Saying Shalom...

This past Friday evening, was my first service at Bolton Street Synagogue in Baltimore, MD as the new rabbi.  This lovely congregation in the heart of Baltimore City is my new congregational home!  The words below are adapted from my first sermon.  This was my opportunity to say Shalom... to introduce myself and my vision!  Lech Lecha, may we go forth to ever greater strength... together!

Shabbat Shalom!  I’m sure there are a ton of thoughts going through your head right now...  Who’s this new Rabbi?  What’s his story?  What’s he like?  And what about Bolton Street Synagogue?  Is the congregation going to change?  Will it be different?  Will I not feel at home anymore?  But really… who is this new rabbi?

Believe me change and transition are hard!  Tonight, we begin anew.  A new rabbi for you, a new congregation for me!  As I thought about this first sermon, it thought about what I wanted to share with you.  About my vision, about my hopes, and about me!  My rabbinate and my life revolve around relationship and stories.  So what better way to start than to share some stories.  About the moments that impacted me and more importantly changed my rabbinate.  So here we go!

Picture it, a classroom of fifth grade students!  About a dozen students.  In front of you is a rabbi.  Not me, I’m only in fifth grade!  It’s Rabbi Ed Garsek, one of my rabbis.  He was teaching my class that day and we were studying Torah.  I’m not sure what I said or even what I did, but I do remember Rabbi Garsek’s response.  He looked directly into my eyes and he said to me: “You’ll be a great rabbi one day.”  And those words changed my life.

Rabbi Garsek saw something in me.  A spark and he pulled it out of me.  From that day, I wanted to be just like him: a teacher, a friend, a mentsch.  My rabbinate is based upon the lessons he taught me.  To live Judaism.  To guide others.  To truly know a person, their thoughts, their passions, their fears, and help them live a better life.  My rabbinate is built upon transformative moments.  It’s these small moments, face-to-face, that transform not only our lives, but the lives of our community, and the greater world.

About ten years later, I’m now a college graduate.  I’m living in Boston, working in the Jewish community.  And I’m searching, searching for a spiritual home.  A couple friends and I shul shop.  Each Friday evening, we travel to a new synagogue to experience worship and look for a community.  Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Non-Denominational.  We try it all… yet nothing sticks.  Nothing feels right. 

That’s when we decided to create our own service.  We called ourselves the Minyanaires and over the course of a year, twice a month, we joined together for services and a potluck dinner.  It was informal, it was filled with singing, and it was brimming full of community.  I knew everyone there, a dozen of us, or so.  We prayed, we studied Torah, and we ate!  Since that day, I’ve never found a community that felt the same as that one.  I’ve been searching for that community.  A place to call home, a place where others feel comfortable.  A spiritual community that is built on relationship, where we study, grapple, learn, pray, eat, and join hands to change the world.

Now move ahead with me.  I decided to follow Rabbi Garsek’s advice and I enrolled in the Hebrew Union College, the Reform Rabbinical School.  I spent five years in Israel and New York City.  My student congregations were in Rocky Mount, NC; Williamsport, PA; Mount Sinai Hospital in the Palliative Care Unit.  I was ordained as a rabbi and became the first Assistant Rabbi at Scarsdale Synagogue.  Later, I moved to Long Island to become an Associate Rabbi at Temple Sinai of Roslyn. 

I love being a rabbi.  I loved teaching, lifecycles, hanging out with the kids, and studying with adults.  But, there was one moment in my rabbinate that changed my life.  It all began through an e-mail.  A rabbinic friend and colleague from Chicago, Rabbi Seth Limmer, asked if I would join him for a 40 day march from Selma Alabama to Washington DC.  This was a march coordinated by the NAACP during the summer of 2015.  This was Black Lives Matter.  This was Police Shootings.  Ferguson.  NYC.  Baltimore.  This was about justice and making our world a better place.   It would be a 40 day journey, a walk across the south.  And they needed a rabbi each day to carry the Torah.  I would travel for one day, but the Torah would travel all forty.

And so, there I was, in the deep south, a small town in Georgia about 2 hours from Atlanta.  It was powerful to march and carry the Torah, but even more importantly was the relationships.  Hearing the stories of my fellow African-American marchers.  Learning about the injustice, the fear they had for their kids, the challenges they went through.  This was about making a different.  Praying with our feet.  Our world was in turmoil and my role, our role, is to make a difference.  To do our part with the interfaith community, to change our world for the better.

These three stories are just small moments in my life and my rabbinate.  There are plenty of others, but these three express who I am and my vision of Jewish life and of Bolton Street Synagogue.  That vision is to create sacred connections through study, prayer and tikkun olam, in order to bring about transformative change in our lives and our world.  Transformative change is the key.  And that only exists through relationship.  We must know one another, be comfortable with one another, and trust one another.

We build sacred connection through study.  We learn Torah because these ancient words impact our lives for the better.  But more importantly, we learn from one another because each of us has Torah to teach.

We build sacred connection through prayer.  There is power when we pray together, sing together, and join together face-to-face.  It’s how we recharge, how we hope, how we dream of the future.

We build sacred connection through tikkun olam.  When we join hand-in-hand, we have the ability to transform hearts, advocate for change, and rebuild a broken world.

You’ve already learned a little bit about me.  I’m excited to learn more about you.  Together, through study, prayer, and tikkun olam, we’ll build stronger relationships.  Yet, these Jewish actions must do something more, they must transform us into better people, a better community, and a better world.  I’m looking forward to doing that with you for a long time to come!

Treating People as People

As you might know, I didn’t grow up in Long Island or New York or even the East Coast!  My accent is slightly different, more Mid-American journalist than Brooklyn heavy.  When I’m tired or when I’m not thinking, I’ll refer to sneakers as tennis shoes, soda as pop.  I’ll ask you to pitch your trash.  Plus, the word God or Adonai never comes out in that New York kinda way. 

As a kid, when I’d visit my Long Island relatives, they’d often joke about my growing up in Ohio.  They’d ask: “Did you ride your tractor to school today?  How many cornfields did you pass by?  Did you go cow tipping this weekend?”  I lived a life nothing like that, much more suburban than rural.  Yet, they continued to jest.  I heard it all – flyover country; rural America; the Midwest, always said with a little bit of disdain.

And it’s not only me.  There are plenty in the very center of our country who the talking heads often refer to them and their way of life with contempt.  One conversation prior to the election that seemed to pop-up over and over again was the differences between college educated and non-college educated whites.  This was all anyone could talk about in the weeks and months leading up to the election.  The pundits would cite polls in which Donald Trump gained support of blue collar workers or where Hillary Clinton increased her lead with white college educated voters.  This encouraged a true dichotomy, defining people by their educational level, not by their political views, family concerns, or actualities. 

This past weekend, Chuck Todd and David Brooks joined together for a conversation about the election results on “Meet the Press.”  This was one of the most interesting discussions I’ve heard post-election and a true mea culpa of their responsibility as journalist and pundit.  David Brooks quite poignantly said that the continued reference to non-educated whites or the working class, assumed disdainfully that they were not only uneducated, but stupid.  Chuck Todd spoke forcefully that his father would have kicked him in the rear for making these assumptions.  By defining people by their education or work experience, they were unfairly defined, put into a box that wasn’t always true.  They felt marginalized, mocked for who they were and what they stood for.

Long ago, there was a similar moment in time.  Assumptions were made about a specific group of people, of their beliefs and actions.  Travel back with me to the time of Abraham and Sarah.  Our patriarch and matriarch lived in Israel, not far from Sodom and Gomorrah.  These two cities were known by their injustice and immorality.  Their unethical and unjust behavior was so grave, that the cries of the innocent even reached the ears of the Holy One.  The Torah teaches that God was so disgusted by their behavior that he decided to obliterate the cities and destroy all the inhabitants of the land.

In one of Abraham’s finest moments, he bravely approaches the Holy One and stands up for the righteous people of these cities.  “Please, God, if there are fifty innocent people, would you destroy the entire city?”  Or to put it another way: “God, you are lumping every single person together.  Does every single person in this city believe the same thing?  Does everyone follow the same path?”  In that moment, Abraham reminds the Holy One, that it is dangerous to define everyone into large categories.  Abraham reminds us that we must see each person as a person; not by their skin color, or gender; education level, address, or even religion.  We must define each of us by who we are, by our life experience, by being us.

But, that is challenging to say the least.  It’s much easier to lump people together.  To define people into categories, to stereotype, label, or pigeon-hole.  Hopefully the pundits have realized their mistake.  They spent way too much time in their New York and Washington bubbles, defining entire groups of people as racists, misogynistic, and even stupid.  Instead of breaking out of the bubble, getting out into the world, they defined people by the polls and the data and their own political assumptions.

Luckily, Abraham was able to break free from his bubble.  The people of Sodom and Gomorrah were not Jewish.  They lived quite a distance away.  They were part of a different world.  Yet, Abraham stopped God from typecasting all of the residents as evil and horrible individuals.  Abraham attempted to know them, to learn about them, to find out who was innocent, who was different from the rest.

Unfortunately, Abraham didn’t succeed in his challenge.  There were not fifty innocent people or even ten innocent people living in those cities.  Abraham’s call was a failure.  Yet, this moment in Torah is one of the most famous instances of social justice, of reaching out to others, of speaking truth to power.  Abraham didn’t succeed, but we can.  We can follow his example and try to treat people as people.  We can break out of our bubbles and attempt to understand those that have different cultural values and world views dramatically different from us.  And most importantly, we can show our respect and appreciation for those in rural areas and in cities throughout the South and Midwest.  Instead of mocking them or showing disdain, we can understand them and learn from them and break down the barriers that surround us all.