We All Belong To Each Other

Rabbi's Notes - December 2001

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

Greetings from my spookily quiet study. I am, as I write, eleven days into my sabbatical. It's been a piece of heaven so far. I am grateful to all of you who are giving me this period of quiet and reflection. You're all being so serious and wonderful about not interrupting me! The "rabbi line" has barely rung in over a week. I know that all sorts of things are going on with all of you, but I don't know any details. It's great for a temporary experience say, two months. But I already know that I wouldn't wish for myself a lifetime without all the "interruptions." I am realizing that in my regular life I spend a lot of time thinking often a little anxiously -- about all of you. Someone is ill; a child is having difficulties; someone is not happy with how things are going in the Jewish community; someone is planning a simcha; someone else is asking big spiritual questions. I feel like I should be tuning in, listening, maybe organizing some sort of support, praying, showing up. Sometimes it is more than I can handle gracefully. Sometimes it weighs heavily. Maybe I should think a bit about not being such a nudnik, trusting more that things will work out as they need to. But mostly, even though it frightens me a bit, I feel deeply grateful for all this stuff to worry about. It falls on me in some percentage because I'm your rabbi. But I am convinced that the much larger percentage is simply because I am part of this community with you. I share this mantle of concern with many of you. We worry about each other because we care about each other. As the French theologian of community, Jean Vanier, says, "We belong to each other."

I didn't take this sabbatical just to take my phone off the hook. As you know, I have set aside this time to reflect on the very issue of community. My specific question is whether the practice of community is something that can be taught or mentored in a place where it is presently not very strong. Can a group, specifically a Jewish group, learn to have a deeper experience of community together? If so, how might one teach them? To begin to answer this specific question, of course I have to wander around in the big questions of community. What exactly is it? How can you tell when a community is alive and vibrant? What makes it that way in one group and not in another?

One way to begin a piece of research is to formulate a hypothesis and then go out and test it. My particular questions don't necessarily lend themselves to scientific method, but I do have a couple of working hypotheses about how community does what it does. And I'll be checking them out with different people and places over these next weeks. My first hypothesis is that at the center of any loving, vibrant community there is a core of people who have some specific quality or approach or way of being. I don't know the content of that quality yet, except intuitively. But I am willing to bet that in every healthy community you will find people who have some very specific and important ways of love and connection. I have a hunch that it may take may take just a few such people to set something in motion that affects everyone. I've invited myself to several different communities that have a reputation for being alive and wonderful. So I'll be looking to see if those people are there -- and, if they are, what it is they do.

Another hypothesis I am beginning to entertain is that there is a transformation that happens in individuals at some point as they connect with a community. People quite naturally approach a group to see what they can get out of experiencing what goes on there. We all begin our life in community as consumers. But it seems like somewhere along the line some people start to realize that it is the very responsibilities of showing up and serving that bring them what they were wishing for in the first place. There is something about this realization that makes people start to feel like they are part of the texture of the group, part of its core. As Jean Vanier says so beautifully, people start to "belong to each other." But is this actually what happens? And if so, why do some people begin to belong so quickly and thoroughly, while others stay on the periphery or wander away?

A third piece of the puzzle is something about mission. There seems to be a paradoxical relationship between the relationships within the community and the programmatic things a community does. One might think that they get friendly with the people in the group because they are actually wanting to engage in the programmatic activities (like services, study, assistance to people in need.) Or one might look at those programs as devices (in the best sense of the term) to help people come together in loving and intense ways. Does program drive relationship? Does relationship drive program? Obviously each affects the other; but if you want something to change or grow or deepen, where do you push?

The way it is starting to seem to me is that in a vibrant community there is a loving, connective center which is somehow open and permeable at the edges. What creates that center? What creates those edges?

There are those who say that community is a fundamental human structure. We all exist to love and be loved, and you have to do it someplace. In fact there are those, like my ever-inspiring friend Kent Hoffman, who say that community mirrors something about the essential nature of God. Well, that kicks up a whole load of questions, doesn't it?

Oh, one more thing: anytime you talk about community, you end up talking about people's personal wounds, losses and traumas. Something about the work of community just gets you involved with your own hurt self and with others'. But how? And why? And to what end? What's the role of people's own wounds and suffering in the work of community?

As you can see, I'm working hard on my questions. I've received copies lately from several sources of a great essay called "Searching for Wise Questions" by somebody named Laura Chasin, who runs a project she calls the "Public Conversations Project." She writes, "Questions have impact even before they are answered." But I am engaging in another kind of inquiry at the same time. Before my sabbatical began, I put a query out to a whole bunch of rabbis and others about what I should do to learn more about community. . I basically said "yes!" to the first five or six suggestions that came my way. I also spent a couple of long evenings looking through thousands of book titles that mention community, and I pretty intuitively selected about fifteen to be my textbooks. Finally I have a list on my blackboard of about twenty people who seem like they would have interesting things to say about these questions, and I'm trying to get together with many of them for a chat. And so I'll be going all over the place, to an interracial Catholic parish in LA and to a prison organizer in Philadelphia and a conference about congregation building and a reputedly fabulous lay-led minyan. I've already read about infant development and fractals and advertising and epidemiology. Lots of ideas and pieces of ideas, impressions, intuitions, experiences and stories are floating with my questions, arranging themselves in curious ways. I'm trying to learn by being both linear and indolent at the same time.

We'll see how this time of inquiry goes. I don't know if I'll learn anything of practical value or not. I daydream about all those researchers who used to put different things into petri dishes filled with strep, trying to develop antibiotics. And then the answer actually came from someone's moldy sandwich. But I can already tell you that I feel renewed and enlivened by both the content of what I am reading, discussing and experiencing and by the endlessly nourishing experience of thinking about ideas and words and people's experiences. Maybe next month I'll have some conclusions to offer about community. For now I can just tell you that you've given me a great gift with this time away. And that I don't want to be away forever! I hope you are all well and happy, safe and connected with each other with love, Margaret

Copyright 2001 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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