We’re looking forward to seeing you in just 8 days for Rosh Hashanah. Find all details about attending Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur at Society Hill Synagogue here.
The best way to participate in these Days of Awe services and to support and strengthen Jewish community is to become a member. Find out more and become a member here, and please don’t hesitate to our Executive Director Sahar Oz, our Manager of Community Engagement and Communications, Alexis Rosen, or me if you have any questions.
Finally, this past week, we published our roster and schedule of adult education classes for the year. The offerings include such courses as our annual Introduction to Judaism course (Nuts & Bolts); Hebrew for beginners; a course reflecting on various approaches to what Judaism is (A religion? A culture? A nation?); unlearning Jewish anxiety; dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians; and more. Sign up here now.
We celebrated a fantastic Open House Shabbat this past weekend, with hundreds in attendance over the course of Friday night and Saturday morning. I’m pleased to share the D’var Torah that I delivered on Friday night, below:
It feels really good to be back together with you all, to meet some of you anew, for our Open House Shabbat — closing out the year 5786 and getting ready to celebrate the new year 5787 in just a couple of weeks.
Open House Shabbat signals a longstanding image in our tradition, underscores a longstanding value in our tradition, a longstanding mitzvah, sacred act, that is incumbent upon all of us to perform: that of hakhnasat orhim, welcoming guests.
You might think that the phrase “open house” is a term coined by realtors to help get houses off the market, but in fact, it is a term that is quite Jewish: in Pirkei Avot, the text known as “Ethics of Our Ancestors” from two thousand years ago, it says that Yose ben Yohanan ish Yerushalayim (a man of Jerusalem), would say: יְהִי בֵיתְךָ פָתוּחַ לִרְוָחָה “Let your house be expansively open.”
Expansively open. Imagine all of the possibilities this entails: all of the ideas our homes and communities are called upon to be open to; all the people, conversation, warmth, and generosity. Let your house be expansively open.
Now, it was rare that our ancient sages left well enough alone, that they simply let a text speak for itself. Sacred Jewish practice includes imagining what else is present in a text, what else it might be telling us. Sometimes they liked to interpret a text in a seemingly literal direction. So, a few hundred years later, in a commentary on this passage, Rabbi Natan commented as follows: “‘Let your house be expansively open’ — what does this mean? It teaches,” he says, “that a person’s house should be opened expansively to the south, to the east, to the west, and to the north, like [the biblical figure] Job,” he says, who apparently was known for making four doors to his house.
Why did Job do that, Rabbi Natan asks? “So that those in need should not have the trouble of going round the entire house. He who came from the north entered straight ahead, and he who came from the south entered straight ahead, and so on, on all sides. For this reason,” he said, Job made four doors to his house.”
So we might be asking, what does such a literal interpretation of four doors, one from each direction, really add to this idea of the open house?
Or perhaps is it not so literal?
Each of us comes to Jewish community from different orientations, different directions, different journeys in our lives. Some of us have been active participants in Jewish community for all of our lives and are looking for a community where we can feel welcomed, where we can find points of connection with peers, possibly new friends; some of us found Judaism later in life and either chose to become Jewish or chose not to, but are supporting a Jewish loved one and are looking to find their way into community and feel embraced. Maybe for some of us it’s more sporadic in nature: in some chapters of life, we’ve had vibrant, immersive experiences in Jewish life; at other times, more distance, more estrangement, and we’re curious about reconnecting. We come with different spiritual orientations: some of us are comfortable with the notion of God, looking for somewhere to nourish our souls; others are more ambivalent about the God stuff but feel enriched by Jewish community; people come from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, different sexual orientations, political orientations; if you can believe it, some people in this room are not even Phillies fans or Eagles fans or Sixers fans. We probably even have some Mets fans and Cowboys fans in the room.
And yet, in the spirit of Job, in the spirit of Yose ben Yochanan, ish Yerushalayim, we open our doors in every direction, no matter the journey someone has been on. All are welcome. And having served in a rabbinic role in this community for going on 13 years now, I can say that this is a community that practices what it preaches. Since long before I got here, it has been especially intentional about this approach of making people feel welcome, no matter your orientation, your approach, your experience or limited experience. All are welcome.
It doesn’t mean you’ll never encounter anything you disagree with. Part of Jewish life for millennia has been about the vibrancy of discourse, the exchange of ideas. “Two Jews, three opinions” isn’t just a joke; it’s a sacred practice. The Talmud is intentional about preserving the perspectives not only of the rabbi who got the last word, but also of the rabbis who did not — sometimes there is no such thing as a last word. Sometimes, on a particular question that is raised, the Talmud presents an array of perspectives, leaving it to later generations to figure out which to follow, which to build upon. It’s why, for example, we’re sometimes unclear about what Judaism has to say about certain questions of religious life. What do Jews believe about the afterlife? It depends on which text you examine and from which generation of Jewish life. This diversity of thought is a feature, not a bug, of Jewish existence, one practiced at Society Hill Synagogue.
Still, this doesn’t mean we don’t stand for anything. I think the tagline we drafted a couple of years ago — Communal Warmth, Spiritual Depth, Jewish Life — helps capture it. Not formally Conservative, yet traditionally rooted; not Reform, and yet deeply in conversation with modernity. The Jewishness you experience here, I hope, is rigorous but joyful, deep yet accessible. Open to a relationship with the Divine but not dogmatic about what that means. Open to wrestling.
And permeating all of that is the mitzvah of hakhnasat orhim, affirmatively welcoming those who are guests. And, as the famous sage Hillel teaches in that Aramaic lilt of his: יוֹמָא דֵין הִיא הָכָא לְמָחָר לֵית הִיא הָכָא we are all guests in this world, here today, gone tomorrow. All of us — every one of us — are guests in some sense or another, both deserving of having the spirit of hospitality provided to us — a chair pulled back for us, a hand extended to us, someone reaching out when we look lost — and having that mitzvah, that responsibility, incumbent upon us: ensuring that others who look lost, who need a hand extended, are tended to. That’s the spirit we cultivate here at Society Hill Synagogue, and each of us can practice it here tonight. What an opportunity! We get to fulfill a mitzvah, right here, right now.
It wouldn’t be an Open House Shabbat at Society Hill Synagogue if I didn’t close by sharing my favorite text on the practice of hakhnasat orhim by its most renowned practitioner. There is only one person who, according to Jewish tradition, compares favorably in this respect to Job, and that is Avraham Avinu, Abraham the patriarch.
In the famous text in Bereshit, Genesis 18, the Torah says that Abraham was sitting at the entrance of the tent as the day grew hot. Looking up, he saw three figures standing near him. As soon as he saw them, he ran from the entrance of the tent to greet them and, bowing to the ground, he said, Adonai: “My lords! If it please you, do not go on past your servant. Let a little water be brought; bathe your feet and recline under the tree. And let me fetch a morsel of bread that you may refresh yourselves; then go on — seeing that you have come your servant’s way.”
This is the episode that is typically cited as the origin story for the practice of hakhnasat orhim, the practice of hospitality in Jewish tradition. But as the midrash (rabbinic expansion) teaches, and as regular attendees of this Open House Shabbat may remember, the teaching actually goes deeper than that. The text begins: וַיֵּרָ֤א אֵלָיו֙ יְהֹוָ֔ה בְּאֵלֹנֵ֖י מַמְרֵ֑א — “God appeared to Abraham by the trees of Mamre, as he was sitting at the entrance of the tent as the day grew hot.” And when Abraham says, “My lords! If it please you, do not go on past your servant. Stay here,” the midrash teaches that Abraham is actually not saying that to the three figures; he is saying that to Adonai, my Lord, to God. He is saying to God — with whom Abraham had been communing as patriarch and prophet — “If it pleases you, do not leave your servant.” “Don’t leave, but I have to go tend to these men wandering in the wilderness.” Abraham had been communing with God in his tent, but he tells God, “God, wait here if you can; I have to tend to these three wandering spirits, who look lost and hot and hungry.”
So central in Jewish life is that practice of extending a welcoming hand that tradition endorses asking God to wait so that we can tend to those who need it, those who are hungry in body or in soul. And little does Abraham know that these three wandering spirits turn out to be malachim, messengers of the Divine themselves.
Then again, as Jewish tradition teaches, we are all created b’tzelem Elohim; we are all created in the image of God. Each of us — both those seated in this room with us and we ourselves — is created in the image of God, a messenger of the Divine in our own way. May we each experience that in ourselves and in one another. Wishing you a Shabbat of welcome.
You might think that the phrase “open house” is a term coined by realtors to help get houses off the market, but in fact, it is a term that is quite Jewish: in Pirkei Avot, the text known as “Ethics of Our Ancestors” from two thousand years ago, it says that Yose ben Yohanan ish Yerushalayim (a man of Jerusalem), would say: יְהִי בֵיתְךָ פָתוּחַ לִרְוָחָה “Let your house be expansively open.”
Why did Job do that, Rabbi Natan asks? “So that those in need should not have the trouble of going round the entire house. He who came from the north entered straight ahead, and he who came from the south entered straight ahead, and so on, on all sides. For this reason,” he said, Job made four doors to his house.”
In the famous text in Bereshit, Genesis 18, the Torah says that Abraham was sitting at the entrance of the tent as the day grew hot. Looking up, he saw three figures standing near him. As soon as he saw them, he ran from the entrance of the tent to greet them and, bowing to the ground, he said, Adonai: “My lords! If it please you, do not go on past your servant. Let a little water be brought; bathe your feet and recline under the tree. And let me fetch a morsel of bread that you may refresh yourselves; then go on — seeing that you have come your servant’s way.”