Sermons and Divrei Torah
You've Got Mail!
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
(Sermon - Kol Nidre 5766)
"MJFR (married Jewish female... rabbi) seeks warm, accepting JC (Jewish community- not the other "JC" of our Christian friends...) to share existential loneliness and falafel. Shared values more important than shared interests. Must understand post-modern angst, spirituality without denomination, and deep faith that is unfocused. Must be serious but joyful, non-coercive but still stand for something. I'm traditional while modern, staunchly egalitarian, politically left but religiously right. You are bold and sophisticated, not defined by financial status or observance level, open minded and knowledgeable. You think outside of the box but still love the box itself. Most of all, you are not commitment-phobic or even commitment-challenged. You are the JC of my dreams. Willing to relocate for you but hope I don't have to. Call me anytime but not on Shabbos, p.o. box 613. No picture necessary, I'll know who you are when I meet you."
OK so now I get the first response to my ad on Jcommunity.com. We exchange e-mails and tell each other a little more about ourselves. I ask: are you transdenominational, because, to be perfectly honest with you, I'm a cross-denominational dresser. I'm fond of Rabbi Yitz Greenberg's admonition, "I don't care which denomination you belong to, as long as you're embarrassed by it." According to Steven Cohen, director of the Florence Heller/JCCA Research Center in New York which monitors Jewish population surveys, there is tremendous evidence for the growing shift to "nondenominationalism" in National Jewish Population Surveys, where 27 percent —more than a quarter—of those interviewed in 2000 declined to identify with a major denomination. They consider themselves "just Jewish." Even more significant is the growing number of young Jews in their 20s and 30s who opt for "transdenominationalism", which is an ability to take the best of, and leave behind the worst of, all the denominations. An example of this is the rise of "traditional, egalitarian" shuls who approximate a traditional service in terms of their liturgy and use of Hebrew, while being totally gender and sexual orientation egalitarian. They often bring in instruments for some services, invite speakers from all and no movements to address them, and consider themselves "post denominational." These Kolel services have been modelled on that style: We use a Reform prayerbook , pray mostly in Hebrew with a Conservative-style davenning and Reconstructionist tunes; we don't have a guitar or an organ but we hear Kol Nidre on violin—before sundown of course— and dance with drums for Neilah. Some would say "weird", some would say "eclectic" and some would say "just Jewish." Rabbi Sharon Brous heads a non-denominational community in Los Angeles. She writes, " I challenge every rabbi cantor and administrator to omit the movement label from our lexicon for an entire year, just to see what happens when we're forced to express what we actually believe in instead of which movement we affiliate with." My ideal JC will transcend labels but still be able to express what it believes in.
OK we still haven't met, but we're on to our second e-mail, and we get down to brass tacks. We talk money. Are you affordable, I ask; because I struggle with three kids in day school, Jewish summer camps, Bar Mitzvah costs, youth group events, and the $65 price tag of an inedible citrus fruit and a bunch of palm fronds I'm expected to wave around for a week. Add on the cost of synagogue and/or JCC membership if you belong, and the annual community campaign you should give to, and the Kolel campaign I hope you are going to give generously to tonight, and other tzedekah projects hopefully taken on during the year. That's just the Jewish stuff, let alone the karate lessons, ballet, an occasional birthday gift; going out to dinner or a movie. When Jewish conventions have a workshop entitled "The High Cost of Living Jewishly" you know affordability is an issue. How about this, I offer to my dream JC: let's have one price to "belong" to you, just like in the shtetl where the Jews paid a "Jewish tax" and for that money they got the services of a rabbi when they needed it, a funeral plot, Shabbat and holiday synagogue services. They paid a little extra to send their boys to cheder so the teacher wouldn't go hungry but that was about it. How about a Jewish tax that everyone in Toronto would pay if they wanted to opt in to you, and to opt in would mean you get a bris, day or supplementary school, Bar Mitzvah lessons and the service, Shabbos and holiday services at the synagogue of your choice (and you could go around and enjoy several or all of them if you wished), the services of a rabbi for your life cycle needs, a film at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, a lecture at Book Fair, a yearly Hebrew or Bible class, a funeral plot in a Jewish cemetery, and... the treadmill next door! There would be communal lulav and etrog for all to share, communal Shabbos dinners for all to share, communal sukkahs for all to share. JC I ask, how big is yours...building, I mean? Do you have a really big building but programs are empty and really great ideas have to go begging door to door? Size doesn't matter to me, JC, it's what you do with it that counts.
So...I think we are ready to meet. I present my third question, the toughest of all: are you prepared to be faithful?
By faithful I don't mean "religious" in the Orthodox sense of the word, I mean faith in the etymological sense of that term, from the Latin fides, fidelity: devoted to something. But I also mean "religious" in the sociological sense of the word. My dream community would think religiously- that is, they would discuss and ponder the deepest questions of the Jewish faith: G-d, Torah, Israel, humanity, tzedakah, peace, belief, spirituality, mitzvot. My dream community would act religiously-they would let their Judaism affect the way they behave; they would expect it to enrich and inform their daily lives. They would engage with people of other religions and feel confident in their own. They would see Judaism in the light of other cultures as something equally fascinating and worthwhile. They would see the whole religious enterprise as new and exciting, and they would feel obligated for its future. The JC of my dreams would be what Rav Soloveitchik, the leading orthodox thinker of the modern times calls, a covenantal community. A covenantal community lives in relation to promises it makes to each other and to something bigger than itself.
I have talked about the covenantal community in many of my classes. If I can admit jealousy here in the context of my own sins, it is the feeling I am most guilty of when it comes to other Jews who seem to have found it. I think I speak for many of you when I say I understand why people leave the liberal Jewish community and often compromise or even abandon previously deeply held beliefs, like gender equality or political liberalism for the "trade off" of living in a covenantal community. A covenantal community is one of mutual obligation. No one lacks for a shiva meal or a shiva minyan in a covenantal community. No one has to look after newborn babies and still cook and do laundry herself in a covenantal community. No one eats alone on yontiff in a covenantal community. Now I want a covenantal community but I'm not willing to compromise or abandon any of my liberal philosophies, nor my universalism, nor my critical thinking, nor my freedom. So as I have asked before I ask again: can there be a covenantal community which is not Orthodox?
Soloveitchik introduces this notion of covenantal community in his beautiful work called The Lonely Man of Faith. I am a lonely woman of faith. Soloveitchik believes that faith, by its very nature, requires a kind of solitude and even loneliness that modern man or woman just cannot stand. I think he is right. How many if you have ever tried to explain your faith- not your customs, not your traditions, not your food, but your faith- to another person? How many times have you become tongue tied in trying to explain what you believe? It's nearly impossible to define our beliefs for ourselves, let alone for someone else. And when you deeply believe, you can't help but feel existentially lonely, because that belief is so private, so personal, that it cannot be shared, even with your most intimate partner. As Shira Wolosky wrote in Judaism magazine in 2003 in "The Lonely Woman of Faith", some of us have "...a sense of mysterious presence and absence, of a divine revealed everywhere yet concealed and beyond" that is almost impossible to explain beyond those paradoxical terms.
Rav Soloveitchik's most pressing spiritual crisis was loneliness, and I suspect that it is ours, too. That's why many of us are here tonight, if we are willing to admit it. Like the "Lonely Man of Faith" he describes in his essay, Soloveitchik sought a community of friends not as a social surface relation but as an existential in-depth-relation between two individuals. Writing on the Lonely Man of Faith forty years after it had been published, Rabbi Shalom Carmy says, "One cannot ultimately truly connect with another person unless the two share a mutual commitment to something outside of themselves." The covenantal community centers around shared commitments, not merely shared interests. Its members work together to "cleanse, redeem and hallow" their existences. Mutual commitment is the foundation of this kind of community. This kind of fellowship and friendship redeems loneliness. The "other" is no longer a stranger, an "It," who concerns me only to the extent that he or she can bring me benefit or harm. Instead, they become a "Thou," a person of equal and independent worth to whom I am committed and whom I engage in true dialogue.
The consequence of the insistent individualism of our society is that we "have" relationships rather than emerge from them. Community is just a name for an aggregate of individuals—detached selves who socially construct ties with each other: knitting clubs, soccer teams. The covenantal community, though, is rooted in members' commitments to each other in pursuit of a common good.
I am willing to acknowledge that, even in a covenantal community, we may not ever fully alleviate a sense of estrangement from the larger, national, even human community. Comfort in one's religious family is no guarantee of comfort and meaning within the larger community. Two of my three children have left the day school system, for their own personal needs, and I watch them try and navigate their way through the secular school system while retaining their fierce loyalty to Judaism, the Jewish calendar which always seems to collide with the school calendar, their kashrut, their Shabbos, their way of looking at the world through Jewish lenses. We lonely people of faith often feel bifurcated- at home with our deep-seated spirituality, but unsure of where to take it, where can we feel safe and not stupid talking about it.
So, JC, I'm looking for someone to creatively share this crisis of faith. To live in a liberal covenantal community which also participates actively in the life of the human family. I know that most Jews do not have confidence in their own personal faith, or in their synagogue (how many of you had Rosh Hashana lunch discussions with family and friends as to whose service was worse?), or in their religion, or in their God: they do not believe that these things, even if they were fully invested in them, can actually create community and transform the world of pressures and problems into a sanctified, safe space. I'd be willing to try, though, if I had a partner. I know it says in our Yom Kippur liturgy, V'anetem et nafshotachem- "you shall afflict your souls." Yom Kippur is supposed to make us uncomfortable. But maybe, JC suitor, I have scared you off. I have made you a little too uncomfortable. Maybe my demands are just too high. Can you come just a little closer so we can talk about it ?
We've successfully founded a transdenominational community at Kolel. We've tried to make it affordable. Perhaps in the coming years we can even make it covenantal. Let's begin tonight with an easy "new tradition." Whenever I am in Jerusalem I am almost moved to tears by the announcement made on the bima after each Shabbat morning service, "if anyone this morning is looking for a Shabbat meal, this week's host is the Goldberg family. Please meet them by the ark after services." I'm looking for two families or individuals to identify themselves to me tonight, after services, here on the bima, to be host families for anyone at our service who has nowhere to go for the break-fast. I need uninhibited hosts and uninhibited guests. You don't have to tell me if you need a place for break-fast, you will simply meet the host right here after the shofar is blown. But you do need to tell me tonight if you are willing to be a host. I will announce tomorrow at morning services that no one at the Kolel service needs to be alone for the breakfast- if I get those hosts, of course. And hosts- you may not get any guests, but you will have made the point and started the ball rolling.
The beauty of Kol Nidre is that we actually come together to be alone. We experience ourselves just for 24 hours as lonely men and women of faith, because by necessity Yom Kippur requires of us a certain self-containment and privacy in order to get inside for true personal self-reflection. But its also a communal time, a time when even the most disconnected of us reaches out somehow to the other disconnected souls among us and we form a magical, almost mystical bond. You can feel it when we sing, and when we smile at each other's kids, and when we come up to the bima in hope of healing, and when we stand in a silence for the Kol Nidre so profound you can hear your neighbor's heart beating. Yom Kippur, according to the Rabbis, is traditionally the time of year to make "shiduchim" or matches. Immediately following Yom Kippur, in the days of the Temple, single women would go out dressed in their finest whites and dance for the single men, and matches would be made. (Hey, I think I see some fine looking women in white here tonight, in case anyone is interested...) In the Talmud, Rabbi Simeon Ben Gamaliel is quoted as saying, "There were no happier days in Israel than the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur." So, in essence, Yom Kippur is to be the day when lonely men and women of faith find each other across the divide and begin the work of building an antidote to that loneliness-a caring community.
Wait! I've got mail! It's from my JC. "Am not scared. Am willing to meet. Picture enclosed." (Open frame on the congregation.) Shana Tova.
Sermons and Divrei Torah
Additional Resources
Elul: Period of Preparation
Yamim Noraim: Days of Awe
Rosh Hashanah: Introduction
Shofar Symbolism
The Custom of Tashlich
Yom Kippur: Introduction
G'mar Chatima Tova...
