Re-Membering Congregation HEA
Parashat Bo 5772
What a person carries in their wallet can tell you a lot about them. I carry a lot of membership cards. I have a Costco membership, which allows me to buy enormous quantities of things I don’t really need. I have an REI membership. When I buy a bunch of over-priced outdoor gear, REI will supposedly give me back a small percentage of what I spend (it would be a lot easier if they just charged less). I have a family membership to the Zoo so my kids and I can go whenever we want. I’m a member of AAA. I gladly pay my membership in the hopes that I never need to use it; but if my car were to break down, I want them to come quickly.
What all these memberships have in common is that they provide me with a service. They establish a commercial relationship that grants me certain privileges. We live in a culture in which much of who we are and how we navigate our world is defined by these utilitarian affiliations. And while they serve some very important functions in my life, what these memberships cannot provide is a sense of belonging and ultimate meaning. The auto club doesn’t hold regular gatherings where members can discuss the meaning of driving. If you have an American Express Card, “membership has its privileges,” but other Amex holders aren’t going to attend your kid’s bat mitzvah. My fellow zoo goers don’t know anything about me. Costco doesn’t send out an email when a customer has a death in their family.
There’s a profound difference between membership and belonging. Community is not based on a set of contractual rights which an individual can demand, but rather a set of mutually interconnected obligations and duties. It’s what Judaism calls mitzvah.
Belonging to a Kehillah – a sacred community – helps us to transcend ourselves and offers us an opportunity to frame the experiences of our lives with meaning and purpose. Synagogues such as ours are places where we gather to share our lives together. Kehillah is not a place where we simply go and take; it is where we come to give something of ourselves and create something with others. It is a place where we can bring our joy and our pain, our triumphs and our disappointments. It is a place where if you are mourning, people will come to offer comfort. If you are celebrating, it is a place where people will dance and feast with you.
Parashat Bo tells of our people’s last night of slavery in Egypt when God asked us to have a feast with our neighbors and our friends. It was on that last night in Egypt that we started to heal from the atomizing and dehumanizing experience of slavery and, by sharing a meal together, started becoming a community.
And, each one of us throughout the generations is commanded to relive that night. “You shall observe this [feast] as an institution for all time,” the Torah says, “… and when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this ritual?’ you shall say…, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt.’” (see Ex. 12:24-26 & 13:8). As you know from the Pesach seder, it is incumbent on each of us to see ourselves as though we ourselves were liberated from Egypt. Each one of us is part of this covenantal community, bound to each other and to God by the common experience of having been liberated. At its essence, that is what it means to be a Jew: to see ourselves as part of a timeless story.
At our best, that is also who we are here at Congregation HEA. We are a strong, warm, caring community that gathers around a shared set of values and sense of duty to one another. And in addition to our communal story as Jews, we are proud of our story as a Synagogue. In a few weeks we will be celebrating 85 years of our synagogue’s Sisterhood. Our Sisterhood, as many of you know, is actually older than the shul itself. The Beth David Sisterhood, which started in 1927, formed the first religious school on Denver’s West Side that taught a new generation of young Jews in English and Hebrew, instead of Yiddish. Five years later, they hired Rabbi Manuel Laderman to serve as the principle of the school; but Rabbi Laderman insisted that the school had to be embedded in the communal context of a synagogue. As the families of HEA, we owe a lot to the vision of the Sisterhood and Rabbi Laderman.
Those early years must have been heady days. Building a community from scratch is an exhilarating thing to be part of. I imagine everyone rolled up their sleeves and pitched in to set up the chairs, put out the Kiddush, and cleaned up afterward. I imagine that the first few years in this new building were like that too.
And all that hard work and those volunteer hours paid off. Over the years, the Alliance has grown and also changed to meet the needs of our families. Eighty years later we are a vibrant egalitarian Conservative synagogue with nearly 1000 households. And despite our size, I think we’ve managed to remain friendly and welcoming.
But our success also comes with risks. Today we find ourselves at a crossroads. The Alliance continues to be successful, even despite the economy. But, we are no longer the grassroots volunteer-driven shul we once were. We run the risk of losing sight of the sleeves-rolled-up spirit that built this synagogue. We run the risk of following the pattern of the society in which we live that has come to value commercial transactions over communal relationships. We run the risk of treating the shul like any of the other memberships we carry in our wallet. For many Jews, synagogues are regarded like AAA: a place to call upon when they need something, but not the community to which they give of themselves. For many Jews out there, Jewish life has devolved into a transactional relationship of fee-for-service.
But that’s not who we are at the HEA. In a few weeks we will be holding our annual fundraiser in honor of the Sisterhood’s 85th anniversary. We need 300-400 people to attend. I don’t usually make these sorts of appeals from the bimah, but I’m asking you to roll up your sleeves again. On the one hand it’s true that it’s about meeting our operating budget… we need this fundraiser so that we can keep the lights on and pay our talented hard-working staff (who, by the way, operates this shul on a fraction of what other synagogues our size spend in a year). But, it’s also so much more than making our budget. I’m asking you to attend the fundraiser to support our community family.
This dinner is so important because it is an opportunity to recall where we came from and to look forward to where we are going. It’s an opportunity for us to recapture the excitement of building a community together as we did in the 1930s and again in the 1990s. Rabbi Dollin is on sabbatical right now precisely for that reason. He reminds me often how important it is for communities like ours not to stagnate – to never be satisfied with the status quo. He plans to return from sabbatical reenergized and ready to revitalize an already vibrant community.
But Rabbi Dollin can’t do it by himself. The clergy and staff can’t do it by themselves. If the next 80 years are to be as successful and energetic as the last 80, it’s going to be because we all come together to share our vision and to do our part.
Community calls on us to transcend ourselves – to see ourselves as part of a larger whole to which we have responsibilities. Where else in our society do we have institutions that invite us to an attitude of reverence, wonder, and gratitude? AAA doesn’t do that, Costco doesn’t do that; your gym doesn’t do that. The synagogue community invites us to broaden the sphere of our concern beyond ourselves. And it is with this posture of reverence and gratitude that we can step out of this building and better serve the broader world. That’s what we are about as a people and that’s who we are as a synagogue.
So, I have a request and prayer for us. My request is: don’t simply be a “member”; be a partner! Belong to this community and give of yourself. Give to each other. You need us and we need you. More than ever, HEA needs you. Yes, I’m asking you to attend the fundraiser; but I am also asking you to give something far more valuable. I am asking you to give your time, to put to use your talents for this community, and to open your hearts to ways in which belonging to a kehillah can change your life.
My prayer for us is that we continue to gather as a community and strengthen our ties to one another. I pray that in the months and years ahead, we will broaden our spheres of concern, that we will allow ourselves to care and be cared for. I pray that we find meaning and purpose in life through Torah so that we can continue to be the sacred community we are today.
To find out more about the annual dinner and to register, please click here.
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