First, I want to say that it is fun to be here, 23 years to the day since my bar mitzvah. J Second, and much more importantly, I want to take a moment for us to pray on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of people across Southern California whose lives have been torn apart by fire this week. From tefillat Geshem we said just a few weeks ago,
Our God and God of our ancestors
"Remember Abraham, his heart poured out to You like water.
You blessed him, as a tree planted near water;
You saved him when he went through fire and water.
For Abraham’s sake, do not withhold water."
May the Holy One who blessed our ancestors, Abraham, Issac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah grant blessing and protection to all those whose lives have been torn apart by fire this week. May they know soon the light of Your love, and find Your presence in the kindness of strangers who, through Your goodness, welcome them with loving arms. Grant protection to the firefighters, to all men and women in uniform who work to do Your will. Bless them with Your sukkat shalom – your shelter of peace – and bring rain and relief soon. And let us say, Amen.
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"I belong to a shul that [welcomes] the newcomer, ala Abraham Avotenu and Sarah Ematenu…In addition to a welcoming committee, there are shul hosts who greet newcomers, a designated member who introduces himself each week who anyone, including newcomers, can meet with to arrange a place to have Shabbat lunch at (if you still have room to eat after attending the lavish kiddush everyone is invited to). There's also "Tefilla Buddies" if a newcomer or old-timer needs help navigating the services, where they are paired up with mentors. All that in addition to the very friendly, nonjudgmental members who make everyone of any background feel very welcome. As I read the article, I thought the rabbis must've come up with their ideas by having visited my shul."
Those words appeared in a letter to the editor in response to an article by our own Rabbi Elliot Dorff and by Rabbi Kerry Olitsky, Executive Director of the Jewish Outreach Institute, that appeared in the Jewish Journal a few weeks ago about the importance of the mitzvah of hachnasat orchim. I wish that those words had been written by a member of the Library Minyan. They were not. And I worry whether, today, a member of our minyan could write that letter.
To be sure, there are people in the Library Minyan community who go out of their way to invite new people into their on a regular basis. But for many, the words of Rabbis Dorff and Olitsky ring true: "We have no doubt your institution is welcoming -- to you," they explain. "For those of us on the inside -- and we happily count ourselves among them -- it is difficult to imagine our Jewish homes, synagogues and organizations as potentially cold and unwelcoming places. But we are insiders. Those who have not yet ventured into our homes, synagogues and community centers may not have experienced that sense of community. Perhaps, they've never been invited. Or maybe, they ventured in, but we insiders did not rush to greet an unfamiliar face, instead expecting that job to fall to someone else."
Friends, I fear we have forgotten how hard it is to walk into a strange shul. People go to shul to feel at home; to feel a sense of connection, yes to God, but equally importantly to God through the image of God each of us represents. Yom Kippur teaches us there is no repentance offered by God if we have not done tshuva to those we have hurt. We cannot skip over people to get to God. And we cannot skip over strangers to get to our friends, lest we become an exclusive club, and not a holy community. There are libraries and universities for study, and concert halls for music; auditoriums for plays and museums for art. But people come to a beit Knesset – a house of gathering – to gather, to come together, to be gathered, for a sense of connection to the Jewish people. And they come to the Library minyan because the minyan is known. We have been featured in books about American Jewish life, and we are populated with a disproportionate number of leaders in the Los Angeles and American and world Jewish community; and so, fairly or unfairly, the experience people have when they come here represents not just ourselves, but something larger, an ideal about who the Conservative movement should be.
But I worry we have forgotten how hard it is to not have friends in the room. Or that we no longer see the pain in the hearts of people, singles or couples or whole families, who have come here week after week and walked away from shul, alone, never or only rarely having been invited into another’s home, to share a meal and conversation and song. There have been people – "newcomers" to use the language from the Jewish Journal article – who have tried praying in the Library Minyan and felt like outsiders; who have come here, prayed, and stayed at kiddush chatting for a while, and left feeling empty and sad because they wanted to belong, but no one approached them, and invited them to join them for lunch. Should that happen here? Is that the sort of community that we want to be? That we can be?
I have been to synagogues in Los Angeles where it is hard, hard to go to shul without someone approaching me and inviting me, and our family for Shabbat lunch. There are communities that are known for always inviting people for a meal. Are we that minyan? And if we are not, why not?
I fear too many of us think of ourselves as "insiders." We think of the Library Minyan as ours. It is not a bad thing to feel a sense of "ownership" of a minyan – so many people in this room have given countless hours of their time and resources towards creating and maintaining our wonderful community. So many people have read Torah, and davened, and organized a committee, and been a gabbai, and made phone calls. We should feel proud of our achievements; it is not wrong to feel a sense of ownership, to feel the Library Minyan is our minyan. It is not wrong unless we feel the minyan is ours, and not someone else’s. It is not wrong unless we forget – l’Adonai Ha’Aretz u’meloav, tevel v’yoshvei va – God owns the land and all upon it, the world and all its inhabitants." The minyan is ours, but everything in the world’s is God’s, and God asks us, demands of us, more than any other mitzvah in the Torah – 36times – to remember the stranger, to care about the person we don’t know. Our homes are ours, but ultimately, they are God’s. And since they are God’s, we must listen to how God asks us, demands of us to use our home. God wants us to have an open home, where anyone can come in. Our lives are ours, but ultimately they are God’s. And since they are God’s, we must listen to how God asks us, demands of us to open up our lives, not just to our friends – though friendship is important, if we only have our friends over for lunch, we have not fulfilled the mitzvah of hachnasat orchim – the tradition asks us, demands of us to open our lives to the stranger we do not know, for their own good, and for ours, for our lives are enriched and renewed when we welcome someone new.
This week’s parsha begins, "And God appeared to Abraham in the plains of Mamre, and he [Abraham] was sitting at the entrance of the tent in the heat of the day." The tradition derives from this verse the mitzvah to visit the sick, because God appeared to Abraham to visit him after his circumcision described at the end of last week’s parsha. But the picture we see is also one of a tremendous zeal to welcome guests! Curious as to why the Torah tells us the detail that Abraham was sitting at the entrance to the tent while it was hot outside, Rashi explains he was sitting there to see if there were any passersby so he could bring them into his house! Let me just confess that if I was 99 years old and had just circumcised myself with a rock! The last thing I would be doing is sitting outside on a hot day just waiting to welcome people into my home! I would want to be alone!
But there is a deep message here about what we gain from opening up our homes, our lives, to another. Abraham’s pain should be debilitating; but his pain, and our pain, is lessened, diminished, when we share it with another. When we close ourselves up, we shrivel and die inside, but when we are open to the world, with its sorrows and joys, we are alive and our pain is eased.
The Hasidic tradition teaches we live in a world of fragmentation where each person experiences the world separately. Nobody can ever know exactly what it is like to be me, nor can I ever truly understand the experience of another. I am at a Dodgers game sitting next to my brother. We are watching the game together. We were raised in the same home by the same parents with the same values and many similar experiences. Yet I cannot know what baseball means to him, what memories the smell of the fresh grass of a major league ballpark conjure for him. I cannot know if he is grateful for the sun and cold beer or envious of the youth of the players. He cannot understand how I, sitting next to him, feel a tinge of sadness and longing for the tension and drama and pure joy of competition that played such a central role in my youth. We sit next to each other; we even talk to each other ("nothing is better than a cold beer at a baseball game in the summer sun," "I used to be in that good shape") and those words and shared experiences help us to understand one another. But they are insufficient to bridge the blockquoteide that separates each inblockquoteidual from one another in the fragmented, world of separation the Hasidic tradition describes. Such a vision of the world may seem pessimistic but it is not sad or bad; it just is. There is pain in this world we feel from feeling separate from one another.
The tradition gives us a mitzvah as a remedy to this difficult part of being a human being. We will not all be Abraham, waiting on a hot day 3 days after surgery to welcome guests. But the picture with which the parsha begins, wanting to welcome someone, anyone, into our homes is so beautiful. The chuppah at a wedding represents a couple’s first home to teach them on the first day of their life together as a married couple what kind of house they should build. One like Abraham and Sarah’s. Open. One without walls.
At the end of services today, Abby Harris and Val Goldstein are going to talk about a program of which, as you can probably tell, I am very supportive. And for us to make real change as a community, we cannot just have ideas and debates – we need to get organized and I praise Abby and Val for their efforts to help us. But their efforts will fail if the importance of this mitzvah falls on deaf ears. We need to change the way we come to shul, to change the way so many of us live our lives; closed, safe, insulated, alone and separated from one another. A person should never come to the Library Minyan and have to walk away uninvited. It is that simple. To make it so that every person who comes here wanting to feel at home finds one in ours, we need a program to get organized, but we also need for each of us to come to shul hoping, eager, praying for the honor and joy and delight of welcoming someone we have never met before into our lives. We must live our lives sitting at the doorway to our homes, praying to see a passerby, who is a child of God, a messenger of the Holy One, and to bring them into our homes, to fill our lives with holiness and light.