Erev Rosh Hashanah 5769/29 September 2008
October 26, 2008
Only Connect
People often tell me—some of you here tonight, in fact, have told me—that they’re not very religious. “I don’t go to synagogue much,” they say. Yet the same people tell me stories from their childhood—memories of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, shofars sounding, tashlikh services, breadcrumbs, fasting, no school, best clothes, and on and on…. And it means so much to them, to come, and to bring their children. Even those who tell me how un-moved they are by High Holy Day services, how dreaded the sermons, how awful the traffic in and out of the ladies’ room—still they come!
You’re here.
Why?
I’d like us to take this opportunity, tonight, since we’re all here, to look at one another and to look at ourselves, to look deeply into ourselves, and ask:why are we here?
You might say, guilt. Or superstition. To repent of our sins. Or to honor our parents, or grandparents. Or to set an example for our children. To talk to God. Or to check out the latest fall fashions. Or to see our friends. You might say, as my father did when I asked him why people go to High Holy Day services, to reaffirm our Jewishness.
Or perhaps you would say you have come tonight to give voice to a wordless longing, to address a need that, most of the time, you are not aware of. You might say, as I would, that you are here for community: to be with your community, or once again in the hopes of finding community, of connecting yourself to a community of meaning, a sacred community, kehilla kedosha.
And whatever you might say, it all comes back to this: Kehilla kedosha, sacred community. It’s why you’re here, it’s why I’m here. You may think you are here for something entirely different, you may feel that you’ve found your true place elsewhere. But I believe that, with the exception of any minors who are here literally under duress of parental force, this is why all of us are here. And even those of you here against your will—if you ever, on some future Rosh Hashanah, find yourself choosing to walk into a synagogue anywhere in the world, ask yourself why, and think about this.
There is a web that connects guilt and superstition, filial and parental duty, the inclination to repent. It draws in even the clothes and the social stuff, and it certainly includes issues of identity, of Jewishness, and of God. At the center of the web sits the “why are we here?” question, and the answer is, we all want our time on this earth to mean something. We want it to matter. To whom should it matter, to whom could it, if not to each other? Even God wants nothing more than that we take care of one another. You can read all about it in Isaiah, as we will Yom Kippur morning. Kehilla kedosha.
This longing for sacred community offers us a great opportunity, and a great challenge.
An opportunity because, well—why does a synagogue exist if not for the sake of sacred community? This is our laboratory. This, our place to make it happen.
And a challenge, because desiring community, saying it is our raison d’etre, does not mean we have achieved it, yet. And the fact that, after the last cry of the shofar on Yom Kippur, some of us will not see one another again until next Rosh Hashanah; the fact that so many of us would have claimed another reason for being here tonight; the fact that some view the synagogue as a fee-for-services institution, which we join on account of the religious school, to see the children “Bar Mitzvah-ed,” or to have a place to go on the High Holy Days; these facts suggest that the need for sacred community, though perhaps experienced by all of us, has yet to be met here for all of us.
I became a rabbi because it is impossible to be a Jew alone. Jewish life requires community—intentional community, community that produces and embraces holiness and meaning. When we pray or study, or decide points of halakha; when we mourn or celebrate; when we eat or play or raise children; when we build institutions or organize against them, we do it in community. In conversation: sometimes quiet, comforting; sometimes shouting, arguing; but always together. Never alone. And as we do these things together, our prayers, studies, celebrations and lamentations, our losses and triumphs, take on meaning they would not have had otherwise: sacred meaning.
Since I first read it in college, I have loved E.M. Forster’sHoward’s End, with its famous epigraph “Only connect.” I love it all the more for its having been anticipated by Hillel’s wisdom two millennia earlier: “Do not separate yourself from the community”(1) ; “If I am not for myself who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?” (2) This reminds us that not only love and friendship, but justice and self-knowledge, and, ultimately, God, and holiness, abide in our relationships.
I strive to pursue this truth for myself, and to bring it to others. We live, however, in a society that prizes independence and self-sufficiency and privacy and quiet—quiet classrooms and libraries, quiet streets and neighborhoods. And industriousness—we are all so terribly busy. All of these qualities hinder community—not fatally, but a little bit: harder to know your classmates, your neighbors, and the rows and rows people sitting all around you tonight.
In my work as a rabbi and teacher, I encounter people isolated by illness, or age, or youth, isolated by family responsibilities, by any of a myriad different life choices, perhaps always surrounded by people, but alone with their fears or dreams, believing they are the only ones who feel this way, the only ones who think as they do, the only ones, the only: private, and self- sufficient, and lonely.
And I walk into their homes, or their hospital rooms, or they walk into my office, and they tell me stories about their grandchildren, or their divorce, or their cancer. Each story is unique, of course, sometimes horribly so: The parents who received a phone call informing them that their 19-year-old son, off mountain climbing alone, had apparently lost his footing and plunged to his death; their faces drawn, frozen like masks, eyes empty. The woman with disabling osteoporosis who has buried one child—car crash—and a husband—after long illness—and now sits housebound with her surviving son, he confined to a wheelchair, having lost both legs to diabetes. The man, unmarried in a small southern town, with nothing but the struggling menswear store his father started and the care of his ailing mother. They tell me their stories and their fears—that God really isn’t listening to their prayers, that there is no God—or their faith—that they feel loved, and blessed, even in the midst of their loss.
I listen, and I offer to pray with them, and they almost always accept, even those who say God is a fairy tale. And I use ancient words, carved into our collective Jewish unconscious, and I use their words, which I have heard, and we ask for what they need, even when we don’t know exactly what that might be. And in that moment, they are connected to something larger than themselves—kehilla kedosha—a community with a history and a heart that can contain all the pain and rage they might throw at it, that teaches us how to move from contentment to devastation and back, sometimes even to joy, without losing our footing and falling into madness, as off a mountain, alone. We are connected to something larger, and it steadies us. This is all I have to offer most times, and so far, it has been enough—the slightest lightening of the load, brightening of the path, and we feel the littlest bit strengthened, and it is enough. We go forward.
If our community can do this for us in our darkest moments, how much more when we are merely struggling through our daily rounds? A rabbi can represent the community to one of its members in a time of need, but all of us together must be the community. Only with everyone pulling together do we have the entity that sustains the ancient words and stories, the human capital to back the promissory note that says, despite all appearances to the contrary: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. We are in this together. We share a language of words and stories and ritual and values. Together we can be powerful. We can change the rules of the game. We can make meaning out of life’s chaos and confusion, even of its bitter leftovers. If we do this right, if we pool our strength, we not only survive; we thrive.
So how do we make it happen? How do we nurture that desire for sacred community, nourish the connection, so that, rather than a faint and sometimes irritating reminder of all we haven’t managed to achieve in the rush and press of everyday, of all we’ve lost to the distractions and responsibilities of life, it becomes something sustaining, something that both anchors us and lifts us up? How, short of all joining hands right now and dancing a hora around the sanctuary?
We return to the words of Rabbi Hillel.
If I am not for myself, he taught, who will be for me?
Sacred community does not require us to repudiate our sovereign selves. It insists, rather, that we speak for ourselves, that we make sure our needs are being met. And so here at Temple Emanu-El we ask that you allow us to honor your particular circumstances: By adding your name or the names of loved ones to the list for Mishebeirach, the healing prayer we say each Shabbat. By sharing your besorot tovot, your good news of the week, which we also bless each Shabbat. By accepting meals in times of need, whether your need was brought on by illness, or death, or birth. By asking us to remember your loved ones’ Yahrtzeits. By enabling us to send holiday gifts and greetings to your college students. By celebrating with us your life-cycle events. By calling when you need help.
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” How can we be for you unless you show us the way?
“If I am only for myself,” Hillel continued, “what am I?” Sacred community does require that we live beyond the dimension of sovereign self, and reach out to support others, or to support the common interest. And so, here at Temple Emanu-El, we offer opportunities to do so: By helping at the Brotherhood/Sisterhood cook-off events that provide those meals to our families in need (the next one is on October 15th). By participating in Mitzvah Day, November 2nd, when we will provide meals and clothes and toiletries and babysitting for the needy beyond our congregational family and provide fall yard clean-ups for those who cannot do it themselves and collect tzedakah for tolerance training and Holocaust education, and learn to advocate against the genocide in Darfur, and bring a children’s choir to brighten the day for JRC residents, and so much more. By asking us to add you to our congregational email blast, which will keep you informed about your community, about what’s happening and who’s celebrating and who’s in mourning. And then by visiting a shiva house. By offering a ride to a Temple event for someone who doesn’t drive. By bringing your gifts, as the Torah teaches us: whatever you have to bring, whatever your heart prompts you.
“If I am only for myself, what am I?” If we never reach out to help another, we are truly alone.
Hillel concludes his teaching: “If not now, when?” The one thing we can never get any more of: time. There is urgency to this matter, because time is so short. Community will mean different things to each one of us, but let us all begin the sacred work of building it, today. “If not now, when?”
Once there was a man named Shlomo who loved his synagogue, his little shul. He was the first to arrive every morning, in the cold pre-dawn, building a fire to warm the room and sweeping the floor and shoveling the path clear of snow before the early minyan. And he was the last to leave every night after evening prayers, having straightened all the pews and lovingly stacked all the siddurim—prayer books. Where other members of the congregation kibitzed, he prayed with focused intention, and while his peers argued loudly over their study desks he listened to everyone with passionate interest.
On morning Shlomo awoke to find that a great snow had fallen the night before. He had to climb through a window to get out, and he dug for an hour just to open his front door. It took him another two hours to clear a path from his house to the road. Somewhere along the way, Shlomo realized it was too late to arrive at the synagogue before morning prayers and study had ended. In an agony of disappointment, trying not to think about the cheerful fire that would not be lit in the synagogue stove to greet any who had made their way through the snow, Shlomo went back into his house to say his prayers alone.
He began with a heavy heart, but soon found himself absorbed in his prayers as never before. When he sat down to study, he luxuriated in the quiet, and in the freedom to set his own pace.
The next morning, still weary from the previous day’s exertions, Shlomo decided to stay in bed a little later than usual. “Surely, the congregation can do without me one more day,” he thought.”
Once again, his solitary prayers took on new clarity for him, his studies carried him to new depths of understanding.
Several days passed like this, and back at the shul, the congregation began to worry. They had certainly missed Shlomo’s warm fires and neatly swept floors, but most of all they worried that some ill had befallen him. They sent the rabbi to visit Shlomo and make sure he was well.
The rabbi found him late that morning, just finishing his studies. Delighted to see his visitor, Shlomo invited the rabbi in. Over warm bread and coffee, the rabbi asked: “are you well? We’ve been worried about you. When will you return to our shul?” Shlomo told the rabbi about how he’d passed the last few days. “So you see, rabbi, I am not at all sure I want to return. Here, I can warm myself by my own fire. No-one disturbs me with needless gossip or loud arguments. No one but me tracks any dirt on the floor, and I have only one chair and one set of books to keep tidy. Rabbi, I do love the shul, but why should I come back?
For a moment the two sat silently, staring into Shlomo’s fire. It seemed the rabbi might make no reply, except to pick up the poker and idly pull one brightly burning coal away from the rest. With greater exposure to the air, the coal’s steady flame leapt up in a burst of light, and then, just as suddenly, subsided. They watched the red coal grow gradually dimmer until it went black. The rest of the fire went on burning merrily.
The rabbi picked up the poker again, and pushed the dead coal back into the fire. Soon enough, it caught, and its added fuel contributed just enough to make the room feel warmer, brighter.
You are like this coal, Shlomo, the rabbi finally said. Step away from the community, and at first you find yourself bursting with new energy, fresh perspectives. But you cannot sustain this alone. Without the warmth of the other coals, your own flame will burn out.
The rabbi rose to go. I hope to see you soon, Shlomo….
“I’m not very religious,” people tell me. “I don’t go to synagogue much.”
But you’re here, tonight. It’s a place to start.
Do not separate yourself from the community, Hillel taught. Guard your fire.
Only connect.
(1)Mishnah Avot, 2:4.
(2) Mishnah Avot, 1:14.
