The Torah of Moderation - First Day Shavuot, 5774

Today we celebrate Matan Torah, the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai.

Usually, when we mention the “giving of the Torah” or the “receiving,” we are talking about God to Moses, or God to the Jews. But really we should understand this as the gift from the Jews to the world.

Because if there is one thing that we can proudly point to as Jews and say, this is ours, it’s the Torah. Not, of course, the Torah alone, but “Torah” in the wider sense of that word: incorporating the millennia of commentary and interpretation based on and illuminating the Five Books of Moses and the rest of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. We have shared that wider gift of Torah with the world.  

And this distinction, between the written Torah and all of its interpretation is essential. ‘Cause let’s face it: the Torah is a complicated book. Yes, there are many wonderful Jewish values that originate in the Torah: welcoming guests (Genesis 18:1-8), taking care of the poor among us (many places, including Leviticus 19:9-10), treating the strangers among us fairly (many places, including Lev. 19:33-34), business ethics (e.g. Lev. 19:13, 35-36ת Deut. 25:13-16), and so forth. But there are many items in the Torah that challenge us as modern, thinking people. Consider for a moment some of the more extreme positions that the Torah takes:

    A disobedient son should be put to death. (Deut. 21:18-21)

    One who violates the Shabbat in public (e.g. by gathering wood) should be put to death. (Num. 15:32-36)

    The Sotah ritual (Numbers 5)

And so forth. But it is essential to note that the Torah alone is not Judaism! Our tradition is not about the literal application of the words of the Torah. We do not put anybody to death or practice humiliating rituals. The rabbinic tradition, through a process that began in the 2nd century CE and continues to this very day, has studied the words of Torah, interpreted them and codified them according to contemporary norms in every generation.  What we know, understand and practice as Judaism is not the written Torah, but rather, as it is filtered through the rabbinic lens. We are not ancient Israelites; we are rabbinic Jews.

For example, we do not stone disobedient children to death, even though that is clearly commanded in the Torah. The rabbis of the Talmud (BT Sanhedrin 68bff) re-interpreted the very concept of what it means to be disobedient to set the bar so high that it would actually be impossible for a child to meet this qualification, thereby mitigating the severity of the Torah’s imperative.

When I was at the Rabbinical Assembly convention two weeks ago, I participated in an extended learning session with Rabbi Donniel Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, on the subject of the precedence of certain mitzvot over others. For example, the Talmud tells us (Berakhot 19b) that if you discover that you or somebody else is wearing an item of clothing containing a forbidden mixture of fibers (e.g. wool and linen; aka shaatnez), you must tear it off immediately. One page later, the Talmud tells a story about a certain R. Ada bar Ahavah who, upon seeing a woman in the market wearing a headress which he thinks to contain shaatnez, and knocks it off her head, causing the woman much shame and stirring up a major hubbub. As it turns out, she’s not even Jewish! So R. Ada bar Ahavah is in the wrong, and has doubly transgressed.

In some places, our tradition upholds a certain kind of zealotry. But elsewhere, we find that the intricacies and sensibilities of human relationships require more attention than the letter of the law. Elsewhere in the Talmud (Megillah 3b) we find that the rabbis ask about the priority of certain mitzvot. If one is faced with taking care of an unclaimed corpse (known as a met mitzvah) versus reading Megillat Esther on Purim, the met mitzvah takes precedence, due to the principle of kevod haberiyot, the respect for all God’s creatures. Furthermore, the Talmud emphasizes that this latter mitzvah, respect, is of such great importance that it outweighs all negative commandments of the Torah.

Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman, aka Nahmanides or Ramban, who lived in 13th-century Spain, cites a verse in the Torah to extend this logic even further (Deut. 6:18):

וְעָשִׂיתָ הַיָּשָׁר וְהַטּוֹב, בְּעֵינֵי ה' --לְמַעַן יִיטַב לָךְ, וּבָאתָ וְיָרַשְׁתָּ אֶת-הָאָרֶץ הַטֹּבָה, אֲשֶׁר-נִשְׁבַּע ה' לַאֲבֹתֶיךָ.

Do what is right and good in the sight of the Lord, that it may go well with you and that you may be able to possess the good land that the Lord your God promised on oath to your fathers.

Ramban tells us that this verse is a kind of legal catch-all that covers every detail of human behavior that is not otherwise addressed in the Torah - that is, that we should go beyond the letter of the law. This is a principle known as “lifnim mishurat hadin.” We are not only obligated to fulfill the mitzvot that are explicitly identified, but also to extend the logic of what is right and good to everything else. Ramban tells us that we must refine our behavior so that our reputations are spotless, and that our conversations with others are always pleasant, so that we may be worthy of being known by others as “right and good.”

Returning for a moment to the case of the R. Ada bar Ahavah, who knocks off the woman’s headress in the market, since he has violated kevod haberiyot / respect for all God’s creatures and damaged his reputation, he has therefore transgressed. Sometimes respect trumps the letter of the law.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the moderation for which we stand, for which the greater Torah stands. And this is the gift that we Jews bring to the world, the very gift that we celebrate today. We are not zealots; we are not fanatics. The ancient rabbis, and even some of us today want us to be sensitive to how we behave while fulfilling the law, and make sure that it reflects well upon us. We must not just perform mitzvot, but must do it in a respectful way that maintains our reputations.

The Talmud (Yoma 86a) also identifies for us the label applied to those who claim to act in the name of God but are in fact profaning God’s name. The term for this is hillul haShem:

But if someone studies Scripture and Mishnah, serves Torah scholars, but is dishonest in business, and discourteous in his relations with people, what do people say about him? Woe unto him who studied the Torah; woe unto his father who taught him Torah; woe unto his teacher who taught him Torah! This man studied the Torah; look how corrupt are his deeds, how ugly his ways.

It is certainly possible to follow the letter of the law and still commit hillul haShem. We need not look too deeply into the Jewish world to see plenty of examples.

Last week, when the rabbinic head of the Agudath Israel, an umbrella organization of Haredi Jews, Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, was giving a brief devar Torah at a celebratory dinner attended by Mayor Bill DeBlasio. He used his opportunity to slander non-Orthodox Jews (and some Modern Orthodox Jews as well). From the New York Times:

Rabbi Perlow offered a shower of condemnation for Reform and Conservative Jews, who he said were among those who “subvert and destroy the eternal values of our people.” These movements, he said, “have disintegrated themselves, become oblivious, fallen into an abyss of intermarriage and assimilation.”

“They will be relegated,” he added, “to the dustbins of Jewish history.”

It was surely a deliberate choice to deliver these words when the mayor was present, because he knew that there would be media coverage, and the bulk of New York Jewry, who he knows are not Orthodox, would read his words. He also knew that Mayor DeBlasio would likely let the remarks go by without comment, which he did.

Just two days later, the same Rabbi Perlow delivered a speech to 10,000 women in his community about the dangers of the Internet. And what’s more, he spoke to them separated from his audience by a one-way mirror, so he could not see the women. That’s right - he actually spoke while looking at himself in the mirror. The possibilities for commentary here are endless.

The moderate conception of Judaism which we emphasize values women and men equally and does not see women merely as sources of temptation that must be obscured from view. This is not how women are perceived outside the synagogue, and it should not be that way on the inside.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Torah is not black and white, to be fulfilled to its letter at the expense of others. Doing what is right and good in the eyes of God means that we acknowledge not only the ethical norms of the society in which we live and the innovations that human ingenuity has brought, but is also respectful of all. What sort of people would the Jews be if we stuck our heads in the sand? How would we fulfill our mission on Earth of bringing this Torah of moderation to the world if we cannot even look at people?

Our task as Conservative Jews is to live our ideals proudly and boldly, continuing to emphasize the voice of moderation, of kevod haberiyot / respect for God’s creatures, that is evident in the wider Torah, for the Jews and for the world. We must remind the Rabbi Perlows of this world that the Second Temple was destroyed due to sin’at hinam, causeless hatred, and that the only path that we have together into the Jewish future is one of mutual encouragement and honor, one based on maintaining the good reputation and the pleasant conversation that Ramban suggests.

Hag Sameah!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, first day of Shavuot, June 4, 2014.)

The Two Keys to the Jewish Future: S + T = J (Bemidbar 5774)

I cannot look at the beginning of Bemidbar / Numbers, with its census figures of the twelve tribes, and not think about where we are as a people. I cannot help but think of the lot of demographic studies of Jews in the New York Area and nationwide of the past several years, most of which reveal shifts in measures of engagement, affiliation, and intermarriage that do not bode well for the future of Judaism in America, particularly non-Orthodox Judaism. I cannot help but wring my hands, as we have collectively done as a people for a long time.

I ask myself, “What will maintain us as a people? What will preserve our fundamental distinctiveness?” Many of you know that this is the question that keeps me up at night.

And when you read the numbers in the opening chapters of the book of Numbers, you see that we have been obsessed with the quantitative measures of our nation from its very inception. An extended family of 70 people went down into Egypt; two million emerged from slavery as a people, Am Yisrael. A million of our number were expelled from Spain in 1492, and perhaps as many remained as New Christians; six million died in the Shoah; the State of Israel was established by half a million mandate-era residents of Palestine. There are roughly five million of us here in America today.

We are captivated with counting ourselves, and the demographic bug afflicted us heavily when it emerged in the late 19th century as an outgrowth of the Zionist movement in Russia, and in particular the work of the great Jewish historian Shimon Dubnow, who established the Jewish Historical Ethnographical Committee of the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia in 1892.

We are not only fascinated with documenting and counting ourselves, but we are also continually convinced that we are on the verge of disappearing. (I noticed with interest this week that the Mashadi community, not by any stretch of the imagination in danger of evaporating, issued a taqqanah about not allowing converts to be a part of their community, similar to that issued by the Syrian Jews in Brooklyn in 1935.)

The Zionist philosopher and historian Shimon Rawidowicz labeled us “the Ever-Dying People,” and published a book by that name in 1948. (Rawidowicz, BTW, was also the editor of a collection of Dubnow’s essays and letters.). He wrote:

“The world makes many images of Israel, but Israel makes only one image of itself: that of a being constantly on the verge of ceasing to be, of disappearing.”

These ideas are built into our liturgy and our theology. On weekdays, when we recite the words of tahanun (“supplication”), we chant somewhat mournfully:  

“Shomer Yisrael, shemor she’erit Yisrael. Guardian of Israel, protect the remnant of Israel.”

It is no wonder that even today we obsess about our nascent disappearance; we are hard-wired to do so.

A Talmud professor of mine at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Dr. David Kraemer, once enlivened our class with a sidebar discussion about Jews and their attachment to Judaism. He noted that there have been times in our history when we have been more committed and engaged to living a religiously-Jewish life, and times of lesser commitment. We have survived periods of oppression, war, intermarriage, conversion away and assimilation and really all the the same issues that we face today. There is really nothing new under the sun, suggested Dr. Kraemer, and so why should we worry? “Should our children be permitted to celebrate Halloween?” we wondered. “Why not?” offered Dr. Kraemer. We rebutted with, “What about Christmas?” He gave us a wry smile, and quietly said (something like), “We already do.”

He was not talking about modern Jews adopting Christmas from their Christian neighbors, but that Hanukkah, like Christmas, is an echo of the festivals adjacent to the winter solstice that many ancient agrarian societies celebrated. Yes, our rabbis gave it a new name, a new backstory, and so forth, but fundamentally it is the same holiday.

Dr. Kraemer’s point was that we have always managed to maintain our peoplehood and traditions, whatever the outside world has thrown at us.

So what is it, then, that has worked about Judaism? Why are there still 14 million or so Jews in the world, when we could have disappeared many times over?

It can only be the strength of our heritage, the value of our teachings, the compelling nature of our rituals.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have a rich, varied, and powerful tradition, one that speaks to people even in these vastly secular, disinterested times.

We have to overcome our fears regarding assimilation, and live Jewish lives of quiet confidence and commitment. And how do we do that? By focusing on our core of active participants, by strengthening the core of our community, and by creating a communal experience that is so compelling that it will draw more people in. And I think we can do so by invoking three essential concepts in Jewish tradition, the themes of the Shema section of Shaharit, which we recited this morning (as we do every morning). Those essential themes are: Creation,  Revelation, and Redemption.

Creation is, of course, about the traditional week, the six days in which God metaphorically created the world, followed by Shabbat. It’s about not only the natural environment that we inhabit, but also the rhythm of the Jewish week.

Revelation is an intimidating (and, let’s face it, goyish-sounding) word referring to our receiving of the Torah (which we will commemorate in a mere 11 days on Shavuot). It’s our national story, the basis for our rich textual heritage.

The classic sense of redemption is that God took us out of Egypt, setting us free from slavery.  However, when we talk about that ancient redemption, we are also hinting at a coming redemption. And we make that connection every morning in Shaharit.

Ladies and gentlemen, those three concepts are not just a series. They can also be read as an equation (and here is where Numbers creeps back into the discussion):

Creation + Revelation = Redemption

In an effort to make this easier to remember, I’m going to abbreviate it as follows:

S = Shabbat, i.e. Creation

T = Torah, i.e. Revelation

J = the Jewish future, i.e. Redemption

Hence, 

S + T = J

That’s it, ladies and gentlemen. Let me explain what I mean.

I took a couple of journeys within the last two weeks; the first was to the convention of the Rabbinical Assembly in Dallas, where I learned a whole lot of Torah, reconnected with colleagues, and reminisced about the five years I spent living in Texas. Talmud Torah, engaging with the words of our ancient tradition, is not only the greatest mitzvah among the 613 (see Mishnah Peah 1:1); it is also refreshing. We recited this morning in Pesuqei Dezimrah this morning (Psalm 19:8) “Torat Adonai temimah, meshivat nafesh.” God’s Torah is perfect, restoring the soul.

Torah, revelation, is not just refreshing to me; it is in fact what has sustained us through centuries of dispersion, oppression, and destruction. If it were not for the Torah, we might have evaporated after the First and Second Temples were destroyed. The Torah contains not only the mitzvot, but also our national story, our heritage, and our secret to everlasting peoplehood. It is greater than the sum of its parts.

But the other half of the equation is Creation, and that speaks to the second journey I took. Right after returning from Texas, my family and I drove up to Camp Ramah in the Berkshires for the second annual Vav Class Family Retreat, where Danny Mishkin and Rabbi Roth and I facilitated a phenomenal Shabbat experience for thirteen member families. What has made this program work so well now for two years running is, primarily, the simplicity of Shabbat. In camp, we observe Shabbat traditionally, including tefillot, festive meals, games, learning, discussion, and other Shabbat-friendly activities. We discourage the use of electronic devices, and of course there is nowhere to travel to and nothing to spend money on. The results are truly beautiful and inspiring.

What makes Shabbat work is that it is a great “reset”-button. It is a chance to reconnect with family, friends, and Creation. And what better place to do that than in camp? And, as if to heighten that experience, all of our tefillah experiences were held outdoors. Synagogue buildings can of course be inspiring places to communicate with God, but davening outside brings a heightened kavvanah.

For minhah on Shabbat afternoon, we first read Torah, as is traditional. Then, after the Torah was returned to the ark, we took a walk out into camp to sensitize ourselves to the beauty of Creation found all around us. We completed minhah by reciting the Amidah in a field, standing far apart from one another to recite the words of tefillah alone with God and nature. Some of us found it very moving.

Shabbat brings us back to Creation. And, moving forward, this will be an essential part of our work here on Earth. At the ordination/investiture ceremony for new rabbis and cantors at the Jewish Theological Seminary this past week, Dr. Arnold Eisen, the Chancellor, made the following remarks:

“I strongly suspect that the mitzvah on which our ultimate worth and future turns—yours and mine—may well be that of preserving God's creation. ’Tending the garden’ means something different than it ever has before, now that the survival of the planet is in question.”

Shabbat and Creation go together. And Creation + Revelation = Redemption. S + T = J.

So what is this redemption? It is that we will merit an infinite future on this planet, which God has created.

   

Ladies and gentlemen, Jews and Judaism have existed on this planet for millennia, and we will continue to exist. Our redemption is our continuation. We have outlasted the Babylonians, the Romans, and a host of other civilizations. All we have to do is keep the ideas of Creation and Revelation in front of us, and the future will glisten with the power of Torah, of Shabbat, and of a healthy planet to sustain us.

Shabbat Shalom.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 5/24/2014.)

A Call to Action - Lekh Lekha 5774

I’m sure that many of us saw the article in the New York Times last week about the demographic state of American Jewry. (The full report from the Pew Research Center may be found here.) The major findings are the kinds of things that set off alarm bells and rounds of hand-wringing in certain quarters of the Jewish community. For example:

• 22% of American Jews now consider themselves “Jews of no religion,” and that figure is higher for younger cohorts
• 72% of non-Orthodox Jews marrying in the last 13 years married somebody who is not Jewish
• Affiliated Conservative Jews now account for 18% of American Jews (cf. 35% Reform and 10% Orthodox
• The Conservative movement is now, on average, the oldest movement (median age of members is 55 years) and the one with the fewest children living at home (0.3 per family)

And so forth. There are plenty more where those nuggets came from.

Now it is very easy to let ourselves get agitated over this, and of course the Times loves stories that get Jews agitated. (Arnold Eisen, the Chancellor of JTS, invoked a classic joke in his blog post on the subject: One Jew sends a telegram to the other: Start worrying. Details to follow.)

But, like Chancellor Eisen, I’d like to suggest that we let cooler heads prevail here. The essential message that we should glean from this report is this: we have to read this not as a threat, but as a call to action. Allow me to explain by illustrating a point in Parashat Lekh Lekha.

Our newly-minted everyman hero, Abram, whom we just met at the end of Parashat Noah, is instructed by God to pick up and leave his home, and move to some other place:

וַיֹּאמֶר ה' אֶל-אַבְרָם, לֶךְ-לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ, אֶל-הָאָרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ.

God said to Abram, “Go forth from your land, and from your homeland, and from your father’s house, to the land that I shall show you.

Abram does not know where he is going, but he trusts God, and so he picks up and leaves his homeland and his father’s house to head out to what we know will some day be called Israel. This is his Lekh Lekha moment, where Abram (according to a midrash), goes off in search of himself, primed to be the father of a new nation.

Ladies and gentlemen, we in this room, who are among the most committed American Jews, and in a wider sense the Conservative movement, we must go off in search of ourselves. And to do that, we have to leave the comfort of our homeland, of (dare I say it) Rabbi Waxman’s house. And I mean that in both the tangible and spiritual sense.

I was on a conference call this week with Dr. Jonathan Sarna, the prominent professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, to put the Pew survey into perspective. He pointed out that (א) studies like this pop up from time to time, broadcasting dire predictions and precipitating much communal angst, and (ב) that they have also spurred the major movements into action, and have even succeeded in helping turn them around.

Dr. Sarna pointed out that this is not the first such seeming statistical low point. In his book, American Judaism (Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 224-5), we read that in 1919, the American Jewish Year Book offers that less than 23 percent of the Jewish population was “regularly affiliated with congregations.” (That is far less than today, percentage-wise.) In 1926, the US Census of Religious Bodies found that “average length of stay in a Jewish school” was two years total. The San Francisco of 1938 had an 18 percent affiliation rate. In Brownsville, Brooklyn in 1935, only 8 percent of men regularly attended synagogue (and the women even less), and ¾ of young Jews in all of New York City in had not attended services AT ALL in the past year, including High Holidays. And so forth.

Dr. Sarna noted that in the 1930s, Reform Judaism was seen by most American Jews as a small movement with limited appeal, and would soon disappear. But in response, Reform reinvented itself, and is today by far the largest movement. Similarly, he noted that his teacher, the sociologist Marshall Sklare, predicted in the 1960s that Orthodoxy would soon languish away. But Dr. Sklare was wrong, and Orthodoxy is thriving today, even though it only accounts for 10% of American Jews.

While news outlets have been quick to point out that the numbers look especially bad for Conservative Judaism, these kinds of surveys have spurred movement-wide change before, and this should be our call to action. This may be our Lekh Lekha moment.

We are living in an age in which fear/mistrust/dislike of institutions is rampant. Government. Corporations. Organized religion (although I’m not sure why anybody would call Judaism “organized”). Indeed, the very concept of “religion” is alienating to many people today; such is the hazard of living in an open, secular society. But that’s why we have to leave our comfortable surroundings, the physical and the metaphorical, and extend ourselves, to reconsider what we do and how we do it.

For decades, and especially through the periods of dramatic growth that the Conservative movement and Temple Israel experienced in the middle of the 20th century, we did not have to work to attract adherents. It was enough for congregations to hire a brilliant rabbi and a cantor with a soaring voice, set up a Hebrew school, and voila! In came the Jews.

But we are no longer living in those days. We cannot expect that people will just walk in the door and join us. Yes, that is true for a few people (we welcomed a bunch of new families this past weekend with a special welcoming ceremony). But many Jews today think that the synagogue experience is not for them; many Jews think that they just don’t have time or money or interest for shul, that they can’t manage the Hebrew or synagogue choreography, and are therefore intimidated or bored. Reaching those people will require that we go out to them, and provide avenues for involvement that are not solely focused on ritual. And here is where we can take some cues from Chabad.

Where do we usually encounter Chabadniks? On the street with lulav and etrog. On campuses offering free Shabbat meals and a welcoming home. Holding big, splashy programs with wide appeal for families. They go to where the Jews are, and they attract them with free offerings, a judgment-free, friendly environment, and the promise of an authentic Jewish experience.

But we have some things that Chabad does not. We are egalitarian, counting women and men as equals in Jewish life. We welcome dissenting views and incorporate history, science, and scholarship into our understanding of Jewish texts. We think and approach Judaism like contemporary Americans. And it is for this reason that we cannot cede the realm of outreach to Orthodoxy: we need to be out there where the Jews are, too.

A Reform colleague, Rabbi Leon Morris of Sag Harbor, offered the following in an opinion piece in Haaretz:

“... the troubling results of this survey actually underscore the urgent need for non-Orthodox Judaism to be successful. If a case needed to be made that the vast majority of American Jews will never become Orthodox, this study makes the case clearer than ever. The synagogues that have the greatest potential to reach the growing number of “Jews of no religion” are the non-Orthodox ones. If American Orthodoxy cares about the survival of Jewish life in America, the results of this study should in fact encourage American Orthodox leadership to work together more closely with the Reform and Conservative movements. Those movements are the shock troops for deepening Jewish life for the most endangered Jews described in this study.”

We are on the front lines, ladies and gentlemen, but we’re all looking the other way.

Dr. Sarna pointed out a few encouraging statistics: that a whopping 83% of the “Jews of no religion” say that they are proud to be Jewish, and 46% of them believe in God! And then he indicated another group: 36% of American Jews are in the “Other” category. They are not affiliated with a mainstream denomination, or describe themselves as “just Jewish.” These are the people, he says, that we should be going after. To this end, Dr. Sarna suggests a few things. We should...

• feature musical Friday night services at a fixed time each week
• reconsider the de-funding of Koach, the Conservative movement’s arm on college campuses
• refocus our energies on promoting day schools - making them affordable as well as the best educational option for Jewish children
• meet the technology challenge - not only to use the new tools of social media better, but also to stop telling people to turn off their phones in synagogue. (And let me assure you that this is a hard thing for me to accept.) People used to come to synagogue to be connected to others; now when they arrive they are told to disconnect

I think we could even come up with our own creative new approaches. There are things that we do already that are so creative and engaging and work on so many levels, but most of them are small programs that reach only a select few people. The things that I think work the best are those that create holy moments outside of the formality of synagogue services, where it is easier to make personal connections: tashlikh, the Sukkah-building workshop, the new members’ welcoming ceremony that we did last Sunday, the Youth House trip to Israel, the retreat at Camp Ramah that we led for Vav class students last spring, and will be doing again, the new groups like Temple Israel Bonds (for parents with children in the Religious School) and the EmpTInesters group.

Along these lines, we should have more retreats, more creative services that are held outdoors, more social groups that bring like-minded people together. We should have meet-ups in Kings Point Park where we learn Talmud, say. We should reach out through Facebook to gather people for a surprise, late-night qiddush halevanah (blessing over the moon), maybe with cocktails. We should organize a volunteer staff of community outreach coordinators, who keep an eye peeled for newcomers to Great Neck and reach out even before young couples sign up to bring their kids to Beth HaGan, or sign up for High Holiday seats.

The point is, we have to think outside the sanctuary. We can’t rely merely on the Bar/Bat Mitzvah process to capture and hold people, especially when so many can easily avoid our “requirements” and fees by going elsewhere.

In two weeks, I will be attending a training session at JTS about implementing the community organizing model, a workshop for rabbis that will help us in building our communities, and I hope that it will give me fresh ideas to bring back to Great Neck.

But it cannot be just the clergy; we have to work harder as a community as well. We cannot sit idly by, even here in this beautiful sanctuary, as 22% becomes 30% becomes 50%. If we want this community to grow, we have to find those “other” Jews, the 36%, invite them in.

So this is a call to action, and an opportunity. There are plenty of people, right here in Great Neck, that might well join our community if we can reach them and offer them appealing points of entry. Our Lekh Lekha moment has arrived - we may need to leave our current model, but we will do it knowing that the Promised Land is at the end of our journey.