Yom Kippur, 5764, Rabbi Kelman
Yom Kippur
5764
Rabbi Kelman
My Year of the "Heart" and of the Congregation's "Big Decision"
Adonai imachem.
Hillel hazaken omer: lamakom shelibi ohayv, lesham raglai movilot oti.
Hillel Hazaken says: "The place that my heart holds dear, that's the place where my feet will lead me."
Years have numbers. We have left the year 5763 behind and we have entered the year 5764 - we are the middle of 2003. These numbers are the public identifications of the years - for documents and licenses and bar/bat mitzvah certificates and invitations and death certificates. But years also have names - some are shared - the year Rabin was assassinated, the year of 9/11; but most years are personal ones: for me - the year we moved to Berkeley, the year my sister Patti died, the year we studied in Israel, the year I got my PhD. We all name our years in this way - after a remarkable event around which the year's events took shape.
What would you call this year for yourself? (pause)
Hillel hazaken omer: lamakom shelibi ohayv, lesham raglai movilot oti.
Hillel Hazaken says: "The place that my heart holds dear, that's the place where my feet will lead me."
For me, this was definitely the year of the heart - in many ways. I stood under the huppah as each of my daughters was married and my heart was filled with joy. I followed my heart to Jerusalem to spend my sabbatical. And it was during that sabbatical that my heart, my physical heart, threatened my life.
As I leave my year of the heart behind me -- I don't know what this will be the year of...I can only know the answer to that question a year from now, looking backward. So we all stand on threshold of a year of.....question mark?
In preparing to talk this evening, I have been thinking of my year of "the heart" and of the congregation's year of "the big decision" and that has guided my heart to share these words with you.
Hillel hazaken omer: lamakom shelibi ohayv, lesham raglai movilot oti.
Hillel Hazaken says: "The place that my heart holds dear, that's the place where my feet will lead me."
I'll begin with describing a wall in Jerusalem. No, not that wall, not the 'Kotel' the Western Wall (that's for another drash). I want to talk about a wall in the cardiac ward at Shaarei Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem. Having been a patient there for close to a week, I had plenty of time to become acquainted with my surroundings - and one wall, in particular, held special meaning for me and, I assume, every other cardiac patient who came to that ward. Imagine an entire, giant wall with what from a distance looks like a swirl on a flower with a central core. Radiating out from that core are what appear to be curved lines - but upon closer examination, each of the curved lines is in fact a biblical verse which contains the word "lev" - "heart". To give you a sense of the scope of the work, there were probably 50-70 verses - all attached somehow, to a central point.
When I checked the concordance, I actually found that there were 202 times when the word 'lev' appeared by itself. Not to worry, I only going to select four of the verses for this evening!
Before I get to those verses, I want to explore the word 'lev', heart. When we moderns speak about the heart, we usually think of the heart as the seat of the emotions. "What so-and-so said was really from the heart" is a typical usage and conveys the notion that something was deeply felt. This is not usually the case in the Bible - for there, the heart most often is the seat of the intellect - not the emotions. So when God says to King Solomon, for example: "I grant you a 'lev chacham v'navon'" - it is more correctly translated as "a wise and discerning mind (not heart); there has never been anyone like you before, nor will anyone like you arise again" (1K3:12). God's gift to Shlomo was not a gift of a wise heart in decision making, but rather the intellectual wisdom to be a just and wise ruler. Most of my Bible teachers at the Seminary took great pains to emphasize this point about the heart as the seat of the intellect; but the more I pondered these next few verses, the more I have come to understand that the matter is far more complex. The Bible sees the heart as a seat of emotions and passions as well. Maybe that verse about Shlomo was that to be truly wise, one needed the qualities that lie in the heart as well as those that are of the mind.
The first verse: Psalm 146:3 describes God as 'harofeh leshevurey lev' - as "the healer of shattered hearts." Healer of shattered, broken hearts - certainly a prayer for those of us who stood beside that wall - but also a description of broken hearts of the kind a cardiac surgeon cannot fix. Experiencing broken heartedness is not a permanent condition of human existence. The more I listen to your stories, the more I hear from many of you whose hearts have been broken, the more I hear of your pain, the more I am convinced that belief in a Divine Being who has the power to heal (not necessarily to cure), the more I have come to realize that faith and prayer and belief can strongly impact healing. The healer of broken hearts indeed.
And then there are the many references in the Torah, to the 'uncircumcised heart' like the one in Deut. 10:16, where Moshe urges, through the use of this metaphor, that the people keep their hearts open. The circumcised heart is the desired outcome. The uncircumcised heart is one which is closed, hardened. In the translation of Everett Fox: "So circumcise the foreskin of your heart, your neck you are not to keep hard anymore." Here Moshe at the end of his life observes that we all have the tendency toward closing over and hardening. How true it is - that as we age, it is not only the arteries which harden, but the harder it seems to change our patterns and our thoughts. We seem stuck into patterns born of experience and habit. Those 'habits of the heart' have become habits of the mind. Stiff necked and hard hearted seemed appropriate adjectives when I stood at that hospital wall.
Third verse: often, the word lev is connected with joy and gladness - certainly, by the way, an emotion and not an intellectual quality. Take for example, 1 Kings 8:66 where Solomon brings the people and the ark to Jerusalem to consecrate the Temple on Sukkot. At the very end of this week of feasting, he sends the people home semaychim vetuvei lev - "joyful and glad of heart over all the goodness that Adonai had shown to David, God's servant and to the people of Israel." On my way to the elevator upon leaving the hospital, this was the verse for me! Joy and celebration.
And fourth, the Bible also sees the heart as a seat of courage. Just look at the last verse in Psalm 27 - the Psalm we recite twice each day from the beginning of Elul - chazak veyaametz libecha - "Look to Adonai, be strong of good, heartfelt courage! Look to Adonai." A message of encouragement - a message of optimism, of faith, of the promise of a better future. Courage! Take heart!
Broken hearts, opening of hearts, joyful hearts and strong hearts- are these not the messages of Yom Kippur? These are descriptors of our condition - personally, individually and, I believe, collectively. If we, you and I can come out of Yom Kippur, with clarity about what our heart really wants and needs, then our path will become clear. For me, being at Shaarei Tzedek Hospital and looking at that wall was when my process of teshuva really began in earnest this past year. I got reacquainted with my lev; I began cleansing my lev, rededicating myself to know my lev - so it could lead me to the places I want to go and the kind of person I want to be.
Hillel hazaken omer: lamakom shelibi ohayv, lesham raglai movilot oti.
Hillel Hazaken says: "The place that my heart holds dear, that's the place where my feet will lead me."
So for me, it definitely was the year of the heart.
What about for us? For Netivot Shalom? Think about the years that have passed. 1988 was the year of our beginning; and then there were the years of our 'firsts' - our first bat mitzvah, our first birth, our first wedding, our first death, our move to 1841 Berkeley Way, the first year I became your full-time rabbi, the acquisition of our first Torah scroll, our first Amitim - and this past year? It could be called the year of "the big decision" - the big decision about our future. Our children and our children's children will look back and know that this was a watershed in the development of Netivot Shalom. They will say, yes, it was the year of a very big decision, but they will also see, that it was a year about the lev of the congregation, about the heart of the congregation.
Over the past few weeks, we've had many meetings about our new home. And in my little 'vort', I've said again and again, that the decision that we now have made is not really about the building; it is about the kind of community we want to be, the kind of community a building can help us to become. True, the discussions were about the architecture and the funding and about the operating expenses, but at the same time they were about something bigger.
There is a story of a mechanic who was removing a cylinder head from the motor of a Harley motorcycle when he spotted a well-known heart surgeon in his shop. The surgeon was there, waiting for the service manager to come and look at his bike. The mechanic shouted across the garage, "Hey, Doc, can I ask you a question?" The surgeon, a bit surprised, walked over to the mechanic - who then straightened up from working on the engine, wiped his hands on a rag and asked: "So, Doc, look at this engine. I open its heart, take valves out, fix 'em, put 'em back in and when I finish, it works just like new. So, how come I get such a small salary and you get the really big bucks, when you and I are doing basically the same work?"
The surgeon paused, smiled and leaned over, and whispered to the mechanic, "Try doing it with the engine running."
As a congregation, we are running! Our heart is beating and we need to keep it beating while we are building. Netivot Shalom has been in existence for 14 years now, and shortly, with God's help, we will be in a home of our own. What will it be like when we move to our next stage in our life as a congregation? The same way that we are planning for the physical space, we need to plan for our spiritual space as well. Always keep in mind that the building is a container for the heart of the community - it can reflect the heart but it is not the heart.
I want to use the four verses I cited before as touchstones for our future planning.
1. Harofeh leShvurei lev - broken hearts - On Rosh Hashanah, Robin Braverman bravely shared her story about her own struggles to conceive a child. That she did not find support within her congregation is both sad and troubling. After Rosh Hashanah, I received an email from Joe Meresman, which said in part:
Netivot Shalom is a strong religious community and responds well to the religious needs of its members. …There are needs that our congregants may hide, whether from misplaced shame or because they do not think of Netivot Shalom as being responsive to those needs.
It is not just the pain of infertility that is hidden from our community. Our economy has been in recession for two years. Many congregants have lost their jobs and some of them have not been able to find new jobs or jobs of equivalent income and satisfaction. The congregation sees this as a loss of membership dues and, potentially, as a decline in membership. We do not see the psychological pain associated with long-term unemployment or underemployment. A man or woman's failure to economically provide for his/her family is self-perceived as a mark of failure, in much the same way that infertility can be self perceived by a woman (or a man) as marking her as a failure. Her drash invites two questions:
1. what other hidden needs, e.g., depression from unemployment, do we as a congregation want to respond to, if only we knew that those needs existed?
2. How can we create a sustained way of listening to/finding/soliciting and responding to these hidden needs?
Yes, we have always tried to meet these challenges, but never in a systematic way. So, I will ask the executive committee of our board at its next meeting to create the appropriate mechanism so that the needs of our congregants can safely and securely and surely be met by formalizing structures and procedures to meet these needs. This is not a question of whether we should walk through the door, this is a matter of how shall we walk through that door. If God is rofeh leshevurey lev, healer of shattered hearts, we need to be too.
2. Opening our hearts: two examples - how do we create a place where hachnassat orchim, welcoming a guest, is widely practiced by all? Sure, we all do this with friends; but how many of us are prepared to do this with strangers - and especially on Shabbat? Sadly, one person who spent a goodly amount of Shabbatot with us this past summer reported to me that she had never once been invited home for a Shabbat meal. This is not acceptable - not now, nor in our new home. And when we do move, how does our new home become the locus for contact and concern with our neighbors? I have been meeting with a group of clergy in Berkeley called BOCA, the Berkeley Organizing for Community Action. We've met as a local group in west Berkeley to talk about the needs of the community - and how Netivot Shalom might respond appropriately. During the next year, I hope that some of you will volunteer to help in organizing and that our community can respond handsomely.
3 - semaychim v'tovey lev - Joy and gladness! Sometime I feel that we as a congregation are much too serious! Joy and celebration needs to permeate our very being - our essence. We need to give thanks - to God and to each other. For starters, there are what I've called "shehechiyanu moments" - when it is required (not only appropriate) to give thanks. Find those moments - and we need to do this more frequently. Create opportunities of celebration!
4 - chazak veya'ametz libecha - Courage - be strong of heart! Try something new! As a congregation, we are taking the bold step in creating a home of our own; but you, too, as individuals - I say: try something new this year - either in learning; or taking on a new mitzvah, or volunteering. Or going to Israel with our Netivot Shalom pilgrimage - whatever it is, have the courage to unclog the arteries and open the heart and muster the God given courage to do something new for yourself, for this holy community, and for the world. Many of the things that mark our years are random events, perhaps things we have no control over, but we can control how we meet the things that do confront us.
I want to repeat what I said earlier: Our building will be a container for the heart of our community - it can reflect the heart but it is not the heart. These four verses are all about the opening and the closing of our hearts. If we, you and I can come out of Yom Kippur, with clarity about what our hearts really want and needs, then our path will become clear.
Hillel Hazaken says: "The place that my heart holds dear, that's the place where my feet will lead me." That is a statement from the Tosefta, Moed Katan 4:2. I've always thought that it was simply a statement about goals and aspirations. Last week I decided to look up the actual quote, which, as often turns out, is far richer when seen in context. Hillel Hazaken goes on to say: "If you come to my home, I will come to yours; if you will not come to my home, I will not come to yours, because it is said: In every place that I will mention my name, I will come to you and bless you" (Exodus 20). It turns out that the quote is not about us, but about God. It is a quote about the nature of the place where we Jews meet God - namely, in a sanctuary. It is about our God who says, if you (meaning us) come to my home, I will come to yours. This is not about a building; it's about us. It's about how we want to be and it's about the kind of future we envision for ourselves and for those who follow us. And, most important, it's about bringing God into our midst.
May we have the strength, the lev, to meet the challenges of a new phase in the history of our congregation and our personal lives. May we have the courage to go forth with strong hearts. May this be the year when we heal the broken hearts in our midst; when we open our own hearts to those in need; when we create and celebrate opportunities for joy, and a year when we can have the strength of heart to meet the new and exciting challenges that life presents us - and may we each be able to say: "lamakom shelibi ohayv, lesham raglai movilot oti - The place that my heart holds dear, that's the place where my feet will lead me."
Gmar chatima tova.