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The Gift of Relational Service: A Vision of Sacred Community at BZBI

Rosh Hashanah 5777/3 October 2016

October 6, 2016

Authors’ note: The following is a d’var Torah we co-wrote. Each of us delivered it on the first day of Rosh Hashanah in one of the BZBI High Holy Day services. We wanted to share with the BZBI community a d’var Torah that reflects some of the ideas that have been motivating our work and the work of the BZBI professional and volunteer leadership this past year. As the d’var Torah focuses on a relational model of community building, we thought it appropriate to collaborate and write this piece together. It was the first time we’ve co-written a d’var Torah, and it brought us closer.

שנה טובה!
Shanah Tovah!

The new year has arrived, offering us the opportunity to clarify our priorities for the year ahead: for ourselves, our community, and our world. Rosh HaShanah helps us remember what motivates each of us to participate in the rhythms of communal Jewish life, and the value our participation in this congregation adds to our lives.

I’d like you to think of a time when you received a particularly meaningful gift. Bring to mind the person who gave it to you and the circumstances under which you received it. What made that gift meaningful to you? … Now, turn to a person in the row in front or behind you and share your stories. Sharing in pairs would be best, and groups of three is fine, too. Take one minute to share your story, while the other listens, and then switch.  

We’ll come back to your stories in a few minutes.

Today we come together, bringing all of the joy, pain, fear, or tranquility we carry from last year. Together we express our deepest hopes and aspirations for the year ahead, all of our yearnings, the discrete parts comprising our communal offering.

Each of us has something to offer, some essential piece of what will be the collective service of our community, our avodah, today. While contemporary Jews use the term avodah most often to refer to prayer, when the Temple stood avodah indicated the sacrificial offerings. Each Israelite had the opportunity to bring offerings at important life moments – a mother after giving birth, a farmer upon harvesting the season’s first fruits, offerings acknowledging sin or expressing gratitude. Priests offered daily sacrifices on behalf of the entire nation. Taken together the people’s offerings, korbanot, comprised their avodah.

Often, when we think of korbanot, we think of the English word “sacrifice” and the notion of giving something up. The name korban, however, suggests relationship and proximity; in the Torah a korban is not something one gives up, but something one gives for. Israelites offered korbanot for the sake of strengthening relationships; the Torah focuses not on the gift, but on the giver and the relationship enhanced through the exchange.

Through korbanot, Israelites drew closer to God and the community, and the same holds true for us:  our offerings strengthen our relationships. In his book, How Will You Measure Your Life, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen writes, “The path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to… What cements that commitment is the extent to which I sacrifice myself to help her succeed and for her to be happy.”[1]

Think back to the story you told earlier. What kind of relationship did you have with the person giving the gift? What did you feel when you accepted it? What do you imagine the giver intended? How did that gift affect the course of your relationship to its giver? What about that interaction created the change?

Would one of you be willing to share your reflections with us now?

Participants in each service shared their story, followed by the rabbi.

Rabbi Goldman: For me, the first thing that came to mind was a recent gift I received from my wife, Annie. For my birthday last month, Annie gave me an apron- a thick, quality, light-chestnut colored garment with a design of artsy artichokes. It’s a lovely apron. But its meaning goes beyond its beauty. I love to cook and to feed others. Over the past few months I have been cooking much more than I had for a while, with a renewed commitment to a wholesome and nourishing diet. When Annie gave me the apron, what I understood her to be saying was that she is attentive to my unspoken wants and needs, that she appreciates when I cook for her and Zohar, and for the guests at our table, that she sees how important cooking is to me as a form of creative expression and that she supports my commitment to wholesome eating and self-care. Now, when I put on that apron in my kitchen, I feel like I am wrapping myself in love and support and it brings me a sense of joy and gratitude, and a desire to share that warmth with Annie and others in my food. That modest gift of an apron strengthened our relationship.

Rabbi Friedman: The story that comes to mind for me happened on my first Father’s Day. One evening Rebecca told me that, as a Father’s Day gift, she arranged a series of private guitar lessons for me. Years earlier, when I first took up guitar, I had enrolled in group lessons and found it a rewarding experience; but jobs, rabbinical school, and parenting resulted in my playing less often. Rebecca knew that I still wanted to learn more, and that I often lamented how hard it was to find time to practice.

Could I have found a tutor and signed up for lessons on my own? Sure – but I never did. Rebecca’s gift touched me not because it was rare or elaborate, but because it revealed how attentively she listened to and understood my passions and aspirations. Each week that summer as I sat for my lesson, and indeed to this day when I use one of the techniques I learned in those sessions, I think of Rebecca and I am moved all over again by her thoughtfulness in choosing a gift that would further support my love of music.

Like korbanot in the Temple, their offerings brought us closer.

The Judaism we practice today originated in the earliest Rabbis’ attempts to stabilize Judaism after the Temple was destroyed. Their activity necessarily influenced all areas of Jewish life, but their most radical innovation emerged when they needed to address absence of the Temple itself. I can’t imagine a more challenging question: what could replace the central institution of ancient Jewish life?

Their answer has stood the test of centuries: prayer would become the new עבודה, the new service, and the synagogue — בית כנסת, “house of assembly,” in Rabbinic Hebrew — would stand in for the Temple.[2]

The Temple, in all its details, reflected a model of objective sanctity: objective in the sense that holiness attached to physical objects, geographic spaces, and specific human beings. The Temple in Jerusalem was holy in a way that set it apart from all other places; the priests and their instruments were inherently holy in ways unlike any other person or tool. In replacing the Temple and sacrifices with the בית כנסת, the synagogue, and prayer, our Sages of Blessed Memory did more than substitute one set of places and practices for another; they abandoned the paradigm of objective sanctity altogether.

In its place, the Rabbis articulated a model of functional sanctity. The rooms in which we pray are not sacred of their own accord.  Our sanctuary hosts concerts and lectures, and even provides stroller parking for our weekday preschool; the Kahaner auditorium functions as a dining room and gym, in addition to offering worship space. A person who attempted to use the Temple courtyard for any of those purposes would commit a grave sin, because the very bricks of the courtyard were sacred; our prayer spaces, however, become holy only when we gather in them for sacred ends.

In a world defined by functional sanctity, the בית המקדש, the Temple, gives way to the בית כנסת, “house of assembly,” the synagogue — whose holiness is conferred by the assembly of worshippers within. In the same way, the sacrificial service, עבודה, transforms into prayer, עבודה שבלב, the heart’s service. Temple offerings, oncesanctified, could never be diverted for other uses. Holiness in prayer, on the other hand, derives from the intention — שבלב, in the heart — that we put into our prayers.[3] The meaning of Temple עבודה lay in the formal characteristics of an offering, be it lamb, dove, or grain; the meaning of the heart’s service derives not from the content of the words but from the substance of the intention.

As we noted earlier, the korbanot acted as glue binding our relationships to God and other Jews. Today, in place of physical offerings brought to the Temple, we offer ourselves – our talents, our caring, our time and money – in service of others. These offerings of the heart reinforce our connection with one another and, in the context of sacred community, also help bring us closer to God.

As the stories we shared with one another illustrate, these קרבנות הלב – the heart’s offerings – derive their meaning from our intentions and the context of the relationship in which the offering is made. Everything we do for another person, whether a tangible gift or an act of service, represents an offering of self: the gift is meaningful when it reflects the relationship between giver and recipient.  

The children’s book, Last Stop on Market Street,[4] beautifully illustrates this principle. The story follows a young boy, CJ, and his grandmother, as they leave church and ride the bus  through increasingly bleak Los Angeles neighborhoods. As CJ yearns to travel by car and have free time for play, like his friends from church, his grandmother engages in lively conversation with the diverse group of passengers. Only at the end, in a surprise twist, do we learn that CJ’s trip through LA is not a journey home but an expedition to a soup kitchen where he and his grandmother serve each Sunday after church. CJ’s longing for other pastimes fades away when he sees Bobo, Trixie, and the Sunglass Man, regular clients; their repeated engagement allows CJ and his grandmother to form real relationships with the people who eat in the soup kitchen and imbues their service with a deep meaning that episodic service – however valuable or well-intentioned – can not provide.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of welcoming my mentor, Jeannie Appleman, a senior organizer with the Jewish community-organizing group JOIN for Justice, to a training session for BZBI volunteers. Among the many insights Jeannie shared, she drew a distinction between “transactional” organizations and those who pursue a “relational” approach. The transactional model is easy for us to understand, as most businesses we encounter operate in this way: they offer a range of products designed and produced based on broad, general research; we decide whether or not to buy, but have limited opportunities for feedback. In contrast, the relational model uses ongoing individual personal contact to deepen our understanding of others’ interests, passions, needs, to strengthen relationships, and to develop programs, services, or activities that emerge from shared passions and concerns and come into being through collective participation.

We can draw the same distinction between transactional and relational modes of service. If I go one evening to serve food at a soup kitchen, I have done something valuable: the patrons get a hot meal and a warm smile, and I leave feeling good. Nevertheless, each of us remains, in the other’s eyes, anonymous. On the other hand, if we – like CJ and his grandmother – commit to a longer arc of service, engaging with the same people over time, we forge true relationships and unlock the full power of service.

This year at BZBI, we’re expanding our opportunities for relational service. You’ll hear more about this over the remaining holidays and throughout the year, but I would like to highlight one example now. We are creating what we are calling a “Gemilut Hasadim Closet.” Our goal is to collect and store toiletries and to distribute them once a month to people in need, right here in the doorway of our Spruce Street entrance. You can participate by collecting toiletries, helping us to connect with local shelters to spread the word, and staffing the closet. Most of all, we hope this and other projects will help you form stronger bonds with fellow BZBI members, as well as with people in our neighborhood who are struggling with homelessness.

In a true relational congregation, every person’s offerings affect the depth and quality of our relationships, providing us with support and inviting us to respond in times of struggle or celebration. Come to BZBI on any given Shabbat, and you might participate in celebrating a baby naming, notice who has sponsored the flowers in honor of her grandson’s graduation, see who is marking a yahrzeit, hear a friend’s name on the mi shebeirach list and notice that he’s not sitting in his usual seat. These are our opportunities to reach out with a mazal tov or a note of concern, to engage in the holy work of relational service.

Rabbi Akiva taught that “More than the calf wants to nurse, the cow needs to give milk.”[5] Despite all the areas of life in which we must depend on others, our need to give, to serve, remains an even more powerful drive. Only relational service, the gifts we offer in the context of relationship, fulfills this desire and replaceskorbanot as the offerings that bring us closer and cement our relationships. My offering to you, when it comes from the heart, invites you to respond with a reciprocal gift; as we follow the cycle of offerings, our relationship becomes ever more stable and secure.[6] 

עבודה, in ancient times and today, is always a communal experience: each personbrings an offering for their own reasons, but we need to come together to achieve the ultimate goal. The בית כנסת, the synagogue defined as a “house of assembly,” amplifies the communal nature of עבודה. You know why you came this morning, but we don’t often reflect on all the other reasons a person might set aside a few hours to come to synagogue on Rosh HaShanah. We have no single universal reason bringing us to BZBI today; but whatever each of us seeks, we come because we know that here, together, we can find something we could not attain on our own.

I thank you, each of you individually, for joining us this morning. In showing up, you have brought with you a קרבן הלב, an offering of the heart. For all the preparation that our clergy and staff put into these days, you make our High Holy Days sacred by gathering here in our בית כנסת, our house of assembly. None of us could have Rosh HaShanah on our own; עבודה, from the time of the Temple until today, requires us to gather as a community.

At family simchas, cocktail parties, and shabbat meals, I get a lot of questions about the future of American Judaism, and the Conservative Movement in particular. Are we witnessing the twilight of synagogues? Does the inexorable growth of “Jews of no religion,” in the Pew Report’s evocative description, point to an ever-diminishing place for organized Jewish communities?

We must see to it that the answer to those questions remains “no.” I can say with great certainty that today’s Jews need a בית כנסת, a place to offer our heart’s service to others, at least as much as ever before in Jewish history – if not more. Americahas become so deeply immersed in a transactional way of life that we’ve forgotten our need to serve. Our Jewish tradition teaches us that we will only find meaning in life through our offerings to others. As other avenues for relationship disappear from the American landscape, the synagogue – this synagogue, this house of assembly – becomes ever more critical. Each time we come to BZBI, each time we make or accept an offering of the heart, we create holiness. What we begin today, assembling in sacred space on this first day of the New Year, must stay with us through the rest of the year. Here, we form and strengthen our Jewish relationships; here, we offer our heart’s service; here, together, we give life meaning.

שנה טובה ומתוקה!
!Shanah Tovah Umetukah

!Have a happy, sweet New Year


[1] Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 115

[2] Sifrei Devarim 41; Bavli Berakhot 6a, 7b-8a, 32b; Yerushalmi Berakhot 4.1 (7a).

[3] Berakhot 13a; Menahot 13:11

[4] Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson, Last Stop on Market Street (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2015).

[5] Pesahim 112a.

[6] Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 3-31; Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2012), 204-207

[7] Tanya, Likutei Amarim 37 (48b).

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