I have to say, I never imagined myself here. I never imagined myself as a pulpit rabbi.
Many of you know that I had a brief foray as an attorney before this, and even when I got to rabbinical school, I didn’t imagine serving in a synagogue context. I imagined leaning on my legal training and working as a rabbi for, oh i don’t know, Jewish federation, or Mazon: the Jewish response to Hunger or a Jewish nonprofit advocacy group of some sort. Not a synagogue.
The Jewish community where I grew up, Minyan Masorti at Germantown Jewish Centre in Mount Airy here in Philadelphia had no pulpit rabbi; it was lay-led, volunteer-led, and while really lovely, did not hold forth a model for me of this sort of synagogue life.
So I think that when I started a very part-time internship at Society Hill Synagogue nine years ago after having reconnected with my friend and mentor Rabbi Avi Winokur, I imagined my time here as not much more than a pit stop.
“A synagogue?” I think I thought to myself. “What self-respecting 21st-century rabbi would work at a synagogue?” “Isn’t it, dare I say, a dying institution?” “Isn’t the future of Judaism entrepreneurship, where we create a startup where people, I don’t know, study talmud in a bar or something?”
“Membership dues? Who’s going to pay to be part of a community?”
“Who is going to pay a couple thousand dollars of the year just for the privilege, of, oh I don’t know, journeying through the lifecycle with a few hundred other people, sharing some of our most intimate lifecycle moments with one another—births, b’nei mitzvah, weddings, deaths; traveling the course of the rhythm of the Jewish year with one another, from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, through Chanukah, Purim, Passover and beyond; breaking bread, unpacking some of our traditions most timeless teachings, bringing our own wisdom to bear, and coming to new insights for ourselves and for those around us? Who is going to pay to be a part of a community to do that?”
As you can see, over the course of my time here, I’ve come to see things differently than when I first began.
Dying institution? It’s nine years later, and, channeling the words of the great sage Mark Twain who once had the privilege of reading what was effectively his own obituary in the newspaper, channeling him I’m here to say that “reports of the death of the synagogue have been greatly exaggerated.” In fact, synagogues, communities like this one, are more important now than ever. I’ve seen it first hand.
But important and inevitable are not the same.
Just because I believe, and I’ve seen, synagogues serve a compelling purpose, does not mean we can just open our doors and people will flock in.
Things are indeed different now than they were for our grandparents and great-grandparents, and there is a reason some hand wringing has gone on over the past several decades about the future of Jewish communal life.
Generations ago, in Europe, for example, Jews had no choice but to remain firmly committed to their Jewish roots and Jewish institutions. Jews couldn’t assimilate into mainstream secular society. For one, depending upon when we are talking about, there was no secular society; everyone was a member of some religious body or some tribal group; there was no neutral middle ground to assimilate into. And two, in many cases, Jews wouldn’t have been welcome in it even if there was.
We went to shul because that’s where our people were. Our only people.
Things are different now. For all intents and purposes, we are welcome anywhere. Secular society holds a more prominent place in most of our lives than our Jewish religious roots do. We have to go out of our way now to choose synagogue life, and many of us don’t. I don’t say that with judgment; I say that with understanding. As I said, mainstream secular society has a compelling pull, and reasonably so. From individual freedoms to popular entertainment to the promise of free-market prosperity to science and empiricism, there is a lot to embrace.
So why should we immerse ourselves in synagogue life? What value do synagogues bring to the table?
It’s my belief that in answering that question, synagogues have to have a clear vision for how they approach three core elements of Jewish life: (1) God; (2) Torah—Jewish tradition; and (3) Israel—the Jewish community, and in doing so, they have to reconcile two truths: one, the truth we just mentioned, that most of us feel strongly pulled, strongly grounded, in a perfectly appropriate way, in modern society; synagogues have to reconcile that truth with the truth we synagogue leaders implicitly believe that Judaism provides real value to our lives; that a life can be sacredly lived with one foot firmly grounded in contemporary society, with all the insights and enlightenment that brings, while the other is firmly grounded in Jewish roots, in the call of the eternal; recognizing that some of the wisdom and the rhythms of life we most need were born ages ago and transcend sensory experiences; that this wisdom has been passed down to us throughout the generations if we are careful not to squander it. That modernity doesn’t know all and in fact if we uproot ourselves completely from the past that there is a lot we lose out on.
It’s my belief, and frankly, my experience, that if a synagogue can do this successfully—can square these two seemingly competing and yet potentially complementary pulls of the modern and the eternal, the empirical and the transcendent, then a synagogue is not a crusty old institution. It can actually be quite groundbreaking. It can serve right at the heart of the human experience; right at the heart of the needs we have: to understand where we come from, to form a relationship to the source of life, call it God, the divine, whatever you want to call it; to form relationships with one another; to develop a sacred social fabric that helps us navigate the rhythms of our lives, the rhythms of our year; a sacred social fabric that helps us confront the ills we face as a society with a sense of hope, a sense that we have experienced redemption and can again; that gives a sense that there are ways to recognize, lift up, and reveal the holiness in each moment, even, and sometimes especially, our most heartbreaking ones.
A synagogue exists in a unique space that sits right at the heart of these questions, and it’s my admittedly biased, but at this point not inexperienced view that a lot of people would be well served by availing themselves, throughout the course of the year, of the rhythms of a special synagogue community.
For a synagogue community to do this well, to contribute positively to people’s experiences of the lives with which they are presented, to help people tap into their authentic spirits, serving as vessels of holiness and goodness in the world, a synagogue has to have some reflectiveness about how it approaches those core pillars of Jewish experience that, again, I am framing as (1) God; (2) Torah/Jewish tradition; (3) Israel/the Jewish community.
So, without further ado, Let’s. number (1) God.
Let me say right off the bat, I know we’re not all on the same page here. I know that the most recent Pew survey of Jewish Americans found that of people who consider themselves Jewish, who actively identify as Jewish, nearly one quarter, 22%, say they do not believe in “either the God of the bible or in any higher power or spiritual force.” Slightly over three quarters—76%— do—but 22% don’t. That number probably breaks down a little bit differently for the people in this room, people who chose to spend Rosh Hashanah in a synagogue, but probably not by much.
I’m definitely aware that for a non-insignificant percentage, for a significant percentage of us, we deeply struggle with, at the very least, the word “God” and for some of us, the concept altogether.
First, a word about the word God. It’s a word. Some human being, at some point in the history of the world, made it up. Now, let me clear: I’m not saying they made up God, whatever is behind the word. We’ll come back to that in a moment. I’m saying they made up the word God. So to the extent the word God serves as a barrier for you, put it out of your mind. It’s a shorthand descriptor so human beings can connect with one another, even though they often mean different things when they use the word, and are talking right past each other. So let’s put the word aside. It’s whatever is behind the word that we’re trying to understand.
In fact in Hebrew, the specific name for God is Yud-Hay-Vav-Hay, a word whose pronunciation is lost to us. Perhaps that’s actually helpful. Perhaps the notion that the word for what we’re trying to talk about is unpronounceable reminds us how ineffable, how beyond the human grasp “God” is. If God’s name is unpronounceable, unutterable, ineffable, if we can’t even say the name—perhaps that actually gets us closer to understanding what we’re yearning for.
Yud-Hay-Vav-Hay is some conjugation of the word “to be.” It is suggestive of the source of unfolding existence, the source of time and space and the sacredness present in every molecule of them, sacredness which can be unleashed further by our actions, while at the same time the source of them, too. Its unpronounceable nature is suggestive of the futility of trying to define or encapsulate it, struggling as I may to do so right now.
And in fact, that struggle is exactly the point.
We are B’nei Yisrael, after all, the people of Israel, the descendants of Israel. Israel, Yisrael, was the name our ancestor Jacob received when, out of nowhere, we read:
וַיִּוָּתֵ֥ר יַעֲקֹ֖ב לְבַדּ֑וֹ Jacob was left alone וַיֵּאָבֵ֥ק אִישׁ֙ עִמּ֔וֹ עַ֖ד עֲל֥וֹת הַשָּֽׁחַר And a figure, a Divine manifestation of some sort, a figure as its now translated, wrestled with Jacob until the break of dawn. When the figure saw that it had not prevailed against Jacob, it wrenched Jacob’s hip at its socket, so that the socket of Jacob’s hip was strained as the figure wrestled with him. Then the figure said, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” But Jacob answered, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” (Which, as an aside, might be the first biblical example of chutzpah.) So the figure said, “What is your name?” and he said, “Jacob.” “Your name shall no longer be Jacob,” said the figure, “but Israel, Yisrael, for you have striven, sar, with beings divine, el, and human, Sar el, and have prevailed.” Sar-el. Yisrael.
That is our legacy. As bnei yisrael, we strive, we wrestle, in each of our respective ways—with El, with the Divine, however we understand that. That struggle, that striving, that wrestling, is a part of our legacy to this question of God.
If a synagogue doesn’t serve as a place to hold space for that sacred Jewish and human act of wrestling with the Divine, where else will? If a synagogue doesn’t hold space for the ebb and flow of our relationship to how we understand the divine, sometimes present, sometimes absent, the relationship transforming as we ourselves inevitably transform, where else in the Jewish world will?
I think a synagogue has to be comfortable with it, doing so in a way that is patient, open to a range of perspectives, and non-dogmatic, while at the same time committed to engaging in the relationship, engaging with the sacred struggle, hopeful that the seeds sown will bear fruit, as they have for many Jews and for many humans since time immemorial.
I say this from personal experience. As many of you know, my father the rabbi, raised me on stories of biblical and rabbinic figures and their devotion to God, so the seeds of that relationship were sown early on in my own life.
As many of you also know there was also the potential for those seeds to be spoiled when my father died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 35, five years younger than I am now, leaving behind my mom and three young children.
If anything, the opposite happened. While I didn’t remain strictly religiously observant in all the ways he was and while I’ve explored many different approaches to Judaism and to faith, sometimes exploring myself right out of it altogether, and while I can only speak to my own personal experience, a relationship to the divine has served and continues to serve as as the bedrock of my relationship to life, a source of strength to me when I need it most. In my most heartbroken moments I call out to whatever is behind this word “God” and I feel a reverberation back, I feel heard. If I feel shame and plead with God, wondering whether there is a way to make things right, I feel love and compassion in return. When I can suspend my preconceived notions about what I think the direction of my life should be, and, in a state of what some would call surrender, ask for guidance, I sometimes experience a sense of clarity that I attribute to the divine.
This doesn’t mean I believe in the old man in the sky, a God who sits there picking winners and losers. I see the pain in the world; I see that innocent people sometimes suffer, and the wicked sometimes prosper. I don’t have all the answers; nor does Judaism or any religion, though in synagogue we talk about some of the ways Judaism does approach that question. But I do experience that engagement with what I see as the source of all of life, the source from which we all flow, can help us attune ourselves and respond to the suffering and injustice we do see; and to lift up the moments of joy and holiness we do encounter.
I think effective synagogue communities can make space for us to explore and wrestle with the divine in a pluralistic way, in a way that holds space for many different viewpoints, as Jewish tradition has done ever since the mishnah started citing this rabbi’s disagreement with that rabbi and didn’t say who was right.
Synagogues, in embracing that diversity of thought, while holding space for the conversation, for the sacred struggle, can add real value to our lives on this fundamental question which, for Jews, is rarely held elsewhere.
But how? How do we approach this struggle? The notion of wrestling with God can feel like an overwhelming task.
Even Moses found that to be the case. הַרְאֵ֥נִי נָ֖א אֶת־כְּבֹדֶֽךָ׃ Moses said to God. “Oh, let me behold Your Presence!” And [God] answered, “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you the name יהוה, and the grace that I grant and the compassion that I show,” continuing, “But you cannot see My face. for a human being may not see Me and live.”
It’s not that easy to approach, to wrestle with, however we understand the notion of the divine.
This brings us to our second pillar. Torah—Jewish tradition. Torah, Jewish tradition, can, in many ways be seen as the pathway in which Jews encounter, wrestle with, live out, their relationship to God.
So what value can a synagogue bring to bear relating to Torah—what perspective can a modern synagogue bring to Jewish tradition?
The traditional understanding of Jewish tradition is based around the mitzvot—the commandments. It understands many of the key rituals of Jewish life—for example keeping kosher; observing shabbat; hearing the shofar on rosh hashanah—it imagines these as being not just traditions, but commandments. God literally commanded us. If, as Rabbi Jacob Staub puts it, there was a tape recorder recording at Mt Sinai the moment revelation was supposed to have happened, we could play that tape back and hear the voice of God; that’s oversimplifying, but in a sense, that is the traditional approach.
I take a slightly different one perhaps embodied by a panel that took place in the winter of 1988 in Jerusalem. There, someone insistently asked my father, then a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Reconstructionists being known at the time for their modern approach to tradition, “do you or do you not believe that God gave the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai?” To which he replied, “well, it depends what you mean by God, it depends what you mean by gave, it depends what you mean by Moses, and it depends what you mean by Sinai. But yes.”
As his friend, Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, now the President of Hebrew College, later said, “We all laughed, but,” she said, “I knew he was serious—not only about the ‘it depends what you mean’ but also by the yes.”
In other words, we can understand there to be a compelling case for engaging seriously and intently with tradition, without understanding ourselves to be guilt-bound to the mitzvot as the literal word of God.
Most of us, dare I say, all of us in this room do not take an orthodox approach to Jewish law. There are certain traditions that some of us take upon ourselves with more discipline than others; some of us might keep kosher; more of us probably fast on yom kippur. But do all of us say birkat hamazon, the blessing after a meal, every time we eat bread? Does a mikveh play a monthly role in our relationship with our partners where women immerse themselves before they are intimate again? Do we wholeheartedly support lgbt relationships?
Depending on our answers to these questions, we are empowering ourselves to deviate from Jewish tradition in certain if not many respects.
And I’m here to say I think that is 100% valid. We, too, are part of the stream of tradition, we are among the many tributaries which flow into it. It has always been evolving, sometimes more than we recognize.
So how do we formulate an approach to torah, to Jewish tradition: which both supports the “it depends what you mean” and also the “yes”? How do we formulate an approach to Torah which both has the humility to recognize our ancestors may have been on to something in the formulation of many of the traditions, while also recognizing we, too, with our contemporary lenses, bring wisdom to bear on our collective pursuit of holiness.
I understand Torah, everything from the text of the Five Book of Moses, to all of the rituals and customs developed in its aftermath to be the Jewish peoples’ response to the whisperings of the divine as they heard them out there in that wilderness and in subsequent corners of prosperity and exile, as we formed ourselves into a community and sought to co-create a pathway forward towards justice, righteousness, and truth, grounded as they were in their lived experience.
In other words, I do not understand Torah, Jewish tradition, to be the literal word of God, utterly infallible and beyond reproach.
As my father’s teacher, Rabbi Art Green, writes, “I understand that all religious practices are of human origin and evolve within religious communities through history.”
But a purported human origin shouldn’t undermine Jewish tradition’s importance for us—if anything, it should invite even more investment, stewardship, and caretaking. We have a role to play as we inherit the stream that has made its way to us throughout the generations, its channel shaped by the ones that have come before us.
“Doing the mitzvah is the will of God,” Rabbi Green continues “in the sense that it is the way we as a religious community respond to the One that calls out to us, that seeks to have us know it, ever awaiting our response. This particular form of response” hearing the shofar on Rosh hashanah, wrapping the tallit over our shoulders “rather than another is sanctified by the canonizing power of the Jewish people, an ancient community that bears much wisdom about how to bring divine awareness into everyday life. The mitzvah is holy because we do it, because [we] have done it for such a long time, and because [we] have invested it with a depth of kavvanah, or spiritual energy, that is never lost but only builds in intensity over the course of centuries. The fullness of that energy is the divine presence that lies within it, waiting to be uncovered anew in each generation…
“We have declared it holy,” he continues and “so it is.” “Hasidic tradition reads the word mitzvah,” he writes, “to mean ‘a place of encounter,’ a form in which the Divine and the human meet and are joined together. Its mystery and power, reinforced by antiquity and the very absence of obvious meaning, remain in force despite the fact that it originates within history. It is an act in which we open ourselves to Y-H-W-H, a moment, a “place,” or a deed of awareness and response. Each mitzvah is an opportunity for encounter between the silent divine presence and the human soul that seeks to articulate it.”
So we continue to engage with the mitzvot, with Torah, with Jewish tradition even if we don’t understand them to be the literal word of God, and even if we deviate from some whose morality no longer is convincing to us, because our heart, our spirit needs a vessel in which to express its love for, and to encounter, the divine, honoring those who came before us in the process.
Tradition becomes a wellspring not of guilt but of opportunity. We have the humility to say, “some of these rituals, disciplined as I may need to be in their fulfillment, their meaning not immediately apparent to me, may serve as powerful vectors for our encounter with the divine, and with one another.
Which brings us to the third and final pillar. Israel. We can’t do this alone.
I have formed my identity on the basis of trying, perhaps unconsciously, to disprove that, to achieve the rugged independence that modern American life suggests to us is the paragon of living. But as B’nei Yisrael, the people of Israel, who rose up out of Egypt as an erev rav, a mixed multitude, we know in our spirit, in our dna, in our bones, that no person is an island; that life is lived most meaningfully when we foster connection, and place ourselves in the midst of community. A synagogue fosters that experience.
I would argue, this experience of community is heightened when our source of connections is not only our immediate family or our blood relatives, those who are only one step removed from our core selves and with whom it takes less effort to be vulnerable, but those where a little risk, a little courage is involved, where we go out on a limb to forge new connections, branches off of new trees.
Israel was made up of twelve tribes, not one. They had a lot of differences among them and within them. But they determined that whatever their divergences, togetherness was more important than purity.
I often experience that the formation of community inevitably involves compromise. The words on any particular page of the mahzor might not always be a perfect reflection of the song our heart yearns to sing; at the same time because of its familiarity to many of us, it serves as a common framework through which our voices can rise together in song, our experience of prayer strengthened through the togetherness that comes from shared language.
And so the experience of life, is heightened, I would argue, biased a perspective as mine might be, when we show up over and over again to communities like synagogues; I would argue that in this arena, too, synagogues hold a special role in modern life—a place where our very presence makes a statement—a statement that our lives are affected by and affect, are impacted by and have an impact upon, those around us.
There are three moments in synagogue communal life where this stands out most to me. The first is in a Torah study, which, in our community, takes place Saturday mornings as part of our service. There, all the things we’ve been talking about today—do we believe in God? If so, what role does God play in our lives? Are we called in any specific ways? What role does tradition play?—all these questions get discussed on a week-in-week out basis. This is where the rubber meets the road; where in real time, people in the community wrestle with these questions, and individual responses inform the collective, even if it’s through disagreement with what someone has shared that helps bring us clarity. Sometimes it’s the reverse; sometimes someone sheds light on a question you may not even know you had been wrestling with in such a way that you have new insight for how our religious tradition might be understood and therefore in some small way how life might be lived. I’ve experienced this through our communal discussions, and I think—here’s my little plug—if you regularly attend, you can, too. It’s not fire every week, but it is often enough to make it worth it.
The second is a kiddush lunch or dinner. We are living through what public health researchers are calling a loneliness epidemic. It is now the case that the percentage of americans who report experiencing loneliness has reached a majority, a Cigna report found, and it has been linked to such ailments as strokes, heart disease, dementia, inflammation and suicide. None other than the former surgeon general has offered powerful testimonials of his own experience, writing that Loneliness — like depression, with which it can be associated — can chip away at your self-esteem and erode your sense of who you are. I know, he says. Because that’s what happened to me. This is our surgeon general talking.
There is rarely a silver bullet for such a sprawling societal problem, and yet I can’t help but lift up the synagogue kiddush lunch or dinner experience as a powerful antidote.
In some ways, and maybe you’ll tell me I’m overstating it, but I feel like the synagogue kiddush experience is like the high school cafeteria minus the teenage angst and cliquishness. People talk about the impossibility of recreating the summer camp experience away from camp, and yet, for an hour on Friday nights or Saturday afternoons, we have that: a bustling social hall, where you can rest assured you’ll see a friend or two or make some new connections. Even as an avowed introvert, I can preach the virtues of the Shabbat kiddush lunch or dinner.
The final moment that I think of when thinking about the profound, unique nature of the synagogue community experience is just what you’d expect: the comforting of mourners at the funeral home or house of mourning. When we’re squeezing awkwardly into a home we’ve perhaps never been in before or we’ve been in only a few times. It may not be someone we know well, but by being there, by being present, we’re saying that though we haven’t necessarily led lives that are intertwined, we recognize that we are on shared journeys, both historically, as part of the mixed multitude that crossed the sea to freedom, wandering through the wilderness together, tasting the fruits of the promised land before being dispersed in the diaspora, yearning to reveal holiness in exile—we are on shared journeys both historically ,and existentially, on this journey between the two poles of life and death—recognizing that it’s just us human beings experiencing this common version of life. That we’re in it together.
Among the most profound moments I have as a rabbi are when I meet with a family who has just lost a loved one, and they share, with all the generosity in the world, about the virtues, and complications, of a life— sharing that gets continued over the course of a funeral and a shiva minyan.
The heart-wrenching experience of losing a loved one leads to a reflection on what it means to look back at a life and ask what a person taught us about how life is best lived, about how we will be remembered, about what we do with our short time in this world. No think piece in the New York times, no podcast, will compel you to reflect on your life more than these moments do
More importantly they present an opportunity to show up for someone in our community. Not because they’re your best friend in the world or you know everything about them, but because someone in your community is going through something, and as a fellow Jew and a fellow human, you show up for them when you can.
Synagogue communities hold space for us to recognize our common bonds, to revel in their holiness, even if we don’t know too well the persons whom we’re bonded to, whom we’re connected to.
Modern society has often suggested to us that all of our emotional and social needs should be met by our partners, our kids, maybe one or two friends. That’s a lot of pressure on those people. Too much for any one family to hold. While our bonds may always be strongest at home, the notion of Israel, of a beit knesset, a house of gathering, suggests that life is lived when we throw our doors, and our hearts, open to a broader community to hold us and for us to hold the other in turn.
The death of the synagogue has been greatly exaggerated. If anything, our individual threads need one another to form a strong fabric now more than ever. Thank God for places like Society Hill Synagogue that allow us to strengthen these connections; thank God I found my way here. Shanah Tovah.
