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by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar
I’d like to share with you the teaching I delivered in honor of our Hatan Torah and Kallat Bereshit this past Friday night, honoring two great annually-selected service leaders in our community, this year, Michael Hafter and Susan Berman:
I’m as familiar as anybody else with the by-now dated notion of a hashtag. A hashtag, for those who are not in the know, is when you use the hash or pound symbol, followed by a word or phrase that identifies a category or topic for the content you’re sharing. A picture of us dancing with the Torahs, #SimhatTorah. A picture of a lulav, #Sukkot. A d’var Torah about God creating the world, #Genesis. See, I get it.
If you took all my divrei Torah, all my sermons, and posted them on social media, and asked what the most common hashtag would be, it would pretty straightforwardly be #Community or #JewishCommunity, rivaled only by #God or #Divinity.
#Community or #JewishCommunity is probably the most common for me, but the slightly more advanced version — #CommunityService or #JewishCommunalService — is dramatically less common, but no less important, and I’ll tell you why on both counts.
I very consistently make the case for spending more time in Jewish community — more time than we might be used to spending in Jewish community. I do that because it’s my job, and I do that because I believe it. I believe spending time in Jewish community enriches each and every one of our lives. I talked about this on Yom Kippur: spending time in Jewish community allows us to make sense of our lives in profound ways, by interpreting what happens to us — losses and joys, heartbreak and fulfillment — through the shared prism of the Jewish story and Jewish ritual. It shatters isolation; being in connection with others who are outside our home and outside our work allows us to see the spiritual resources we each have inside of us in new ways, transforming our understanding of ourselves and of what happens to us. It helps us make friends in new stages of life, as kids, parents, or grandparents; it helps us wrestle with God, however we understand what is behind that word, something that is very difficult to do on our own.
On Yom Kippur, I cited Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for the teaching that “Not the individual man, nor a single generation by its own power, can erect the bridge that leads to God.” So for all these reasons, in sermon after sermon, d’var Torah after d’var Torah, I talk about #Community, #JewishCommunity, #ShowUpForShabbat, week after week after week, to reap the benefits of Jewish communal life.
What I preach and teach about less, as I suggest, is the next level, which is #ServingTheJewishCommunity or #JewishCommunityService. That’s because sometimes I am under the impression, which is perhaps a misimpression, that in the increasingly individualized world we live in, where people are focused on their own households; the increasingly secular world, where people find themselves mystified by, and skeptical of, religion, letting it get monopolized by fundamentalists; and the increasingly attention-oversaturated world, where there are so many demands for our attention, from Instagram feeds to Netflix queues to TikTok videos, that in this world, it is a heavy enough lift to convince people that regularly being a part of Jewish community will be of significant benefit to them, that I don’t spend time also trying to convince them that they should also be committing to service of others in Jewish community. It’s enough of a case to make, I imagine, that showing up regularly and participating in Jewish life will enrich our spirits and our lives, that they and I don’t have the bandwidth for me to make the case to them that they should also be rolling up their sleeves to help build Jewish community. That’s the next level.
But I’m wondering if I have that wrong a little bit; I’m wondering if I have that a bit backwards. That perhaps the act of building is part of what makes it so enriching. Which brings me to one of the reasons we are here tonight: in addition to being here for Shabbat, the regular weekly rhythm of resting our weary souls and celebrating the rhythms of creation; in addition to celebrating our Kitah Hey and Vav students, watching as they grow toward adulthood before our very eyes; we are celebrating Jewish communal service, service to Jewish community, in the persons of our Hatan Torah and Kallat Bereshit, Michael Hafter and Susan Berman, two of the more significant contributors to building Jewish community that this community has had.
And we’re doing that because, to state the obvious, Jewish community doesn’t build itself. With rare exception, no tax revenue, no government funding, no federal bureaucracy supports the creation of Jewish community; it’s just us, the people in this room, the present generations of Jewish community and our loved ones.
The availability of a regular weekly shabbat service with a meal afterwards, so kids can run around together in a safe environment; the availability of a Hebrew School that immerses students in ancient Jewish rhythms and experiences through an inclusive, thoughtful perspective; the availability of clergy and community members to step up, from a Jewish perspective, and surround someone with love when someone has died, or to celebrate with them when someone has been born, or to hold a Young Families Shabbat — all of that is dependent on people following in the footsteps of the likes of Michael Hafter and Susan Berman, rolling up their sleeves to provide many hours over the course of the year to building Jewish community.
Contributions to Jewish community show up in so many different ways, each essential to the vibrant life we share at Society Hill Synagogue. Building community takes everything from leyning Torah to poring over spreadsheets — from signing up to chant an aliyah so we can complete the Torah reading, to ensuring we have the resources to pay our bills and spend wisely for maximum impact. It takes greeting at services and calling new members to make them feel at home; volunteering for home visits to those who are sick; and joining social justice efforts to help neighbors facing food insecurity. It means developing Israel programming that reflects our shared values; emailing fellow parents to show up for a class service; helping guide a strategic planning process that keeps pace with our growth; reviewing the details of an employee contract to ensure fairness; and having the courage to ask fellow congregants to make donations — and making them ourselves. And, of course, it includes the invisible labor that makes all this possible: caring for children or family at home so that others can show up fully for our community.
It truly takes a village. And sometimes the very act of contributing to the construction and sustenance of that village is the entrée, the inroad, that enables us to also reap the benefits of Jewish community for ourselves, the way that it can enrich souls in subtle, imperceptible ways that, over time, sustain and nourish us.
So maybe as I write more divrei Torah, the hashtags won’t just be #JewishCommunity; they’ll be #ItTakesAVillage — because it does, or #WeCouldntDoThisWithoutYou — because we couldn’t. I’m so grateful to Michael Hafter and Susan Berman for providing their service to Jewish community for all these years, and so grateful to so many of you for following in their footsteps. Because we need you.
