When we started planning these High Holyday services several months ago, we had to figure out who was doing which sermons when, but we had no idea whether I would be selected to be Kehilla's rabbi. I said that if I were the rabbi, I would like to give the sermon at Kol Nidre, and if I weren't selected, well, we would figure it out. Howard Hamburger then gave his "p'sach din"his judicial decree on the question. He said that I should give the sermon in any event because either I would have something to say as the new rabbi who emerged from the community or, if I were not the rabbi, it would be even more compelling, because then I would be up here affirming Kehilla and its process even though I had been rejected.
Fortunately, I think, this won't be quite as compelling as Howard's alternative.
But all humor aside, it is true that I would have been here tonight in either circumstance. And I want to talk about two things tonight. They are quite different, but related. It will be sort of two mini-sermons. I want to talk about the internal process I had to undergo as an applicant for this position within the community. And I also want to address the issue of what kind of community it is that we want to build. Let me begin.
Last Yom Kippur, on this bima, I addressed you on the issue of dealing with change in our lives. As part of that sermon, I spoke about how I had decided not to apply to be Kehilla's rabbi, and how happy that decision had made me. From this you might learn that you should take my High Holiday sermons with a grain of salt.
So as not to completely discredit myself, I want to explain a little of how I decided to reverse my prior decision. I've written about this at greater length, but to make a long story short: after working with the Spiritual Leadership Committee for eight months providing pararabbinical services to our community, I began to notice that I came more and more to think of Kehilla as my primary work.
On top of this, two short conversations forced me to face myself. One was with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the grandpa of the Jewish Renewal movement, and the other was with my Afikomen partner, Jerry Derblich. Both of them questioned whether I was doing what I really should to be doing. I can't express to you how much I resented God or circumstance for putting me in the position of having go through all this soul searching all over again.
After all, I wasn't unhappy at Afikomen, in fact, I loved it. I liked my hours and I liked the people and I thought that one does not leave a job one likes for a job you do not know. But I just couldn't get it out of my mind that by staying where I was that I was running away from what was mine to do. From this point in midwinter, and pretty much all the way to the present, I have been going through a long Yom Kippur of the soul.
Before I could apply, the first thing I had to do was examine my ego involvement in all this. One of many reasons for not applying in 1998 had been a sense that being the rabbi might just be some sort of ego trip for me. I'm not saying that I'm beyond all that now, but working with the other four people in the Spiritual Leadership Committee had been (and continues to be) a humbling experience since each of them is a rabbinical master in some way that I lack. Howard, Avi and Rachel all are skilled as counselors and amazingly sensitive to nuances of the psyche; Ilana is a powerful organizer who works from both her brain and guts; Rachel coordinated the entire operation keeping her finger constantly on the pulse of the community and (if I can digress for a second) I want to especially thank Rachel for her unsung efforts. Continuing to work with this intimidating group would keep my ego in check. But now, as I reconsidered applying, I discovered that it was ego that was discouraging me. After all, once the application was in, I would be subjecting myself to the most intense public scrutiny of my life, and by people I really cared about and with whom I wanted to live for the rest of my life. Now all my insensitivities, and my spiritual and personal shortcomings, all these would be the appropriate grist of community discussion. I was pretty much ready to keep my yearnings to myself and put all my efforts into building a great web site for Afikomen.
But I couldn't get it out of my head that I had to try, and that if I didn't try that I was running away. I thought to myself, "If I do this, there are no guarantees. If I do this, I may leave myself in a worse situation than when I started. And if I do this wrong, I can definitely cause my community more problems than if I just do nothing at all."
And lastly, I had no idea whether I was off my crock. So what if my inner voice tells me do this, another voice inside my head - that sounds remarkably like my mother - says: "If your inner voice told you to jump off the Empire State Building, would you do it?
Then I heard yet something else within me say: "Maybe you are appropriate for Kehilla and maybe you're not, but at this point there is only one way to find out, and that is to submit to the collective wisdom of the community you love, put yourself in their hands, and accept whatever emerges."
My Yom Kippur sermon last year was entitled "Prostrating to a Process". I had no idea when I gave that sermon just how much prostration to process I would be doing in the coming year.
I don't want to use our time up describing everything I did as part of that process, nor every step we took as a community, nor about how wisely and cautiously the Rabbi Search Committee acted. I just want to say that after the consideration process was over, I had an opportunity to practice some Zen detachment and consider the process without yet knowing its results.
I realized that the process itself was transformative for me in a way that I had always wanted Yom Kippur to be, and that even if I were turned down, nothing could take away from me the benefits of this most amazing rite of examination and initiation that I had to undergo. I had to learn to practice in a communal context the utmost truth and self-disclosure. This rite was no love fest. I was confronted by hard questions and negative assessments that were all too accurate.
But I never for a moment felt that I had misplaced my trust when I put myself into the hands of this community. I love you, I really do, and I actually believe that I would be saying that tonight even if were not selected.
I have shared all this with you all for several reasons, one of which was that what I went through involved personal processes to which Yom Kippur invites us to open ourselves today and everyday: self-examination, considering yourself in regard to the community around you, redefining your life's purposes and goals, listening to the guidance of the still small voice or voices within you, the process of facing uncomfortable truths, considering how your ego may interfere with your goals. When we go through these processes we are more able to make our lives a Mishkan, a sanctuary of service. I hope sharing a little of my process will help you with yours.
But enough about me
The other topic I wanted to consider this evening has to do with community. During Rosh Hashanah and tonight we have considered the importance of building our communal Mishkan, our community, but I want to ask exactly what kind of community are we building? Rabbi Burt described Kehilla's purpose in his original Kehilla vision statement about 15 years ago. I want to put what I think we're doing in my own language. In doing so I invite you to explore your own way of thinking about it.
Many of us adults in Kehilla come out of a background of political and social ferment. Older members grew up during the time of the depression and the New Deal. A younger group of us became adults during a time of protest against racism and the Vietnam War. And we have been active in feminist and gay/lesbian issues. Many of our activities were in the context of many issue-oriented groups. In fact, many of the people involved in creating Kehilla, first became acquainted as part of a Jewish support group in LAG, the Livermore Action Group.
These political groups often provided some sense of community where we saw familiar faces and made deep friendships and alliances and even marriages. And these opportunities for community were important because we live in a highly divisive society that does not naturally draw people together. In fact, our society thrives on atomization. Each family has only tentative connections to the next and each person within the family has an entirely different schedule and peer group from the other people in the family.
I studied these issues in a Socialist Feminist study group while doing community organizing in the early 70's. I was very much influenced by the writings of the Frankfort School and by the thinking of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. The Frankfort School was writing from the perspective of progressives in Hitler's Germany, and Gramsci was writing from a jail cell in which he had been imprisoned by Mussolini and where he would eventually die. Both Gramsci and the Frankfort School asked how come it was that people had such a hard time uniting together to resist such obvious tyranny, and an even harder time resisting the more subtle control in non-fascist countries.
They put forward the idea that the ruling elites of society do not hold onto their power simply though military force but by their ability to get people to redefine their aspirations and expectations, their sense of place within the universe and their entire definition of redemption. Thus one of the ultimate ways in which the status quo is enforced is through the redefinition of our very spirituality such that it no longer reflects our authentic needs, but only our expected role in the market.
One cannot resist this spiritual hegemony in isolation. So spiritual resistance requires community. Not an isolated community trying to escape from it all, but an engaged community of people living their lives in mutual support.
Communities organized only around political issues are topic-dependent, often dissolving when the issue has been won or lost or when a policy difference develops. But in atomized and individualistic America, the groupings which have lasted cohesively are those communities which serve people in their everyday lives, in their times of personal crisis, in their times of celebration and mourning; the communities which gather to celebrate the seasons and give witness to the values they stand for and create an atmosphere to pass these values to their children. And these institutions are the synagogues, the churches and the mosques.
I remember talking to Ricky Sherover Marcuse around the time we were starting to organize Kehilla. Ricky, of blessed memory, was deeply influenced by Gramsci and the Frankfort School and applied their analysis to explain internalized oppression. Now I treated Ricky as my personal Central Committee from whom I could receive wise directives. And I asked her whether Gramsci would prefer it if I did organizing work with a progressive secular Jewish organization or whether I should work to help organize this radical synagogue. She chuckled and said that her version of Gramsci would think that, in the long run, the radical synagogue might be more subversive. I was glad she thought so, because I wanted to join Kehilla and raise my kids in a community.
During the last two decades we have seen many of the things we have stood for slipping away through welfare reform and the attacks on civil rights protections. It has not been a good time for progressives, nor do we see a better time coming over the near horizon. Given the present reality, it is our responsibility to struggle where we can and to create local bases that support the kinds of values we uphold: feminism, inclusiveness, accessibility, democracy, empowerment and concern for and identification with the oppressed. By building and living within such communities, we keep up the pressure for the kind of change we advocate and we maintain a base community in which we can thrive, grow old, take care of each other, and raise children with values and concerns like those of the three teens who spoke on this bima on Rosh Hashanah.
Moreover, from such a community base, we are better able to add our voices into society's dialogue and into the dialogue of the larger Jewish community. We can speak up about our concerns for peace and justice in Israel/Palestine as we are doing these High Holydays with our scroll of conscience in the lobby. And we can enable the local Jewish community to expand its vision. For example, after a gunman attacked the North Valley Jewish Community and then killed a Filipino postal worker a few weeks ago, our local Jewish Federation considered doing a gathering to respond to the attacks. Kehilla's Ilana Schatz was at the planning meeting and it was on her initiative that Federation jointly sponsored the evening with the Filipino community and focused the gathering on all racism.
Creating communities of resistance is nothing new in Judaism. In some way each Jewish community of the last 1900 years has provided some degree of haven to enable community members to maintain their values in the face of pressures to conform
To build a Jewish base community means that what we do in this community must authentically reflect who we really are. If we believe in that the community is ultimately the seat of our spiritual energy and that Shechina (God's imminent presence) is to be found in the sacred space we create as a community, then the rabbi's job cannot be to act as the great spiritual leader but rather as the facilitator of the community's spirituality. That is why I am not up on this podium leading every service nor giving every sermon. That is why it is so "us" to have reached within the community for spiritual and musical leadership at these services. This isn't David's shul or Burt's shul, it's our community.
Kehilla and other Renewalist congregations have an amazing opportunity to build a community in our own image. We can model for our children what a spiritual community can be. In this way we will enable them as adults to understand the importance of community and give them the skills to participate and build communities of their own. V-shinantam l-vanecha ; You will diligently teach your children.
So I urge each of you to examine yourself and ask: have I helped build a Mishkan? Can I do more to make my community an authentic expression of whom we really are? If you are here because you identify with Kehilla and you haven't joined, please join us. No one synagogue or church is a perfect match for all of your needs, but join the one that most speaks to you. If you are unaffiliated but you more identify with another community, please join that community. And if not now, then when?
I want to finish by wishing that we all be sealed for a good new year, and a good new millennium, and - for us Berkeley-style Jews - I wish us all a particularly wonderful Jewish decade, since for us Jews, the sixties are just beginning. Happy 5760!
Thank you. Shana Tova