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RABBINIC REFLECTION BY RABBI michael berk
WHy Do We Need the Synagogue?
DECember 2007
I’ve spent a good part of the last few months speaking with you, the members of CBI. I have invited you to open up to me, to tell me of your dreams and hopes for our temple. I have learned a lot, and am grateful for the opportunities to get to know you. These conversations can make people a bit uncomfortable, because they bring up issues and problems we face as a synagogue community. I think it’s good to be a bit uncomfortable, because it is our discomfort that will inspire us to move forward.
My rabbinate has always been devoted
to the synagogue. Let me tell you a story, which, while a little frightening, means a great deal to me and is important to my vision of what CBI can be. It’s a story the rabbis tell about two men in a garden. Each of them has one handicap. One of them can’t walk or stand. The other is blind. The garden is full of fruit trees and they are both hungry. As the rabbis tell it, each man is absorbed in his own world. Each man is totally frustrated with his inability to get at the fruit. There is no communication between them. They each starve. Pooling their bodily strengths to overcome their disabilities never occurs to them. Each agonizes in his own, self-imposed isolation.
I am frightened by that story because, like the two men in the garden, too many Jews are shut up in the solitude of their own hearts. We know that many people feel unconnected and want something in their lives, but many people have looked in every place but their synagogue home for answers to the complex questions we face in our world today.
We have to know by now that the race to do our own thing and flee the strictures of community does not work. Are we better off since so many people have sought such lives of isolation? Is the suicide rate going up or down? Is the divorce rate going up or down? Is drug abuse up or down? You know the answers to these questions. We are not better off. Isolation does not work.
You want to know what works? Not just for the last four days, or four months, but for the last four thousand years? Torah. Mitzvot. Giving tzedakah weekly. Shabbat family time every week. Praying and studying the wise words of our mothers and fathers. Worshiping with other Jews. That’s what works. We have survived. We have prospered. We have given the world one half of the Nobel Peace Prize winners. We give the world dreams and ideals. Something to live for. That’s what works. And what you and I must do, we who love our synagogue, we must have the courage to strengthen CBI as a place where Jewish people will experience the fullness, the warmth, the embrace, of Jewish community.
Some of us know that we cannot celebrate our lives, much less our Judaism, in isolation from others. Some of us know we need each other. I also know that in most synagogues, ours included, despite all the good intentions, there is still a lot of work to do to shape the synagogue into a fully warm and welcoming community.
I love the men, women and children of Congregation Beth Israel. We reach out in love and friendship to help each other navigate the complicated lives we have in the 21st century. May we strive to be even warmer and more welcoming, reaching out in love to bring those on the periphery of our community closer to the center, and helping those outside our community see the beauty and meaning that they can add to their lives by joining us.
Let us never become complacent; let us always remain open to asking the questions, How are we doing? Can we do better? How can we reach out to those who haven’t discovered the beauty of this community, Congregation Beth Israel.
Rabbi Michael Berk
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