר לֹא־תוֹנֶ֖ה “You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt;” to callings that invite us to subtly notice the holiness, the sacredness inherent in the universe. Brushing our hand over a mezuzah as we pass through a doorway, noticing the sacredness of space; lighting Shabbat candles, to notice the sacredness of time; sitting down to dinner, eating in such a way that we notice the sacredness of all life.
Which brings us to number 8. Brisket. I love brisket. Because my kashrut practice has gotten a little more strict in recent years, it’s not very convenient or easy for me to eat meat that often, and so when I get to eat brisket it tends to be a special occasion. But it’s not just the taste that has brisket make it onto this list.
Brisket is in many ways the encapsulation of the Jewish spiritual and sociological journeys. Spiritual, because—I didn’t know this until recently—the hindquarters of a cow are very rarely eaten in Jewish tradition. The hindquarters are where the prohibited fats are—fats that are seen as belonging to God, that were burned up on the ancient altar on behalf of God.
Because these prohibited fats are difficult to extract, many traditions within Judaism forgo the hindquarters entirely. Brisket is “one of the few large, visually impressive cuts of beef” in the front quarters, food historian Joanna O’leary writes. So eating brisket symbolizes the traditional Jewish spiritual approach to eating—conscious of the sacredness of life, some of that life is prohibited to us.
But there’s also a sociological component to why we eat brisket. As O’leary continues, “Brisket has a tough, stubborn texture that requires roasting at a low temperature for an extended period of time which in previous centuries made it less appealing to most non-Jewish customers and therefore less expensive. More affordable. This protracted preparation timeline proved perfect for Jewish cooks, who could begin roasting the brisket just prior to pausing labor” for twenty-four or 48 hours in observance of Shabbat and holidays.
So brisket is also Jewish because non-Jews historically didn’t want it.
As our fork and knife slice into the tender meat we are brought back not only to the ancient altar, where burned up on the altar were those prohibited fats in an effort to draw closer to God; we are also brought back to exile, the shtetls in europe, tenement houses in new york, a manifestation of our peoples living on the edge of history, just trying to make ends meet.
Still, speaking of the ancient altar, we are at number 9 on our list. The kotel. Hakotel ha’ma’ravi, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, to which Israelites, Jews from all over the ancient world would make pilgrimage, bringing the best of their flock, facilitating a connection to the Holy of holies through sacrifice and communal experience. Can you believe a remnant of this seemingly mythical 2000 year old structure still exists?
When the temple was destroyed and Jews were exiled they were barred from access to the kotel for 364 days a year, the exception being Tishah b’av, the ninth day of the month of Av, when they were given limited access on the anniversary of the temples destruction to mourn it. They would weep at the emotion of being reunited with the site of their former glory, thus spawning the term Wailing Wall.
As a young child, living in Jerusalem during my kindergarten year, my dad a rabbinical student there, I was in awe of the wall. I had been told if I scribbled a note to God, and stuck it in a crevice in the wall, God God’s self would read it. Its power stuck with me. 10 years later when I finally returned to Israel on a trip for us teenagers, the kotel was our first stop. Groggily stepping off the van, I saw it at dusk. It was simple yet glowing with light, and I was awestruck.
Like many things in life, when I got closer to it, the sheen of its perfection wore off, if only a little. An aggressive Orthodox man tried to insist that I put on his tefillin as I approached the wall, wanting to make sure I fulfilled his understanding of that mitzvah that day; as it stands now, haredi, ultra-orthodox youth have become physically violent towards reform and conservative Jews gathering at the pluralistic, mixed gender prayer space at a different part of the Wall, trying to impose one standard of religious expression. Sound familiar?
The Kotel makes this list because it both reveals our potential as a people, still grounded in the sacred practices of our ancestors ages ago; while also serving as a stark reminder not to deify humanity or its structures. No one has a monopoly on truth.
The Kotel also brings us to number 10 on our list. Exile. Galut. The diaspora. Exile is a real historical event—twice in antiquity we were exiled from our home, by the babylonians in 586 BCE and by the Romans in 70 CE; we went from being a self-governing people rooted in our soil to being scattered across the hinterlands, not fully able to express ourselves spiritually. Then, time and again we were expelled from places we put down new roots. England in 1290, Spain in 1492, Portugal in 1496, to name just a few examples. The experience of exile speaks to a real political, historical circumstance.
But it also refers to our fundamental, existential condition as Jews and as humans—longing, yearning, pining to return. We spoke, with items one and two of God’s pathos, the sadness we experience in God, and the mirror image is of course, our own heartbreak, our own sense of longing—our own sense, even in the experience of utmost joy, of a yearning to connect to something deeper and more profound. To a sense of wholeness. For some, To God.
So why is this on the list? Because tradition teaches that exile can serve as that very pathway to healing, to God. I love to quote author Nathan Englander who asks“ Is exile a punishment that distances us from God or an opportunity to get closer to him? Is it more Jewish to be broken than whole? Or is the point of Judaism the attempt to find wholeness in the brokenness?” That opportunity to find wholeness, sacredness in brokenness the whole point:
Which brings us to number 11, the breaking of the glass at weddings—we think of this as a moment of pure jubilation. So many in-person or pop culture experiences of the shattering are followed by the crowd breaking into celebration and music and siman tov u’mazel tov—what good fortune is coming upon us.
And yet the foundational interpretation of the breaking of the glass may be from a passage in the talmud which interprets the verse from Psalms which says, “גִילוּ בִּרְעָדָה” “Serve Hashem in awe and rejoice with trembling.” “Rejoice with trembling,” the Talmud interprets to mean that even in our moments of utmost joy, unrestrained joy, we should not turn our hearts away from the brokenness of the world, that it needs our attention, our tender loving care.
An expansion of this interpretation is that the union supporting that moment of perfection, that partnership of two people in love is, like the glass, fragile. In need of care and attention like the broader world around us.
In the seminal work, I and Thou, probably better translated as I and You, Martin Buber teaches about the centrality of relationships to Jewish life, to all of life. “Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung,” he writes. “All actual life is encounter.” The work inherent in those encounters, he suggests, is to truly center whomever, whatever is in our presence, putting blinders on to the rest of the world, to our own internal wants and needs—that that work is sacred. That is what partnerships can call for—being truly present to the person in front of you, in that moment.
Which brings us to number 12… Silence. Do we experience enough silence in this day and age? Enough quiet? I don’t. I’m stating the obvious when I name how we’ve allowed our phones to step in to take away the silence from us, take away the quiet. There’s a world of information at our fingertips, how could we not be tantalized by it, even before we go to bed. As one meme I recently saw put it: “can’t seem to sleep. Let’s see if the bright light of my phone, containing all the information in the entire world, held inches away from my face for the next 15 minutes, manages to lull me into a peaceful slumber.” That phone is right there in our face, so many hours of the day.
What we’re actually called upon to as Jews before we go to sleep is “shemah.” To listen. Each night before we go to sleep, the traditional practice is to chant the shemah, shemah yisrael, listen, Israel. Listen to the quiet, listen to what tradition calls the kol demama daka, the still small voice.
This phrase is from the biblical book of Kings, as the prophet Elijah is weary from being on the lam, hunted by the evil queen jezebel. He finally hears God’s saving voice, not in the ruach gedolah v’chazak, not in the great and mighty wind, not in the ra’ash, the earthquake, and in not the esh, the fire, but in the kol d’mamaha daka, the still small voice, or as another translation renders this in “the sound of slender silence.” Do we give ourselves enough space and time and quiet to shemah, to listen, to hear that voice?
Quiet is a compelling feature of the Jewish experience. When Buber talks about an encounter, an I-Thou, I-You experience, in part he’s talking about the Jewish equivalent of what other faiths refer to as listening, hearing someone into speech—giving them the space, having the patience and the discipline to just listen. Listen so their hearts unspool slowly and in tender hands.
It can be so hard to quiet the parts of ourselves that want to jump in with our thoughts, our opinions, our judgments, even when coming from a helpful place. Sometimes it is so important to just be, so that the person we love can sort out their soul with us tenderly alongside them. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out “It is fascinating that despite his often fractured relationship with Judaism, Sigmund Freud created in psychoanalysis a deeply Jewish form of healing. He himself called it the ‘speaking cure,’ but it is in fact a listening cure. Almost all effective forms of care involve deep listening.”
Which brings us to number 13 on our list, a counterpoint to silence: 🎵Avinu Malkeinu, Haneinu Va’aneinu 🎵, the plaintive somber appeal for God’s compassion that we’ve experienced this morning. From there we’ll soon move to 🎵b’tzet yisrael mi’mitzraim, beit ya’akov me’am lo’ez 🎵, the springy cadence of hallel that we jubilantly sing on sukkot, celebrating our deliverance upon navigating this stormy season of penitence, moving to 🎵aneunu, aneunu b’yom koreinu 🎵, that’s from the bouncy hakafot, the dancing we do on simchat torah, celebrating the completion of a cycle of engagement with our sacred text, moving to 🎵maoz tzur yeshuati lecha na’eh leshabeakh 🎵, rock of ages, hear our song, that sense of faith and hope during even our darkest seasons. From there to 🎵chag purim, chag purim, chag gadol la yehudim, Masechot, ra’ashanim,shirim verikudim 🎵, that locomotive sound of revelry and the sacred silliness of purim, then onto mah nishtanah ha’lailah ha zeh mi kol ha’leilot, the sound of questioning, of late night chatter among parents and children of passover, that eternal mode of Jewish learning, interspersed each week with 🎵lechah dodi likrat kalah, penei shabbat nkabbalah, lechah dodi likrat kalah, penei shabbat nkabbalah 🎵, each week harmonizing shabbat, israel and the divine as one transitioning through to the life cycle, 🎵simen tov umazel tov, umazel tov simen tov umazel tov 🎵, celebrity births, beni mitzvahs, weddings, and finally the culminating 🎵Miz-mohr leh-dah-vid, ah-doh-noi roh-ee loh ekh-sar Bin-oht deh-sheh yahr-bee-tzay-nee, ahl may meh-noo-khoht yeh-nah-hah-lay-nee 🎵, at a funeral or during yizkor. The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want.
Music has the capacity to express the seemingly inexpressible. To stir our hearts to experience its longings, its yearnings. Tapping into different notes at different seasons, channeling different experiences of the soul. Music is a fundamental part of the Jewish experience, as central a part of the religion as its most sacred text.
Which brings us to number 14. Midrash. In some ways my favorite genre of that text, midrash comes from a word meaning to seek, to inquire, and it refers to the practice of playing with, imaginatively immersing ourselves in our text, in our stories, and wondering what new insights this process might yield—even insights that have never before presented themselves to the Jewish people. No one has walked in our shoes, facing our circumstances. Our interpretations are as valid as any old rabbi’s. As Rabbi Art Green writes, “Torah must have new interpretations in each generation, in accord with the generation’s spiritual character. Only in this way… does Torah, eternally belonging to God, historically belonging to Moses, become our Torah.”
One of my favorite midrashim, favorite examples of a rabbi playing with a text for this season is when a rabbi plays with a verse from the book of Isaiah, on which according to Isaiah God says, “I will bring the people to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in the house of My prayer.” The verse does not say I will make them joyful in the house of their prayer, but rather תְּפִלָּתִי, “the house of My prayer”.
This teaches us, one rabbi suggests, that God, too prays. God says “the house of my prayer.” God too prays. What does God pray? Another rabbi builds off of this and says God’s prayer is יְהִי רָצוֹן May it be My will that My mercy will overcome My anger towards the people. That’s God’s prayer. God struggles, like us. Wrestling internally, trying to have God’s better instincts, more compassionate, loving instincts win out over God’s reactionary ones. What does it do for us to imagine God struggling like this? That is midrash.
Which brings us to number 15, the related concept of etz chayiim. Tree of life. The name emblazoned on our maroon chumishm, Torahs, out there on our bookshelf. Etz chayiim.
The Book of Proverbs says:
אַשְׁרֵ֣י אָ֭דָם “Happy is the person who finds wisdom, The person who attains understanding,” and goes on to say עֵץ־חַיִּ֣ים הִ֭יא לַמַּחֲזִיקִ֣ים בָּ֑הּ וְֽתֹמְכֶ֥יהָ מְאֻשָּֽׁר׃ “She is a tree of life to those who grasp her, And whoever holds on to her is happy.” Judaism is a religious tradition that cherises wisdom. Not knowledge, but wisdom, and implores us to seek it.
I find myself on an ongoing search for new ways of understanding the divine, new ways of connecting to and serving the holy one, that are relevant to whatever moment of life I am experiencing. One moment I might relate to God as parents lovingly watching out for me. The next it might be God as the force that shows up in our actions of love. Torah is a tree of life in the sense that, with the intentionality we bring to it, it can yield fresh understandings at each moment.
This is true even if we don’t understand it to be a divinely authored document in the traditional sense. The beauty of sacred literature passed down through the generations is that it is a vehicle for introspection, for theological and social reflection regardless of its origin. Torah, is alive, not relegated to a shelf on a museum but is meant to be turned over and turned over, made into our own, so that we and it come out the other side of our engagement transformed.
Which brings me to number 16. Teshuvah. When I’m confronted with the word “transformation” I think teshuvah. I believe that encounters with Judaism are meant to always be, even if only subtly, transformational. We’re meant to come out of our engagements with Jewish ritual transformed, changed. Teshuvah, the Hebrew word commonly translated as repentance, suggests a degree, even just a hint of needing to course correct, to transform. That inevitably over the course of the year all of us will have drifted from true north and we’ll need to do something to course correct, to get us back on track.
And yet the word teshuvah, literally means to return, so it does not mean to transform into something we are not, to transform into someone new, but rather, to love our true selves, to invite ourselves, gently and compassionately, but with purpose and commitment, to return to our true selves. Elohai neshamah she’natata bi, tehora hi, we traditionally pray each morning. My God, the soul you have placed within me she is pure. She is good; that’s what we’re returning to, transforming back into: that core soul implanted within us, invited to love ourselves. When I say, “encounters with Judaism should be transformational,” I don’t mean in the sense of a departure from ourselves; I mean they should give us the clarity to see through to what is true and good, which each of us is, if we would but allow ourselves to be.
This brings us to number 17: tefilah, prayer. Prayer remains one of the most challenging features of the religious experience. Many of us don’t even know what to do with prayer; I know I’ve struggled with it. Do we use the words in the book or not in the book? Are we praying to anything or anyone or just singing along? What is it?
Prayer, whether we consider ourselves to be people who pray or not, seems to happen at every important Jewish moment in the year or life cycle. When we celebrate someone becoming Bar or Bat Mitzvah or getting married, the central thing that is happening in the service are prayers, blessings; when we are saying goodby to a loved one, or remembering them, at a funeral or shivah minyan, we do so around a service, a set of prayers; week in week out when we gather for Shabbat, or every year when we gather the High Holidays, the main thing that happens at the service are prayers.
And yet many of us don’t feel comfortable saying we do, in fact, pray. We are present in the services; we may love being surrounded by community and tapping into whatever spirit is in the room, but do we pray?
I don’t necessarily understand prayer to be a switch through which we change the course of human events. Pray for rain, get rain. Pray for wealth, get wealth. That’s not how I see it. But I do see the capacity for a conversation with the Holy one, to pour out our deepest thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes, and to feel heard—to feel like those prayers reverberate through the cosmos and back to me in the midst of my community. To feel that sense of connection between me and the divine and everyone around me.
Which brings us to the final davar, number 18: you, this, us. Kehillah. Community. One of the most sacred institutions in Jewish tradition. There is a reason we pray with a minyan; certain prayers can only be said in community.
As I’ve said many times, I haven’t always been a natural communitarian. As someone who faced a lot of loss and disruption early in my life, death, remarriage, divorce, cross-country moves, etc. I learned to be highly self-reliant, maybe even highly self-centered. I didn’t trust in availing myself of the power of community.
And yet over time, I’ve seen those points of connection, I experienced being interwoven into a fabric of community, thanks to this work.
I have congregants who email me to let me know they’re not going to be there on a given Shabbat, not because they had some role we needed them to fill or because they were responsible for some specific part: just because we are part of each other’s lives in that way now, interconnected.
We take part in shivah minyans for one another, holding each other through loss, even if we don’t know each other that well. We take part in one another’s anniversary celebrations, even if we’re new to the couple’s journey together. Our kids go over to one another’s houses and eat out of one another’s refrigerators. These ties bind us and thus strengthen us in our journey forward.
Don’t take it for granted. You’ve got something special on your hands in this community. We all do. Avail yourselves of it.
That’s the theme of this sermon. Avail yourselves of the sacred resources available to you and make them your own. Invite them in and allow them to serve as the source of strength and light that they have for so many up until this point.
18 d’varim; 18 things. 18 spiritual and communal resources we’ve relied upon throughout the generations, to help us endure, to help us thrive, and then can, if we invite them in and make them our own, allow us to do so in the future. It doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Oh, we’ve seen dark times. But these 18 are representative of the central force we’ve been channeling as we’ve gone about our days. Chai. Life. L’chayyim. To life. Shanah Tovah.
