Click and Clack and the Shabbat Project

I was very surprised and saddened a few weeks back to hear that Tom Magliozzi passed away at the age of 77. Tom and his brother Ray were the hosts of the long-running show “Car Talk” on NPR. For the benefit of those who were not familiar with the show, it was ostensibly about car repair - people called in to ask questions about their cars - Tom and Ray were expert mechanics, both alumni of MIT who had opted to work in car repair rather than the corporate world. But inevitably the advice that was dispensed, in their humorous, irreverent, Boston-inflected style was more often about the relationship issues of the callers than about the cars themselves. Car Talk was really only a pretext to get to the really important stuff.

Tom had a warm, inviting, and frankly quite infectious laugh, and for every hour-long episode of Car Talk, the listener would probably have heard Tom laughing for a good 20-plus minutes in aggregate. That laugh just sucked you in. It simply grabbed you by the ears and pulled you into the conversation. Everybody listening to Car Talk, whether or not they had any interest in cars or car repair, felt like they were a part of the conversation.

The ability to welcome callers and listeners into a conversation about people and their relationships using the “bait” of car problems is really a very clever idea. And really, it’s a nice model for how a synagogue should function. Let me illustrate this in the context of a recent community-wide success, the Great Neck Shabbat Project.

Ostensibly, the major goal of the Shabbat Project was to involve as many members of the community into a Shabbat experience. We did that. By providing a full complement of activities, targeted to a wide range of people and interests, by personally inviting everybody to participate through various means, including direct, individual outreach, we welcomed many more people into our midst than would ordinarily participate on an average Shabbat. There were close to 1,000 people (women and men!) at the challah workshop at Leonard’s on Thursday evening. There were 600 people at Shabbat dinner at Temple Israel on Friday night. There were more than 150 at the Camp Shabbat service for 5th and 6th graders and their families on Shabbat morning. There were 200 people for se’udah shelisheet, the third Shabbat meal on Saturday afternoon. And hundreds attended the concert Saturday night, preceded by a havdalah service led by rabbis and laypeople from across the ideological and ethnic spectrum of Jewish Great Neck. And there was even more.

 

But the real accomplishment was not the very impressive numbers. The actual intent of the Shabbat Project, as it is with everything we do at Temple Israel, was to create and nurture relationships among members of the community, and between us and God. And we did that, too - by providing multiple forums for people representing different subsets of our community to rub elbows; by creating an environment in which many were sharing Shabbat together openly, and on a grand scale; by hosting discussions on parenting and being a Jewish college student and our own personal journeys within Judaism.

So while we did not have Tom Magliozzi’s inviting laughter, we did have members of our community reaching out directly to others to raise the Shabbat bar, and although we did not talk about cars, we did talk about Shabbat as a platform to deepen our relationships. The results were tremendous in terms of community building and social capital. Kol hakavod to all who made it happen! (And may Tom’s memory be for a blessing.)

~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally published in the Temple Israel Voice, November 20, 2014.)

Summer Sermon Series #2: Elevating Ourselves Through Words of Welcome - Mattot/Mas'ei 5773

Shabbat shalom! We are into the second topic of the seven-part summer sermon series about the most essential parts of Temple Israel’s vision: being a welcoming congregation. Here is a brief sketch of the series:

1. Telling our narrative (6/29 - Pinehas)

2. Welcoming (7/6 - Mattot-Mas’ei)

3. Learning / Torah (7/13 - Devarim)

4. Egalitarianism (7/20 - Va-ethannan)

5. Israel (7/27 - Eqev)

6. Repairing the World (8/3 - Re’eh)

7. Tradition and Change (8/10 - Shofetim)

Considering the list of topics above, you might think that Torah comes before welcoming. Let me tell you why we are addressing welcoming first. Consider the following mishnah from Pirqei Avot, the collection of rabbinic wisdom which is traditionally studied in the summer months (3:21):

אם אין תורה, אין דרך ארץ; אם אין דרך ארץ, אין תורה.

Im ein Torah, ein derekh eretz. Im ein derekh eretz, ein Torah.

One possible translation: “If there is no Torah, there is no respect. If there is no respect, there is no Torah.”

“Derekh eretz,” while often translated idiomatically as “respect,” is more literally rendered as “the way of the land.” It refers to how we treat others as we go through life, and suggests to me, from an ancient Middle Eastern perspective (arguably the most important one when interpreting Jewish text), how strangers are treated when they are passing through your village, or how you might be treated when passing through somebody else’s territory. The point, of course, is that in the desert, you pay it forward: this time, I’ll give you food, water, and shelter; next time, you’ll give some to me.

Our patriarch Abraham is an exemplar of derekh eretz when he welcomes traveling strangers (acutally angels) into his tent and gives them food and water at the beginning of Parashat Vayyera. But even in today’s world, derekh eretz still carries a traditional sense among desert-dwellers, and it refers specifically to welcoming others into your tent.

When I was studying at the WUJS Institute in Arad, Israel in 1999, I did a lot of hiking in the desert around Arad, which is located not far from the Dead Sea in the southern Judean Hills. One day, a friend of mine and I were hiking nearby, and we wandered into a Bedouin camp - there were a few tents (well, temporary structures made of corrugated iron) surrounding a pen with a few horses and other animals. And there was a dog, which, when it spotted us, started barking and raising a ruckus. A middle-aged Bedouin gentlemen in contemporary Israeli clothes came out of his tent, spotted us, and beckoned to us to come in. We obliged, and sit on his poured concrete floor (this was a fancy tent) covered with rugs and pillows, alongside his Japanese SUV, and chatted in Hebrew about his work in the construction business as he gave us tea and water. A few other men in kaffiyas joined us, and we sat politely and soaked up the derekh eretz, and schmoozed with these Bedouin, whom we would otherwise never have met.

Without welcoming others into our tent, we will never get to the Torah. Without derekh eretz, there can be no Torah, no Israel, no community. Welcoming others in is the foundation of Judaism, and it is time for us to take it to the next level.

We read today at the beginning of Parashat Mattot about the power and significance of our words. We are able, through vows, to make a binding commitment that cannot be violated. As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch taught, a vow is “self-imposed legislation.” Vows are so important that there is an entire tractate of the Talmud, Massekhet Nedarim, devoted to the particulars of what constitutes a vow and its implications.

This is just one example of how our tradition elevates words, and how words can elevate us; our lips can praise and curse, heal and wound, impose a vow and break it. Jewish ritual is always accompanied by powerful words.

I would like to suggest the following: We as individual members of this congregation should all take the following vow: to work as hard as possible at welcoming others into this community.

Now, I am not suggesting that we are not friendly. On the contrary, as synagogues go, we are pretty good. In fact, we were roundly complimented by the Board of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which met here about a month ago. (United Synagogue is, of course, the umbrella organization of Conservative congregations.) Our member Marty Werber, who serves on the USCJ Board, reported back to us that many members of the Board came away from their visit to Temple Israel with the impression that they were made to feel welcome here, and that is a strong statement; these guys see a lot of congregations, so they have what to compare us to. And we came up pretty well. So Kol Hakavod.

Here is another example: at Tot Shabbat two weeks ago, the first held in the Blue Room, a guest parent exclaimed to my wife Judy, not aware that she is the rebbetzin, how friendly our congregation is. That’s another nice compliment.

And look at all we have accomplished in this regard in the last couple of years:

• We have pioneered the Nitzanim Family Connection, a program that brings together parents of children who are beginning their religious school experience to discuss what it means to be Jewish parents;
• We put together a phenomenally successful pre-bar-mitzvah retreat for the Vav class families;
• We have started a social group for empty nesters and one for parents of young children (called Temple Israel Bonds, the first event, a barbecue, is on August 1 - see Jackie Astrof for details, and there is a flyer out front);
• We have created new offerings in the Youth House to reach out to teens more effectively;
• We have offered adult learning programs in congregants’ homes that welcomes both TIGN members and non-members and thereby creates new connections within our wider community that synagogue-based programs do not necessarily foster.

We have also made it a point, as you may have noticed, to re-arrange the sanctuary (at least some of the time) in a way that many find more inviting, and we often have one rabbi standing at the back with the other greeters and Shabbat officers, to make sure that everybody is properly welcomed, and we have initiated a task-force discussion to talk about our religious services here, and to consider more carefully how we approach them. Focus on the welcoming aspects of our tefillah / prayer experience will surely be a part of that discussion.

However, there is always room for improvement. A few years back, a colleague and friend of mine, Rabbi Kate Palley, was visiting here at Temple Israel for Sukkot. She came early to services, and was davening quietly to herself when she realized that somebody sitting in front of her seemed somewhat agitated, and was looking and pointing at Rabbi Kate and talking to a friend in an animated fashion. At some point, the friend comes over and says, “You’re in his seat!” She moved, and was otherwise undeterred. But is that really the impression that we want to give visitors?

Furthermore, we cannot afford to welcome only those who are already in the building. We have to work a little harder, to reach beyond these walls.

Why is being welcoming so important? Because building this community, as I mentioned last week, is the central pillar of maintaining Temple Israel's strength, for supporting the egalitarian approach to Judaism that we value in an increasingly non-egalitarian community, for ensuring that modern understandings of Judaism and an open approach to the Torah are given a fair shake in the theological marketplace. And there are many people in our wider community who respond positively to our take on Jewish life when they experience it.

By inviting others in and making them feel like a part of us, we stand a chance of growing.  There is no shortage of unaffiliated Jews out there, some of whom may be amenable to finding a spiritual home in a qehillah qedoshah, a sacred community such as ours. But they likely will not join unless we reach out to them and make personal connections.

I am going to frame this issue another way. We read elsewhere in Pirqei Avot the following (2:5):

הלל אומר, אל תפרוש מן הציבור

Hillel omer: Al tifrosh min hatzibbur

Hillel says, “Do not withdraw from the community.”

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are living in a time in which many Jews have, in fact, separated themselves from their community. But I think that this statement implies that just as we personally are obligated not to separate ourselves, we are also encouraged to act on the converse of that statement: that is, not to allow others to separate from us, the Jewish community. Chabad, Aish HaTorah, and other such Orthodox organizations commit much of their energy to doing exactly that; we need to do so as well, so that those who are unaffiliated are exposed to all of the values that we cherish as modern Jews committed to traditional Judaism.

In other words, we, individual members of Temple Israel, and not just the clergy and the officers, have to reach out, to take on the personal challenge of inviting others to join us. Like Abraham and my Bedouin buddy, we have to go outside the tent and invite others in.

So that is why I want everybody here to take a “vow” today: to be an ambassador of welcoming for Temple Israel, even off the synagogue grounds. Let’s kick it up a notch - let our words of greeting and invitation elevate ourselves and this community. To that end, here are a few action items:  

1. Whenever you are in the building, take Maimonides’ advice and greet everybody with a smile (Mishneh Torah Hilkhot De’ot 2:7).
2. If you have a friend who is unaffiliated but may be open to visiting, let Rabbi Stecker or I know and we might be able to suggest a point of entry best suited to her or him.
3. Find one person whom you do not know at kiddush each week with whom to strike up a conversation. Likewise, you might even want to introduce members of this community who may not know each other.
4. If you bring a guest to TIGN, introduce him or her to me and to a member of the Board or the Membership committee. If you do not know any board members, ask me, and I’ll hook you up.
5. If you have a tech-savvy young person in your orbit, ask them to “like” our Facebook page, and/or to follow @TempleIsraelGN on Twitter. Spreading information far and wide is easy today if you’re connected to the Internet, which we are.

Shabbat shalom! Next week, we’ll talk about the value of learning Torah.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, July 6, 2013.)

Essential viewing: Dr. Ron Wolfson speaking to the 2011 Rabbinical Assembly convention

Dr. Wolfson delivers a crash course in the value of welcoming to a group of Conservative rabbis.  It's nearly 47 minutes, but he is so engaging that you won't even notice the time.  Click on the link below, and enjoy!

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/13628955

Save the date: Ron will be spending a weekend at Temple Israel as a visiting scholar, May 4-6, 2011.

The Future of Temple Israel of Great Neck

I have seen the light.

In August, I attended a two-day institute with LOMED, a program run by The Jewish Education Project through which our Religious School is continuing the work of Re-Imagine. I was there with RS Director Rabbi Tracy Klirs, RS teacher Jennifer Khoda, and Beth Hagan Director Rachel Mathless.

The keynote speaker of this institute was Dr. Ron Wolfson, who is a professor of Jewish Education at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, and also one of the prime movers of Synagogue 3000, an organization that provides resources for synagogue transformation, so that synagogues can be equipped for current and future realities.

Dr. Wolfson’s message at this program was simple: the successful synagogue of the future is the one that builds relationships between people.  Judaism should be “relational,” and that synagogues that fail to build relationships will never thrive.

The overarching message of the LOMED Summer Institute was as follows: when synagogues offer programming, the central question surrounding each programmatic offering and its success should be, “Did this program, or service, or class, or Shabbat dinner build relationships?”

Dr. Wolfson is the author of the book, The Spirituality of Welcoming (Jewish Lights, 2006), a book we all should read and perhaps commit to memory. In the introduction to the book, he notes that many synagogues (including Temple Israel) have the words, "Da lifnei mi atah omed" ("Know before whom you stand") written above the Ark. He quips that it should be replaced by, “But we’ve always done it this way!”

Ladies and gentlemen, I have seen the light.  

I am convinced that today, when it’s getting harder and harder to get people in the door, when synagogue dues seem an almost outrageous luxury, when the fastest-growing religion in America is “nothing,” we cannot afford to do things exactly as we have always done them.  

We have to re-examine, re-evaluate, and re-envision everything that we do.

To that end, I am pleased to report four items:

1.  I am happy that I received the first evaluation since I have been here (now four years and change).  I am sorry, however, that this was the first one.  Evaluations of clergy and other senior staff should be conducted with far more regularity, and not just in advance of contract negotiation.  Evaluation of everything needs to be part of our culture.

2.  Related to this, in a matter of days every single member of the congregation will receive, for the first time, a survey form regarding the High Holidays.  This represents a huge step - not only will the feedback be useful to the clergy, the office, and the other professional staff, but even more so it will send the message to you that we want to listen to you, and we care about what you think.

3.  During Sukkot, we held the first meeting of the Nitzanim Family Connection, a pilot program for which we have received a $6K grant to bring together parents of Nitzanim / kindergarten children in our Religious School, to build connections between parents and give them the opportunities to discuss their Jewish experiences and the Jewish education of their children.  The first meeting was in my Sukkah, next door, and was by all accounts a resounding success.  

We hope that this will be a model for building those relationships throughout the Religious School experience, and not only that this cohort will continue to meet, but that a new cohort will begin with next year’s Nitzanim class, and onward and upward.

4.  A final thing: on Shabbat mornings, one rabbi is now in the back of the sanctuary, and this has been not only a tremendous learning process for me (since the view from the back is quite different than the view from the bimah), but I think that this has also helped to change the tone of the sanctuary environment. I try to greet every single person that enters the sanctuary for tefillot / prayer. Many have told me that they appreciate this.


*****


To conclude, I strongly suggest that you buy Dr. Wolfson's book and read it. I have already purchased copies to give to members of the Ritual Committee and the Membership Committee.  Furthermore, I am now in communication with Dr. Wolfson, and I hope that we will be able to bring him to Temple Israel as a scholar-in-residence and board-training weekend in May, so that he can bring this message to a much wider audience within our community.  I am hoping that a few more of us will see the light, so that we can make Temple Israel the community that we all want and need it to be for the future.


(Originally delivered at Temple Israel's semi-annual congregational meeting, November 7, 2011.)

The Most Welcoming Guy in Canaan - Thursday Kavvanah, 11/10/2011

The beginning of Parashat Vayyera, which we are reading this week, features a fascinating vignette on hospitality.  Abraham is hanging out by the entrance to his tent, when three strangers approach.  He and his wife Sarah hasten to get them food, water, a place to wash the desert off their feet and chill out, and then stand by them patiently as they eat.  Abraham welcomes these people, with whom he has no connection whatsoever, and brings them into his home, no questions asked.

Sometimes, the famously dysfunctional characters of the book of Bereishit / Genesis are undeniably virtuous; this is one of those instances.  The Talmud (Tractate Shabbat 127a) tells us that the mitzvah / commandment of hakhnasat orhim, welcoming visitors into your home, outweighs that of welcoming the Shekhinah, God's presence.

What do we learn from this?  In an age of increasing isolation, when some of us relate more easily to screens than to human faces, this is a time that we must all reach out to others, to make those connections that only people can make, and particularly in the synagogue.  Abraham welcomes the strangers into his tent, and so should we.

Va'et-hannan 5771 - Listening to our Jewish Stories

I am often asked what led me to the rabbinate, and my stock answer is that I was not happy working as an engineer, and wanted to work with people instead of things. That is true. But there is more to the story. The inclination to become a rabbi had been within me for many years. But there was some sort of obstacle – something prevented me from acting on it.

When I was 28, I was living in Houston, and I belonged to a Conservative synagogue (not many 20-something single men do, of course). After having sat anonymously in the back for a while, I was invited by one of the gabbaim to sing in the synagogue choir. I soon became close with Hazzan Stephen Berke, who invited me to learn how to lead High Holiday Shaharit / the morning service on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Not long after I led my first Rosh Hashanah service, Hazzan Berke invited me to have dinner in his sukkah, during which he recommended going to cantorial school, something which had really never occurred to me.

I needed that series of invitations. I needed to be welcomed. It was that personal connection that enabled me to get around the roadblock that had prevented me from continuing my Jewish path. Thirteen years later (this Rosh Hashanah will be a kind of Bar Mitzvah for me), and here I am.

Everybody in this room has a Jewish story. Most of them do not involve rabbinical school. But we are all here because of the invitations we have received and the obstacles that we have circumvented. And that's what connects us all to Judaism, to God, and to each other.

****

Perhaps you noticed that I was sitting in back today for much of the service. Maybe I greeted you when you came in. I hope you don't mind that I was conducting a sort of experiment, inspired by lectures that I heard this week.

I spent two days at an institute hosted by the Jewish Education Project, an organization that provides training and resources to synagogues and religious schools in the metro area. I was there with our Religious School director Rabbi Klirs, our nursery school director Rachel Mathless, and educator Jennifer Khoda. This seminar was under the auspices of LOMED, a project that is helping synagogue schools move forward with new, “high-impact” models; Temple Israel has participated in LOMED for two years. The keynote speaker was Dr. Ron Wolfson, who is a professor of education at the American Jewish University in LA, and an uber-educator who has made it his business to help synagogues improve their educational offerings and everything else that they do. In particular, he has spent the last several years working on helping synagogues become more welcoming, and studying what makes houses of worship successful.

The essential mantra of Wolfson's presentations (I listened to him for nearly 6 hours over two days) was the following:

Many synagogues spend much of their time and energy preparing great programs and hoping that people show up. They should instead re-orient their priorities such that the bottom line is not, “How many people came to our fabulous program,” but rather, “Did our program build relationships?”

Because, let's face it: a faith community (synagogue, church, mosque, ashram, whatever) is about relationships. Why do most people join synagogues? Maybe it's because they want High Holiday tickets, or because they want their children to become bar or bat mitzvah, or because they want some kind of satisfying Jewish experience that they cannot get for free from Chabad.

But what makes them stay and become involved? That they have bonds with other members. That they make friends. That they feel like part of a community of like-minded people.

Why do people leave synagogues? Because they have nothing to connect them any more. Why do most members of Temple Israel deactivate? It's because their last kid completed bar or bat mitzvah.

In the four years that I have been here, our membership has remained about the same – that is, about the same number have left Temple Israel as have joined. That's good, I suppose, in one sense.

But it's not just about membership. It's not just about making our finances work. On the contrary – a synagogue exists to give people opportunities to get in touch with God. And study after study has shown that the vast majority of people, even skeptical, cosmopolitan Jews, want that. And we should be unapologetic about that goal. But we need to connect people first with each other, before we can connect them with God. If we succeed in doing that, the inflow of new members might stay the same, but the outflow might just decrease.

So how do we build these relationships? Ron Wolfson has spent years studying two models that are thriving right now: Chabad and the so-called “mega-churches.” What makes these models work, in a nutshell, is that they have mastered the art of making connections with people. How does Saddleback Church in southern California draw 30,000 people for services on a Sunday morning? By making personal connections with each and every one of them.

You see, one reason that many synagogues are not good at building community is because they are committed to a top-down style of management that is traditionally associated with, well, the 10 commandments, which we read this morning. God dictated the aseret ha-dibberot to Moshe on Mt. Sinai, and Moshe reported them to the people, and expected them to follow. Leaders and followers – that is how it has always been. The rabbi, the president, the board – they run the synagogue.

Whose pictures adorn the walls of the hallway outside the chapel? The past presidents of the congregation, and of course Rabbi Waxman (zikhrono livrakha). And of course we are grateful for their service. But what is missing is the photos of families enjoying a meal in the Temple Israel sukkah. Where are the pictures of the Adult Bat/Bar Mitzvah classes? Or the Youth House kids playing ga-ga at a “shul-in”? Where are the people?

****

My friends, the world has changed. The tools of social media have enabled the sharing of ideas and collective social interaction that was never possible before. The governments of Tunisia and Egypt were felled by calls to action on Facebook. Maybe Syria is next. There are thousands of people sleeping in tents all over Israel, precipitated by movements on Facebook and Twitter. The people of Iran and the whole world know about the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan because of the Internet - you can even watch her death on YouTube. I heard on NPR yesterday morning that Great Britain is seeking to limit the power of social media sites to help quell the riots of the past week.

The world is changing. Powerful social innovations now come from everybody, not merely from Mt. Sinai. Traditional, top-down organizational structures are being bypassed. And certainly for just about everybody younger than I am, this is how we are all beginning to think.

All of us in this room today are the insiders of this congregation. And we want others to join us. But they will not do that unless they feel like they have a certain connection to Temple Israel, to others in the room, to the clergy, to the teaching staff, to the office staff, and so forth. Most of us in this room have those connections already.

Dr. Wolfson told us that studies conducted by Saddleback Church indicate that new members won't stick around until they have made strong bonds with 5-7 people. That might not sound like a lot in a congregation of 930 families. But it's actually quite a high number. Especially when most new adult members belong so they can send their children to the schools that we have, and might only rarely get out of the car during their 5 or so years of membership here.

The goal of every person in this room is to make sure that they DO get out of their cars, and that they are welcomed into the building, and that they hang around and talk and make friends. Everybody here is an ambassador, and we are going to call on your talents in the coming years. My role at Temple Israel is changing, and I hope to be focused on finding ways to engage people so that we might build the congregation that we want.

Now, Rabbi Stecker, Cantor Frieder and I can stand up here on the bimah, week after week, and parcel out the 10 Commandments from on high, as has happened at synagogues for 2000 years. I can give sermons that teach the the literary and grammatical nuances in the Torah or Haftarah or siddur. We might be able to impress you with fiery oratory or magnificent vocal acrobatics. But the question that we should all be asking is, do these things build relationships? Because in today's climate, that is all that counts. Yes, once people are engaged, then we can hit ‘em with Rashi and Ibn Ezra. But the first step is to invite them in.

One thing that we, the ambassadors, can do is to train ourselves to follow all the guidelines on this handout on how to make this congregation a place that people will want to come to.

We have to be the inviters, the ones that remove the obstacles to the Jewish journeys of others. Let them complete their journeys here. With us. Let’s not send them to Chabad, which will surely be waiting with open arms.

And that’s why I am sitting in the back today, welcoming people and making everybody feel comfortable to share their stories. We can’t all sit in the back, but we can all welcome, and we can all listen.

I want to thank you for being such good sports and sharing your Jewish stories. I look forward to hearing more of them from you and from everybody else, and I hope that all of you give the opportunity to others in this community to do the same.

Shabbat shalom!

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel, Shabbat morning, 8/13/2011.)

Balaq 5771 - Lighten up!

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel, Shabbat morning, July 9, 2011.)

A story is told of three Jews who are comparing the holiness of their rabbis.

The first says, “My rabbi is so close to God, he trembles all the time.”
The second says, “My rabbi is so close to God that God trembles for fear of displeasing him.”
The third says, “Well, first my rabbi trembled. Then God trembled. Then my rabbi said to God, ‘Look, why should we both tremble?’”

OK, so maybe that’s not so funny. My wife Judy often reviews my sermons on Fridays, and she’s a tough critic. Some of you have told me that I should tell more jokes from the pulpit, that I am too serious. So I searched for a good joke to tell today, but none of them passed muster (i.e. the Wife-Laugh-O-Meter), and it occured to me that, there are no good jokes about the Torah that I have not already used. That’s right, I’m out of good jokes. Funny how Rabbi Stecker never seems to run out of material.

Another struggle that I have as a rabbi is the healthy tension regarding how I spend my time. This question is wrapped up in the larger question of what the role of a synagogue is. Is this building, this community center, primarily:

1. A place where people come to pray
2. A school for teaching children about Judaism
3. A learning institute where adults can discover their own path (perhaps not having found it as a child; refer back to number 2)
4. A place to celebrate benei mitzvah, weddings, and so forth
5. A community gathering place, where people come to meet others, to participate in social activities, etc.

Of course, it is a little of all of these, and many more as well. Given that Rabbi Stecker and Cantor Frieder and I only have a limited number of hours, how should we spend them?

And it's not just the clergy, of course. It's also how you, the active members of the laity, spend your time here as well. Participating with the Board of Trustees, the various arms and committees, the volunteer opportunities, helping those in need, and so forth. The tasks associated with community-building are effectively endless.

It is sometimes easy for the clergy, through various forms of work-based myopia, to miss the forest for the trees. So considering today's parashah, in particular, we might think about the message of Bil’am’s donkey. Or his apparent change of heart, turning curses into blessings. Or Balaq's foolishness.

And in doing so, we might miss the fact that THIS IS COMEDY! The aton, the she-donkey opens her mouth to speak! This was hysterical to our ancestors! And it might be to us as well, if only we did not take the Torah so seriously. Not only that, but Bil’am, who is a seer of some note, fails to see the angel by the side of the road, which even the dumb ass sees. The “seer” is blind, a witty trope that appears throughout Western literature.

Furthermore, Bil’am is supposedly so powerful that his mere pronouncements can change the course of history, but he is powerless in the face of his disobedient donkey! He needs a sword to kill it?! Ridiculous!

Bil’am is a comic figure; Balaq, who sent him, merely foolish, and the donkey comes off as the cleverest one of the bunch. Makes an ass out of all the others, you might say.

Not all of our commentators seem to be in on the joke; Pirqei Avot (5:8), from the first or second century CE, indicates that pi ha-aton, the “mouth of the ass,” was created on the sixth day of Creation just before Shabbat, grouping it with other very serious miracles.

Writing a millennium later, however, Rashi sees the irony. Here is his comment to Numbers 22:29 (לו יש חרב בידי; “If I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now.”):

גנות גדולה היה לו דבר זה בעיני השרים,
זה הולך להרוג אומה שלמה בפיו, ולאתון זו צריך לכלי זיין
“It is a great disgrace in the eyes of the Moabite dignitaries [with whom he is traveling] - Bil’am is going to kill an entire nation with his words, but for a donkey he needs weapons of war?!”

The authors and editors of the Torah intended it to be eclectic and entertaining. It contains a wide variety of material: history, folktales, law, poetry, songs, love stories, erotic material, and, yes, humor.

And yet, we read the passage with Bil’am's talking donkey about a half-hour ago, and I did not hear a single person laugh.

OK, so it's in an ancient language which is nearly impossible to understand, even if you speak Hebrew. OK, so te'amei ha-miqra, the cantillation melody, is not conducive to comedic timing.

We simply do not expect to read the Torah in a way that is allows us to laugh. We take it awfully seriously. And frankly, that’s how we approach much of Jewish practice - anytime we are in the sanctuary, for example.

Yes, of course we need to be serious during tefillah. We read in Mishnah Berakhot (5:1):

אין עומדין להתפלל אלא מתוך כובד ראש.
One must not stand up to pray without deep earnestness (literally, “heaviness of head”).

One cannot truly approach the Divine without being quite serious. Furthermore, says the Mishnah, some of our very pious ancestors used to sit in silence for one hour beforehand in order to prepare for prayer.

However, let me counter this with a quote from Voltaire:

"Dieu est un comédien, jouant devant un public trop effrayé pour rire."
“God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”

We are taught that holiness means to tremble before God, to feel that this is serious, and not to laugh. And yet, sometimes the higher truths can be told with levity, speaking the truth in jest, you might say. We need not fear laughter and joy in the pursuit of holiness.

That is one of the primary lessons to be gleaned from Parashat Balaq: The Torah uses comedy to relay a very serious message. As Marc Zvi Brettler put it in his Jewish Study Bible:

“At times amusing, and somewhat mocking of the non-Israelite prophet [i.e. Bil’am], the message of this pericope is serious: The intent of the Lord reigns supreme and cannot be superseded. Even the powers of a well-known non-Israelite prophet are ultimately controlled by God.”

And hence the need to think about this in the context of this particular community. Rabbi Stecker, it’s true, is funny - far funnier than I am, as we have already established. But it’s not just us, the clergy. It’s all of us. We are the ones who make this place welcoming, a synagogue where all will want to gather and feel at home, where joy and levity are an integral part of the synagogue experience.

Services should be respectful, but not dour; we can find that sweet spot that incorporates levity and joy and yet still play by the rules.

To that end, I would like to offer a few suggestions for making this sanctuary and the rest of this building more welcoming to all:

Smile and greet people who you don’t know.

If somebody looks lost, find a gentle way to help him/her out.

If others are talking and it’s making it difficult for you to find your prayer space, please find a playful way to quiet them.

If a visitor is in “your” seat, use it as an opportunity to give a friendly smile and graciously sit somewhere else.

If somebody is speaking on a cell phone in the building on Shabbat or holidays, or texting, or taking photos, find a cheerful way to inform them that we discourage that. (Of course, if they’re reading my blog, let ‘em continue. Talmud Torah keneged kulam.)

Yes, we can have intellectual rigor and dignified worship and decorum. But let’s face it, folks: this community is about families! It’s about bringing people together for the sake of raising our stake in holiness. All of the things that we do, all of the ways that the clergy and everybody else devote their time, they contribute to this bottom line. And we need to go about this in an easygoing manner to do so effectively.

And yes, that’s just one more button that we have to hit as a community, one more task on an ever-growing stack - it’s not just the rabbi who can be light-hearted up here on the bimah; it’s all the rest of us as well. As we go about doing the work of building community in the pursuit of holiness, we have to do it with a smile.

Good spirits lead to a more serious understanding of what it is that we do as Jews, how we sanctify time. The donkey speaks the truth, and we only need to tremble so much.

Shabbat shalom!