Al shlosha d’varim ha’olam omed. On three things the universe stands. Al ha’torah, va’al ha’avoda, v’al gemilut chasadim. On Torah; on Avodah, worship or service, and on gemilut chasadim, acts of lovingkindness. So says pirkei avot, the teachings of our ancestors, that sacred entry in our canon
On Rosh Hashanah, we talked about the first of these elements, Torah. We talked about the ways in which the jewels of our tradition can shed light on how we traverse the most perilous of moments. How buried within the challenges, within suffering, within adversity, the Torah teaches, are the sparks that effect the ultimate oneness we are trying to reveal.
Last night, on Erev Yom Kippur, on the eve of the day of Atonement, we talked about Avodah, how service to the ultimate other, as manifest in the divine and as manifest in one another, has the capacity to make for a more fully lived life, a richer, more meaningful, holy life.
Today we are going to talk about the third pillar of what the universe rests upon, Gemilut Hasadim.
So, what are gemilut hasadim? What does this seemingly grandiose phrase, acts of lovingkindness, mean?
The talmud teaches
תורה תחלתה גמילות חסדים וסופה גמילות חסדים.
The Torah, its beginning is comprised of acts of gemilut hasadim, and its end is comprised of acts of gemilut hasadim.
In the very beginning of the Torah, when Adam and Eve discover that they are naked, God provides clothing to them. This is an act of communal lovingkindness, we larn. Stepping up to help someone in their moment of need.
And the end of the Torah, what is it referring to?
וַיִּקְבֹּ֨ר אֹת֤וֹ
And God buried him. God buried Moses, God tended to Moses’ final resting place here on earth. At each moment of our lives, we are in need of tender loving care, from cradle to grave and every moment in between.
And how does this manifest? How does God’s presence show up?
Well, we are taught, through us. Through one another
אמר רבי חמא ברבי חנינא מאי דכתיב אחרי ה’ אלהיכם תלכו
And Rabbi Ḥama, son of Rabbi Ḥanina, says: What is the meaning of the verse of Torah which says: “After the Lord your God shall you walk”? How can someone follow Adonai our God, he asks? Doesn’t it say in a different verse in Torah “Adonai your God is a devouring fire?” But How can one follow a devouring fire?
Rather, Rabbi Hamah says, the meaning of “after the Lord Your God you shall walk” is that one should follow the divine attributes as expressed in the Torah. Just as Torah teaches that God clothes the naked, so should we. Just as Torah teaches that God visits the the ailing, as it is says God appeared to Abraham after his circumcision at the age of 99, so too, should we visit those whose health, physical or mental, is struggling. Just as the Holy One tends to mourners, as it is written: “And it came to pass after the death his fatherof Abraham, that God blessed Isaac his son” (Genesis 25:11), so too, should we tend to our mourners. Just as the Holy One buried the dead, as God buried Moses, so too, should we bury our dead.
Gemilut hasadim, this third of the three pillars is about pivoting towards our fellow human beings with love and care. It’s about sacred community. Upon three things does the universe stand. The first, Torah, study, reflection, wonder, introspection; the second, avodah, worship, service, an orientation towards the Divine, whatever that means for us; and the third, gemilut hasadim is about our love for our fellow human beings.
In a sense, these three pillars can be distilled to tending to (1) one’s relationship with the self, (2) one’s relationship to God, the divine, whatever that means to us, and (3) three one’s relationship with others.
I confess, I may be an outlier when I say that I think the first two of these pillars come much more naturally to me than the third.
When I was working as an attorney and I began to craft my application to rabbinical school, I imagined myself as different than my peers. I imagined they were stressing their engagement with their communities as the reason for their applications to rabbinical school, while I was stressing my inner life. The lonely man of faith, as is sometimes the case in liberal Jewish settings.
As the old adage goes, an atheist Jewish father takes his son to synagogue, and one day, his son finally asks: “Dad, if you don’t believe in God, why do we keep coming to synagogue?” That’s easy, the father says, and points to an old religious Jew named, Garfinkel. “You see Garfinkel?” he says. “Garfinkel comes to talk to God. I come to talk to Garfinkel.”
I think many, not all, but many folks would more nearly identify with the father in the story, and, if I’m being honest with myself, I was probably this Garfinkel guy. I was the guy who would go to synagogue on my own in my 20s because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do, I was supposed to davven, to pray. And I would kind of dread those moments when the rabbi or the president would say, “now turn to your neighbor and introduce yourself.” Not out of misanthropy or shyness—ok, maybe a little bit of that— but more because… that’s not what I was there to do, I was there to talk to God. The other stuff, community, was besides the point.
I am not overstating things when I say that being in this community, at Society Hill Synagogue, has changed all of that for me. It has begun to shift community and gemilut hasadim, towards the center of my life in a more profound way.
When I was growing up, I didn’t really have modelling for this kind of communal engagement. I say that with no disrespect to my mother who was left suddenly on her own to raise a seven year old, a four year old, and a one month old. That was more than enough to keep her occupied. Board Meetings, canned food drives, volunteer initiatives were not part of my life growing up. We had enough to juggle.
So as I got older, synagogue for me—life, if I’m being frank—was a solo project, not a team sport. I went to synagogue on my own, was never a fan of group projects in school, and, in high school, I ran track and field, didn’t play basketball; I played the sport where you line up in the starting block and sprint ahead as fast as you can, looking neither to the right nor to the left. For me independence and self-reliance has been one of the hallmarks of my existence.
And yet here I am, rabbi of a synagogue that prides itself on being a caring connected community. So, what happened?
Well, in a sense, you happened.
I have said before that I landed in this congregation somewhat by happenstance. I needed a job entering my second year of rabbinical school, you posted an internship opening, I applied, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Since then, I have felt so fortunate to be placed in a role that puts community at the center of my life. The rhythms of the week, rhythms of the year, rhythms of our lives, births, coming of age, weddings, deaths are done in concert with one another, and this has enriched my life, helped make it holy..
I don’t want to sell myself too short, I have long cared about the broader social welfare of the community, but there’s a difference between that being one’s job, as it was for me when I was in AmeriCorps, and then going home to do one’s own thing—a difference between that, and integrally immersing yourself in a community, having people be reliant on you and you being reliant upon them. The difference is profound.
This is in some ways my vision for this community. I’m often asked that, as the new rabbi of this congregation, what’s your vision for this community?” Well, I’ll share it with you. In a sense it manifests in these same three pillars about which we’ve been speaking, with community as the overarching theme: Torah, Avodah, and Gemilut Hasadim, with kehillah kedoshah, sacred community as the thread that ties them all together. That is my vision.
So I’ll start with Torah. Deep sacred learning; engagement with our texts, engagement with our ancestors’ conversations with one another and their conversations with their ancestors, and so on, and so on. Conversations about questions we often don’t have space to ask in other corners of our life. Where is God, if anywhere, and in what ways are we each being called in this moment? How do we celebrate and mourn the most sacred times in our lives? How do we cultivate a sense of gratitude and awe? How do we explore the inner recesses of the soul, the dark places, the tender spots, the uncertain elements? In what ways do these mysterious spaces signal the infinite depths which lay within each us? What glimpses of eternity might our souls signal to us?
My vision is that SHS be a place where Torah matters: where big questions are asked and engaged with, up and down the age spectrum, in our moments of sacred gatherings, whether that is Hebrew School, Adult Education, Shabbat mornings, or these High Holy Days, these Days of Awe.
Those of you who have had the chance to join us Saturday mornings on Zoom during the past few months have, I think, had the opportunity, if I may be so bold as to say, to see this in action. The depth and richness that you each have brought to these conversations, with your reflections on how a stray verse in the Torah applies to your own life, whether through a reflection on a relationship with a loved one, or on your inner lives, or on what our tradition demands of us on a public scale—through these conversations I have seen the value of community take a new hold on my life, and you have helped me have a new relationship with this pillar of Torah.
Second. Avodah, service or worship. We are a synagogue, and as a synagogue in the 21st century, one of the primary modalities through which we express ourselves Jewishly and communally is through prayer, through the prayer service like the one we are engaged in today.
It was not always obvious that prayer would occupy such a central role in Jewish life. You can scroll through the entire Torah, and you will not find anything that says that the way to mark sacred time, like Shabbat and Holy Days, is to chant hundreds of pages from a prayer book.
And yet, as we moved away from the Temple cult, as we moved away from animal sacrifices, prayer, worship, and song became some of the primary modes of our religious expression
Is this how we would design it today if we were starting from scratch? I’m not sure. And yet, I think gathering together as a community for prayer remains a compelling mode around which to orient ourselves for a number of reasons. For starters, just as I suggested with respect to Torah that my vision for SHS is that our study involves asking questions we don’t get to ask in other spaces, prayer invites us to explore parts of ourselves we don’t get to explore in other spaces.
I find myself using the word “yearning” when describing prayer. Prayer, I think, is one of the only spaces we get to express that yearning, so purely, in such an unadulterated fashion. As Rabbi David Ingber describes, “When you yearn for wholeness, the yearning itself has the capacity to bring you wholeness.” As my colleague Rabbi Shawn Zevit adds, “I can’t always tell you what’s missing, but it’s staying with ‘missing,’ with ‘longing,’ that gets me in touch. And if we don’t try to solve the question right away, if we don’t look at prayer as being the answer, but at prayer as being a conversation, we can enter a dialogue.”
Now, there is no doubt that Jewish prayer is not always conducive to tapping into this feeling of yearning or to facilitating dialogue with the divine, if that is what we are yearning for, because there are so, so many words.
Sometimes, Jewish prayer is like being on a date with someone you’re trying to get to know, only to have the waiter come over and hand you a script telling you exactly what you are supposed to say. For a lot of people, this does not lead to a second date. Not the sort of dialogue we’re looking for.
Still I think there’s some value to it. First of all, no one is telling us, we need to stick to the script. The script is a starting point. Come to the restaurant. Come on the date. Take the script. Read the first line, and let it take you wherever you want to go. The recesses of your mind, your heart, your soul. The cliffs of a mountain, the depths of a sea, your relationships, the cosmos. Wherever you want to go.
Second, what the script does is give us all a common starting point. It facilitates community. Sometimes, I am definitely more in the mood for what in Jewish tradition is called hitbodedut, spontaneous, whatever comes to your mind, your soul, prayer, than I am for traditional Jewish liturgy. But the literal definition of hitbodedut, is self-seclusion. It’s something you do in seclusion. Jewish prayer facilitates community by putting us literally all on the same page. Even if we go off on our own mental, spiritual, and emotional deviations throughout the service, Jewish liturgy helps facilitate our coming together by giving us a common script.
And, I don’t want to denigrate the nature of the script itself. I heard our president, Jeremey Newberg say at the end of Rosh Hashanah, that the liturgy really got to him, and I think it is written in such a way that it is meant to and indeed does have that effect. I think it invites us into spaces we often don’t get to otherwise, and that can be necessary for us as human beings on our journeys here on earth.
As a means of making this liturgy accessible, since so often our communal gathering spaces in Jewish life are centered around liturgy, are centered around a sea of verbiage that can often be overwhelming and mystifying, another component of my vision for this community is to always be offering courses that make sense of the sea of ink we encounter in our prayerbooks. This year, We offered what we called a high holiday boot camp, we’ll do the same for passover, and throughout the course of this year, we are offering a course on the shabbat liturgy, because in a sense, if you can make sense of the shabbat liturgy, and have reflected on how it can be meaningful to you, you have the tools to join into so many different communal Jewish spaces. So I hope you’ll join me in participating in that learning, in searching for entry points in our sacred liturgy, understanding how it all fits together, and how it might take you on a journey, might make you want that second, or third or millionth date.
Which brings me to the third and final pillar of my vision for SHS and the third pillar of what each universe, each community, each individual stands upon—gemilut hasadim. Acts of loving kindness among community members.
In many ways, Society Hill Synagogue already embodies this. You couldn’t come up with a better name for encapsulating what gemilut hasadim is meant to achieve than what we already have in our committee that we call God’s Unfinished Business, led by congregant Julie Wilson. Many of you, as members of this community, for much of the pandemic have received weekly Shabbat Shalom calls checking in on your well being. And many of you were the ones making those calls. Some of us might find it annoying, or overkill. Fair enough. And yet, I think there is something special about having someone who is not a family member looking out for you, checking in on you. This type of community strengthening is what I envision. Strengthening communal connections, putting community at the center of our lives. Zigging while the rest of the world is zags. While much of the world is living increasingly individualistic lives, pressures our society subtly signals to us, having us pride ourselves on our self-reliance, I encourage us to move in the opposite direction, to integrate our lives with one another. Gemilut hasadim is exactly about this, checking in on one another’s well-being as a godly act. Showing up for shivah minyanim, visiting people when they are in mourning, even if we don’t know them so well or at all, just by dint of their being members in our same community. Visiting those who are ill, delivering them High Holiday care packages. Making sure we’re in touch about who needs assistance. Tending to our corner of the universe. These efforts embody gemilut hasadim. And so I encourage you to volunteer with this Gods Unfinished Business or to otherwise show up in these waty.
Same with Social Action. We have a decades-long legacy of being engaged in Social Action, thanks to the leadership of Phyllis Denbo and others, from our tutoring and library support of Vare-Washington Elementary school, to our adoption of an immigrant family from the Congo, to our involvement with POWER and Philabunance.
Earlier this summer we held a social justice town hall and had over 70 people in attendance looking to get more involved, and out of that developed our now twice weekly get out the vote phone banking and letter writing, led by congregants Laurie Krivo, Bob Kaufman and Wendy Greenspan, so that we do our part to make sure our democracy heals. These, too, are acts of gemilut hasadim, of love and kindness, of sacred community, not only because of the primary ways they contribute to our broader community but also because of the ways they strengthen this community through sacred togetherness. A few weeks ago I came downstairs in our home after teaching the final session of our High Holiday Boot Camp, and there was my wife on a Zoom call with a range of SHS members all across the age spectrum, chatting as they scrawled out letters to disenfranchised voters encouraging them to re-engage with the political process and vote. This is gemilut hasadim.
To continue to facilitate this multi-level social justice engagement, I’m going to offer a monthly space going forward that I’m calling Currents, which is simply a space for folks who are interested to come together for a facilitated conversation about the events of the world of the week or of the month. Recognizing that we yearn to connect, we yearn to express ourselves, we yearn to learn from others, we’ll create a regular structured space for us to talk politics, world events, community developments: to share what’s on our minds and our hearts regarding this world in which we live, and how we can do our small part to contribute to its healing. I hope if this interests you, you’ll join us.
Finally, I think that gemilut hasadim can manifest in how we gather in spaces like this one, how we gather religiously, and how we do so at one time in particular each week: on shabbat.
One of the comments I often get in relationship to my sermons is that I demonstrate one thing people appreciate: vulnerability. That I’m willing to share parts of myself where I am toiling, where I am struggling. For some, there’s perhaps a bit too much of this in my sermons. Fair enough, we’ll keep growing and learning together.
In any case, in some ways, this sermon right now is both my most prosaic, substituting programmatic detail for theological reflections, imagery that marks many sermons out there, while in a way my most vulnerable, because in it, I am asking something of you. I’m not entirely in control of what happens. That’s up to you. This is a vulnerability I’m not that used to or frankly that comfortable with, because at a certain point it’s out of my hands.
But that’s the paradox, isn’t it. It’s not really vulnerable, there’s no bravery involved if you don’t have some fear surrounding it.
So what I’m asking, where my vulnerability extends, is for you to carve time in your calendars for this community. Each week if you can—or, most weeks, many weeks, obviously there will be exceptions—for an hour or two to come together in community for Shabbat. To come together to reflect, to learn, to sing, to engage, but mostly just to be. To be with one another. To put our lives in the hands of others and take others lives into our own; not in a physical sense but in a deeply rooted sense. To immerse ourselves in community, in just the sacred act of putting community at the center of our lives.
I recognize that we can do that without necessarily putting our synagogue community at the center of our lives; we have other communities; plenty of us already do it, whether it’s our school or our work or somewhere else, and that’s terrific. It is admittedly a bit self-serving of me to ask you to put this community more front and center, and yet… I’m asking that. Because I believe in it. I believe being present to communities like this, a community that celebrates and mourns together, learns together, connects together, engages together helps make our lives more radically meaningful.
It’s our job as synagogue leadership to help make this workable and desirable to you. To help explore, for example, whether more young families can join us if we move Hebrew School from Sundays to Saturdays, so that when school is over, when services are over, we can all be together, break bread together, have some schnapps together, when our universe permits it, so we can model to our children what sacred community looks like.
Sacred Community, kehillah kedoshah. I mentioned before never imagining myself in a role like this. I grew up going to a chavruah, meaning the synagogue services I attended didn’t have a rabbi, they were entirely led by congregants. So the role of congregational rabbi is not one I am entirely familiar with. And yet, here I am. Hienini. I consider myself so, so fortunate to have found this role which places me right in the midst of that which I have for so long avoided—a kehillah kedoshah, a sacred community. And I have you to thank. Shanah Tovah.
