Yom Kippur 5786
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar
We need each other. That’s the premise of this sermon.
And yet as nice as that sounds, and as easy as that is to affirm, I can promise you it can take a lot longer to learn than one might think. I’ve learned that lesson the hard way.
It’s Yom Kippur, so I’m going to start with a confession: I don’t have a ton of friends. I’m not saying this to arouse pity. I like my life. It’s hard work, but I feel grateful for where I am. My family, my community, my faith. I am profoundly grateful.
But I’m just stating a fact: I don’t have a ton of friends.
I usually attribute this to my life circumstances growing up, though in some cases it’s hard to identify when it became a result of my own choosing. I had plenty of friends when I was young, but our family started to move a lot. Most of you know my father died very suddenly when I was young, and my mom was really working to find her footing after that. Between grades five and nine, we had initiated two cross-country moves, and I found myself at three schools in four years, hardly knowing a soul at each new one.
The difficulty of creating and sustaining friendships under these conditions resulted in disappointments that, over time, led me to become more and more self-reliant, led me to turn less and less to relationships for meaning, and more and more to personal and professional ventures instead. As I got older, I poured myself into school, into work, imagining that each new credential, each new professional success, was what would nourish my soul, rather than my relationships with fellow human beings.
It wasn’t until I got to rabbinical school when I realized that I was on potentially the wrong track. The right track professionally, but the wrong track spiritually, emotionally, and, most important, relationally. The urgency of this realization took place when I was taking a class in pastoral care, where we studied, in brief, the work of Erik Erikson, the famed Jewish psychoanalyst, who pioneered the work of developmental psychology, identifying that we go through different stages of development, not just when we are children, but throughout the course of our lives. And, he teaches, each stage presents us with different life tasks. At the time, I was in my early 30s, at the tail end of what Erikson calls the young adult stage, in which, he said, much of our task is about seeking companionship. “We try to find mutually satisfying relationships,” an author summarizing his findings writes, “primarily through marriage and friends. If negotiating this stage is successful,” he teaches, “we can experience intimacy on a deep level.” But, he said, “if we’re not successful, isolation and distance from others may occur. And when we don’t find it easy to create satisfying relationships, our world can begin to shrink as, in defense, we can begin to feel superior to others.”
I wish this diagnosis hadn’t been so on the nose for me at the time. But it was. Reading this description of how bluntly I was failing not at work or school but, at least according to some, my true life’s task, my relationships, was a wakeup call. I know that if it hadn’t been for this realization, I would not have met my wife and started our family — or I might have met her, but I would not have realized whom I had met.
Judaism intuitively understands this. וַיֹאמֶר יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהִים לֹא־טוֹב הֱיוֹת הָאָדָם לְבַדוֹ After creating the first human being, Adonai Elohim, The ETERNAL God said, “It is not good for ha-adam, the human, to be alone.” אֶעֱשֶׂה־לוֹ עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדוֹ I will make him a fitting counterpart, God says.
And Judaism’s instinct about togetherness does not stop with the companionship of one other person. Judaism reserves the most sacred prayers in Jewish tradition for gatherings of ten people or more, a minyan. Ultimately, to fulfill our most sacred and profound religious and societal obligations, Judaism says, we’ve got to gather.
Where we are right now is testament to that: the Hebrew word for synagogue is beit knesset — not house of prayer or house of study, but house of gathering.
We live in an era where we’ve grown deeply skeptical of institutions: where we think longstanding institutions don’t have our best interests at heart, that they’ve lost touch or are, worse, corrupt. But, in essence, an institution is the product of a group of people gathering for a cause. The work, in my view, is to keep them alive and responsive, not to abandon them. In most cases, we would just need to build something similar in its place. And that’s because, I say again, we need each other.
Specifically, I want to talk about three levels upon which we need each other.
We need each other in small, local communities like this one: Society Hill Synagogue. Judaism teaches us that we need a community where we can feel like part of a social fabric that goes beyond the loving but often cloistered interests of our home, and beyond the meaningful but inherently transactional interests of our work. We need a place where we feel connected to others, where we understand the rhythms of their lives, and they understand ours; where we know when they are celebrating a joy, and they know when we are going through a sorrow.
I mentioned before that I began to learn my lesson about isolation in my class on pastoral care. Pastoral care, writes Rabbi Dayle Friedman, “is the practice of offering a spiritual presence to people in need, pain, or transition.” In this sense, it sounds somewhat specialized — a spiritual presence; do most of us know how to offer a “spiritual presence?” And it’s true that there can be some training involved. But as Rabbi Margaret Holub suggests, fundamentally all pastoral care is about is accompanying people and being accompanied in turn. “We walk alongside [our fellow] in the course of their journeys through suffering, illness, change, and joy,” and the same is done for us in turn. “Being in caring connection,” writes Rabbi Friedman, “can transform suffering, because relationship shatters isolation and provides an opportunity for reflecting on one’s experience.” By being in communities like this, we attune each other to the spiritual resources that we each have inside of us. All of us.
This is a unique profound thing that has gotten lost in the hustle and bustle of modern life, and yet synagogue communities are among the places where it remains present.
My foundational memories are from Germantown Jewish Centre in Mt. Airy here in Philadelphia. When my father died, our house was flooded by members of that community during shivah. I have watched the way synagogue communities fill niches in people’s lives that, in modern societies, are otherwise increasingly vacant. I’ve witnessed how the simple practice of showing up once a week for a Shabbat dinner or lunch, not for any overt religious reason (though of course that is welcome, too), can have this transformative effect on people’s lives.
We know the teaching that “it takes a village to raise a child.” Children learn not only from parents and teachers, but from peers and fellow community members. Unfortunately, such communities are not so easy to find in our society, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say we’ve got one, right here at Society Hill Synagogue and in communities like it. Every Shabbat morning here, I witness kids running around with their friends, while their parents eat lunch together, everyone keeping an eye on one another. I watch older generations feel the inspiration of the younger generations coming up behind them, and I watch the younger generations witness the ways that their elders continue to avail themselves of Jewish communal life, not only as something for kids, but for themselves, for their own lifelong spiritual and communal nourishment. They witness it, and they internalize it, and the foundation for the next generation is laid.
Which brings us to the next level of community in which we need each other, the Jewish people — we are the Jewish people, and we need each other.
In some respects, this is a sermon about loneliness — about an existential sense of loneliness that can be hard to shake.
Finding people to connect with who can accompany us, who help us strengthen our spiritual resources, who understand in the deepest recesses of the soul what our experience, the experience of being a Jew, entails may, as Rabbi Friedman writes, have the capacity to shatter isolation, to provide an opportunity for reflecting on these experiences; the experiences of which we are conscious — the joy and depth of a Passover seder, the sound of the shofar, the light of the Hanukkah candle, the plaintive call of the mourner’s Kaddish — and the experiences of which we are not always so conscious: of having ancestors, inherited or chosen, by birth or by conversion, who, our story says, formed a brit, a covenant, with God; having ancestors who experienced descent into Egypt, the narrow place, and the subjugation and oppression that went with it; who then tasted the salt air of the Sea of Reeds as our people crossed it, experiencing jubilation and redemption, knowing that redemption will come again to us all; ancestors who saw the thunder and heard the lightning at Sinai, as we all did, tradition teaches, hearing the mitzvot, the sacred calls ringing from that sacred moment; ancestors who journeyed in the wilderness and who who experienced exile across the seas: during the Inquisition in medieval Spain, in shtetls in the Pale of Settlement, in settlement houses in the Lower East Side, in the camps of death in Poland and Germany, in kibbutzim in the Galilee, in synagogues in Philadelphia. We need community with whom we can reflect on these experiences, who can connect with us about them on a soul level, allowing us to make ongoing sense of them and to experience ongoing sacred transformation as a result.
Community, writes Arnold Eisen, is nurtured by the discovery that, only five minutes into the first encounter, one can abandon small talk in favor of short-hand conversation about things that matter.
Don’t get me wrong, I love small talk, I love the ability to see somebody wearing green on the day of an Eagles game and shout out, “go birds.” (Perhaps some of you might even reject the premise that Eagles talk is small talk. Fair enough.)
But there is a deeper level of meaning that calls out to us to find a sense of kinship. To be in community with people who know, on a spiritual level, what we’ve been through; who share language — not just literal languages like Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino, although those are important too, but cultural and religious languages that allow us in a shared way to express something about the human experience, our unfolding understandings, rigorously reached, about what the Jewish journey teaches us, about our values, about our sacred practices, about what it means to be responsible for one another, kol Yisrael arevim zeh la zeh, the Talmud teaches. These are profound means of connection that create unparalleled bonds in our lives.
Articulating that we need each other as Jews means not taking for granted that today’s gathering on Yom Kippur, here at Society Hill Synagogue, might not exist if for centuries, millennia, the Jewish people had not seen one another as connected, as bound up: in a shared story, shared values, and shared practice across time and space — scattered across the seas, scattered across the sands of time.
On Rosh Hashanah, we talked about the mystery at the center of our lives — call it God, call it the Divine, call it the force from which we have all ultimately flowed. The task of grappling with this mystery is no easy one. We need each other, both within and across generations to persist in this task. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, “Not the individual man, nor a single generation by its own power, can erect the bridge that leads to God.” And Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, Judaism was never the private faith of isolated individuals. Its entire pulse is collective, societal, communal.
That doesn’t mean there haven’t been disagreements among us. Ours is not the first generation in which there have been vociferous disagreements among the Jewish people. The book, Jew vs. Jew, The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry, was written 25 years ago, long before the horrific events of October 7, 2023, and the horrific subsequent war were present in anyone’s minds. Going back to the formation of the State of Israel, there were not one, not two, but three different Jewish armed factions, fighting with one another just as they did with the Arabs and the British; we’ve had Reform Jews and Orthodox Jews, the Hasidim and Misnagdim; the word Misnagdim literally means “opponents,” as in opposing our fellow Jews — the legally-minded Misnagdim opposed the spiritually-minded Hasidim; we’ve had Jewish theologians and philosophers like Baruch Spinoza excommunicated for their dissenting beliefs; we’ve had the Pharisees and the Sadducees; the ancient separate kingdoms of Israel and Judah; twelve tribes who initially identified as much with their own tribes as with the collective B’nei Yisrael; and our founding families were who defined by nothing if not profound sibling rivalries.
So mutual commitment does not mean putting all of our disagreements to the side and saying all Jews anywhere are immune from criticism. Moral critique, healthy conversation, and dialogue have been our lifeblood.
But it does mean recognizing what we have in common: where we’ve come from, even if we have disagreements about the implications of that journey; and where we’re going, even if we have disagreements about how we should get there. We need each other.
To be clear, the recognition that we need to invest in our relationships with our fellow Jews, here in America, in Israel, and all around the world, is not intended as a statement of exclusion. This is not a statement that we need the Jewish people and no one else. We all have many relationships with people who are not Jewish, who have entirely different backgrounds from us, some of which are among the most profound relationships in our life. Judaism has often been in conversation with, and enhanced by, the communities that surround it. Moses would not have made it through the wilderness were it not for his father-in-law Jethro, not to mention his beloved wife Tzipporah, neither of whom were Israelites. When the Israelites broke free from Egypt, from the place of constriction and oppression, the Torah says וְגַם־עֵרֶב רַב עָלָה אִתָם, and a mixed multitude, a mixture of peoples, went up together with them; they all linked arms together. The Jewish people have never been monolithic, have always included friends and loved ones and spouses who are not Jewish. Our multifaith and multicultural relationships have made us better.
Which brings us to the third and final level upon which we need each other. Humanity: all of us. We all need each other.
We all know the Torah teaches that וַיִבְרָא אֱלֹהִים ׀ אֶת־הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ, God created humankind in the divine image, creating it in the image of God. So we know each and every human being, no matter who they are, is patterned from the same divine imprint, has the same spark of God, is equally a child of God.
But Jewish tradition actually goes further than this. The Talmud actually poses the question, if companionship is so important, as Jewish tradition clearly teaches, if togetherness is so important, if community is so important, why does tradition teach that God created the first human being… alone? Why wasn’t a whole community of human beings created together?
Well, the Talmud actually has an answer to this: מִפְּנֵי הַצַדִיקִים וּמִפְּנֵי הָרְשָׁעִים, this was done so that nobody today could say, “I come from righteous ancestors, and therefore I am inherently righteous,” while another group comes from wicked ancestors and is therefore inherently wicked.
We all flow from the same source; we are all, on some level, kin; we are each other’s keepers. We need each other.
We are all catapulting through the universe together on this solitary planet, around and around the sun we go, space stretching out around us, light years from any other known life. It’s just us. This is the sole planet we human beings have, and we are paradoxically alone together upon it, the world is in our hands, together.
None of us, and I mean none of us, controls where we’re born, the conditions of how we came into this world. But for a flip of the cosmic coin, any of us could have been born into entirely different circumstances. But for a flip of the cosmic coin, for example, any one of us could have been born into families in the midst of dangerous circumstances in Venezuela or Haiti or Honduras, desperate to be given refuge in a country that could shelter us; indeed Jews know this experience — having sought to escape Nazi Germany only to be turned back upon reaching these shores; but for a flip of the cosmic coin, any one of us could have been born four miles up the road, in Fairhill, North Philly, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the poorest big city in the nation, on the brink of food insecurity week in and week out; maybe some of us were. Any one of us could have been born in Kibbutz Be’eri or Nir Oz, massacred or taken hostage on October 7, or we could have been born in the West Bank or Gaza, experiencing the bombardment, the desperation, that is being experienced there right now.
To me, understanding the teaching that we all flow from the same source means we are invited, or even commanded, to feel a sense of kinship with one another, invited to feel that our souls are mirrored in the other, that there but for the grace of God, are our circumstances not reversed, and therefore, this teaching suggests, that we’re duty bound to do our parts to contribute to our collective efforts to seek to ensure that we all get a fair shake in this life.
Now, I’m not naive — or at least I don’t think I am. Multiple examples I’ve just cited included bad actors preying on those who are vulnerable.
As Yehuda Kurtzer teaches, if we are all created in the image of God, that means I am, too, and I have a duty, even an obligation, to defend myself, too. But it also means that whoever is at the other end of my response is also created in the image of God, and I better consider that with each and every step I take.
We need each other. We need to see when our self-defense has reached its limits and when we are in danger of losing sight of the shared humanity of the other, that they flow from the same source as we do; we need to call out when others are not seeing our humanity, when they throw around what they see as slurs — Zionist, Zio, Jew — in an effort to dehumanize us. I am all of those things: Jew, Zionist, human being.
We’re all human beings, and we need each other. We share in the experience of being a human being, responsible for one another, the only possible answer to one another’s loneliness.
So we need each other means, we need one another in this community, people beyond our family and our workplace, to accompany us, to share in our story, to, through that accompaniment, transform our experiences of suffering and joy to experiences of connection and holiness; it means that we need each other as part of the Jewish people, a collective that has sustained these rhythms, practices and stories, in profound ways, that allow us to be joined in our collective memories and experiences and to gather on days like today; and we need each other in the whole of humanity — the planet’s fate rests in our hands, collectively. Every person’s actions affect the other and are affected by the other’s actions in turn. We are bound together; we need each other.
It’s taken me much longer than it needed to to realize that; to accept the invitation to be fully present to the connection that our souls share. To be willing, despite my hard earned self sufficiency, to allow for the notion that we need each other. But we do. G’mar hatimah tovah — may you be sealed in the Book of Life for good. Shanah tovah.
