Well… here we are in the Palace. Surrounded by lush deep red velvet. Dwarfed by the space.
Today it’s just us. The shul goers and those who religiously come to services on the second day of Rosh Hashanah because they feel it’s the right thing to do. Family. Today there is a feeling of intimacy, even in this cavernous room. Today it feels that we can talk truthfully about us, our lives together, this synagogue community we are a part of and, in many ways, we are the core of.
To begin with, I want to tell you that I worry a lot about synagogues in general and our synagogue in particular. Oh, I have all the same concerns and worries as everyone does. But, when I think of the Jewish people and the Jewish future, what really keeps me up at night, the thought that makes me stare at the ceiling in distress, is whether synagogues are going to survive as institutions that matter.
I know that’s my own idiosyncratic concern. No one else probably cares that much about whether synagogues survive or not. Who would? But you need to understand, synagogue is not just the place where I earn my livelihood; synagogue represents to me the very heart of Judaism, its core, its central and most essential institution. I have spent the majority of my professional life thinking about how to make synagogue life meaningful, how to make synagogues stronger and more viable, so the question as to whether synagogues live or die is a question about the validity of my life’s work. This is my 18th Rosh Hashanah at Kol Shofar, and in that time I have put every fiber of my being into shaping our synagogue into a model of a vibrant and meaningful community. It’s hard to bear the thought that I am presiding over a soon to be defunct species, the “synago‐saurus.
So I lie awake some nights asking myself, “is it possible that the real purpose of a synagogue is to prepare kids to have a bar or bat mitzvah? Is that what Judaism is all about? Do we want Kol Shofar to be another bar mitzvah mill? Is that really a meaningful contribution to the destiny of the Jewish People? Does anybody anymore really think that synagogues matter?”
Well, you are here today; you represent the most committed of the community, so let me ask you: sit quietly for a moment or two and ask yourselves whether you feel strongly that our synagogue is meaningful to you? I’m guessing that almost of all of you will answer in the affirmative, so I want you to take some extra time to think about what it is specifically that you find meaningful about this synagogue? Now turn the person sitting next to you and for the next five or six minutes share with each other a brief story about a time when your synagogue really mattered to you. Or didn’t matter, if that’s the case…
For the next few minutes I’m going to tell you what I think about this question. Some of what I have to say you may find harsh. Some of it you may not agree with. That’s ok. I intend this to be the beginning of a conversation we are going to have all year long at Kol Shofar, so that when next Year, God willing, we gather in our new sanctuary and Beit Am for Rosh Hashanah, we will know, with one heart and one mind, the purpose and mission of our synagogue, what we stand for, and we will believe that this institution matters.
Rabbi Larry Hoffman, a scholar who has spent the better part of two decades studying and thinking about how synagogues can regain their vitality and meaning, and who is going to be our scholar in residence in January, suggests we ponder a simple question: What is the purpose of a synagogue? I think most people who belong to synagogues would answer, “To give children a Jewish education.” That’s after all why most people join synagogues in the first place. Now no one thinks that providing a Jewish education for children is unimportant, but this attitude has created a kind of “pediatric” Judaism that caters to children but has very little of substance to offer to adults. And if the purpose of a Jewish education is to give children knowledge, skills, beliefs and identity, one has to ask how parents can pass all of this on to their children when they themselves don’t have it. So synagogues become the surrogates, trying to give children a passionate Jewish identity based on knowledge and experience in 5 hours a week, which is a business model destined to fail. Moreover, it stands to reason that if the central purpose of the synagogue is to educate children then bar and bat mitzvah become the central ritual of Jewish life, and presumably, the end of the educational journey. The synagogue becomes a bar and bat mitzvah mill and most congregants will come to services only if their invited to the simcha.
I recall one parent here, many years ago, who did not want to send her daughter to Beit Binah and became incensed when I told her that her daughter had to learn Hebrew to be bat mitzvah at Kol Shofar. She yelled at me that “I was denying her daughter her God‐given right to a bat mitzvah”. And that statement represents a more dangerous implication of pediatric Judaism.
When synagogues become places where one goes to buy a Jewish education for kids, that makes us a consumer oriented organization, like a health club: you pay a fee for membership, which entitles you to receive goods and services in return, like High Holiday tickets, or a rabbi to officiate at your life‐cycle event, or a bar mitzvah for your kid. And once you’ve gotten what you paid for, there’s no reason to stay around. In fact, that’s the great challenge for synagogues these days: what creative product can we sell to people that will get them to remain members after their kid’s bar or bat mitzvah?
In a fee for service synagogue, members feel entitled to get what they’ve paid for, so synagogues become communities of gratification rather than communities of obligation. Judaism and the Jewish future are reduced to a transaction rather than being experienced as a sacred journey to the numinous. The community becomes a place for people to get their needs met, and ceases to be a place where relationships are formed and people feel responsible to and for each other. Not only is Judaism cheapened, but relationships are cheapened too: members are users, and the synagogue becomes something to be used. The anthropologist Mary Douglas describes the market community as “a place where we are spun loose from commitments to other people and from assumed rules of conduct”.
You can tell what kind of community a synagogue is by paying attention to the grumbling that goes on. When people complain that they aren’t getting what they want, what they’re entitled to have – that’s a community of gratification. Communities of gratification are never satisfying for long, and are rarely purveyors of lasting meaning. You join them, you use them, and you leave them. In this market driven world, synagogues have little meaning as institutions.
I believe that a synagogue has four purposes and that these purposes will make synagogue communities matter. The four purposes of a synagogue are: to facilitate people’s Jewish growth; to awaken people’s spirituality; to unleash acts of loving‐kindness and justice in the world; and to create sacred community. And while these four purposes are relevant to children, I believe that the primary focus of the synagogue needs to be on adults.
These days we’re all pretty used to the idea that life is a journey, and that it unfolds in ways that are sometimes surprising, sometimes expected, sometimes devastatingly painful, sometimes ripe with joy. We know that we will not end up where we started, that we are not meant to, that there will be turns and detours along the road that will take us to unexpected vistas and experiences. A community that respects the natural flow of peoples’ journeys would become an attractive place, where the sharing of our “exodus” stories would be cherished and valued.
Our synagogue needs to be a place that encourages people to share their Jewish stories, of growing up, of leaving the fold, of theological struggle, of searching for meaning, and which cherishes them. Everyone who walks in the building must be accepted exactly where they are in their journey, whether they are knowledgeable or not, whether they are observant or believers or not. The greatest act of welcoming we can give in this community is to show that we accept people where they are as Jews.
To help people grow as Jews we need to be committed to teaching and learning. We must provide everyone with the tools, the resources and the experiences to help them grow as Jews. We can’t tell them how to grow. We have to provide as many kinds of learning opportunities for growth as possible and encourage people to make use of them. We can guide them gently; we must never insult them for their lack of knowledge or experience.
We must be centers for learning the texts and literature of our traditions and our teaching must be based on reverence for the tradition and the greatest intellectual integrity. For beginners and life‐long learners alike, the meaningfulness of a synagogue will depend on whether there are opportunities to encounter, study and make meaning of our basic fundamental texts. To become, in a word, a community of learners.
You know, when I said “we” just before, I really meant “you”. Expecting the rabbis and the paid staff to guide people on their Jewish journey to me seems just like dropping your kids at Beit Binah and expecting the teachers to turn your children into Jews. It never works that way. No, the greatest learning for people will come from their interaction with you. So if you want a synagogue that creates meaning, you are going to have to feel your obligation not just to your own religious path, but to the entire community. When someone walks into shul and looks around anxiously, you have to go over to them and help them feel at home. It’s not the “Greeters” job to do it, it’s everyone’s job. And it’s a mitzvah. If we are to help people on the periphery become more integrated into the community, you will have to reach out to them: sit with them during services, talk to them about your Jewish journeys over Kiddush, invite them for a Shabbat meal. You will have to be the guides, who listen to the newcomer and point the way to greater Jewish experience and knowledge. Or you can sit around and complain about people who put their siddurim on the floor or who botch the blessings over the torah, but that just sends you back to being a community of gratification with no get out of jail free card.
A second core part of the synagogues mission is to awaken peoples’ spirituality. By spirituality I mean the personal experience of transcendence, of mystery, of God. Spirituality is discovered in moments when we are confronted with the existential experiences of being a human being. Birth, death, illness and healing, suffering and joy, fear and anxiety, sex and passion – all are openings to the numinous, and therefore all must be part of the content of synagogue life. Spirituality occurs when experience shakes us up and awakens us to deeper meaning. It may arise out of an experience of pain, or when singing with the community, or being in nature, when praying with passion, or when we simply experience the natural ebb and flow of the breath. What all these examples have in common is that they stimulate the recognition that we are at one with something beyond ourselves – it may be the community, the earth, humanity, or God. Spirituality fundamentally connotes connectedness, ‐ to God, to Israel, to humanity, to nature – and as such it is the antidote to the loneliness and alienation we experience all around us.
We will want to be able to provide experiences of prayer, of meditation and silence, of song and chant, and physical practices such as yoga to enable our congregants to experience the numinous. Our synagogue must support and encourage curiosity and questioning about God, as well as opportunities to experience God (and not just to intellectualize about God). It must support and encourage an examination of life’s purpose. It must offer ancient and new rituals that will hold and support deep and powerful emotions. And if synagogues hope to be places of that matter they must be able to explain the spiritual meaning of our tradition.
The third purpose of a synagogue that matters is to unleash acts of loving‐kindness and justice in the world. It’s been my experience that when you participate in a God centered, spiritually centered community, there is a natural arising in the heart of compassion, and a desire to bring healing to yourself, to the people around you and to the world. We tend to think of this as giving tzedakah, or doing acts of tikkun olam – which is usually translated as repairing the world. The problem with these value concepts is that they are simplistic. When we give tzedakah we are treating the other as an image of God whose existence obligates us to take care of them, but we are not making any real sustainable change. I’ve paid the mortgages or the electric bills for any number of people in need over this past year, but I have not successfully altered their reality. If I repair a car or a broken light I’ve fixed a technical problem. When I engage in tikkun olam and feed the hungry or build a house for the homeless, I’ve helped the world, but I have focused on a technical solution. Healing the world – not repairing it – requires being engaged in a process that leads to systemic, adaptive and sustainable changes in the world around us.
We should never minimize the importance of acts of loving‐kindness, but we must remember that helping is not healing. Helping is an act of kindness. Healing produces sustainable results. This distinction was brought home to me with great clarity a couple of months ago. For years we and local churches have been feeding the homeless through the Southern Marin Coalition, and in the winter we were able to provide temporary indoor shelter for the homeless as well. Just 6 weeks ago or so the Marin Organizing Committee convened a public meeting in which Supervisor Susan Adams pledged that she would work to create and provide funding for a permanent and sustainable homeless shelter in Marin County. In the course of her remarks she made clear that had it not been for the Marin Organizing Committee the homeless of Marin would have remained below the radar of the county and a permanent shelter would never be built. Sitting there that night I was overcome with the feeling that the Torah had suddenly become real. What happened at that meeting WAS Torah!
Giving tzedakah, and acting with chesed‐ kindness‐ are important mitzvot. But when Kol Shofar is able to prod the county government to build a much‐needed permanent homeless shelter then Kol Shofar matters in a new and profound way. We take on an added dimension of meaningfulness to ourselves and to those around us.
By the way, for the past two years, maybe more, Kol Shofar has not had a tikkun olam committee. I wonder why that is? Perhaps we have lost that dimension of meaning in our synagogue? Or perhaps people are not willing to engage in projects that they find less than meaningful? Or perhaps we have allowed people to be users of the community without asking them to make commitments to help others.
Providing excellence in learning, spiritual awakening, and an outpouring of justice and compassion in the world are the first steps toward creating a sacred community. As Larry Hoffman says, “Sacred community is an organization of relationships and acts which emulate God. Synagogue is that set of relationships and acts, not a building.” Sacred community challenges us to bring the presence of God into all our relationships. Sacred relationships become relationships in which we feel the presence of God. When we meet in the halls, when we sit in committee meetings, when we speak to the staff – can we be mindful enough to make the relationship sacred? And what if we could? What if we began to treat every person we encountered in this community as truly an image of God? Would it change the nature of our community? Would people experience our community differently, not as a market in which to purchase some Jewish experience for a fee, but as a place where the human being is treated with respect and honor? Isn’t that the kind of community you, and they, would want to be a part of?
Rabbi Noach Weinberg of Aish haTorah in Jerusalem once gave a talk to new students at the yeshiva in which he said to them that the whole purpose of Judaism, the whole purpose of life, is that we should experience a bone‐tingling bliss, continually, all of our lives. Most people, burdened with the weights of daily life, cannot imagine such a possibility. But what if a synagogue could be a community in which you could know that joy? What if a synagogue could be a community in which you could know that depth of meaning?
The only real questions are: Is our synagogue that synagogue? And, are you willing to think and discuss how we might become that synagogue?
I think we could be that synagogue. I think that as we build a new building we might actually transform ourselves into a new community, a sacred community, committed to making a real difference to our selves our neighbors and our people. I think you don’t want to settle for mediocrity. I think we have no choice but to strive to become that synagogue.
Because fundamentally, synagogues are too important to the future of Judaism to let them become second rate institutions and drift into an empty meaninglessness. Because if we don’t try to answer these questions now, in the years to come we’ll have a beautiful new building and a community that no longer thinks that synagogues matter.
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