Gathering Jews Two-by-Two
Parashat Noach 5772
I am very happy to report that this week, the Board of Directors of HEA approved a renewal of my contract – which means that until at least July 2014, you’re stuck with me! Melanie and I are very happy. We both love this community and we love living in Denver.
I love being a rabbi; and I owe it to you for giving me the chance to start my career at this shul. It’s hard work and sometimes I put in long days; but when I walk out of this building at night, I thank God for leading me down this path. No matter how much I do in a day; it rarely feels like work. I find being a rabbi deeply gratifying and meaningful. It is truly a privilege and honor to serve God and the Jewish people in this capacity and I’m very grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to do that work here. But being a rabbi also has its challenges.
The truth is most of the challenges are really just the flipside of the blessings (which is often true of life’s challenges). I became a rabbi because I love the Jewish people and I love touching lives. At the same time, as you know, people can also be challenging too… especially Jewish people. Another thing I love about the work is the diversity and variety. A typical week can include teaching classes, hanging out with religious school students, singing songs with pre-schoolers, celebrating the birth of a baby, mourning with a grieving family, counseling, planning programs, writing sermons, attending community events, and on and on. Again, it is deeply gratifying to do all these things, but sometimes it can also be exhausting both physically and emotionally. But, as I said, most of the challenges are really just too much of a good thing.
But there is one challenge I find to be the most difficult. The one truly dangerous hazard in the rabbinate is despair. What I mean by that is that rabbis and other leaders in the Jewish community have to deal with a very difficult fact; which is that despite all our efforts, we can only reach a small percentage of the Jews out there. If you listen to the demographers and sociologists; if you pay too much attention to the numbers and statistics, it’s incredibly depressing. The fact is, most American Jews, have little interest in practicing their religion. What I have dedicated my life to as a rabbi – love of Torah and tradition, a commitment to God – doesn’t seem to matter much to many Jews. The most difficult thing for a rabbi is fighting the feeling that despite all your efforts, the vast majority of Jews out there will assimilate and essentially stop being Jewish. If all you pay attention to are the numbers and statistics, you’ll want to throw in the towel.
This week, as I was studying parashat Noach, I reflected on the work I do and its challenges. It isn’t entirely clear in the Torah why God chooses Noach. He is described as “ish tzadik, tamim haya be’dorotav” – “Noach was a righteous man; he was blameless in his generation…” The traditional commentaries all focus on what seems to be a superfluous qualifier – what does it mean to say he was blameless in his generation. Our sages debate whether this is a true compliment or conditional praise: some say he was only considered righteous in comparison to the wicked people around him. Others say he was truly a good person and that it was to his credit that he could remain righteous in the midst of a corrupt society. But, this year, reading the story and reflecting on the challenges of my work, I wondered if there were other qualities that God looked for when choosing Noach. Besides being righteous, I imagine that Noah was also a very resilient and optimistic person. I can only imagine the weight of responsibility on Noach’s shoulders. What did it feel like to know that all living things would be wiped out except him and his family and the pairs of animals he brought on board the ark? He too faced bleak demographic projections. I wonder if despair crossed his mind. I wonder if he considered giving up. And I wonder about the courage, optimism, and faith, it took to be the one responsible for repopulating the earth.
One of the lessons I think we can take away from the story of the flood is the power of individual encounters. For whatever reason that isn’t clear in the story, Noach cannot save all of humanity. Perhaps the corruption was just too enormous. Maybe one righteous person was just not enough to change the ways of an entire society. Whatever the reason, the way Noach saves the world is by gathering a relatively small group of individuals together and connecting them to one another. It could not have been easy and there was no way to know if it would work, but it reminds us that the building blocks of a community, the basic units of a society, are individuals coming together, connecting with one another and then those lives connecting with others and so on down the line.
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, the dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, always admonished us not to measure our success by numbers. Numbers do matter, he would tell us, but they don’t really tell you if you’re doing a good job. The measure of success is a rabbi’s ability to touch individual lives. Whether you have a big synagogue with a thousand families or a little shul of a few dozen people, your job is to teach Torah and a love for our tradition. The measure of success for a rabbi is not how many people you can get in the room, it’s the experience they have once they get there. If people walk away having learned something, having felt something, if they are moved to action, moved to tears, touched in some way, that is the measure of a rabbi’s success. If you do that well, he would tell us, the numbers will take care of themselves (hopefully).
It is a lesson I’ve carried with me into the rabbinate and it is also the ethic of this synagogue. Rabbi Dollin reminds me of it all the time. Our job is to bring individuals together to feel more connected to their heritage and to one another. And, this year, I’ve also been reflecting on this idea in the work we are doing with young adults. As many of you know, with the help of a generous grant from the Rose Community Foundation, we started a project called JConnect. The goal of JConnect is to reach out to Jews in their 20s and 30s and help them find their way into the community. And the core of this work is the one-on-one encounter and building community one connection at a time. To do this work, we have our own Noach, she is a young woman named Danielle Menditch. Like Noach, she goes out into the world and finds stray Jews and, one-by-one, brings them together. It starts with an individual encounter, a phone call, a meeting, a conversation. She learns about their lives, what they care about, and what being Jewish means to them. She then empowers these folks to create their own programs and Jewish experiences with other like-minded people. I help her with this work and I do what I can to infuse substantive Jewish content into the programs we do. But it is Danielle’s legwork that has made JConnect a huge success.
Just this week, one of our participants approached me and told me that after having lived in Denver for 10 years, this is the first time he has Jewish friends and a link to the community, and it’s because of JConnect. Many of our participants have told us that the meeting with Danielle or with me was the first time anyone from the organized Jewish community actually asked them what Judaism means to them. It’s enormously powerful work, but it is also labor intensive. And, getting Jews together can make you feel like Noach trying to herd animals onto an ark.
But, it’s worth it. And, while it isn’t about the numbers, our success has been impressive. To date, we’ve had nearly 200 individual meetings; we’ve had almost 50 programs, attended by over 350 individuals, 85 of whom have attended 5 or more events. Most of the programs are small, intimate gatherings of people who share a common interest.
But now comes the second big challenge rabbis face for which there is no easy solution. How to pay for it all. In December, our funding from the Rose Community Foundation will run out. We’ve been fortunate to receive a generous gift from the Merage Foundation and this week, the HEA board took the courageous move to extend some of the synagogues funds to JConnect. But, while these commitments buy us some valuable time; in the long run, we need to figure out a way for JConnect to be sustainable into the foreseeable future.
This sermon is not an appeal. But it is an attempt to spread the word about this valuable cutting edge project. We are one of the only synagogues in the United States doing a program like this. And, despite all the demographic data and all the bad news about the future of the Jewish people, JConnect is working. It is bringing young Jews into Jewish community – and our synagogue in particular. Rabbi Dollin and I are working hard to find a way to continue doing this valuable work. We are determined to see it succeed. And, we have good reason to be optimistic.
I hope you will share my enthusiasm for JConnect. If you do, I would love to talk with you about it. If you know individuals or foundations who might want to support this work, come talk with us. And, most importantly, if you’re kids are in their 20s and 30s… give us their phone number. We’ll call them and take them out to coffee.
Getting young Jews excited about Judaism isn’t easy, but it certainly can’t be any harder than getting hippos on a boat.
Shabbat Shalom.
מזל טוב, Rabbi Shlomo! Lucky the synagogue to enjoy your wisdom, spirit, and leadership. I’m happy for you and your family to have found such a home!
Thank you, Rabbi Artson. I wouldn’t be here were it not for your example, guidance, and support.