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Kol Nidre 5766 - Hineh ma-tov
Hineh ma-tov uma na'im shevet achim gam yachad. 3000 year old lyrics to a song of gathering. Psalm 133 - a song of ascents, designed, as Samson Raphael Hirsch says, to lift us up, to lift our spirits beyond all present ills and sorrows.
Hineh ma tov - a phrase without a verb to confine its tense, which says simultaneously to us: how good it was to be together in the past, when last we met; how good it is right now as we sit side by side and how amazing it is that those who can be separated physically for much of the year can still feel like family, united by the powerful things we share; and how good it would be if we could dwell together in times to come.
And what a year we have ahead of us as a Temple family. In two weeks our congregation will welcome back composer Dr Jose Bowen, who will present a setting of Hashkevienu commissioned especially for Temple Emanuel in celebration of our milestone jubilee year. In March, we will be fortunate to have Dr David Ellenson, the President of the Hebrew Union College, the seminary of the Reform Movement, address us about the last fifty years of Reform Jewish thought and help us glimpse the next fifty years. All of us will have the privilege of lending our creative efforts in generating a beautiful piece of art to adorn our social hall wall, as participants in workshops led by our artist in residence, Jay Wolf Schlossberg Cohen. And we will be blessed with the presence of many rabbis and cantors who served this congregation with distinction in its history at our gala jubilee weekend in April. Kal v'chomer, all the more so tonight we say hineh ma tov, this is an extraordinary time to look forward to being brought together b'simcha, with joy, again and again.
In Torah, the Jubilee year, the fiftieth year, is intimately connected to Yom Kippur. In fact, the jubilee year is proclaimed throughout the land on the Day of Atonement and with the sounding of the shofar. After concluding their celebrations of the New Year, ten days later the blasts of the ram's horn on Yom Kippur of the fiftieth year reminded our ancestors that the obligations of the jubilee were to begin. If you were an indentured servant, in the year of the jubilee you were released from your obligation. If you had sold your land to pay a debt prior to the jubilee, your family could reclaim that land.
In essence, the jubilee was meant to be a time you could begin again, another appropriate thematic link to Yom Kippur, the day we make atonement for the past and actually begin the New Year with a clean slate and a renewed commitment to moral and spiritual values. What is particularly striking to me, is that after a brief synopsis of the sweeping changes mandated for the jubilee, which spans all of nine verses, the Torah spends thirty verses enumerating obligations one is not permitted to put off until the jubilee. V'Chi yamuch achicha, if your fellow falls into straits and has to sell his land, you must come to his aid and redeem it for him immediately, before the jubilee...V'Chi yamuch achicha, and if your fellow falls into straits and loses his home... you must let him live with you. It is as if the Torah is saying, the jubilee is there every fifty years for those who fall into hard times. But Israel, you are a community. Don't leave your brother in trouble until the jubilee. Don't let him suffer alone until the natural cycle of returning happens. Be there for him and one another now.
And so it occurs to me as we celebrate this jubilee milestone in our Temple history that we cannot forget why we come together into a kehillah kedoshah, a sacred community. The true measure of how deeply we can enjoy our jubilee celebrations this year is relative to the amount that we have cared for one another and will devote ourselves to each other in our darkest hours. On the one hand, it is a time to atone for where we have missed that mark, where we have left our brothers and sisters to mourn a loss without our presence, to suffer in a hospital bed without a visit from a Temple friend, to wrestle silently in the back rows of the sanctuary with feelings of inadequacy in the aftermath of a divorce or the loss of a job. And on the other hand, it is a time to reflect on whether we have allowed Temple to be safe space for us to be vulnerable, to be carried and supported by others. The spirit of this Yom Kippur and of our Temple Jubilee is that it is precisely the time to rededicate ourselves anew to the tasks of devoting ourselves to accompanying one another through the valleys and allowing temple to be our own haven from life's storms and through life's painful transitions.
Last fall, Lilith, a Jewish magazine for women ran an article entitled: "Jewish teen girls who like their bodies?" A group of 16 year old girls discovered, one night at a slumber party, that instead of being plagued with the usual self-loathing, they all felt just fine about how they looked. Why?
Because at the Jewish summer camp they all attended, there was a communal shower, where all the girls and women - campers, counselors and specialists aged 8 to 25 - showered together each day, finding a kind of solace that older women tend to find only after many years, perhaps in the communal dressing-rooms at Loehmann's. The Lilith article analyzed this "girls' shower culture" and the healthy, liberating influence it had on all those who stood together, soaping up and rinsing off, on the "grimy floor" of the camp shower. There were several powerful qualities that made this experience work for them.
First, it required a leap of faith. It was scary in the beginning to get naked with a bunch of strangers. Many girls started out showering in their bathing suits, but eventually they all took the bold step of taking them off.
Second was a culture of support. The communal shower was a relief from a commercial culture that seeks to make girls feel inadequate and puts them in constant and exhausting competition with one another.
Third was the multi-generational setting- the opportunity to for younger girls, teenagers and women to share the experience. The younger girls, seeing idolized older girls with their differently-shaped bodies, felt more comfortable with their own - and also learned something about what it means to grow into a woman. The older girls, conscious that they were role models, felt an extra responsibility to be "positive and free about their bodies."
Fourth, the communal showering was a reality check. Showering with dozens of other females over the course of a summer meant that they saw bodies of all different shapes and sizes and cured them of the oppressive belief that they were the only one who was imperfect.
And finally, showering together was joyful and fun. There were spitting contests, a lot of singing and a lot of silliness and goofing around. Before you jump to conclusions, I want to make it clear that I am not suggesting communal showering as a programmatic innovation for Temple Emanuel's jubilee, or ever.
But I did find something charming about this article with its vision of a cheerful band of sisters supporting one another and helping each one find her way to through the physical and emotional transitions of maturation and to self-acceptance. In fact, I thought that this was one way of describing the aspirations of a kehillah kedoshah, a sacred community: that we could be uncovered and open to one another - not physically but emotionally; that we could be present for one another in the deepest sense; that we could be unafraid to reveal our imperfections and our flaws, thus helping all of us feel better about who we are. Shared self-disclosure, after all, can be a great comfort.
It is one way for an individual to find out that he is not alone in his neuroses, unique in his mishegoss, solitary in his sadness. I thought that this "shower culture" was a great challenge for young and old alike- even those of us who are shy about baring our souls in a crowd. It does take a leap of faith to discover and create this sense of community. But that's what it takes to make our faith and practice of it real.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Protestant theologian murdered by the Nazis, wrote a whole book devoted to this subject called Life Together. Essentially, while he would draw a different conclusion than Jews, he does describe a picture of what I think people find so hypocritical about religious institutions. Where concern for one another or the world is at the margin, or where it is nothing more than the desire to create others in our own image, then a Temple isn't possible. All that is possible is a gathering of people interested in themselves -- in their own rituals, their own ideas, their own ends, their own company, and their own purposes. Only we can save the Temple from avoiding godliness through the comforting illusions of religion.
Who needs a synagogue if it is merely another place where we have to put on the facade that our lives are neat and tidy, that our children are happy, successful and fulfilled, that our jobs are secure, that our marriages are strong. We don't live in Garrison Keilor's Lake Wobegone, where all the women are strong, men are good looking and the children above average.
And we already have so many places where we know it is best to keep our problems to ourselves: on the soccer field, at the water cooler, on the golf course, in the carpool line. I would like for us to think about what we could be for one another and what we could have for ourselves if we came to Temple in all our naked frailty, uncovered and without pretense. Living behind a barricade you've built for yourself, a public face you display to the world while the real you is locked up someplace inside is an existentially lonely place to be. And I don't know what a Temple is, if not for being a place where there is a shoulder to cry on. People here don't seem to care about what someone is wearing at services, but are we all comfortable bringing our baggage into the sanctuary? Or being caught really praying to God, would that expose our weakness?
Hineh ma tov - wouldn't it be good if when we gather, be it shmoozing in the lobby Sunday mornings, at onegs and kiddushes, during family and adult education classes, we can be sisters and brothers who sit together and trust one another to say what we really think, and feel safe to say what we really feel?
And wouldn't it be good if, after the holidays when we go our separate ways, we didn't disappear from one another behind our various barricades, but found a way to dwell together, live honestly together, between our times of gathering?
Hineh ma-tov u-ma naim shevet achim gam yachad. Behold, how good and beautiful it is to dwell together in unity. They are beautiful words to set before us as a song of ascent - a song to lift us up, just maybe, to a higher and more honest and more loving way of being together. Let this be our vow on this Kol Nidre eve and our goal at this jubilee.
