I want to start my sermon tonight with two stories. They re both very old but they have as

Rabbi Jordie Gerson 2017 EREV ROSH HASHANAH 5778 I want to start my sermon tonight with two stories. They re both very old but they have as much resonance now as they must have had thousands of years ago. The first story: A ship is sailing through the ocean a big ship, with many, cabins. And on the lowest floor, there is a man who decides to gouge a hole in his cabin floor. So, of course, the ship begins to sink. The other passengers discover what s going on, and follow the leak to the cabin. What on earth are you doing? they demand, as he continues gouging holes. He shrugs, says, It s my cabin. I paid for it. I can do whatever I want with it. And down goes the ship. (Midrash Rabbah Vayikra 4:6) The second story is similar, but different - a folktale. It concerns a new synagogue building. The only difference between the synagogue in the story and ours is that the man who builds the synagogue in the story designs it with no lamps. So when the synagogue opens for the first time, the congregants notice the missing lamps and ask him where they are. He walks to the back of the sanctuary, opens the closet, and takes out a big box. He reaches into it, and takes out a lamp for every person present. He tells them that the missing lights were not a design flaw at all. You, he says, are the light, and instructs that each of them should bring the light they ve been given with them every week when they come to pray, and thus their light will enable the prayers of others. When you are not here, he tells them, God s house will be dark. 1

Now that I ve told you these two stories I m going to tell you a third, far more contemporary. It s a bit about me, your new rabbi, but it s also a parable, like the other two. So, for those of you I haven t yet met (or those who arrived a bit late) I m Rabbi Jordie Gerson and I m the new Rabbi here. And though I went to graduate school in Boston and Rabbinical School in New York, and served as a Hillel Rabbi in New Haven for a few years, the truth is I m not actually from the East Coast. I grew up in Chicago, in Oak Park, Illinois, (the home of Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and the guy who does the voice of Homer Simpson). And in Oak Park, I grew up at a mid-size Reform Congregation where I had a special role. I was the Rabbi s daughter, which meant that I was horribly behaved in religious school and only marginally better behaved during services. It also meant that everyone recognized me even the congregants who only came a few times a year (I m taking special care to not look at anyone specific right now), and though they couldn t always place me or remember my name, they always had an opinion about what I was wearing and how much I d grown. They also made me feel loved despite my having done nothing really, nothing to deserve it. It was, I liked to tell my friends, a lot like being a B-list celebrity. It also meant that though my parents had met at Penn, and gone to medical school and Rabbinical School in Philadelphia, the city where my whole extended family lived, my sister and I never felt the distance. At Oak Park Temple, we had dozens of parents, 2

grandparents, siblings, and cousins. As a toddler, my mom says, she would let us run free because she knew there was always someone looking out for the kids. It meant, too that when I moved to New York City for Rabbinical School as an adult, and knew no one except my classmates, one of the first people to contact me was my oldest friend in the world who I d met in preschool at Oak Park Temple. And though he worked in private equity in midtown, and lived a half an hour subway ride from me, he was the one who drove me to the grocery store, helped me put together my IKEA furniture and even drove me to deeper Brooklyn to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond when I needed new linens. He didn t do this out of a sense of obligation, or because we were dating, or as any kind of quid pro quo. He ordered his furniture already put together, ate out at fancy restaurants and had a housekeeper. No, he did it because we were family, and that s what family does. And several years later, when my paternal grandmother died, our shiva house was full for days, people spilling into the hallways and kitchen, because so many people felt that my grandmother was part of their family. She hadn t lived in Chicago, but she was part of our family, and because of that, she was a part of theirs as well. Three stories, all of them pointing in the same direction. But it s a direction, which, in this day and age, is profoundly counter-cultural. According to Sherry Turkle, MIT Professor of Social Science and Technology, in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other: We friend strangers on 3

Facebook. We text instead of talking. We tweet our emotional/mental states We connect with the social network at will and disengage without fear of reprisal. So, a show of hands: If I were to offer you the choice between making a phone call and sending a text message, which would you choose? Phone call? Text message? Synagogues suffer from these same tendencies; the bigger Reform, Reconstructionist and Renewal synagogues now stream their Friday night services, and often, their high holiday services as well. You don t have to leave the comfort of your living room, or even your bed, to attend synagogue. This was intended, of course, with the best of intentions. To make services accessible to the homebound, the ill and elderly who actually can t make it. For them, the ability to tune in to Shabbat online has been no pun intended a godsend. But it also has taken away an essential part of what it means to be Jewish, which is to be part of a community that requires you to show up. See, for millennia, one of the Rabbi s favorite topics has been the importance of Jewish community. They discussed it and argued about it in multiple chapters of the Talmud, debating who belonged and who didn t, the role of women and the role of minors, and the rules required for belonging. But ultimately, the bottom line was always the same: The kahal, the congregation, always takes precedence, because, it is more than a simple community; it is a sacred entity. And because of this, it is referred to in our literature not merely as the kahal the community but as a Kehilla Kadosha, a holy community 4

So why all the back and forth? Because Jewish communities, our sages taught, are special. A group of Jews has the power to transform the world, and is itself transformed by the act of gathering. Remember the rule about a minyan? It goes like this: Without ten Jews, you can t legally hold a prayer service. Or, spun another way: You need a critical mass of people to invoke God s presence. That is - it is only in community that we can create holiness. Not only are we forbidden from praying with fewer than 10 Jews, we also cannot mourn with fewer than 10. We cannot recite the mourner s Kaddish for loved ones unless we are surrounded by community: we require witnesses to our grief, and a circle of Jews to comfort us in its wake. For theologian Martin Buber, this was also true. All real living, he famously wrote, is meeting. That is, all real living, all the holiest and most consequential moments in our lives, happen in relationship. And so the laws of mourning, like the laws of prayer, are stringent when it comes to numbers. Abraham Joshua Heschel, wrote that Judaism exists only in community. And then he recounted an allegory of the Kotzker Rebbe. What is, the Rebbe asked, the one who looks out only for themselves and their own perfection compared to? To a tzaddik (righteous person) in a fur coat. And what is, he asked, a tzaddik in a fur coat? If there is a chill in the house and we want to warm our bodies, we have two choices, to light a fire in the stove, or to put on a fur coat. And what 5

is the difference between lighting a fire and putting on the coat? When the fire is lit, I am warm and others are warm as well; when I wrap myself in fur, it is only I who am warm. And so it s not surprising that in 2014, the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture found a strong correlation between religious affiliation and personal happiness. Of the more than 15,000 people surveyed, 45% of those who attended a religious service weekly reported that they were very happy compared with only 28% of those who said they never attend. The study concluded that it wasn t necessarily the praying that produced the difference (with apologies to God) but, rather, the social support people found in their religious communities, regardless of which God they were praying to, or what they called themselves, the results were the same. The study controlled for variables such as self-reported health, marital status, age, education level, race/ethnicity, and marital happiness and found: a community of shared purpose and meaning makes us happy, regardless of who we are. Now, one final story. I want you to look up, at the beautiful halo lights above you. Now I want you to look out the window, through the floor to ceiling windows, at the rock. Now, take a moment to see the beautiful filigree ark behind me, and the eternal light above it. Notice the seats you re sitting in. They re comfortable, right? Aesthetically pleasing too. And finally feel the weight of the new machzor high holiday prayerbook - in your hands. 6

Now listen: your Rabbi, and staff, is not responsible for any of what you see. The reason this brand new beautiful building is here, and these new prayerbooks and the eternal light, and the ark, and the chairs, which took hours of debate to choose, was because a committed minyan of laypeople made this happen. Because of a core group of this community a kehila kedosha, built this place. Because, even when they wanted to kill each other, and their contractor, they kept at it. They hired lawyers, and an architect, and spent countless hours looking at paint and carpet samples and arguing with the town of Greenwich. They did this out of a sense of love, yes, but also out of a sense of obligation to the future that would follow them, and a keen sense that what they were building was more than just a building, it was a sacred community. To be a kehilla kedosha, to make a minyan, is to sit in board meetings when you d rather be at home with your family, to volunteer for Inspirica with our social action committee when you d rather be at the gym. It s offering a smile and a Shabbat dinner invitation to new members (of which we have many), taking Adult Education classes, and showing up more than twice a year. We do this not merely because it s a mitzvah an obligation but because it makes our lives better, because it puts us at the center of a community who, when bad things happen, are there to mourn with and take care of us, and when good things happen, are there to rejoice with us. On Yom Kippur morning I ll be speaking more about this what the loss of community and shared sense of purpose means for us as Jews, as Americans, and as citizens of a global community, but for now, simply this: the Kotzker Rebbe story, and the story of 7

this building suggests something profound: community, though it may be led and inspired and nurtured by a leader, does not vanish when the leader does. If, say, a clergyperson who has led a congregation for a decade steps down, it will surely change the structure and feel of the congregation, but it should not spell it s end. The community, you see, has a life of it s own, a life played out in classrooms and committee meetings, in choir rehearsals and holiday celebrations, in Friday night services and visits to the sick. And even then, prayer isn t reliant on the rabbi or the cantor. They may lead prayers or teach Jews how to pray but ultimately, we do not, as Heschel once wrote, pray by proxy. Nor do we create community by proxy, or on facebook, or via streaming video, or even by text. Community requires Jane and Joe Jew. That s you. You are the lamps. You are the fire in the hearth. You are the minyan. The truth is: we teach by example. If we want our children to take Judaism and living a Jewish life seriously, it s our responsibility to argue about the color of the chairs in the sanctuary so that, years hence, they will argue about the chairs in their own sanctuaries. It s not enough to send the kids or grandkids off to religious school and think that the synagogue will run itself in your absence. The kehilla kedosha demands more than that: a minyan, a group of Jews to sanctify each other s holiest moments and comfort each other after wrenching losses. You are the minyan. You are the ten Jews required for holiness. And this building, these people sitting next to you whether you know them or not they are your community if you wish to make it so. 8

And so my blessing for you all this Erev Rosh HaShanah is this: I wish you all the kind of kehillah kedosha sacred community that was such a gift to me and my family growing up. I wish you to see it as both a mitzvah an obligation and a gift. I wish that twenty years from now, your children or grandchildren, perhaps living alone in big cities in the Midwest or on the West Coast, will be blessed to run into someone who feels like family, even though they re not. I wish that when they meet that old friend as an adult, they are amazed by how familiar this person feels, and how magical it is to have found someone who remembers them when. I wish that you all will have invested enough time, energy and love into Greenwich Reform Synagogue that for the next generation, it will become a place that is a home to dor l dor, the chain of generations, and that if you run into the strangers sitting next to you in the seats here this morning, on a street in Manhattan or Los Angeles or downtown Chicago, many years from now, you will recognize them, instantly, as family. This is what I believe the Rabbis must have had in mind when they spent hours discussing what it meant to be Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, a Kehilla Kedosha, a sacred community: a group of Jews bound to each other through time and generations, across countries and states. A place like Greenwich Reform Synagogue. A home. A blessing. A gift. Kein Yehi Ratzon. May this be God s will and may it be ours as well. 9