Welcoming Guests and Embracing Openness: A Reflection on Hachnasat Orchim and the Spirit of Community
Last year, when we inaugurated this version of our Open House Shabbat, which begins with our first TGIShabbat after a Summer Break and extends through tomorrow morning, Shabbat morning, we did so through a teaching built around the Jewish value of Hachnasat Orchim, the welcoming of guests.
We talked about how central a Jewish, and really a human, value it is. How it is on the shortlist of mitzvot, of sacred callings, which the talmud teaches adam ochel peroteihem ba’aolm hazeh v’ha keren kayaemet lo ba’olam habah—the deeds which immediately yield fruit upon performing them, and which also sew seeds whose fruits will be reaped ba’olam habah, in the world to come.
So sacred is the act of welcoming guests, of turning to someone we don’t know and introducing ourselves and making them feel at home, that not only do we light a spark in that moment, lifting our spirit and theirs in that moment, but something about the action, according to Jewish tradition, has reverberations, echoes, ripples in time. It has emanations that play out in time to come. Some actions have cascading effects, Jewish tradition teaches, and the welcoming of guests is one of them.
If that’s not enough to inspire you to carry out the spirit of the open house within our synagogue walls and beyond, fulfilling the mitzvah of hachnasat orchim, of welcoming those around us, Judaism goes further. As we taught last year, the talmud teaches:
Greater is הַכְנָסַת אוֹרְחִין hospitality towards guests than קְבָּלַת פְּנֵי שְׁכִינָה receiving the shechinah, receiving the Divine Presence.
How could this be?
Well the rabbis of the talmud cite the verse in Bereshit, in Genesis, when our ancestor Abraham welcomes three men wandering in the hot sun.
When abraham looks up from the opening in his tent and sees the three figures, Abraham says
אֲדֹנָ֗י אִם־נָ֨א מָצָ֤אתִי חֵן֙ בְּעֵינֶ֔יךָ אַל־נָ֥א תַעֲבֹ֖ר מֵעַ֥ל עַבְדֶּֽךָ׃. Typically this is translated as Abraham saying to the figures, “Adonai,” which can mean God, but which can also mean, “my lord,” “dear sir,” “leader of these three men,” אִם־נָ֨א מָצָ֤אתִי חֵן֙ בְּעֵינֶ֔יךָ “If it please you,”
אַל־נָ֥א תַעֲבֹ֖ר מֵעַ֥ל עַבְדֶּֽךָ׃ “do not go on past your servant,” “do not go past me, Abraham. Let me serve you, let me show you some hospitality.” That’s the straightforward reading of this text, which in and of itself is an example of hospitality.
But the talmud takes this a step further by plausibly, if imaginatively, interpreting the verse such that when Abraham says, “Adonai,” he is not saying “my lord,” “sir,” addressing the lead wanderer, but is addressing “Adonai,” God, that God is present with him, and that Abraham is saying Adoani, God, saying, אִם־נָ֨א מָצָ֤אתִי חֵן֙ בְּעֵינֶ֔יךָ If it please you, אַל־נָ֥א תַעֲבֹ֖ר מֵעַ֥ל עַבְדֶּֽךָ׃ do not go on past your servant, as in, “do not leave, God,” but I have to go tend to these fellows wandering in the hot son. Abaham is not saying to the men, do not leave; let me serve you. He’s saying to God do not leave while I go tend to my fellow human beings.
So important is hospitality, is extending a warm welcome in Judaism, that tradition not only excuses Abraham from turning his attention away from God but encourages Abraham him to do so in in order to turn his attention towards the wandering person, the wandering spirit the wandering heart.
And of course, as Jewish tradition also teaches, God is there, too. In the spirit of the stranger and in the connection between two human beings.
We can have some profound moments on our own, Jewish tradition says, in our own world, with the divine, but if someone’s looking a little lost, a little lonely—and who isn’t in this world every now and again—then we drop what we’re doing to ensure they feel even just a little bit more at home. “Hi, I’m Nathan. Have we met before?” We let the conversation unfold, apparently sewing seeds for the world to come. That can be all it takes.
So that’s the groundwork we laid out last year, in the spirit of our hosting an Open House: part of being Jewish, and being human, really, is about going the extra mile to make sure people around us feel welcome, feel at ease. And of course it applies to everyone in this room.
Last year, when asking what an ideal version of hospitality can look like, we cited the example of the rabbi who had a guest over, a guest who spilled a glass of wine all over the rabbi’s beautiful tablecloth. Without missing a beat, the rabbi nudged the table from underneath, thereby knocking over her own glass. “Hmm, must be something wrong with the table,” she said, and proceeded to help clean up.
When we invite guests in we do what we can to make them feel welcome, to put them at ease, to to make themselves at home.
So let me once again say welcome to everyone here at Society Hill Synagogue. Welcome to our members; welcome to our guests, I hope you all feel at home here tonight.
But I think we can actually take it a step further this year. For starters, I want to break down the differentiation between member and guest for the evening. Yes we value the structure of synagogue membership. We value when people say “I’m here, I’m committed, I’m going to show up to this community with my time, or my talents, or my resources, however it is I can bring just a little bit of myself, because I’m committed to ensuring Jewish community is available as a resource for those who need it. I’m committed to fostering a set of communal connections and ties and making an investment in the cultivation of Jewish wisdom and light so that we can all be uplifted by it.” That sort of commitment to a synagogue community like this one sustains us. So we absolutely value and rely on synagogue membership as a vehicle for our endurance as a community.
But we don’t need to worry about that right now. Right now, we’re all just sharing this space for the moment; we’re all a community, right here, right now in this moment.
And so I want to talk about the experience of the open house, not just from the perspective of hachnasat orchim, of welcoming guests, but from the perspective of the very word that serves as its foundation: patuch, open, like the opening of Abraham’s tent.
Openness, according to Jewish tradition, is not just about welcoming people into an experience that you’ve pre-created, valuable as that it is. Openness is about a willingness to be transformed, to be impressed upon, about a willingness to be transformed and impressed upon through the experiences which make up community, which, in a word, is what Jewish tradition refers to as an encounter.
Abraham and Sarah were transformed through their encounter with their three visitors, who told them that when they returned the following year that Abraham and Sara would have a son. This is where their son Isaac got his name, because Sara laughed at the notion that she would have a child at such an old age.
But an encounter doesn’t have to be this l or dramatic for us to be open to change through it.
In pirkei avot, this wisdom of our sages בֶּן זוֹמָא אוֹמֵר, ben zoma says, אֵיזֶהוּ חָכָם, who is wise? הַלּוֹמֵד מִכָּל אָדָם The one who learns from every person. That’s a central notion of openness, that we learn from our guests and our guests learn from us.
No one puts this better and more famously than Jewish Religious Philosopher Martin Buber in his seminal work, I and Thou, or, as I recently learned, perhaps a better translation from the original German, simply I and You.
In articulating this understanding of openness, Buber writes, “Relation is reciprocity. Our students teach us, our works form us. Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.”
The currents of universal reciprocity. To be truly open is not just to extend a welcome hand or a welcome word, though that is a deeply important first step. It is to open ourselves to the words, the heart, the spirit, of another, even if just for a moment. Not always thinking about what we’re going to say next. Listening; being; as we allow the encounter to unfold in whichever direction it takes.
This is lofty talk for an exchange in the buffet line. And no doubt many of our exchanges will be inherently transactional. “Please pass the salt.” Much of life passes by that way. It’s why Buber made space for what we called the I-It paradigm, where we’re simply not able to be truly present to the other. Where we’re just making our way through the world.
But he also sees opportunity—here, Shabbat, tonight being one of those opportunities—for what he calls genuine dialogue: “where,” he says “each of the participants really has in mind the other… and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them;”
This he draws in contrast to what he calls monologue disguised as dialogue, in which, he writes “two or more persons, meeting in space, speak each with himself in strangely tortuous and circuitous ways and yet imagine they have escaped the torment of being thrown back on their own resources” or as Rabbi Amy Eilberg puts it, thinking we are relating to another when in fact we are speaking and listening only to ourselves.
An open house suggests an openness to experience life differently based on our encounters, while also bringing our full selves to the exchanges. As Rabbi Eilberg puts it, ”On the one hand, without a willingness to articulate our own views, we are not fully present to the dialogue. On the other hand, without willingness to be changed in the dialogue, we are not allowing the other to be fully present to us.”
“All actual life is encounter,” Buber says. “It is in the ‘interhuman’ dimension of life where we become ourselves, where truth and meaning are created, where I and Thou meet, and where we may glimpse the divine,” writes Eilberg, summarizing his thought. May we each encounter the divine through our encounters with one another here tonight and throughout our year. May we experience openness within these walls and beyond. Shabbat Shalom, and Shanah Tovah.
