Jeff once told me that what he could remember of high holidays services from his youth was that he understood none of it, except the one part that was done in English – the part when they asked for money. 

As a board member with a tenure over a decade and service leader, I would be mortified if I ever learned that this was someone’s impression of the High Holidays at Temple Shalom. I hope that illustrates the gravity with which I step onto the bimah to ask for your support. We’re working hard to build and maintain a community here, and while the need for that community has grown so much in the past two years, so have the challenges in maintaining it. 

Though I could paint you a very detailed picture of those challenges and Patrick, our treasurer has provided me with all the data I need to draw up enough charts and spreadsheets and projections to cross your eyes, let’s take this discussion in a different direction. Not the what of your support, but the why. 

Why should you support temple Shalom (other than to provide me with a vehicle by which to force people to listen to me speak)?

I could remind you that you need to be a member here for your son to have his Bar Mitzvah here. While true, that leaves thirteen years from bris to bar Mitzvah and then ten or twenty or, god forbid, thirty years from bar Mitzvah to wedding during which you don’t need us, so that’s not a very good argument. 

I could tell that Temple Shalom is a great place to meet people, and that I met my best friend and countless others here. I could tell you that I met the love of my life because of a friend from Temple Shalom. But you don’t have to be a member to come and meet people at Temple Shalom, so that’s not it, either. 

I could tell you the story of a young mother who moved here and whose husband had to be hospitalized and how members of the Temple helped her in her time of need. I could tell you that being a member means that other temple members would help you out if you were in a similar crisis. But there are a lot of kind people here, and they would do that for someone in the community, regardless of whether they were a member.

If the point of membership isn’t to get all of those things and high holidays tickets, then what is it?

The point, my friends, is not to get those things for yourself, but to secure them for the community. Don’t be a member this year because your daughter will have her bat Mitzvah in February. Be a member every year because you want there to be a place in Waterloo for daughters to have bat mitzvahs.

Don’t join so you can make friends. Join because Jews need a place to be friends. 

Don’t join just to get the support of our community, join to help ensure that there is a supportive community for all who need it. 

That is what your membership does here. And by having helped to build and maintain this community, you can take pride in your contribution, you can take solace that it is here for all who need it and you can take pleasure in all of our enjoyment of what we have wrought.

The post Mike Lopez’s Rosh Hashanah Speech, on behalf of the Board appeared first on Temple Shalom Reform Congregation.

As you disembark the ferry connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn, you are greeted at the Williamsburg ferry stop by a bright yellow, larger than life statue made up of the letters O and Y. Depending on which side you view the sculpture from, this iconic sculpture by American Jewish artist Deborah Kass either spells out “oy,” or “yo.” Since its initial installation in Brooklyn, the piece has found its way to California, to the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, and to countless reproductions in print, in jewelry, and in take-home size sculptures. “Oy” speaks to the quintessential Jewish Yiddish expression that has trickled into colloquial English. The Jewish English Lexicon, a dictionary that tracks the usage of Jewish words in English, defines “oy” as an “Exclamation of dismay, exasperation, or surprise.”[1] “Oy” can sometimes seem like it is the essence of what it means to be Jewish – to be perpetually dismayed with the state of the world, with the prospect of the Jewish future, with the horrors held in the Jewish past (and in the Jewish present). And yet, if we stay stuck in “oy” mode, we are missing out on a significant part of our Jewish equation. What’s the explanation for nearly every Jewish holiday? “They tried to kill us…we survived…let’s eat!” Our Judaism does not stop with “They tried to kill us.” They didn’t kill us. We did survive. And then we celebrate.

Over the course of our High Holy Day journey together, I’ve offered different motivations for “Why Be Jewish,” as we’ve explored what has brought Jews towards Judaism in the past year. Some are motivated to lean into their Judaism because of fear, because of the mandate of the weight of our collective history. Some are motivated to be Jewish because of the strong sense of community, of Jewish peoplehood, of connection to our beloved State of Israel. But what if we put the J back into our Judaism? Add J to OY and it becomes…JOY. As Michael Lopez introduced last night, this year we are embarking on a Year of Jewish Joy here at Temple Shalom.

Jewish joy might seem impossible, or even disrespectful, at this time in our history. How can we lean into Jewish joy with 101 hostages still somewhere underground in Gaza? Is Jewish joy even possible when we can’t gather for services without security at our doors, when we know far too many stories of synagogues and Jewish schools here in KW, throughout the Greater Toronto Area, and around the Jewish world, that have been the targets of antisemitic hate crimes? Not only is it possible, but joy must be the inevitable outcome of all of the oys that our people endure now and have endured in the past. Ross Gay, a Black American poet and author, took on the challenge of writing a short essayette about something delightful every single day for a year. He published the results of that project in The Book of Delights, a stunning collection of joy, from the beauty of the natural world to the joy of our human relationships. He writes of what it means to experience joy, to write joy, as a Black man: “It is a fact, that one of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness. Is to conflate blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness.”[2] We too, have conflated suffering and Jewishness, making it an essential, inextricable part of Jewish identity and the Jewish experience. The time has come for us to reclaim Jewishness from the chokehold of suffering and history – not to deny our legacy of suffering, but to declare, proudly, that suffering is not the sum total of Jewish identity.

Our suffering and our joy go hand in hand. Our history of suffering allows our joy to shine even more brightly. In The Book of Delights, Gay references Zadie Smith’s 2013 essay, “Joy.” Smith describes being en route to visit Auschwitz, to confront the worst examples of the capacity for evil and hate – the exact opposite of joy. And yet, on the way, her husband touched her gently, a small act of human intimacy and care. “We were heading toward that which makes life intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy.”[3] Our knowledge of suffering and evil goes hand in hand with our experience of joy. We ritualize this idea every time a couple stands underneath the chuppah, the wedding canopy, and smashes a glass. Replete with multiple meanings, this ritual at its essence is a reminder of the brokenness of the world, of the destruction in our history, even at our most joyful moments. We cannot live a full Jewish life without both.

Perhaps you’ve heard the idea that Inuit language has at least a couple dozen words for snow, if not more. Given our litany of expulsions, pogroms, and destructions over the centuries, you might think that Hebrew has a long list of vocabulary for sadness and suffering. Although once you expand to synonyms, the list might grow, there are essentially three words for sadness that show up in our texts, our liturgy, and in modern Hebrew: atzuv, yagon, and tza’ar (which of course becomes the Yiddish tsuris). And yet, our list of vocabulary for happiness and joy is lengthy. Rabbi Jodie Gordon and Rabbi Jen Gubitz identify 8 different words for Jewish joy, each with its own nuances: simchah, orah, rinah, gilah, ditzah, sasson, osher, and chedvah. I want to dig a little deeper into chedvah, which Rabbis Gordon and Gubitz translate as “the happiness of being together.”[4] Many joys can be experienced solitarily, and yet our joy is amplified when we share it. In her memoir, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, Glynnis MacNicol writes of her trip to Paris in August 2021, after over a year of Covid isolation living alone in New York. Her summer spent in Paris is a return to embodied pleasure, to being with other humans. MacNicol eats, dances, walks, sits for hours over wine with friends. She writes of the return of the gaze of others to her life: “Gone are all the reflections of myself I have depended on for the last year, what feels like an eternity. Gone is the understanding of myself from the me I see looking back. Gone is the me who existed to so many loved ones only from the neck up, in a square box staring back at me from a screen. I am fully inside myself and only looking out.”[5] MacNicol’s pleasure is embodied. She experiences it by showing up, by being fully present with other humans, both beloved friends and near strangers. Our Jewish joy is embodied. We experience it when we show up to be with our community – it is the joy of a wedding couple under the chuppah, shared with their loved ones surrounding them. The joy of our holidays, of Shabbat, of the tiny rituals that build on each other to create a Jewish life. In his essay “Found Things,” Gay writes about sitting in an airport and noticing birds swooping through the terminal. In the moment, merely noticing the birds is not the endpoint of the joy. Gay finds himself:

…looking around, searching among the commuters for fellow compatriots of glee. I wonder if this impulse to share, the urge to elbow your neighbor, who maybe was not even your neighbor until the bird flew between you up into the pipes and rafters you did not notice until you followed the bird there, is also among the qualities of delight? And further, I wonder if this impulse suggests – and this is just a hypothesis, though I suspect there is enough evidence to make it a theorem – that our delight grows as we share it.[6]

Our delight grows as we share it. We do a lot of sharing of the horrible parts of life. Jewish WhatsApp and Facebook groups are often a litany of all of the ways that the world is turning against us, becoming a dangerous place to live as a Jew. We are quick to share news of the latest antisemitic incident, whether close to home or across the globe. This sharing is important and necessary, and allows for us to be together in our sorrow and to respond collectively. But do we share our delight in the same way? This year, let’s change that. Let’s share our joys. Let’s show up to celebrate them together. As you heard from Mike last night, this year, the board and I are inviting all of you to share your joys with this community – birthdays, anniversaries, professional and academic accomplishments. Not merely to share, but to celebrate together, with our community – with bimah blessings and onegs, hugs and mazel tovs.

In the introduction to The Book of Delights, Gay writes about how the year of daily writing about delight shifted his own attitudes, forming “a kind of delight radar…Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”[7] The more we seek out joy, the more joy there is to be found. There is no scarcity of joy in this world; we need not hoard it for ourselves, worried that a moment of joy is ephemeral and will disappear if we focus on it too hard. Our joy can be a constant, an abundant ongoing source of uplift.

It may seem counterintuitive to stand here in front of you, on Yom Kippur morning, the most solemn day of the Jewish year, and speak about joy and delight. When we list out the themes and motifs of this day, joy is usually not one of them. Midrash offers another way of looking at Yom Kippur, connecting it to that most joyful of holidays – Purim – with a play on words. Yom Kippur is also called Yom HaKippurim, and with a slight change of the vowel signs, this becomes, “the day that is like Purim.” What on earth could these two drastically different holidays have in common, beyond a similarly sounding name? The rabbis teach that in the Messianic Age, all of the Jewish holidays will be canceled – except for Yom Kippur and Purim. Every other holiday celebration, including the three pilgrimage festivals that are at the heart of our Jewish calendar, will be irrelevant in the world-to-come – except for these two.[8] Our mystical tradition goes even further to imagine that Yom Kippur will become a day of celebration akin to Purim.[9] What is eternal about Judaism? Not our suffering, and the sacred ways we memorialize it. Not our pilgrimage festivals. But our joy at surviving, and our commitment to the ongoing work of repentance, which will remain even in the world-to-come.

Our Year of Jewish Joy has three parts, three ways that each of you are invited to participate: study joy, share joy, and show up.

Study joy. The study of joy is a reorienting of all our senses to notice joy, to become experts in the ways that joy manifests itself in our lives. To turn on our joy radar. Not to turn off our radar for all that there is to despair about (how many times did I check Times of Israel while sitting to write these words back in August?), but to put a little more energy, a little more attention to seeking out joy instead of seeking out hate. Perhaps Gay’s prediction will prove true, that as we study joy, seek it out, we will find even more of it. And I hope you’ll join me to study in even more depth what our tradition has to teach us about joy as we traverse the calendar of the year, through a series of classes exploring Jewish manifestations of joy, starting with Sukkot on Tuesday night, October 22.

Share joy. When something brings you joy, when you have a simcha, a joyous lifecycle occasion in your family, share it with us. Watch your email this week for instructions on how to let Temple Shalom know when you’ve got a joy to be shared. Gay writes that “joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us.”[10] Let’s make it visible, together. We’ll be celebrating our joys all year long with bimah blessings, announcements, special onegs, and together, as a community, turning up our joy radar.

Show up. Our joy grows in community. Even if you’re not feeling joyous on a particular Shabbat – the news from Israel is weighing heavily on your heart, it’s been a particularly tough week at work, you or your loved ones are facing the hardest of life’s challenges – come. Let us together lift up some of that heaviness, hold it with you, and create more space, more capacity for joy.

Last week on Rosh Hashanah, some of us studied a Talmudic text together that explains what is the correct procedure when a wedding procession and a funeral procession meet at an intersection. Talmud tells us that the funeral procession must give way to the wedding party, as the medieval French commentator Rashi explains, “When the bride comes out from her father’s home to the wedding hall at the same time [as] those accompanying a dead body for burial and both groups will be shouting – one group with joy and the other in mourning and we don’t want to mix the two, we reroute those accompanying the deceased…”[11] Rabbi Jen Gubitz adds, “What the rabbis of the Talmud nudge us to imagine is this: As the beloveds cross the road to their chuppah, and the mourners in the funeral procession look out from their sadness through the car window, for a split second they see one another and look each other in the eye. The mourners witness as joy proceeds, the beloveds witness the fragility of life, and neither one’s existence can steal from the other’s truth. Because loss and grief and joy and gladness are deeply intertwined at every moment of being human. So maybe we need the reminder to push ourselves, especially when the world is offering us more grief than gladness, to witness them both, but not to postpone the joy. Rather, let us allow joy to lead the way.”[12]

May we all allow joy to lead the way in this coming year. May we tune our radar to seek out Jewish joy, not only Jewish pain. May we lift up our joy, our delight at being Jewish, at being alive, at being in this world, and share it with each other. May we experience joy in abundance in this year to come.

________________
[1] “Oy,” Jewish English Lexicon, oy – Jewish English Lexicon (jewish-languages.org).
[2] Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2019), 220.
[3] Zadie Smith, quoted in Gay, 44-45.
[4] OMfG: Double the Adar, Double the Fun — OMFG Podcast: Jewish Wisdom for Unprecedented Times
[5] Glynnis MacNicol, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris (New York: Viking, 2024), 121.
[6] Gay, 173.
[7] Gay, xxiv.
[8] Midrash Mishlei 9:1
[9] Tikkunei haZohar 57b
[10] Gay, 163.
[11] Ketubot 17a.
[12] Why did(n’t) the Funeral Procession Cross the Road? – Lilith Magazine

The post Rabbi Miriam’s Yom Kippur 5785/2024 Sermon – A Year of Jewish Joy appeared first on Temple Shalom Reform Congregation.

A story: January, 2003. Place: The Western Wall in Jerusalem. Time: Erev Shabbat. I was in Israel studying on the Reform movement’s premier high school in Israel program, then known as the Eisendrath International Exchange (and yes, you can do the math on that later). It was our group’s first Shabbat in Israel, and we were spending it in Jerusalem. We welcomed Shabbat with a kabbalat Shabbat service outside the Old City, and then walked to the Kotel to participate in the unique experience that is the Western Wall as the sun sets on Friday. If you’ve been, you know that the plaza in front of the Kotel is divided with a mechitza, a tall divider between the men’s section and the (much smaller) women’s section. I approached the women’s section, where I skimmed one of the many bookshelves, crammed with prayerbooks of all types and languages. “But where is mine?” I asked, looking unsuccessfully for something that looked
remotely familiar, and not seeing anything that approximated the Reform prayerbooks I was used to from home. An older woman thrust a prayerbook at me, saying in heavily accented English, “Here! This is for you!”

The prayerbook she handed me was the ArtScroll Siddur, an Orthodox prayerbook with English translation, known for its commentaries and side notes to encourage traditional halachic practice. This was not my prayerbook. Her Judaism didn’t look like my Judaism – and mine didn’t look anything like hers. Could we possibly be part of the same tribe, the same people, the same faith?

And yet – we are. We are all part of Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, that glorious, multihued multitude. Our Jewish tent somehow includes Jews of all stripes, even some Jews who we maybe wish we didn’t have to share a tent with: Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox, post-denominational, Renewal Jews. Diaspora Jews and Israeli Jews. Jews who welcome those who marry people from other backgrounds, and Jews who don’t. Jews who agree with us on Israel…and Jews who don’t agree with us on Israel. This tent is messy, this tent is LOUD, this tent is full of faces familiar and not, voices singing niggunim, melodies, that call to something buried deep within our souls. Since Rosh Hashanah, I’ve been speaking about the multitude of reasons that we are called to lean into our Judaism, especially post-October 7. Why be Jewish? Why are we here tonight? For some of us, knowing that we are part of this big messy multitude called Am Yisrael, the Jewish people, being part of something bigger than ourselves – this is why we are here.

Even if we feel comfortable in this messy, cacophonous tent, there’s probably someone in it who we think doesn’t belong here. Those Jews who don’t recognize the full humanity of LGBTQ+ Jews. Those Jews who use Judaism to inspire violence against Palestinians. Those Jews who seem to have left the tent themselves, by abandoning their connection to Am Yisrael and rejecting Zionism.

In the Torah, who belongs in this tent seems more straightforward. Tomorrow morning, we’ll read these words from Deuteronomy:

Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem lifnei Adonai Eloheichem.
You stand this day, all of you, in the presence of Adonai your God – your tribal heads, elders, and officials; every man, woman, and child of Israel; and the stranger in the midst of your camp; from the one who cuts your wood to the one who draws your water – to enter into the covenant of Adonai your God, and the oath that Adonai your God makes with you this day, to establish you as God’s people and to be your God, as promised to you and sworn to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And not with you alone do I make this covenant and this oath, but with each one who stands here among us this day in the presence of Adonai our God, and with each one who is not here among us this day.[1]

Everyone is part of the covenant – including strangers, those who do the grunt work of the community, and those who aren’t even there that day (which commentators understand to mean those Jews who haven’t yet been born – us! We’re included in this ancient covenant, too!) This biblical covenant in Deuteronomy is rooted in an even older covenant from Genesis, the covenant God made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Jewish thinker Rabbi Donniel Hartman, in the book Who Are the Jews – and Who Can We Become?, an exploration of Jewish peoplehood today, offers two stories of Jewish peoplehood: Genesis Judaism and Exodus Judaism.

Genesis Judaism is rooted in the family story found in the first chapters of the Torah, full of promises made by God to our Genesis ancestors. For Genesis Jews, “Jewish identity [has] little to do with…doing. Being Jewish [is] just who you [are].”[2] The Judaism of Genesis is a birthright, available to all descendants of Abraham – just by being a descendant of Abraham. Hartman offers one caveat to the “mode of being and not doing” called for in the Genesis covenant: the act of circumcision, first commanded to Abraham and his sons.[3] Circumcision, in Hebrew, brit milah, literally, the sign of the covenant, “means that while one inherits one’s status as a Genesis Jew, Genesis still demands that one actively embrace this status. It defines one’s Jewishness only to the extent that one actively chooses to be a Jew.”[4] In some ways, we are all Jews-by-choice – every time we actively choose to identify as a Jew, as part of the Jewish people, to step into that tent – we are activating that Genesis covenant. For the Judaism of Genesis, there is no such thing as a “bad Jew.” “Jewish identity, once acquired, requires no further validation – not even in abiding by the word of God,” Hartman explains.[5] Jewish identity and belonging is unconditional – regardless of synagogue membership, dollars given to tzedakah, who you marry, how many mitzvot you do.

However, the unconditional nature of Genesis Judaism is two-sided. Not only are we unconditionally connected to God, but we are unconditionally part of the Jewish family – all of the Jewish family. God is stuck with us – and we are stuck with each other. Genesis Judaism “demands, fundamentally, an unconditional loyalty to one’s fellow Jews.”[6] One of my favourite texts to study on Yom Kippur, Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah: Laws of Repentance, makes it clear what this actually means, and what the stakes are:

One who separates from the ways of the community, even though she has not committed any sins, but remain separated from the community of Israel, not observing commandments together with them, not including themselves in Israel’s troubles, not mourning on Israel’s days of mourning, but follows their own path as if they were one of the nations of the world, and not a part of Israel, such a person has no share in the World to Come.[7]

It doesn’t matter if this person has otherwise been an absolutely exemplary observant Jew and good human being. If they do not see themselves as part of the Jewish community, part of the Genesis Covenant, they have no share in its destiny. They have left the tent.

Not including themselves in Israel’s troubles. Not mourning on Israel’s days of mourning. Genesis Judaism reminds us that we are one family. No matter how different our Jewish practices might seem to be, or how much we disagree on, we share the same tsuris, the same pain, the same mourning. For Maimonides, once someone has disengaged from this collective experience, they are no longer part of the Jewish family.

However, our Jewish collective story continues beyond Genesis. In Exodus, we learn that being Jewish is more than being born to a family – it comes with obligations, with sacred actions, and with ways into Judaism other than being “Jewish-by-chance” – born into a Jewish family. Revelation at Mt. Sinai, and the giving of the 10 Commandments declare “that Jewishness is not just an inherited or assumed identity but a way of life comprised of obligations and commitments.”[8] Judaism is not just identity, but action. More than that, Exodus Judaism carves out a pathway for joining the Jewish people through conversion. Once Judaism “is no longer experienced as merely an inherited label of regional or familial affiliation but as an aspirational system of beliefs and practices to which one is obligated as well,” the rabbis begin to develop what has become our modern ritual of conversion.[9]

Of course, as the old saying goes, “Two Jews, three opinions” – there is no end to arguments over “who counts as a Jew,” in Israel and in the Diaspora. One group doesn’t recognize another group’s conversions, some Jewish communities, such as ours here at Temple Shalom, recognize as Jewish anyone with one Jewish parent who has been raised Jewishly, while many other Jewish communities only recognize children born to a Jewish mother as Jewish. The Rabbis of the Talmud had a simpler boundary. As Rabbi Hartman writes, “If you openly separate yourself from the community, we then designate you as an outsider. As long as you do not sever ties with one of the covenants, [either the Genesis Covenant or the Exodus Covenant], you remain a member in good standing…The foundational rule of the Genesis Covenant is that an Israelite who has sinned is still an Israelite. In the synthesis of Genesis and Exodus sensibilities, the Rabbis generated a new foundational rule: an Israelite who sees oneself as an Israelite, no matter how much they’ve sinned, is still an Israelite.”[10]

No matter how much we’ve sinned – we are all still part of this covenantal community. Earlier in our service, we read the words of the prelude to Kol Nidre: anu matirin l’hitpalel im ha’avaryanim. We are permitted to pray with the avaryanim – those who have transgressed. Our mahzor notes that “Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, a 13th century sage, inserted these lines in the liturgy, basing himself on the Talmudic statement, “a public fast that does not include the sinners of Israel is no fast.” All of us are avaryanim; none of us is unworthy to join with others in prayer” – and in community.[11] No matter how much we have sinned – we are still part of this community, part of this tribe, part of this people. Rabbi Alan Lew adds, “We are all avaryonim. We are all imperfect. We are all sinners.”[12] By showing up here tonight – each and every one of us has opted into the Jewish people, regardless of our behaviour and our actions over the last year. Whether you were a fierce advocate for Israel or not, whether you diligently attended Shabbat services or not, whether you gave tzedakah abundantly or not – by being here, you are part of the Jewish people.

So what do we do with those who have seemingly left our Jewish tent? I don’t want to demonize those who opt out – in many of our families, we might include those we love in the category of those who have chosen not to be a part of Jewish peoplehood. They remind us of the Wicked Child at our Passover seder, who asks, “What is this ritual to YOU?,” distancing themselves from our rituals and celebrations. The haggadah tells us that had they been in Egypt, they would have been excluded from the communal redemption. Rabbi Sharon Brous offers a glimpse into how we might respond to this person. She describes a ritual at the Temple in Jerusalem, part of the ancient pilgrimage. The mishna reads almost like a set of ancient crowd control techniques:

All who entered the Temple Mount entered by the right, circled to the right and exited by the left, except for one to whom something had happened, who entered and circled to the left…
That person was asked: “Why do you circle to the left?”
They replied “I am a mourner,” and they were blessed: “May the One who dwells in this house comfort you.”
If they replied: “Because I have been ostracized – she’ani m’nudeh,” they were blessed: “May the One who dwells in this house inspire your community to draw you near again,” according to Rabbi Meir. But Rabbi Yose challenged him: you make it seem as if the community treated him unjustly!
Rather they should bless: “May the One who dwells in this house inspire you to hear the words of your community so that they may bring you close again.”[13]

At this peak moment of gathering for the ancient Israelites – the pilgrimage festival – the instructions for how to enter into that most sacred of places, the Temple Mount – includes directions for the m’nudeh, the one who has been punished by being ostracized. Rabbi Brous elaborates that this person, the m’nudeh, is “deemed to have endangered the community in word or action,” a severe punishment used rarely in extreme circumstances.[14] They were “effectively considered dead. They could no longer do business, teach, learn, or engage in any social interaction…They were forced to physically distance themselves from the rest of the community.”[15]

BUT – the m’nudeh chose to show up at the most holiest place on the most sacred of days, and when they did, they found a way in, a way back to their people. Rabbi Brous writes that she finds it “astonishing that the menudeh, the outcast, the ostracized, was included in the Temple ritual at all. But it’s clear that the Rabbis wanted to envision a world in which no one is outside the circle of the community.”[16] As long as one shows up – as long as the menudeh, the one who has harmed the community in some way, is yearning to return to within the fold of the community, to be counted among the avaryanim, we will make space for them.

Our people, our tribe, has space for all of us in our imperfections – as long as we want to be here. This tent has space for those who have chosen Judaism as adults, for those who are part of Jewish families by loving Jews, for those who are Jews-by-choice and Jews-by-chance. Sometimes – just being part of the tribe, feeling Jewish – is enough. We are Genesis Jews.

Erin Foster, the creator of the recent Netflix hit Nobody Wants That, following the dating adventures of a rabbi, says of her own journey to Judaism, “You don’t feel Jewish until you’ve been Jewish. When I see antisemitism, I think I’m Jewish. I have felt more Jewish since I converted because of the lived experience way more than learning about it in a classroom and learning the date and meaning of a holiday. Existing in 2024 with what’s going on in the world, that makes me feel Jewish.”[17] Her sense of Jewish identity comes through Jewish actions, through participating in Jewish community – we are Exodus Jews. That gut connection to a people bigger than ourselves was activated for many of us this year, calling us to feel part of this covenant, part of this people.

There’s a custom that the very first thing we are meant to do after Neilah, the close of Yom Kippur, even before breaking our fast – is to start to build the sukkah. Exodus Judaism calls us to engage with our Judaism, to rush to do Jewish actions, to do mitzvot in the world. There’s a beautiful text from the Talmud about the sukkah. It starts with the verse from Torah: Every citizen of Israel shall dwell in sukkot – kol ha-ezrach b’yisrael yashvu b’sukkot (Leviticus 23:42). The Talmud goes on to say – this verse teaches that all of Israel are fit to sit in one sukkah. Kol Yisrael reu’im leishev ba’sukah echat.[18]

I love the imagery this text invites – a sukkah large enough to fit all of us, with all of our messiness, with all of our disagreements, our diversity of Jewish practice and Jewish belief. A sukkah that can hold space for the complexity of who we are as a people, that has room for every person who chooses to sit in it.

I spoke last week on Rosh Hashanah about the multitude of reasons that have driven Jews towards Judaism and Jewish community since October 7. For many of us, one core reason is Jewish peoplehood – that desire to sit in a sukkah, to be included in the Jewish tent, to be part of something bigger than us, bigger than this community. I pray that we can work to build a sukkah large enough to hold all of us, sturdy enough to withstand the external winds of antisemitism, and the internal shaking of our arguments. May we soon find ourselves celebrating, together, with the entire Jewish people, the avaryanim – the sinners, the m’nudeh – those who are ostracized, those with whom we see eye to eye, and those with whom we have nothing in common except being in that sukkah. May this be God’s will.

________________
[1] Deuteronomy 29:9-14
[2] Donniel Hartman, Who Are the Jews – and Who Can We Become? Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2023, 7.
[3] Ibid., 10.
[4] Ibid., 10 (emphasis mine).
[5] Ibid. 16.
[6] Ibid., 19
[7] Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah 3:11 (trans. Donniel Hartman)
[8] Hartman, 32.
[9] Ibid., 53.
[10] Ibid., 78.
[11] Mishkan HaNefesh: Yom Kippur, 16.
[12] Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, 181.
[13] Mishnah Middot 2:2, trans. Rabbi Sharon Brous in The Amen Effect, 196.
[14] Sharon Brous, The Amen Effect, 171-172.
[15] Ibid., 172.
[16] Ibid.
[17]https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2024-09-30/erin-foster-jewish-women-nobody-wants-this
[18] Sukkah 27b

The post Rabbi Miriam’s Kol Nidre 5785/2024 Sermon – Sharing a Tent with Sinners and Outcasts appeared first on Temple Shalom Reform Congregation.

Hayom harat olam. This is the day the world was born. We remember Adam in the garden, the first human created, dancing around the Garden of Eden, taking in all of the beauty of creation: the huge variety of animals, the lush vegetation, the soft grass underneath his feet, the eyes of his beloved Eve, created with him on that final day of creation, the day we mark today. The sun warm on their skin, everything they needed provided for them. Everything was perfect.

…And then, the sun begins to set. The light gets dimmer, the sun sinks lower in the sky. The warmth of the day fades as night sets in, and Adam is beset by absolute fear. He and Eve have never experienced night before, and they are terrified. “Oy li! Because I sinned, the world is becoming dark around me, and the world will return to tohu va’vohu, to chaos and disorder.”[1] Adam took a look at the world around him and he was SCARED, and created a narrative in his head that he was to blame. This darkness was his fault. “As the sky blackens, his alarm turns into desperation. Could it be…that the world is ending?”[2] Eve, his beloved, hears his cries, sees his terror, and comes to sit across from him, weeping along with him. Eventually, inevitably, the sun rises. After a long night of crying in each other’s arms, Adam and Eve realize that a new day has begun, and this is the way of the world.

This Talmudic midrash, retold by Rabbi Sharon Brous in The Amen Effect, gives us insight into that most elemental of human emotions – fear, present from the very first hours of humanity.

Maybe you know this deep existential fear. The kind of fear that convinces you that the world is ending – that the world as you know it, the routines, structures, and relationships that you rely on, are crumbling around you. This fear shows up on an individual level – when a family is upended by tragedy, when a new diagnosis, physical or mental, rocks our worlds, with job loss, abuse, addiction, or divorce. We know this fear on a communal and societal level – on October 7, we woke up to a terrifyingly changed world, a world in which our sense of security as a Jewish people, protected by the existence of the State of Israel and the Israel Defence Forces, was forever shaken.

Maybe you know the kind of fear that keeps you up all night crying. Perhaps from last Rosh Hashanah to this one, you have felt like Adam – sitting awake in those predawn hours, crying with dread.

The question is – what do we do with that fear?

Storyteller Rabbi Marc Gellman imagines a different ending to the midrash of Adam and Eve and their first night on earth, surrounded by all the animals of the Garden, shivering and scared. After the relief of that first dawn, their terror returns when they realize that the sun is sinking in the sky, again. This time though, they are sure that they have a solution. “Let’s build something to stop the sun from sinking!” The animals scurried around piling stuff at just the spot where the sun sank. They hoped that the sun would hit their heap of junk and stop at the edge of the Garden of Eden just before it dipped below the horizon and everything got cold again. The monkey brought bananas and the elephant hauled tree trunks and the squirrel collected nuts and the pile of stuff rose high over the wall that surrounded the Garden of Eden. It was a HUGE pile…but of course, it was powerless to prevent the sun from setting anyway. The inevitable occurred, and God explained to Adam and Eve and all the animals that the sun would rise and set over and over again, forming days, weeks, months, and years.[3]

Sometimes, when that deep existential fear begins to sink into our souls, when we can’t imagine having to survive another dark night, we search for something – anything – to do. We can’t abide feeling powerless, so we rally our friends, our loved ones, and our community to fight the scary stuff, to try to make it go away. As humans, we desire action. We need to feel powerful – if you break apart the etymology of the word “power,” it originates from the Latin poder, which literally means “the ability to act.” To feel powerful in the face of fear is to feel that there is some action we can take, even if that action is useless.

I want to give you a little “behind the scenes” insight for a moment. I begin preparing and writing for the High Holy Days months before they start, and spend much of the summer reading broadly on all sorts of topics, collecting ideas and insights that eventually become the High Holy Days sermons you’ll hear. So when one of my favourite writers, Anne Helen Petersen, interviewed Soraya Chemaly, author of The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma, I immediately added Chemaly’s book to my pile. Her argument is that the definition of resilience as personal strength and individual grit isn’t enough to get us out of the dark times. We need “mutual dependence and interconnectedness…[to nurture] our relationships with people, spaces, stories, history, and time itself.”[4] She draws examples from around the world and multiple fields of study, one of my favourites being from neuroscience research that shows that “traditions and rituals such as swaying…and singing in unison are all practices of embodied harmony. All national, ethnic, and athletic cultures have well-developed rituals that bring people together in ways that stabilize bodies physically, emotionally, hormonally, neurologically while bonding participants. As with fans chanting at a soccer game, these physical connections signal affection and rapport and help build connections between people and communities…”[5] Beautiful, right? I immediately thought of all the times we’ve sung together in this room, or I’ve stood in a circle, swaying to the familiar melody of havdalah, the ritual we use at the end of Shabbat. Or every time we’ve risen to say Mourner’s Kaddish together, flanking the mourners in our midst, holding the mourners throughout the Jewish people in our hearts.

But here’s the thing that occurred to me as I read The Resilience Myth, marking pages as I went: she’s not saying anything new – for us. The idea that “resilience draws its power from mutually nurturing relationships in supportive environments, serendipitous experiences, sharing resources, and creating tolerant, compassionate communities”: this is the secret sauce of the Jewish people.[6] We have been building resilient communities for millennia, long before we stood in a circle with a guitar to sway to havdalah. It is in our bones. It is in our Torah, which is the very blueprint of how to be a resilient community – of how to build a society that takes care of each other, that looks out for those whose nights are long and full of fear – the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. This wisdom of resiliency is there for us to rediscover. To remember how to show up for each other. To relearn the ancient wisdom. That is how we get through these dark times.

We’ve done this before. Jewish historian Salo Baron cynically described “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” – the way of telling the Jewish story that emphasises only our dark times, our unending suffering, our brushes with extinction, and our struggle to survive. Jewish history is more than struggle, Baron argued. Jewish history is also a tale of resilience – a story of how our people has survived, time and time again. That is our story, our inheritance.

We’ve built this into our communal infrastructure. Jewish Free Loan Toronto, since 1924, has provided direct financial assistance to Jewish residents of Ontario, Saskatechwan, and Atlantic Canada in need using interest-free loans to help individuals and families navigate challenging times, invest in their futures, and achieve lasting stability.[7] This is communal resilience: setting up structures so that a medical emergency, getting an education, or even paying for fertility treatments or adoption is possible beyond one individual or family’s financial means. Our community has built structures of care, so that after a night sitting up crying, contemplating the worst, we are not on our own to respond. Instead, we can get up, blink new life into our tired, dried-out-from-crying eyes, and make space for resilience, to imagine a different way forward, held by our community. And while Jewish Free Loan Toronto provides loans within the Jewish community, its sibling organization, the Hebrew Free Loan Society in New York, loans to anyone regardless of religious identity – knowing that as a community, we are only as resilient as the society in which we live.

Communal resilience happens closer to home too, on a seemingly smaller scale. Earlier this year, WRJCC started a Chesed Committee, to help people right here who need some support, be it a meal delivery, a ride to a doctor’s appointment, a bag of groceries, or just someone to visit with them. Adam didn’t sit alone on that long dark first night – Eve sat with him. I bet we have some Eve-types here this morning – if you think the Chesed Committee sounds like work you’d like to get involved in this year, to help build our community’s resiliency by supporting individuals and families right here in Kitchener-Waterloo, please speak to Rahel or Jay who can help get you connected, along with any of the other members of the Chesed Committee who are here this morning.

After almost any disaster or horrible news event, a meme inevitably surfaces with a quote from Mr. Rogers, of the beloved American children’s TV show. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” In the dark days and weeks immediately following October 7, the image that continually gave me hope, a break in that endless parade of horrific images, was a photo of Jerusalem residents lined up to give blood. They waited in line for twelve hours. We are the helpers. In Israel, the grassroots network that had built a vibrant protest movement in 2023 harnessed the power of organized people, and many many WhatsApp groups, to collect and distribute donations for the uprooted and traumatized residents of the South and the North – diapers, children’s toys, clothing, food. We are the helpers. This is how we get through the dark times, by being each other’s helpers. This is why the Jewish people has survived for 3000 years. We have a toolkit for resiliency and survival, honed over the generations. The first step in opening that tool kit is showing up for each other, showing up in community.

To return to Adam and Eve in the Garden. They had a number of possible responses to their fear at seeing night descend. In one story, they acted from a place of panic, actions that gave them a semblance of control and power, but in the end, were useless. In the other story, the Talmud is careful to tell us about Eve’s actions. She sits down with Adam, and cries with him. She comes close to him. She doesn’t avoid his fear, or pretend it doesn’t exist, or reassure him with platitudes of “don’t worry, it’ll be ok.” Eve is with Adam in his fear. Rabbi Sharon Brous, in her retelling of this midrash, calls this “the most important question we must answer in our lives: When the night comes, who will sit and weep by your side? Who shares your worry? Who sees you?”[8] I spoke last night about the “surge” in Jewish life post-October 7. The research conducted by Jewish Federations of North America shows that people within our Jewish community are turning to Judaism because the war affects them a great deal. 90% of the Jewish community is concerned about antisemitism (and that’s probably the closest a group of Jews has ever come to agreeing on anything). At this time of fear, worry, and uncertainty, through this long dark night since October 7, we show up for each other. We show up with each other.

When I spoke at the Waterloo Walk for Israel this summer, I quoted Yemenite-Israeli author, Ayelet Tsabari. She spoke of her decision to return to Israel earlier this year, after spending some time with her young family in Canada immediately after October 7. One friend, an Iranian here in Canada, urged her to return home, saying, “At least there, you can breathe together.” Tsabari’s friend echoed Soraya Chemaly’s writing on resilience. Chemaly describes interpersonal synchronization, when our bodies begin to sync up to each other, building resilience as we go. “Each of us is a body, but together we are interbodies. Your body is yours, but it is also part of everyone else’s environment, which has implications for how we respond to stress, hardships, and trauma.”[9] We’re here today to breathe together, and through that breathing, through the singing, through the praying, through every time we open our Jewish toolkit to get through another dark night, we build our own capacity, and our communal capacity, for resilience.

If you’re here today, in some part, because you’ve felt scared at some point in the last year – if you’ve felt deluged by reports of antisemitism in our region, and our country, and our world, if you have been worried for the safety of loved ones in Israel, and what the future will hold for Israel and her Palestinian neighbours and the rest of the region – I’ve felt that too. We’re here to breathe together. I hope you’ll join me on Sunday night, at 7pm at Kitchener City Hall for our communal memorial ceremony for the victims of October 7 – we’ll remember, we will mourn, and we will breathe together.

People turn to Jewish community for all sorts of reasons in times of trouble, and throughout these High Holy Days, we’ll explore a number of different reasons, but I have a hunch that for many people – maybe for some of you sitting in this room this morning – fear is part of it. And we’re all looking to not have to sit alone with our fear. We don’t have to – this community is here, resilient, and growing even stronger, using the wisdom of our tradition, all of our tools of resilience honed over the generations, to enable us to make it through even the darkest of nights.

We’re each looking for the Eve to our Adam, for the person who will breathe with us, sit across from us, cry with us, hold our hands through the dark night. We are Eve and Adam, sitting together, breathing together, crying together through the night, knowing that the sun will rise in the morning.

Shanah tovah.

________________
[1] Talmud b. Avodah Zarah 8a, as discussed in Sharon Brous’ The Amen Effect (36).
[2] Brous (36).
[3] Marc Gellman, “The First New Year,” in Does God Have a Big Toe?, p. 10-11.
[4] Soraya Chemaly, The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma, ix.
[5] Chemaly, 38.
[6] Chemaly, xi.
[7] Jewish Free Loan Toronto | Jewish Community Interest Free Loans
[8] Brous, 36.
[9] Chemaly, 39-40.

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Shana tova!

Here we are. On the precipice of a new year. A year ago, when we marked the beginning of 5784, all of you were here in Waterloo, and I was on the other side of the globe in Singapore. Could we have imagined the year that the Jewish people would endure? And yet, just a few weeks after communities gathered to dip apples in honey, hear the shofar, and chant the echoing words of Unetaneh Tokef, the Jewish people endured the worst atrocity, the highest number of Jewish casualties in a single day since the Shoah.

Collectively and individually, there are so many ways we all responded to the horrors of October 7. Some of us were glued to the news for weeks – some of us still are. Some of us tried to ignore what was happening, to go on with life as usual. Some of us tried to protect those we loved from rising antisemitism around the globe. Some of us sought to educate ourselves even more on the history of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to better understand how we got to this point, and where we might go from here. And some – many actually! – turned to Jewish community.

Several months ago, the Jewish Federations of North America, JFNA, embarked on a study to determine just what was going on with North American Jews following October 7. Had our behaviours changed in any measurable way? What were our attitudes towards Israel? How had we been experiencing antisemitism in our communities, workplaces, and online?

Here’s what they found: since October 7, there has been a surge in engagement in Jewish life. “These same events have also fueled an explosion in Jewish belonging and communal participation that is nothing short of historic. Jews are feeling more invested in their identity and community and looking for ways to connect,” researchers Mimi Kravetz, Sarah Eisenman, and David Manchester declared in May.[1] 43% of Jews have sought more engagement in Jewish life. 83% of Jews identified as not so engaged before October 7 – and 40% of those have sought deeper engagement, deeper connection with Judaism and Jewish community, what researchers have named the Surge.[2] Of the core of the Jewish community – those who were already deeply involved, our communal leadership – the people in this room who show up week after week – 60% of that population found themselves being even more engaged in Jewish life, and needing more from their communities.[3]

I wonder if you see yourself in these statistics, or if you see people you love in these statistics. Maybe you are part of the “Surge” – those who were previously less engaged with Judaism and the Jewish community, who, following October 7, showed up, maybe for the first time in a very long time. Perhaps this is your first High Holidays with us, or in a synagogue at all – ever, or in many many years. Maybe over the course of the last year, you have found yourself feeling called to come closer to Judaism and Jewish life.

Or perhaps you are part of the “Core,” those who have described “feeling more comfortable and less distant in the Jewish community since 10/7.”[4] The war and the impact of rising antisemitism on Jewish communities around the world weigh heavily on your heart, and you know that the Jewish community is a place you can turn to.

I know that these statistics are far more than numbers on a page. This is the reality of our community over the past year. In Singapore, our Thursday morning minyan that had been struggling along for months, not really drawing in a lot of folks – suddenly was standing room only, with people who had never been seen at that service before. Since I joined you in January, I’ve heard your stories. I have met with families who never considered joining a synagogue to be important – until this year. I’ve spoken with some of you who never imagined yourselves to be regular Shabbat attendees – until this year. We have folks here who are discovering the Jewish heritage somewhere in their family tree – and want to know more about it. This desire to dig deep into who we are as Jews and come together with other Jews spans the generations. We have young people, pulling their families to the synagogue, knowing that this tradition, this community, is their inheritance, that being Jewish is more than being the target of hateful slurs. One of our new religious school students grew up with a strong sense of Jewish identity, and something about this last year compelled them to ask their parents if they could start studying for b-mitzvah, entering Jewish community and beginning formal Jewish education for the first time. This is the Surge in action.

Dr. Mijal Bitton highlights the paradox that we’ve seen play out over the last year. “Every day since October 7, I have…seen how this rise in antisemitism and anti-Zionist rhetoric is inspiring Jewish pride and solidarity with Israel among so many young Jews.”[5] Turning to Jewish community, living Jewishly with pride was not an inevitable outcome! Hate and fear could have caused equal numbers to turn away from Judaism and Jewish community, to hide their Jewish identity, to downplay their heritage and connection to Am Yisrael, the Jewish people. But – it didn’t. We told a different story. Despite the pain of the last year, including the antisemitism that many of us have faced in our places of work and in our public schools, Bitton writes that even though they may feel lonely in their offices, the young professionals with whom she works \“are rediscovering that they belong to a rich history of Jews who experienced othering and expulsions but whose greatest strength was in each other. They are rediscovering the millenia-old Jewish rituals and community structures that nourish belonging.” Our Jewish story does not end with “othering.” It ends with belonging, with building a Jewish community that is expansive, that includes all of us as stakeholders in its future.

The Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley explores the ways that humans seek belonging, and that our societal institutions – including, yes, our synagogues! – can increase and deepen a sense of belonging. Belonging is more than a warm and fuzzy feeling; it is more than mere inclusion. In institutions of belonging, everyone has a stake and a voice. This community belongs to you – whether you are born Jewish, chose Judaism as an adult, or are part of a Jewish family by loving someone Jewish – and you belong to Temple Shalom, and to the Jewish people. This sense of belonging is essential, and can be literally life-saving. Canadian author Casey Plett writes, “Humans need community. Every piece of our knowledge tells us this. Isolation and loneliness are deadly, like actually deadly. It’s hard to quantify such experiences, but researchers taking stabs posit that social isolation drags down a person’s mortality as much as alcoholism or smoking.”[6] Being in community, feeling a sense of belonging beyond our small circles of family and friends, is essential for our survival as individuals and as a people.

Over the course of these High Holidays, we are going to explore together what are some of the reasons driving this surge. Essentially – why be Jewish? This good question has more than one good answer. Some of us may be called to lean into our Judaism as a response to fear and anxiety – Judaism can be a source of comfort in dark times, and living Jewishly in community offers us a way forward. Some of us might resonate with the idea that being Jewish, participating in this synagogue, is about being part of something bigger than any one individual, than any one Jewish community – about being part of the great project of Jewish peoplehood. And some of us might find joy in living Jewishly, in celebrating Jewish time together, in being proudly, ardently Jewish. Perhaps some combination of fear, peoplehood, and joy bring you here tonight, bring you to Judaism throughout the year.

I’ll close tonight with a story. There’s two old Jewish men who religiously attend shul, always showing up on time on Shabbat morning – let’s call them Shmuel and Moshe, but they could just as easily be Rivky and Tsipi, Dena and Adam, Ovadia and Noa. Every single week, Shmuel and Moshe are there – through bad weather, ill health, family crises. One day, their synagogue had a guest speaker, a rabbi visiting from out of town. As the rabbi made the usual small talk with the congregants over coffee and bagels after the service, she asked Shmuel and Moshe why they each came to shul that day. Shmuel responded, “Why do I come to shul?! Why, I come to talk to God! Obviously!” “Moshe, why do you come to shul?” “Oh, me? I come to shul to talk to Shmuel!”

Whatever brings you here tonight, and over these next 10 Days of Repentance – it’s the right reason. If you are here to talk to God, or to talk to August, or because this last year has left you feeling scared, or seeking connection with something bigger than you, or searching out joy and pride. No matter why you are here, we’re glad that you are.

Shana tova.

________________
[1] ‘The Surge,’ ‘The Core’ and more: What you need to know about the explosion of interest in Jewish life – eJewishPhilanthropy
[2] ‘The Surge,’ ‘The Core’ and more: What you need to know about the explosion of interest in Jewish life – eJewishPhilanthropy
[3] Jewish Federations of North America, Israel-Hamas War Sentiment Survey, 2024, 38. Berman Jewish DataBank
[4] Ibid, 39.
[5] Opinion: Anti-Israel protests encourage Jews to turn toward Zionism | CNN
[6] Casey Plett, On Community, 49.

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Since there are so many people here, I will use this opportunity to give a brief overview of the most recent steps the rabbi search committee has taken:

• Following the advice from the congregational meeting, we added Mabelly Tuchsznajder, Marty Finestone, and Ernie Ginsler to the search committee and we’ve been enriched by their joining us
• We still have four candidates.  We have interviewed three and are interviewing the fourth on Wednesday.
• After the fourth interview, we will meet as a committee and decide next steps
• We will keep everyone up to date.  Things were slower in the last couple of weeks because of High Holidays.

I had some trouble with writer’s block for this talk, but two different recent events inspired me just in the nick of time.

• The first event was conversations with rabbi candidates.  All four of our current candidates originate from the US and a couple brought up a reputation that we have in Reform Jewish circles of being “more conservative” than our US counterparts, whatever that means.  
• The second event was Rabbi Lori’s teaching on Sunday last week about how we adopt or don’t adopt new technology as part of Jewish practice.  

Both of these led me to meditate on the topic of conservatism.  Not in the sense of political parties or policies – this is not the time or place for that.  And, not in the sense of another sect of Judaism.  I’m talking more about personalities, habits, and how we relate to tradition.

What both of these discussions brought up is the question of how people handle change.  As people, we tend to like our habits and our traditions.  Change can be scary or threatening.  Most of us, most of the time, would prefer that things go along much as they have.  It’s comfortable and predictable.  Continuity of externalities allows us to calmly and deliberately plan our lives, careers, and families.  Even if we don’t like the status quo, it’s the devil we know and we can plan in that context with confidence that we can maintain or improve our own lives if we make sound decisions and work hard.  But, when everything is changing around us, we don’t know what will happen.  Sure there is the chance things will get better, but there is also a chance things will get worse.  And, worse than that, the external changes may thwart our most considered plans and our hardest labor.  Psychologists have proven that humans put more weight on potential loss than an equal amount of potential gain.  So, external changes in our lives tend to make us feel very insecure.

Which brings us back to the word “conservative”.  The derivation of the word is to conserve or to maintain or preserve.  This can mean politics, morals, ethics, and economics – again, not the topic of a synagogue talk.  It can also mean the environment, as in “conservation” – also not our topic today.  It can also simply mean our day to day behaviors, our relationships, and our communities.  And, that last aspect is what I’m interested in as synagogue president.

A lot of people equate conserving with never changing.  If external circumstances never changed, then sure, conserving would mean eternal personal consistency.  But, when external circumstances change, conserving means something different entirely.  Let’s illustrate that by contrasting it with two different psychologies and applying those ways of thinking to a situation we all face here – how we work through Rabbi Lori moving on to a new position.

One psychology is reactionary.  It says that nothing should ever change and any changes that have happened, usually from an imagined utopian past, need to be reversed as speedily as possible.  Applied to the current situation, this would lead to a dark outcome, as reactionary thought almost always does – chaining Rabbi Lori to the bima and never letting her go.  She’s been our rabbi, so she must always be.  Since freezing time is impossible, people with reactionary psychology can never be satisfied.

Another psychology is radical.  It is the mindset that will throw out the baby with the bathwater.  In this situation, a radical way of thinking would be, “It hurts to have the rabbi leave and all rabbis will eventually leave us, so let’s not have a rabbi.”  I think we can all agree that this would be an overreaction and that we would lose so much from that.  Since ending evil and suffering is impossible, radicals can also never be satisfied.

The middle psychology, the one that gives us a real chance for happiness, is conservative.  It acknowledges external changes and then asks, what are the central principles that we seek to preserve and how do we need to change in order to maintain what we cherish most in this new world?  That is the approach we are taking here at the temple.  We’re searching for a new rabbi.  And once we find the new rabbi, there will be changes.  It will be a different person with a different background with a different focus in their teaching, a different personality, and a different bedside manner.  While a good rabbi will strive to adjust their approach to who we are, we will also have to do the work to meet them partway.  

So, in this situation, as in many others, conservative doesn’t mean never changing.  Not changing is not a realistic option.  It’s about choosing peripheral changes that conserve our core principle – that we are a rabbi led congregation.  In this case, it means that we have to do the hard work of searching for a new rabbi, taking a calculated risk to hire the person we feel best suits us, giving them the time and space to adjust to us, and having the patience to understand and adjust to them.  Conserving is hard work.

The good news is that as Jews, we’ve had a lot of practice at doing this conservation work and succeeding.  Look at our history.

• Like I talked about last year, our historical beginning was after the Bronze Age collapse, about 3200 years ago, in the time of the judges.  The Israelite religion was distributed and egalitarian with shrines on many hilltops.
• Then we became a kingdom and kings love to centralize power and leave monuments behind.  So, we became a temple based religion with all observance in Jerusalem with mass pilgrimages to one holy place.
• Then we survived Babylonian exile without access to Jerusalem.  We did this by starting the process of canonizing the Torah which the exiled priests could use to anchor our people.
• Then, under the Persians, the Greeks, a brief period of independence, and again under the Roman Republic and early empire, we became temple based again.
• Finally, for 2000 years after the destruction of the temple, we shifted again to a more distributed religion, this time led by rabbis instead of priests, and anchored by a fully canonized Tanach, and additional works such as the Talmud.
• And, most recently, we’ve once again been able to return to Israel, but not Davidic Israel or Hashmonean Israel, but something else entirely that also requires us to compromise with modern realities.

That is a lot of change through the ages.  But, that change all served to preserve the core values of the Israelites who started it all.  Monotheism, certain holidays and festivals, ways of eating, and most importantly the core ethical practices of how we treat one another and help one another.  Today, most of us don’t farm and don’t own fields whose corners can be gleaned, but we have commandments to charity.  We help each other in the community when people are hungry or sick.  We make shiva calls when people have died.  We don’t look aside from the widow and the orphan.  We resist the temptation to put a stumbling block before the blind even when it would profit us to do so.  And, remarkably, we’ve even preserved text and language throughout the millennia.  Scholars tell us that one of the two oldest parts of the Tanach is the song of Deborah.  With all that’s changed and all we’ve written over 3200 years, we still have an original founding song of joy and triumph right in the middle of our holy text.

But imagine if the Israelites or Jews through history embraced reactionary thinking and said that nothing could ever change.  We’d have died out.  Or imagine if they fell into radical thinking and abandoned everything.  We’d have just melted into the surrounding populace and disappeared.

I do think that Jews and Canadians are conservative and I mean that in the best sense of the word, and again, completely apolitically.  In that spirit, this year I’d ask us to think about what that means to us and our plans as a temple.

• What are our enduring principles?
• What changes are happening around us?
• What do we need to change in order to be able to preserve our enduring principles in the face of the changes around us?

Given the search for the rabbi, I’ve had to listen to the congregation and put together what seems to be the consensus around our principles.  Here is what I have now (and if folks disagree or think I missed anything, please reach out after Yom Kippur)

1. We are a Jewish spiritual group.  We are not just a social club that happens to be made up of Jewish families.  We seek to learn more about Judaism and to put it into practice in our daily lives.
2. We are a loving community.  We are here for each other and take care of one another.
3. We are inclusive.  Anyone who embraces Judaism and their families, whether fully Jewish or mixed, are welcome here and will be treated with love and respect.  This inclusiveness spans national origin, race, native language, whether we were born Jewish or chose Judaism, level of observance, age, family structure, sexuality, or gender identity.  Our Jewish values and our humanity define us, none of those other characteristics that some cynically use to divide us from one another.  
   • As a side note about accepting change in order to conserve our values and strengthen our community, just think about how many us would not have been welcome in even the most liberal congregations just a generation or two ago.
4. We congregate.  It’s in the word congregation, isn’t it?  For that we need a home, a building that is maintained and that we are secure in.
5. We value our lay leadership.  We respect the learning and wisdom of our neighbors and their contributions to keeping ritual alive.  We would have this respect even if we could afford a full time rabbi and cantor.
6. We are rabbi led.  Even with strong lay leadership, we are awed by just how much there is to Judaism and how much wisdom has been accumulated over the millenia.  We acknowledge the need to have a guide that has dedicated themselves to learning and teaching Judaism.

Those are the principles I feel we need to conserve.  But, we know that there are challenges that come from external changes that make us have to figure out how to best conserve our values in a dynamic world.  

• Demographics change
• Society changes
• Antisemitism waxes and wanes
• A new generation’s feelings towards joining religious institutions change
• Attitudes towards how much to give and to who change
• Personal finances change along with the broader economy
• Real estate and building costs change
• The availability and expectations of clergy members change

In closing, I’d like to leave you with a challenge.  Tonight, you are all board members.  I ask you to meditate on what is eternal for us, what we need to preserve and conserve.  I ask you to further think about what is changing around us.  Consider how those changes either make it easier or harder to continue who we are.  Then, the hardest part.  I ask you all to think about what changes we might make to preserve who we are.  

• Do we need to change how we do membership?
• Do we need to change how we do dues?
• Do we need to change how we maintain our shared home?
• Do we need to change our external relationships
  • To other synagogues?
  • To unaffiliated Jews?
  • To the church?
  • To the community as a whole?

In short, what do we need to do differently tomorrow so that we can maintain the essence of who we are today?  

Given the sad event of Rabbi Lori moving on, it’s an ideal time for our community to think critically about our future.  If we get it right, if we embrace discomfort, if we make the right changes in terms of all the responsibilities and relationships we have, we can conserve and preserve our essence and put the temple on a sustainable path for decades.  

And then, of course, many of us and our children and grandchildren will sit here 20 years from now and listen to some other president give this same talk in response to changes in their world that we couldn’t have possibly anticipated here and now.

Thank you for being a part of Temple Shalom.  Each of you brings something special to the community.  I’m grateful for you all.

Shanah tova and g’mar chatima tova

The post President’s Message: Kol Nidre 2023 appeared first on Temple Shalom Reform Congregation.

There’s been a murder! Who could be the killer? Was it Haman, Zeresh, Achashverosh, Mordechai, Shaashgaz, or even Esther? Interrogate the suspects with your group, inspect the evidence, and discover… who killed Vashti?

• An interactive murder mystery
• Costumes are welcome and encouraged
• $20/person
• Ages 14 plus welcome
• Refreshments and snacks will be served

The post Purim Murder Mystery Party appeared first on Temple Shalom Reform Congregation.

Join Temple Shalom for Purim festivities, and trivia! The potluck will follow a short Kabbalat Shabbat service from 6:00-6:30pm.  Please RSVP to Diana at dianajpark@gmail.com with the number of people attending and the vegetarian item you will be bringing.  Some attendees have severe nut allergies. Please bring a list of ingredients that we can put out next to your dish.

The post Purim Potluck Dinner appeared first on Temple Shalom Reform Congregation.

Parents and kids (ages 8 months to 8 years) are invited to a short Purim service with Rabbi Lori featuring songs and stories, followed by pizza, activities, and a costume parade to celebrate Purim! RSVP to Mike at mike.lerman@gmail.com

This event will run concurrently with the adult Purim Potluck and Kabbalat Service. The Potluck service will begin at 6:00PM. Please feel free to join the potluck group for dessert!

The post Purim PJ Shabbat appeared first on Temple Shalom Reform Congregation.