It's a part of rabbi-ing that they don't tell you about in school -- how exciting and slightly scary it feels to see everyone walk in the door of the shul on Rosh Hashana, that it feels a bit like throwing a big party, seeing the beautiful, expectant faces of your community as they enter the room… 'I invited them, and they actually came!' And of course no one could have prepared me for the loveliness of how you-all sing. Oh my gosh, it takes my breath away.
The High Holy Days are lots of things -- but one thing they are is a mustering of the Jewish community. We see each other at our strongest and most beautiful. (Not everyone, I know -- some of our community 'wouldn't be caught dead…' at a Rosh Hashana service. In some funny way I think we feel your presence in the room too.) What a gracious, earnest, hopeful, loving energy we are when we are together.
This is the twenty-third year that I have had the honor of throwing this party with all of you. So I've watched those babes-in-arms grow up and go out into the world. I've seen those young parents get grey, lose their own parents, put in flush toilets and buy health insurance. I've seen the slightly-older become quite older, seen new folks move here and get established, new babies get born, people leave, some die. Even though I see many of you throughout the year, there is a time-lapse quality to looking at all of you on Rosh Hashana, my friends and community moving through life. It all seems very beautiful and very fragile at this time of year.
God-willing, we will all grow up and grow older. We watch those ahead of us in line as they face the challenges that await us. We watch those younger than us start catching up with our milestones. We need each other more and more each year.
I would like for us to age beautifully as a community.
We have pioneered some ways to be Jewishly-young and adventurous together: our river mikvehs and Tu B'shevat seders, ritual experiments in menarche, bar and bat mitzvah, divorce and more, our sin buffet and human rights seder, our red tent, our plaque-free way of doing money, our shtetl-style open membership… We have also had some inspiring struggles: trying to figure out how to be inclusive of all the generations, to talk about
Israel, to address violence and xenophobia even as we love Torah, to hold space for so many perspectives and personalities.
I see our Jewish community as brilliant, adventurous, inventive, principled and generous. All good traits with which to age together. Over this next year, our Board and I would like to host an ongoing conversation, an inquiry into how we can best care for each other as we all move through life. We would like to study together, brainstorm, dream, reflect on the successes and failures of what we have already tried. We would like to learn about how other communities care for each other, look at models. We would like to try some experiments. By the end of the year -- "bli neder," as they say, without taking any vows! -- we would like to see that we have moved into more thoughtful forms of community care.
Just to start the ball rolling, here are a couple of the questions that are on my mind:
1. What are the best roles for the Jewish community in caring for someone who is in need? Where do we stop and family, friends, social programs or paid help begin? What can we realistically and dependably offer each other?
2. What does distinctively Jewish care and support look like? Is there a role for prayer, for ritual, for study with people who are in need?
3. Most people are shy. How do we get more comfortable visiting each other? How do we de-isolate? How can we move across generational and cultural comfort zones?
4. I believe that there is a fundamental human need to do mitzvot, to contribute to the good of the world, to be needed and valued -- even when people are sick, frail or disabled. How might we engage each other in meaningful contribution, especially those of us who are in need of care as well?
5. Many in our community can't afford the health care that they need. What is our role here? Is it part of our community care obligation to address health care politics? And how do we help each other in the breach?
I would love to talk with any of you who are interested in helping to facilitate this conversation in our community. I see a need to gather information, to look back on our own successes and failures, to figure out how to best talk, dream, assess and plan. I have lots of ideas, and some of you certainly will too.
You might be interested to know that this kind of community process is a very Reconstructionist thing to do. Some of you may even remember way back to when Rabbi Bob Gluck, from the Reconstructionist movement, came out here to spend a weekend with MCJC. At one point he offered an example of the difference between the various movements. (This is reaching back almost two decades, so undoubtedly I've got this scrambled a bit. Please forgive me, Bob!) Take the matter of keeping kosher. The orthodox say you have to keep kosher as described in halakha, period. The Conservative movement has a central committee of rabbis which makes decisions for all its members about rules of kashrut. The Reform movement says that each individual must decide how to eat in accord with his or her own conscience. The Reconstructionist approach, in its perfect form, would have a community study together -- learn traditional laws of kashrut, study ecology and nutrition, food politics, ethics and whatever else is pertinent -- debate, discuss and come to a decision as a community about how people should eat. The Reconstructionists are big promoters of Values-Based Decision Making.
I'm personally mostly a promoter of bumbling along and doing the best we can! But I see so much potential in who we are and who we can be together. So I look forward to trying to grow our sense of possibilities. In these Notes here, I really just want to invite you all into this conversation. You will -- bli neder! -- see more organized ways to get involved very soon.
I wish you all, and those you love, a sweet and healthy 5768 and years beyond, and I look forward to growing up and growing old with you.
© 2007 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 10/01/2007(rge)