How lucky are we to be part of something so much larger than ourselves!?
It is an amazing honor to be here tonight, ritualizing, making real, this commitment to care for one another as a community. I have wanted to be a rabbi since I was a kid, maybe 10 or 11. But never, beyond my wildest dreams, did I imagine that I would get to serve a community as creative, as spiritually and politically radical, as full of skill, passion and presence as Kol Tzedek. A community where I can fully and truly be myself. Tonight is a blessing beyond words.
Thank you to Rabbi Benay Lappe, Rabbi Deborah Waxman and Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld for your inspiring leadership and living Torah. Thank you to the Kol Tzedek Board, the Search Committee, the founding members, the Fundraising and Installation committees, with special shout outs to Noga, Rachel, Elana and Lula for finding the holy in every detail! Thank you to Brenda for the amazing Tallit clip, and to Jessi for her soulful song. Thank you to everyone who joined this year. Thank you to everyone, which I think it is everyone, who made a contribution of time and money. Thank you to the Kol Tzedek staff, Rabbi Michelle, Scott and Kari. Thank you to our community organizing partners and fellow clergy of heart and conscience. Thank you to my extended family for your love and support. Thank you Shosh, Naim and Zeev for dreaming up this life and journeying with me. And thank you Rabbi Lauren - for the courage to step into the waters and dream up this sacred community. Thank you for your trust and your confidence. I surely stand on your shoulders here tonight. I am honored to place myself in your lineage.
Just moments ago I received the Kol Tzedek Torah from Rabbi Lauren. In so doing, I commit to continuing to transmit Torah at Kol Tzedek.
I commit to being generous with my heart and cautious with my judgments.
I commit to cultivating a culture of learning and to make Judaism accessible to students, scholars and seekers of all stripes.
I commit to treating Jewish tradition with care, to take it seriously and hold it accountable so that it remains relevant and just.
Tonight I receive not just the written Torah, the sacred scroll, ink letters pressed on parchment. But also the oral Torah, the traditions and stories that define us. The the ongoing commitment to uncovering wisdom that can support personal and spiritual transformation. The belief in a concept of the Divine that has at least 70 names; a God whose preferred gender pronouns are “Is Was Will Be.” A force for transformation that agitates, inspires and supports our own longing to become.
And perhaps most importantly, it is the Torah of this community that I am specifically honored to receive. The Torah of your lives. The Torah of healing and justice; the Torah of survival and sobriety; the Torah of complexity and compassion.
Ever since I first interviewed for this position, I have been searching for just the right metaphor for our community. An image to aspire towards. And as it turns out, the image I want to offer comes as a resolution to a story about two rabbis who disagree about the nature of ritual purity. So much so, that they feared it might cause a person to question the wisdom of Torah altogether. To which the rabbis respond, 'Make yourself a heart of many rooms, and enter into it the words of those who declare a matter impure, and those who declare it pure."
In response to a great debate about the nature of truth and authority, the ancient sages encourage us to embrace complexity and contradiction, to increase our capacity for compassion and connection. To be a student of Torah, says this text, is to expand the horizon of your heart.
Make yourself a Heart of Many Rooms.
This describes my greatest aspirations for us as Kol Tzedek.
We are a community of artists and organizers, teachers and healers. We are critical thinkers and cultural workers. We are strong-willed survivors and the inheritors of a tradition that encourages us to ask a lot of questions. And we have decided to bind our lives together in sacred community. And at the center of our community is this heart of many rooms. A heart resilient enough to contain the brokenness is that is always part of our longing to be whole. A heart trustworthy of our vulnerability. A heart flexible and strong enough to pursue justice and compassion, righteousness and mercy all in one beat.
We as individuals and as a community are growing and changing. And together we can hold fast to the nostalgia and the excitement. There are rooms for study and rooms for organizing. There are rooms for dancing and rooms for grieving. There are rooms for micro-communities and sub-committees, all contained within one sacred heart.
And isn’t this exactly what we have been doing here at the Calvary Center for Community and Culture too. A building that declares Black Lives Matter with the taglines of four different communities of faith. A building that is home to three churches, a synagogue and a masjid. A building that supports youth leadership, community theater, international musicians, martial arts, social services and neighborhood gatherings. Calvary is in its essence the neighborhood heart of many rooms. And it calls us to our own purpose.
To co-house with complexity, to remember that generosity births abundance, to seek interdependence, to build multi-racial, multi-faith, cross-class alliances. To experience the divinity in each and every person we encounter.
Yet the rabbis teach: “Make yourself a heart of many rooms.” And so tonight I also want to extend this teaching to myself as your rabbi. Tonight I commit myself to you as a heart of many rooms. To being your teacher and your pastor, your advocate and your organizer.
According to our ritual calendar, in just a few weeks we will arrive at Mt Sinai preparing to receive the Torah on Shavuot. At the foot of the mountain the Israelites accept the Torah saying: Na’aseh v’Nishma, we will do and then we will understand. We too are called to decide on this side of the mountain that we will stick around. And I hope you do, because from what I know of the past 9 months, this community is too beautiful to miss.
I have found God’s grace in 70 community members packed into a sweaty classroom for the Black Lives Matter Study group. I have found God’s grace in our circle dancing well past the final shofar blast of neilah. The grief gathering on election day. The joint Hanukkah and Christmas service. The Multi-faith Solidarity gathering for Inauguration Day following by Praying in the streets at the Women’s March. At Let My People Sing, more than once! I felt God’s grace saying kaddish at the Mt. Carmel cemetery, standing shoulder to shoulder with our Muslim and Quaker cousins, resisting Islamophobia and anti-semitism. Our Klezmer blow out Purim party fundraiser. Baby namings and B’nei mitzvah on the regular. And shabbat services and learning, filled with warmth and song, always greeting me like a loyal friend.
I have found God’s grace more in the past 9 months than I ever could have dreamed and for that I am deeply grateful and endlessly excited about what’s to come.
May we as a community go from strength to strength!