"Learning in Evanston"

Rabbi's Notes - April 2008

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

I had to go, unexpectedly, to snowy Chicago last month, where my beloved Grandma Sylvia was in her very last days. I was there over Shabbat, and so I asked my mother and uncle to join me at Friday night services at the local Reconstructionist synagogue in Evanston. I know the lovely rabbi there, Brant Rosen, from my rabbinical association. I had wanted to visit his synagogue on earlier Chicago visits, but this was the first time I had actually gotten it together. We were sad. We were tired. I wasn't expecting to like it, or anything, very much. The service was really quite wonderful, as it turned out, in some ways I could have anticipated and in others that surprised and moved me and made me think anew about how we do things here.

First of all, the congregation had just moved into their new synagogue building the week before. I was looking forward to seeing the place. It had been written up in the Jewish press, and in the Chicago Tribune, as the "greenest synagogue building in America." And indeed we learned while we were there about a few of the numerous eco-friendly aspects of the building - floors recycled from demolished Chicago public schools, walls made of pruned fruit trees (or something like that,) a kind of forced-air heating and cooling that only heats or cools the bottom six feet of the room's space, not wasting energy on the air above people's heads. Above the ark there even hung a solar ner tamid! After the service there was an announcement about training docents to tour people around and explain the building's green features.

But, cool as this all was, it wasn't actually what impressed me the most. Backing up to the beginning of the service, Brant, the rabbi, greeted everyone said that there would be a thematic focus that night on "renewal." He said that members of the Reggie Marder Memorial Team would be presenting some readings about renewing ourselves on Shabbat. Something like that. Hmmm?

We sang some niggunim, lit candles. Someone read a poem about sorrow and healing. A few prayers and someone else read a long excerpt from a biography of Abraham Lincoln, about Lincoln sinking deep into depression and finally finding the will to go onward. When the time came for a davar Torah, the woman sitting next to me came forward and gave a teaching about the Golden Calf. She talked about the Israelites waiting below while Moses was up on the top of the mountain, about how anxious and lonely they must have been, how hard it is to wait for things to change. There were a few more readings, all in some way about hanging on while things seem unchangeably difficult. The Reggie Marder Memorial Team was referenced a few times in passing. I began to get an idea of what this team might have been.

When the service was over, I offered a yashir koach to the woman next to me on her davar Torah, and I asked her who Reggie Marder was. "Who was Reggie Marder?" she repeated back to me, and her eyes filled with tears. Reggie Marder was apparently a powerful, inspiring local activist, one of the engines behind the green building project and many other endeavors, both in the congregation and in the educational world of Chicago where she worked and advocated for many years. "But she couldn't hold on," said the woman I was talking with. She had taken her own life. It was an incalculable loss, she said, to the synagogue community and to the whole city.

In response to this, a task force from the synagogue formed to pay tribute to Reggie Marder by raising people's awareness of depression and supporting people in the congregation who suffer from depression. A weekly support group meeting was announced, as was a speaker coming to lecture about some aspect of treatment. More than this, depression was acknowledged in the Shabbat service, in the eloquent, spiritual way I had just experienced.

Something else, apparently unrelated, also struck me during the service. At one point a young woman (the next day's bat mitzvah, in fact) was called up to the front, and she read the names of five Americans and five Iraqis killed in Iraq recently, along with some kind of a peace prayer. During announcements at the end of the service, along with all the Reggie Marder programs, a woman stood up and introduced herself as part of the congregation's peace and justice group. She announced that their group had decided on this ritual of reading ten names each week during the Friday night service, and she invited people who wanted the honor of reading the names at upcoming services to sign up on a schedule.

As a person who struggles with depression myself, I was moved by this congregation's energetic, forthright campaign to address this illness. And as one who, like all of us, struggles to respond meaningfully to the wars in which our country is engaged, I found the reading of names to be touching.

But what inspired me most was not the programs or seeing the evidence of groups of people in this congregation getting together to find ways to address things that they care about in the context of their congregation. It clearly wasn't just the rabbi, or a single grieving member of Reggie Marder's family, who pushed the congregation to focus on depression. There was a memorial team. It wasn't just each individual person praying in the privacy of his or her own heart about the war in Iraq. Nor was it the rabbi's own call to acknowledge it and to pray for peace in the particular way that they did. There was a peace and justice group.

I've thought about this service quite a bit in the last couple of weeks. Back in 2001, when I took two months off to read and study about community, the main conclusion I came to was that for a community to have depth, people need to bring what concerns them to the community. For our Jewish community to have meaning for us, we need to see it, see each other, as a place where matters important to us can be meaningfully addressed. People need to be visible about their concerns, passions and interests and then gather together to find ways to address them.

In the airport on the way back home, I picked up the book Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande. I'd already read a bunch of the book's essays in the New Yorker, but I needed something with pages that would turn themselves for the long flight home. I like reading about medicine. I wasn't really expecting a book about rabbi-ing.

Gawande organizes his essays around three themes: "diligence," "doing right" and "ingenuity." Diligence means that you still wash your hands for fifteen to thirty seconds, back and front, up to the elbow, before and after you see each patient, many times each day, day after day. Doing right means the obvious, making good decisions along the way. Ingenuity means that you don't fall into the lethargy of seeing the same old problems as insoluble -- you keep trying to solve them, trying on frame after frame until something works better than the old approach.

Dozing in the plane, I found myself thinking about how I used to try more than I do now to get groups of people together to figure things out about our community. But it got easier to just make decisions myself. I used to solicit input more than I do now. But at some point I started figuring that if anyone had anything to say, they would seek me out. I used to worry about certain intractable problems, but over time I began to surrender to them. Reading Gawande I found myself taking his admonitions about surgery into my own operating theater.

I always believe that we have great potential as a community to profoundly affect our own and each other's lives and even, in some small ways, the world beyond ourselves. We do a good job -- but there is always more possibility. We can be more diligent, more right-doing and more ingenious. There is lots we haven't tried -- haven't even thought of -- yet.

The steps, like hand-washing, are probably small. Forming a team to mourn, bringing people together for a conversation about war, imagining a greener building together… I could see during that Friday night service in Evanston how each of these arose from someone bringing his or her needs and concerns into the congregation, gathering people together to solve a problem or create something, then bringing their shared ideas to the community as a whole.

We are in the moment right before passing through the Red Sea into the unknown land. An apt time for new growth, new thought, new commitment. What more could we create with and for each other if we came together with our yearnings and dreams? Happy Passover, my dear community.

- Rabbi Margaret Holub

© 2008 Rabbi Margaret Holub

(home) (calendar) (info) (articles) (sponsors) (links) (bios) (reviews) (travel) (recipes) (projects) (photos) (art)