Breaking the Fourth Wall: Pete Seeger and the Mishkan - Terumah 5774

If you know anything about folk music, you know that Pete Seeger sang an assortment of Hebrew songs, even though he was not Jewish. In fact, his group, The Weavers, had a hit in 1950 with a song that was on the flip side (remember flip sides?) of their squeaky-clean cover of Leadbelly's Goodnight, Irene. That song was Tzena, Tzena:

צאנה צאנה צאנה צאנה הבנות וראינה
חיילים במושבה
אל נא אל נא אל נא אל נא אל נא תתחבאנה
מבן חייל איש צבא

Tzena, tzena, tzena, tzena habanot, ur’ena

Hayalim bamoshava.

Al-na, al-na, al-na, al-na, al-na tithabena

miben-hayil ish tzava.

Go forth, daughters, and see soldiers in the moshava (agricultural settlement)

Do not be afraid of a man of valor, one of the army*

Pete Seeger passed away at age 94 this week. Among the remarkable things that he was known for in his long and varied career as a folksinger was the knack for bringing the audience into his music.

I saw him once in 1990, when I was a sophomore at Cornell. He played in Bailey Hall, a 2,000 seat on-campus venue that has a certain intimacy about it. When Pete asked us to sing along, we did. He stood alone on the stage with his banjo, a skinny, affable septuagenarian that raised his arm and beckoned us into the music. It was a transformational experience. We all joined in, in one voice. (Well, almost all. My physical chemistry professor, the most boring lecturer in upstate New York, was seated a row in front of me with his wife, and he nodded off.)

What endowed that experience with magic was the physical chemistry, if you will, that occurs when the fourth wall is broken, when the audience becomes the performance. And you might say that this is the kind of magic that took place in the mishkan, the portable worship-space that is explicitly described in today's parashah, and for most of the rest of the book of Shemot / Exodus.

I have often wondered why the Torah spends so much time on the details of the mishkan, particularly when it spends such a small amount of space on crucial events in the lives of the main characters of the Torah. For example, the Aqedah, the Binding of Isaac, takes all of 19 verses (Gen. 22:1-19). The episode with the burning bush takes a mere 39 (Ex. 3:1 - 4:17). The flood story? 77 (Gen. 6:11 - 9:19). And the mishkan gets a grand total of 454 verses over a total of 13 chapters (Ex. 25 - 31 & 35:4 - 40:38). This is a stunning amount of detail for an over-decorated tent that was in use for a very narrow slice of Jewish history.

Why the detail? Why the repetition? You might think of these as academic questions. But they are connected to the more serious question of why, which is, why are these 454 verses of any relevance to us today as contemporary American Jews?

The answer is that the mishkan is the model for our ongoing engagement with holiness. The 13th-century Spanish commentator Nachmanides (aka Ramban) was also perplexed by the large fraction of the book of Shemot dedicated to the mishkan. Ramban felt the need to write a special introduction to this parashah explaining that the mystery behind the mishkan is that after Moses received the tablets on Mt. Sinai, the few basic principles enshrined in the Ten Commandments, that God would need a way to continue that conversation about holiness. And so God commanded the building of the mishkan to be that vehicle of ongoing engagement.

The Torah itself justifies the building of the mishkan right up in the opening verses in the parashah (Ex. 25:8):

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם.

Ve-asu li miqdash, veshakhanti betokham.

They shall make Me a holy place, and I will dwell among them.

What is a miqdash? A place of holiness. You can see within it the root qof-dalet-shin, the shoresh from which all words for holiness are derived.

Ladies and gentlemen, you cannot buy a miqdash anywhere. You cannot get it online. Holiness is something that only we create, and we do not create it through designing beautiful buildings for worship. (Some of you may be aware that we are currently working on a capital campaign for improvements around THIS beautiful building, which is this community’s miqdash, our place of holiness.)

What made the mishkan, which the Torah deliberately calls a miqdash, holy is not the fancy materials. Not the gold, silver, lapis lazuli, the threads in royal colors and so forth. Rather, what made it holy was the participation of the Israelites in building it and taking part in an ongoing way in the rituals featured therein.

And just like a performer on stage, like Pete Seeger, created transformative moments by engaging the audience, by breaking that fourth wall, so too did Moses and Aaron and, frankly, God create holiness by engaging the people in the construction of the mishkan. What would have been merely a mishkan, literally a resting place for God, became a miqdash, a holy precinct.

And so too for us today. A well-designed synagogue building with soaring architecture and fancy amenities means nothing without the people inside it! Our presence, our participation, our engagement make this place holy. We make this a sanctuary, a miqdash. Without us, it's just a building.

Yes, this bimah might look like a stage. But there is no fourth wall here. Everybody in this room is engaged in the holy act of learning together right now; everybody is a part of the building of community right now. Furthermore, I am not speaking merely about services, about tefillah / prayer. What makes this a miqdash and a qehillah qedoshah, a holy community, is everything else that goes on here and in the context of  Temple Israel:

• learning
• celebrating
• grieving
• schmoozing (for Jews, that’s also a holy act)
• marking lifecycle events (weddings, benei mitzvah, beritot millah, etc.)
• giving tzedaqah
• visiting the sick
• comforting those who mourn
• yes, even eating together
• etc.

It is our participation in those things that make this a holy place. Not God, but us! Those are the reasons we need community. We need each other. We need you.

Without places like this, without a community like this, how would we grieve, or celebrate, or learn about our tradition?

Ve-asu: Let them make the miqdash, says God. And I will rest among them. That’s us. That’s you.

We need you. Every single one of you. Every single person here. We cannot afford to let anyone in our midst NOT be involved on an ongoing basis. And that is why I, Rabbi Stecker, Cantor Frieder, and the lay leadership are constantly looking for new ways to connect, a new way to identify, a new way to participate. We need to continue to build community, individually, in small groups and in large, from the ground up.

So do not be surprised if I call you to talk about ways that you can be involved. Because you make the miqdash. Do not be afraid to pass through the fourth wall. Your community needs you.

Shabbat shalom. 

~Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, February 1, 2014.)

*The Weavers sang it first with English lyrics which they composed:

Tzena, Tzena, Tzena, Tzena

Can't you hear the music playing

In the city square

Tzena, Tzena, Tzena, Tzena

Come where all our friends will find us

With the dancers there

Tzena, Tzena join the celebration

There'll be people there from every nation

Dawn will find us laughing in the sunlight

Dancing in the city square

Tzena, Tzena, come and dance the Hora

One, two, three, four

All the boys will envy me for

Tzena, Tzena, when the band is playing

My heart's saying

Tzena, Tzena, Tzena

An Ancient Principle Revived: Our Shared Story - Vayishlah 5774

This past week we observed Veterans’ Day, which, I think, is just behind Memorial Day in the list of Most Unappreciated American Holidays. NPR played stories of recent veterans - one man who served in Afghanistan and is recovering from horrible burns, vets who are finding work and community by becoming firefighters, older vets recalling their experiences in WWII as their numbers dwindle. The stories were touching indeed, but my sense is that most Americans were not reflecting too seriously on Monday about those who have served in the nation’s armed forces.

What Veterans’ Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Thanksgiving do for us as Americans is to help maintain our shared story. This is who we are; this is our history; these are the memories and principles that sustain us as we move forward.

Problem is, I don’t think we have a shared story any more. Maybe we never did, but in any case, the texture of American society is too varied, and our willingness to spend time reflecting about anything is too scarce. We are more likely to spend these days shopping than celebrating our American-ness or recalling those who served and died for this nation. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of our society has, I think, yielded multiple Americas: Consider how we are failing to speak to one another in the public sphere - our politics, issues of education or race or even religion.

And, thanks to the magical information-sorting mechanism known as the Internet, we are moving to a place where we are all living in our own little echo chambers. As print media and even broadcast journalism (is anything actually “broadcast” today?) continue their slow decline, we are gradually growing more isolated due to the search engines that make choices for us regarding what we want to read or watch, all in the name of the advertising dollars that sustain Google and Facebook by getting us to click on more and more links.   

Abetted by the binary thinking that underlies computer technology (everything boils down to ones and zeros; you either “Like” something on Facebook or you don’t), there are two mutually-exclusive narratives on climate change, two narratives on health care, multiple narratives on Israel, and on and on. These binary echo chambers are, in some ways, limiting our abilities to see the complexity in difficult issues and ancient religious traditions.

In this environment, it is very hard for us to have a shared story.

However, ladies and gentlemen, shared stories are the vehicle that binds us to each other. And no matter how talented our electronic devices become, they will never bring us together in the ways that our ancestors bonded, first over communal meals by the fire, then in the foundational myths that held ancient societies together, then in the common ideals and dogma of the great religions, and in contemporary times, the modern tales of war, revolution, and technological advancement that have shaped our world.

So, while shared stories have always been the glue of societies ancient and modern, consider for a moment the following. In the last month, I have been to four different gatherings of Jews discussing the Jewish future: 

• the United Synagogue Centennial Convention,
• a seminar on the future of the rabbinate with Long Island colleagues, hosted by UJA-Federation’s Synergy program,
• a workshop on using the model of community organizing for synagogues hosted by the Rabbinical Assembly (Clergy 2.0), and
• a training session for congregational facilitators of United Synagogue’s Sulam for Emerging Leaders, a leadership-development program that we are launching here at Temple Israel next month. 
   

At three out of four of these gatherings, significant attention was paid to the need to build relationships between people by sharing stories. In the seminar on community organizing, I and 43 other Conservative rabbis spent a day and a half learning techniques for eliciting stories from members of our communities, individually and in small groups. It seems that the idea of sharing stories is one of the foundational principles of the brave, new world of reimagining faith communities.

But here’s the irony: we know that! In particular, we, the Jews, the People of the Book - we know that stories bind us to one another. We are the keepers of the greatest contribution of storytelling to Western society: the Torah!

In fact, we read this morning what I have long felt is the most essential, foundational story in the Torah related to Jewish peoplehood. It’s Yaaqov’s one-on-one encounter with an angel, where he wrestles all night long, but before the angel departs, he bestows upon Yaaqov a new name: Yisrael.

What does Yisrael mean? The Torah tells us:

כִּי-שָׂרִיתָ עִם-אֱלֹהִים וְעִם-אֲנָשִׁים, וַתּוּכָל.

For you have striven with beings divine and human, and have prevailed.

We are Benei Yisrael, the children of Israel. Our very name says everything you need to know about the Israelite people. We are the people who struggle with God. We ask questions. We argue. We disagree. That is an essential quality of the Jewish character. I could rattle off any number of relevant jokes here, but what I am saying is actually quite serious: our theological struggle, our willingness to wrestle with the words of the Torah and Jewish tradition and yes, with God, defines our peoplehood.

And this story of who we are is just one of literally hundreds in the Tanakh, the entire Hebrew Bible. Why do we read the Torah in its entirety every year? Yes, because we continue to learn from it. Yes, because God has commanded us to meditate on these words day and night (c.f. Joshua 1:8). But all the more so, because these are the stories that unite us. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, even the Secular Humanists have to admit that the Torah is our collective, national story.

Here is the challenge that we face as the 21st century picks up speed: the Torah may not be enough. Why are all these Jewish organizations exhorting their rabbis and lay leaders to focus on building relationships through shared stories? Because we have lost sight of our heritage. Because we no longer have one narrative.

How many of us are hear the Torah read regularly? How many of us are meditating on it night and day? I can tell you that in my weekly parashah discussion, Dor HaBa, we usually have about 12 very eager participants. It’s always a great discussion, but can we seriously say that this community is engaged with the Torah?

The recent study by the Pew Research Center indicates that only 11% of American Jews attend synagogue once per week or more, and another 12% once or twice a month. Most of the people in those two categories are Orthodox. That means that ¾ of American Jews, and the vast majority of the non-Orthodox, are not engaged in the time-honored tradition of hearing our Jewish story on a regular basis. And furthermore, even of the ones who are there week after week, how many of us are actually listening, reading, and actively engaged?

We have to work harder to find our contemporary shared stories, so that we can maintain our ancient story, the Torah.

And that will require cultural change. What made big synagogues like this one function through the middle of the 20th century until recent years is the common narrative of its members. Not just the Torah, but the immigrant experience in the New World, the common foods and musical tastes and cultural pursuits, the struggles provoked by anti-Semitism here and abroad, the wake of the Shoah and the establishment and building of the State of Israel.

But we don’t have that anymore. We are far more diverse today, with an ethnic mix far more varied than that of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, with different tales and origins and foods and music. Israel is not struggling for survival. 73% of Jews in the Pew study indicated that “Remembering the Holocaust” is an essential part of being Jewish, but as the survivors among us dwindle and World War II recedes further into our national memory, this will also figure less as a uniter of Jewish peoplehood. (BTW, only 19% that “Observing Jewish law” is essential to being Jewish, although this, of course, is material for another sermon entirely.)  

What this institution, and all the institutions of American Jewish life need, at this point, is cultural change. We are going to need a change that is akin to Yaaqov’s name change, from the one who aspired at birth by grasping the heel of his older twin brother, to the father of the nation that struggles with God. That kind of change.

And that change will have to come from within. It will emerge through a range of conversations: individual conversations one-on-one with members of the clergy and senior staff or lay volunteers, larger conversations in group meetings, and so forth. The primary question that we will be asking, ladies and gentlemen, paraphrases that most famously asked by President John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address. The question is not, “What can Temple Israel do for you?” but rather, “What are you willing to do with Temple Israel? What might you do to make this a more engaging place for more members of this community?”

We will need to move this congregation from a transactional relationship with its members (i.e. you pay your dues, we provide you with services) to that based on personal engagement and participation. And we can build that personal institution. Yes, there are some among us who will always prefer to write out a check than participate in a hands-on way, and there are many of us who feel like we simply do not have time for a more active role in Jewish communal life, and we need all of those people too. But it is upon us as a community to seek ways that we can reconnect, to make this a place of shared stories, to make this institution less, well, institutional.

We are all searching for personal meaning, and we as a community have to get to a place where meaning can be found in our relationships with members of this synagogue, where our stories bind us to each other and to God. And to find those entry points, to create the environment in which we can share those stories, we, the clergy and the laity of Temple Israel will need your help. So we hope that you will step forward when asked.

Until that framework is created, however, here is an easy suggestion: When you are in the building, don’t just talk and greet your friends. After today’s service is over, at the kiddush, find somebody you have never met before and get to know them. Ask: What’s your story? What brought you here today? Tell me about yourself. What makes you want to be involved with a community? What are the things about Judaism that appeal to you? If you had the time, the energy, and the resources, what great idea might you initiate in this community?

We have to continue to struggle with God. We have to continue to engage. If we stop doing so, then we will no longer be Yisrael, the ones who struggle with God. Look for those opportunities to elicit the stories of others, and to share your own. It’s an ancient idea whose time has come again.

Shabbat shalom.

~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, November 16, 2013.)

Why You Can't Be Jewish Alone - Wednesday Kavvanah, 2/22/2012

When I was in my mid-twenties and still working as an engineer, I moved to Houston to take a new job, arriving not long before Pesah.  I knew next to nobody, had not yet joined a synagogue, and could not fly back to my parents for sedarim, so I did nothing.  No Four Questions, no plagues, no fun songs.  I ate matzah alone.  It was the most miserable holiday of my life. 

A fundamental characteristic of Judaism is that it requires community - family, friends, even strangers.  Unlike those spiritual traditions that emphasize one's individual path, Jewish living requires participation with others to be done properly.  We read this week in Parashat Terumah:

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ; וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם

Ve'asu li miqdash veshakhanti betokham
Build me a holy place and I will dwell among them. (Deuteronomy 25:8)

God, of course, speaks in the singular (almost always the case in the Torah).  The references to God's partners here in building the mishkan (the portable Temple-like structure for sacrificing to God while the Israelites were wandering in the desert) are plural: the builders who are being commanded, and those among whom God will dwell.  This is a departure from elsewhere in the Torah, particularly the Decalogue, where God speaks as if to an individual. 

The message is clear: this first act to be executed after the covenant at Sinai, the building of this holy place, is to be understood as the cornerstone of the community.  You (plural) shall build it together, and I will reside with you as a people.  And the same principle is still in play today: we make holy moments together, we celebrate together, we grieve together.  God dwells among us when we join hands, hearts, and minds.

"Organized Religion"? Not Really - Tuesday Kavvanah, 1/24/2012

As a rabbi, I advocate for Judaism.  Whenever I meet somebody who tells me that s/he does not believe in "organized religion", I can't help but joke: "You call this organized?"

To the uninitiated, the assortment of Jewish rituals - the mumbling of lengthy pages of tefillot, or the dietary restrictions, or the separation of Shabbat from the rest of the week, as a short list of examples - might seem at best curious and at worst burdensome.  Indeed, many Jews agree.

We are living in what you might call a devoutly independent age, in which what JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen has termed "the sovereign self" is the overriding personal element in our interaction with the world.  Individual choice is the ultimate guide.  Jewish practice, although hardly conceived in any orderly way, seems to have been designed to thwart this inclination.  Tefillah / prayer generally requires a minyan, a quorum of 10 people.  Jewish learning traditionally requires a partner, and often takes place in a beit midrash, a house of study.  Kashrut, lifecycle events, and many rituals necessitate communal involvement.  You can't be Jewish alone.

So while I hesitate to call Judaism organized, it surely works hard to build community.  And in these times, what could we possibly need more than relationships with others?


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson

Tuesday Kavvanah, 8/23/2011 - Building Community: Sacred Moments

The third level of building relationships is bein adam la-qehillah / between individuals and the community. How do we do this? By creating shared sacred moments.

It is indeed possible to have sacred moments alone - some of us might identify our most mundane rituals as holy to us: that first cup of coffee in the morning, the quiet read before bedtime, and so forth. But I have found that the most powerful sacred moments are the collective ones: lifecycle events (weddings, benei mitzvah, etc.), special tefillah / prayer experiences, singing together after Shabbat dinner on Friday night.

These are the moments that connect us to each other, that establish relationships between the individual and the qehillah, the group. We need to find more of these. As the sociologist Robert Putnam pointed out in his essential book, Bowling Alone, our "social capital," our interconnectedness as a society has gradually eroded over the past half-century. As such, the need for shared sacred moments is greater than ever; we should strive to create more of them, both within and without the synagogue.

Thursday Kavvanah, 8/18/2011 - Building Relationships Between Individuals

The second level of relationship-building that a faith community should be committed to is finding ways to connect people to each other, bein adam le-havero. One way of doing this is to build affinity groups; that is, to feature activities that bring together people with commonalities. Synagogues have traditionally done this through groups that categorize people by age, gender, or stage in life: seniors, young couples, men's club, sisterhood, and so forth. There are other groups that we can try as well: professions, hobbies, reading groups, and so forth.

Looking around the room at the minyan (morning service) attendees today, I saw that everybody who was willing to give an hour of their day, beginning at 6:45 AM, was fairly well-connected to others in the synagogue community. Only very rarely do we get somebody at morning minyan who is not.

But it is not enough to put similar people together in the same room. We must then offer ways for each person to share his or her own story. Telling one's own story, and listening to those of others, helps to build those personal bonds. We need more of this.

Tuesday Kavvanah, 8/16/2011 - Six levels of building relationships

According to Dr. Ron Wolfson, there are six levels of relationships that a synagogue should work toward building:

1. בין אדם לעצמו
Bein adam le-atzmo
Between a person and him/herself

2. בין אדם לחברו
Bein adam le-havero
Between individuals

3. בין אדם לקהילה
Bein adam la-qehillah
Between individuals and their faith community

4. בין אדם ליהדות
Bein adam le-yahadut
Between individuals and Judaism (Jewish practice, Jewish text, Jewish life)

5. בין אדם לעולם
Bein adam la-olam
Between individuals and the greater world

6. בין אדם למקום
Bein adam la-maqom
Between individuals and God

This is not necessarily a linear process, but it makes sense to start with one's internal accounting before moving on to the relationships with others and with God. In future kavvanot, I hope to elaborate on all of the above.

Tuesday Kavvanah, 6/14/2011 - The Goals of Tefillah

What are the goals of tefillah / prayer? Why do we set aside time to recite ancient Hebrew liturgical formulas?

Here are some possible answers:

- to connect with oneself
- to connect with the others around us
- to identify with fellow Jews, our history and tradition
- to be comforted in the context of a loss
- to fulfill our obligation to daily prayer

For me, the goal is connection, and I find that I cannot do this properly if I do not set aside special time for it; 40 minutes in the morning pays off over the rest of the day.

But your answer is within you.

Rosh Hashanah 5771 - The Youth House is the Qodesh ha-Qodashim of Temple Israel

(Originally delivered on September 9 & 10, 2010.)

This is essentially the first of a 2-part sermon, and I will be giving the second half on Yom Kippur.

I must confess two things. The first is that I am receiving no money for mentioning the following product. The second is that I own, and love, my iPod Touch. It gives me instant access to many wonderful things: news, email, music, the Internet, YouTube, and so forth. I am sure that many of you have similar devices, which you are similarly devoted to.

But all of this instant gratification gives me pause. The modern Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s describes God’s encounter with humans at Mt. Sinai as having left both fundamentally changed; likewise, my iPod has changed me as well. And I am not sure that it is necessarily all for the better.

We will come back to the iPod, but the overarching theme to this two-part sermon is this question: What makes us Jewish, and what keeps us Jewish, in the age of the iPod, when momentary satisfaction can be found instantly, and infinite choice rules our desires?

* * * *

What makes us Jewish?

Is it merely bloodlines? Being born to a Jewish mother? Tribal affiliation?
Is it going to services? Bar/t Mitzvah? Jewish law? Shabbat?

Is it a way of thinking?

Is it a commitment to a certain set of principles?

Now how about this:
What keeps us Jewish?

This is a harder question to answer.

In the wake of the recent marriage of Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of two famous Southern Methodists, and Marc Mezvinsky, who grew up in a Jewish home identified with the Conservative movement (that’s right, he’s one of us!), some among us are asking, is this our highest aspiration in America?

America has always been a land of freedom. Arrival in what my great-grandparents called in Yiddish “Di Goldene Medina,” the Golden Land, brought more liberties than they could have possibly known in their country of origin. They fled not only the oppression of non-Jewish rule, but also rabbinic control, the coercion of the Jewish religious authorities in the old country. There are stories of people burning their tefillin while crossing over from Europe by boat, demonstrating their release from this religious control. As Dr. Jonathan Sarna reports in his monumental work, American Judaism, rabbis who immigrated in the late 19th and early 20th century were shocked to see, even on the boat to America, many Jews who “defiled themselves with non-Jewish food... abandoned their daily prayers and considered their tallitot and tefillin excess baggage.”

There are many of us here this mornng, and I think that your presence here indicates that you think that Judaism is valuable, that it is a gift that you have been given by your parents, and that you would like to bestow upon your descendants. How many of us here want great-grandchildren who positively identify as Jewish? Raise your hands.

Given all of that, what will keep us Jewish in America, the golden land of freedom, that great double-edged sword?

And here, I do not necessarily mean “Jewish” in the halakhic sense. That is, the simple definition mandated by Jewish law, which says that you are Jewish if you are born to a Jewish mother, or convert to Judaism under the auspices of a rabbinic Beit Din.

No, I am talking about something else. There are, in fact, multiple ways to be Jewish.

A story is told of one Shimon Fogelberg, who was obsessed with joining a restricted club. So he goes off to Oxford University, acquires an education and the accent of a British gentleman, gets his clothes tailored at Savile Row, and changes his name to Chauncey Fumpleroy III. He returns two years later to the same club, walks up to the same clerk that had kept him out two years before for being Jewish, and says, in the Queen’s English, “Good afternoon. I should like to apply for admission to this grand institution.”

“Certainly, sir,” says the clerk, taking out a form. “And may I ask your name?”

“Chauncey Fumpleroy the Third.”

“Very good, Mr. Fumpleroy. And may I ask your occupation?”

“I deal in stocks and bonds.”

“Very good, sir,” said the clerk again. “And I hope you won’t mind, sir, but it is our policy to ask about your religion as well.”

“Religion?” said Fumpleroy. “I am of the goyish persuasion.”

For Mr. Fogelberg, and for many of us, the American experience has been as much about assimilation as anything else. As such, we have produced many different ways to be Jewish, more than there were in the old country. Yes, there is the halakhic definition of who is a Jew, but it is also possible to be halakhically Jewish, but not religiously or culturally Jewish. It is also possible to be culturally Jewish without being religiously so. And then there is secular Zionism, something that my wife was born into.

You can also be what we might call “reflexively” Jewish. This is when you’re Jewish when you’re with your family - for holidays and for life-cycle celebrations (weddings, benei mitzvah, beritot milah, and so forth), but with no further consideration as to how Judaism permeates the rest of your life.

And then there is what you might call “default” Judaism, which is that you think of yourself as Jewish, and perhaps even as a member of the Jewish people, but do not do anything distinctly Jewish in your life. Those Jews are growing in number today, but they do not tend to pass their Judaism on to their children.

But I am about to advocate for the best way to be Jewish: that is, to be actively Jewish. Active Judaism and those who practice it are what makes us all Jewish, and will keep us Jewish.

To be actively Jewish, you have to do Jewish things: learn our sacred texts, go to the synagogue (even when it’s not a bar mitzvah), and associate with the Jewish community. This is much harder than the “default” method. For many of us, to be actively Jewish requires stepping outside of our comfort zones.

Default Judaism will not ensure that there are Jews in the next generation. Active Judaism will.

And, just to be clear about this, being active does not necessarily mean being Orthodox. And default does not equal Reform. I know many active Reform Jews, and many default Orthodox Jews.

My friends, I have a two-fold suggestion about how to make sure that Temple Israel, and the moderate approach to Judaism that it stands for, will be around for our children and grandchildren: number 1, that we have more children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and number 2, that we dedicate and re-dedicate ourselves to the building of this community by being actively Jewish.

Now, anybody who has been paying attention to my High Holiday sermons over the past three years has noticed that this is my cause. Some rabbis like to talk about personal goals, about bettering yourself. And that’s good. One way of building community is to improve yourself.

I have a more collective vision, one that seeks to incorporate individuals into the greater community. And this is, I think, the most important task facing us as modern people. There are plenty of societal forces that tear us apart, driving extended families to become nuclear families, and nuclear families to become distant associations (as an extreme example, my brother and sister and I live in Florida, California, and New York). This is not unusual in America, for Jews or non-Jews.

But we Jews have each other. We are all members of Kelal Yisrael (that is, the collective group of all Jews). And we need each other. Without commitment to community, our Jewish community, we have nothing, and will rapidly disappear into the wider fabric of America.

* * * *

I have been here at Temple Israel for three years now, and, as some of you might know, I have now taken on an second role, a role is about to lead me into the inner sanctum of Temple Israel. Our Qodesh ha-Qodashim, the Holy of Holies. No, it is not the main office. No, there’s no secret inner rabbinic lair. There is no special clubhouse behind the ark in the sanctuary, open only to an elite few.

The Qodesh ha-Qodashim is not even in this building. It’s across the parking lot, in the Waxman Youth House.

I am fortunate in that I have been charged with the task of taking young adults, newly-obligated to the 613 mitzvot - commandments of Jewish tradition - and exposing them to the depth and breadth of Judaism. I have taken on the job of turning children who have barely passed the milestone of their benei mitzvah into committed, strongly-identified Jewish adults.

Because that is our goal. If we want children, grandchildren, and subsequent generations who understand the value of the Torah in the world of today and tomorrow, then it is not enough to sit here on Rosh Hashanah and be introspective and seek forgiveness on Yom Kippur; it is not enough to gather with family and friends for other holidays; it is not enough to provide our young people with merely sufficient Jewish knowledge to be called to the Torah on their bar or bat mitzvah. It is certainly not enough to reproduce. Rather, we must produce children who are actively committed to Judaism and our traditions.

OK, sure, Rabbi. But how do we do this?

Think for a moment. What was your most memorable Jewish experience?

How many of us had that experience between the ages of 13 and 22?

Two weeks ago, I and the Youth House staff took a bunch of students and a few parents to Lido Beach, on the South Shore of Long Island. We spent a few hours there, playing in the sun, riding the waves, eating lunch, and so forth. It was beautiful. And powerful. And although you might not think of this as a Jewish experience, some of those teens will remember the day that they went with the rabbi to the beach, and have positive associations with the Youth House, with other Jewish teens, with Temple Israel, and of course with Rabbi Adelson.

Adolescence is the time when one’s identity is truly coming into formation, when your brain knits together the various pieces of your personality that will become the adult self. Yes, it is a challenging time for most of us. But it is also a time from which, as grownups, we will draw the most powerful lessons, memories and associations.

The psychologist Erik Erikson (a German-born Jew who immigrated to America when the Nazis rose to power in 1933) identified the adolescent years as a period in which we face the basic challenge of Identity (vs. Role Confusion). We start to make our own choices. We struggle with social interactions, and begin to grapple with moral issues, and our most significant relationships are with peers. According to Erikson, the teenager asks, “Who am I and where am I going?”

Who here remembers first falling in love as a high school student, whether it was with a novel, a class, or another student? Who here remembers taking those first few steps outside of your childhood, when you began to understand that the world offers many more options than those that had been available to you up until that point, like the option of choosing your own activities or vocation, or even (has veshalom!) disagreeing with your parents? Who remembers discovering a new idea, a new philosophy, a new cause, and discussing it passionately with your friends? These are all experiences that contribute to the formation of our identities, and this is the central developmental feature of adolescence.

By taking teens to the beach, and helping them learn to recite the words of ma’ariv (the evening service), and discussing the texts of our tradition with honesty and reverence, and answering their questions about God and tradition frankly, and being in the background while they enjoy themselves with their friends, I hope to build the lifelong identity components that will make sure that they will always be committed to Judaism and the Jewish community, that they will be active Jews.

Some of you might be thinking, is he still giving a High Holiday sermon? Why should I care? My kids are grown, or I don’t have teenagers, or I want to hear something about personal betterment or repentance for my sins, rabbi.

Here is why this should be important to you. Because the teens that attend the Youth House are the actively Jewish kids who are most likely to carry the mantle of Jewish tradition for this community. Sure, there are some people in this room who will never send their kids to the Youth House, even if I were to dedicate 20 sermons to the idea. But I think that everybody here can agree that we need to send strongly-identified, Jewishly-knowledgeable teens out from Temple Israel into this world, so that they will continue to build this community and others like it for subsequent generations.

And as I am sure you know, 13-year-olds who complete the Bar Mitzvah process know many things, but they have not even begun to wrestle with the more serious questions of Jewish identity. If we do not give them the opportunities to do so in the years following, they may form adult identities that do not include Judaism, Jewish life, or Jewish learning.

Our teenagers, these are our builders. These are our the future of our community. We have to be there when they ask, as Erikson put it, “Who am I and where am I going?”

The concluding paragraph of the Talmudic tractate of Berakhot is a famous passage, one that appears in every Conservative siddur that I know of, including the mahzor that you might be holding right now. It’s on page 290, if you would like to look, but you will have to read the Hebrew, because I do not agree with the translation. It reads as follows:

R. El’azar said in the name of R. Hanina: The disciples of the wise increase peace in the world, as it says, (Isaiah 54:13) “And all your children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children.” The word, banayikh, your children, appears twice in this verse. R. El’azar wants us to read the second one as bonayikh, your builders. Hence, “And all your children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your builders.”

There is actually a double-entendre here, as the word “bonayikh” can be read as either “your builders,” or “your learned ones.” The point is that our learned ones ARE our builders. We build community through learning, and being involved. To be actively Jewish is to build community.

And building the Youth House, where young people become strongly-identified, Jewishly-knowledgeable adults, is an essential plank in maintaining our community. The Youth House is the Qodesh ha-Qodashim. It takes newly-minted benei mitzvah, and turns them into Jews. It is what makes these young adults Jewish, and in so doing makes all of us Jewish.

It is more than just a place for teens to hang out and learn. It is also a focal point of this community. It is where education meets practice meets social interaction. It is the incubator of ideas that infiltrate the rest of this community, from social action to environmental action to religious action.

Let me give you some examples. Here are some of the things that students in the Youth House will be doing this year:

1. Taking a trip to Israel. I will be leading a nine-day excursion to Israel during the February vacation, in which we will see not only the holy sites and the archaeological wonders, but also points of historical interest throughout Jewish history, and we will also have as many opportunities as possible to interact with modern Israeli life, through socializing with Israeli teens and spending a Shabbat in the homes of an Israeli Conservative community (known in Israel as Masorti).

2. Building involvement with USY and Kadima. United Synagogue Youth, or USY, is the national Jewish youth group of the Conservative movement; our Youth House is a chapter of USY, and we aim to step up our involvement, so that our teens have the opportunity to meet and be actively Jewish with others from all over the region. Kadima is a youth group for 6th through 8th grades, and we are also planning to establish a chapter here for our middle-schoolers.

3. Team Tikkun. We have instituted a new program this year that meet once per month and help teens learn how to raise money and donate it wisely, so that their donations match their personal priorities for tikkun olam, repairing the world. It is called Team Tikkun,

4. Finally, continuing all of the great teen-centric programming, in addition to its academics, that the Youth House has always done: Shabbat retreats, trips to amusement parks, holiday activities, the teen Shabbat service in the Main Sanctuary on Shabbat Hol Hamo-ed Pesah, and so forth.

Furthermore, I have some very good news. Outside of the academic portion of the Youth House, the classes that meet every Tuesday and Thursday, all of the things that the Youth House does are open not only to teens who are enrolled in the High School classes, but to every child in the community. Any child in grades 8-12, even those whose families do not belong to Temple Israel, can just show up to any of our social activities. The opportunity to participate and learn and grow with your peers is open to all.

There is a Hasidic story of a boy who used to wander in the woods. At first, his father allowed him to go, but as the child grew older and spent more time in the woods, his father began to worry more. The woods were dangerous, and the father did not know what lurked there.

One day he decided to ask his son about it. “My son,” he said, “I have noticed that each day you walk into the woods. Why do you go there?”

The boy replied, “I go there to find God.”

“That is a very good thing,” replied his father gently. “I am glad you are searching for God. But, my child, don’t you know that God is the same everywhere?”

“Yes,” the boy answered, “but I am not.”

All of us seek God, in one way or another, depending on how you define God and what you expect to find by seeking. Sometimes, in order to find God, we have to reach a little beyond our comfort zone, we have to step out into the woods. The teenage years are essential in our own personal quests to discover and understand the wealth of Jewish tradition, and the depth of the Infinite. The Youth House is the place to seek and find, just across the parking lot, and just a little bit outside of our usual realm. It’s a little like going into the woods.

And it’s the laboratory in which we create active Jews, from those who might otherwise be default or reflexive Jews. And in so doing, the Youth House makes us all Jewish. It is truly the Qodesh haQodashim, the inner sanctum of Temple Israel. It is the closest we can get to an insurance policy to ensure our survival as a community.

Whether you are a parent with a teenager in the 8th-12th grades, an empty-nester, a young adult, single, married, whatever, the Youth House is the center of the action. So I encourage you to urge your children, grandchildren, siblings, cousins, and friends to come and participate. And drop by yourself to check it out.

On this day when we ask for God to remember us for life, I suggest that we all remember that adult Jewish life only begins at Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah. The opportunities for teens to clothe themselves in their adult Jewish identity are available here. If we fail to cultivate strongly-identified Jewish teens, after their bar or bat mitzvah, our future as a community is, at best, tenuous.

We no longer live in the pre-modern world, where our children had no choice but to be Jewish. Today, with our iPod mentalities, when you can delete a song just as easily as you can buy it online, Judaism is just one more choice that can be just as easily discarded. It is only through continuing to further their Jewish involvement and learning through the teenage years, that we can even hope that our young people will keep Jewish identity on their playlist. The Youth House is the Qodesh haQodashim, the Holy of Holies of Temple Israel. Please help me in making that a strong, steadfast reality.