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by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar
We have an important announcement: Society Hill Synagogue is hiring a new Manager of Community Engagement & Communications, and we hope you’ll share this posting far and wide by forwarding this email.
A couple of years ago, as part of our previous Strategic Plan coming out of the pandemic in early 2022, we set four top priorities as a community, one of which was to revitalize our communications: to reflect upon, and revise, how we talked about ourselves as a community; to hone our storytelling about who we are and the benefits of becoming part of this community; and also, to invest more time, thought, and resources in amplifying that storytelling to the broader Philadelphia-area Jewish community, whether through social media, our website, email, or print.
A cornerstone of that effort was, for the first time in this congregation, to hire a full-time Communications Manager — LilyFish Gomberg — who, after initial support from a synagogue Communications Committee, and under direction from our Executive Director, Sahar Oz, and me, spearheaded this effort to revitalize our communications.
LilyFish has done so in spades. As an example, compare our website in 2022 to our website today. Take a look at our Member Spotlights or our Playschool Family Features, both of which center the human beings that make up this community, honoring them for the ways in which they contribute to this community as well as helping others imagine themselves as part of this community.
As we know, this has benefited us immensely: the synagogue has grown by some 80 households just since early 2024, when LilyFish was hired.
Meanwhile, LilyFish has been pursuing her Masters in Jewish Education, with a dream of leading Jewish education in a community, ideally in her home state of Massachusetts. We’re delighted for LilyFish that that dream is being fulfilled. She’s been hired as the Director of Congregational Learning at Kerem Shalom congregation in Concord, Massachusetts, where she’ll be starting this summer.
Now, Society Hill Synagogue is in a different place than when we first created the Communications Manager position. Our communications apparatus has been significantly built up, thanks in no small part to LilyFish, and our community is a lot bigger. As we develop our current Strategic Plan, informed by the surveys and focus groups in which so many of you participated, we are identifying that one of our top priorities going forward is investing more in relationships. People are seeking connection and community when they join a synagogue, and with a bigger community, it takes more intentionality to ensure that people feel connected to one another and to the larger synagogue community, and that they — you — do not fall between the cracks.
To that end, as we hire anew, we are revising the portfolio, title, and salary of this position: still with an emphasis on communications — storytelling is how people understand what is happening in this community, and how to stay connected — while recognizing that our communications work now is about sustaining and evolving rather than overhauling. Therefore, with the additional available time in working from a communications apparatus that is largely built up already, this person will turn their additional available time to fostering relationships within this community: helping onboard new members so that people who join can feel more deeply connected to the community within their first few years of membership; supporting our Hesed Committee, so that there is a continuously organized effort to ensure people in need in our community are supported; and helping us thank and nurture the generous contributors to this community — you all — through your generous gifts of resources and time.
We hope you’ll join us in thanking LilyFish for her service to this community, and in spreading this job description far and wide to ensure that we hire a talented, compassionate, hardworking contributor to life at Society Hill Synagogue.
I’d also like to share the D’var Torah that I offered this past Friday night at Shabbat services:
Each service I lead — a Shabbat service or a weekday service, a service celebrating a Bat Mitzvah or a service as part of a shivah minyan, a service comforting mourners — I find myself saying some version of these words: “We turn now to the Amidah, the central, standing prayer of the Jewish service, where we offer the words on the page, or the words of our heart, the offering of the heart.”
This is in part because if you can believe it, some three thousand years later, every single time we gather as a religious community, that gathering, whether we realize it or not, is structured around an offering.
In ancient times, as we know, one of the primary means by which we expressed ourselves religiously, spiritually, was to bring a korban, a sacrificial offering, from the root, karov, to draw near, to experience the nearness, the perpetual presence, of the Divine. Twice per day every day, morning and afternoon, the community would bring this korban, this communal offering, burning up a lamb and some grain on the altar, as a pleasing scent to the Holy One, feeling near. Feeling close.
When the temple was destroyed, the offering continued in the form of prayer: twice each day, like the ancient sacrificial offerings, plus a third, to be paired with the nighttime Sh’ma, which we are called upon to say morning and evening, this offering of the heart became the cornerstone of our communal religious life.
Jewish prayer often takes the form of one of two modes: liturgy, the words on the page; spontaneity, the words of our heart, the words that we’re forming in our heart in that moment. Both have their virtues, both have long held a place in Jewish life.
Some say the words of the heart preceded the words on the page: this is literally true in the sense that for centuries, Jewish communities operated with no printing press, so it would have been quite difficult for every community to have a written record of everything they were “supposed” to say; inherently, the prayer leader’s ability to improvise around a set of select themes — love, redemption, repentance — was necessary. Furthermore, tradition derives the obligation to pray from words of Torah which say v’avadetem et Adonai eloheikhem, and you shall serve, pray to, Adonai your God, u’le’avdo b’khol levavkhem, serve, pray to God with all your heart.
Initially, instinctively, that’s what prayer is — the offering of the heart, bringing forth whatever is on our heart before God, in all its vulnerable authenticity.
Rabbi Aryeh Ben David says we need this:
“With whom can I call out,” he writes, “without hesitation or concern of being judged or disregarded? With whom can I express the fragility of my life?
With my friends? When they ask, ‘How are you doing?’ can I reply, ‘I think I have failed one of my children, my body is showing worrisome signs, my wife and I seem to be missing each other, and I have an overall feeling of dread’? Will my friends ever ask me again?
With my wife? I have been married for almost thirty years. My wife is one of the world’s great listeners, nonjudgmental and loving. Yet when and how can I bare my soul without qualification or second-thought? How often? Is she ready to hear me at precisely the moment I need to unburden myself?
I call out to God from the deepest inner chamber of my being, expressing my greatest fears, disappointments, failures, worries, anxieties — not in order to have my problems solved, not in order to receive something, but in order to fully encounter myself.”
Now, sometimes, in our offering of the heart, we are not able to access all of this. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov helped repopularize Jewish prayer as spontaneously offering whatever is on our heart, after centuries of prayer in the prayerbook. Prayerbook prayer is important, too, the rabbis teach, because how else can we facilitate a communal experience if we do not have a shared language? The prayerbook helps us move together, collectively. Vessels of meaning that have been invested in and shared across the generations. Still, Rabbi Nachman considers finding time within or outside of the prayer service for our personal outpourings before God to be the most important religious experience — and yet, he says not to put pressure on it.
“No matter what a person is lacking in worshiping God,” he teaches, “even if the person is totally and absolutely distant from God’s service,” even if we’re not even sure we believe in God, “we should speak about it all.”
The offering of the heart does not have to be the most earth shattering revelation you have to offer. I found myself a little stuck this morning. In my brief daily prayer this morning, in my brief morning offering, I found myself saying, “God: I don’t know if I have it for you this morning. I’m distracted; my to-do list feels a mile long: I’ve got an important Bat Mitzvah to prepare for, emails to respond to, a sermon to write — I’m finding myself struggling to fully turn to You, to bring all of my powers of concentration to You. I don’t think I have it for You today.”
And you know what I heard back? “What you’re offering is enough. I will meet you in your distractions,” I heard. “Let your distractions be your pathway to Me.”
This is echoed in Rebbe Nachman’s teachings about the offering of the heart.
He says, “Even if occasionally a person’s words are sealed and the person cannot open their mouth to say anything at all to God, this itself is nonetheless very good. That is, the person’s readiness and presence before God, and their yearning and longing to speak despite their inability to do so: A person should cry out and plead to God about this very thing. “This in itself — gam ken tov me’od — is also very good.”
“Even if many days and years pass and it seems that you have accomplished nothing with your words,” he teaches, “do not abandon it. Every word makes an impression.” It may seem that water dripping on a stone cannot make any impression, yet after many years, the stone wears away.
“Your heart,” he concludes, “may be like stone. It may seem that your words of prayer make no impression on it at all. Still, as the days and years pass, your heart of stone will also be penetrated.”
The offering of the heart: it’s an invitation, a call, to transform a hardness of heart into, just heart. Yihiyu leratzon, may the words of our mouths and the meditations of our heart be pleasing offerings to the Holy One.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi K.
