From the Cyber Torah Archives

Shabbat services were wonderful this past Shabbat! We experienced a real sense of holy community together. There was a wonderful group who came first to pray, then to study, and then to socialize. The Talmud teaches that when Jews come together to study and pray, that God's holy presence, His Shekhina, dwells in their midst. God's presence is felt most strongly when Jews come together to fulfill His commandments in joy. We experienced that sense of God's presence through joy this Shabbat.

Moments of transition are both scary and filled with opportunity. When things begin to change, when the way in which we are used to responding no longer works, we face a crisis. We want a new equilibrium - we want the "new" way of doing things to arrive so that we will be able to relax again. We want to reestablish our comfort. At the same time, there is an opportunity that out of the change in circumstance, out of the crisis, we may learn something new or we may find something out about ourselves or others that we would never have otherwise discovered.

Individuals can experience these moments of transition when someone gets a new job, or moves to a new area, or loses a loved one, or has a child. Each of these transitions force us to discover new ways of doing things, whether as prosaic as finding a new Grocery store (which I can tell you from personal experience is surprisingly stressful) or as difficult as realizing that I can never again just pick up the phone and call a beloved parent. We must find new resources and new ways of doing things and in that process we can grow.

Groups also experience such transitions. Arguably, the Jewish community today is experiencing one as we try to grapple with the loss of Jewish identity and the rise of intermarriage. The crisis is obvious. People no longer automatically join Synagogues as they used to, observance of Kashrut and Shabbat are rare occurrences, and nearly half of all Jews marry a non-Jew. Yet the opportunity is phenomenal as well. We can no longer assume people will join Rodef Sholom, we can no longer assume our children will marry other Jews. We must offer something meaningful that gives our community a sense of God when they come together in the Synagogue. We must build family rituals to create a meaningful Jewish home life. It was easy to ignore these holes in our identity before because they had no institutional effect. Now that institutions are hurt, we are forced to confront and resolve real problems in the way Judaism is transmitted and taught.

Jacob's descendant, living in Egypt for several hundred years, experience such a moment of transition. The book of Genesis is about a family and that family's special relationship with God. Exodus begins by telling us about a people descended from that family who would become Jews. We are referred to as a people for the first time in the book of Exodus when Pharaoh says, "Behold, the people Israel have become greater than us." That change in nature required a new way of doing things and that change frightened Pharaoh into attempting to wipe out this new people.

The results of this moment of transition were extremely positive. The Jews, now a people, faced a crisis of loss of identity on the one hand and persecution on the other. It became an opportunity because out of that pain and suffering they cried out to God. The depth of their cry was such that God heard and answered, bring them out of Egypt and to Israel.

Their crisis had an element similar to the one we are facing. The Midrash teaches that the Jews in Egypt had forgotten everything about their identity as Jews and their special relationship with God except for their Hebrew names. In other words, by the time Pharoah began to enslave the Jews they had only the smallest piece of their Jewish identity remaining. This Midrash carries special meaning to me because early in my Rabbinic training one of my teachers, who is a pulpit Rabbi, said to me, "Its depressing out there. You can't imagine how many people come into my office to get married and don't know their own Hebrew name." The failure isn't the people who did not know their Hebrew names, but rather the Jewish institutions that failed to impart the knowledge and meaning of a Hebrew name - and symbolically a Jewish identity.

God solved the crisis of enslavement by freeing the Jews from Egypt. He solved the crisis of identity by giving us Torah. Torah literally means instruction. The Torah is meant to be a guide to life, an instruction book on how to build relationship with God and become a holy people through God's commandments. We are similarly in need of this book and particularly of the code of behavior it gives to us. For it is through mitzvot, through God's commandments, that we draw close to God and draw God close to us.

A heartfelt confession: my goal as a Rabbi is to help this community begin to understand, step by step, single action by single action, that mitzvot must be the cornerstone of Jewish identity. My prayer is that this moment of crisis, as we realize the emptiness in our hearts and the emptiness we have felt even in the Synagogue, will be an opportunity to build a more meaningful Judaism dedicated to God and His path which He gave to us as a token of love.