Creating Community

Yom Kippur, 5784

I want to start this year with an acknowledgement: No one remembers the rabbi’s high holiday sermons. Really, no one does. As proof of this, I asked my mother if she remembered what I spoke about last year. She drew a blank. So you really don’t need to feel embarrassed for not remembering. To be honest, I only remembered what I spoke about on the second day of Rosh Hashanah last year and needed to look up the rest. I say all of this to let you know that I’m not expecting anyone to leave here today actively quoting my D’var Torah to each other. As cantors like to say, no one leaves synagogue whistling the rabbi’s sermon. Instead, I am hoping I can instill a feeling in you, a feeling that will persist long after you’ve forgotten that I started my sermon by telling you how you won’t remember my sermon. I’m hoping that when you look back on what I’ve said, you remember the feelings, not the words. The feelings may be different for everyone here, but I am hoping they are strong.

I would like to invite y’all to rise to your ability now and look around the room. Just take a brief look. Who do you recognize here? Who don’t you recognize here? If you are next to someone you don’t know, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell them your name, what brought you here today. Do you feel like you know most people in the room? Do you feel like a stranger? Ask yourself, what brought you here to pray with these people? There are several congregations here in Savannah. Why did you come here?

If you came to any synagogue event or service in the last year that wasn’t Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, please remain standing. Everyone else, you may be seated. Whether you are standing or sitting, take a look around the room. When we advertise our events, our services, Gala, parties, classes, and so on, these are the people attending. They might come to a couple of events, or every one. What do you know about these people who are standing, or to each other? Do you feel connected? Disconnected? How many do you recognize?

If you came to a service or class at least once a month in the last year, or you are a board member or Shalom School teacher, please remain standing. Everyone else, you may be seated. The people who are standing right now are what are sometimes called “regulars.” They might not be here every day, but if you pop into a service or event you have a good chance of finding them there. The same questions apply: what do you know about this group of people? How many do you recognize?

If you came to a service or class once a week or more in the last year, please remain standing. Everyone else, you may be seated. The people standing help keep the synagogue running. They are often the people we call when we need to make a minyan, the folks who are constantly around the synagogue. Again, for both those standing and those sitting: do you know them? Do you feel connected to them? Do you feel in community with them?

You may be seated.

You’ve heard the old joke about the Jewish man on the desert island who builds two synagogues, one for him to pray in and one he won’t step foot in. But the truth is, that joke is relatively recent. Go back two thousand, one thousand, even three hundred years, and synagogues were prayer space and study halls for the local community. They were spread out based on walking distance, or maybe in a community with lots of Jews, multiple synagogues in walking distance to accommodate more Jews than one synagogue could fit. But synagogues were not communities in and of themselves. They served a specific function: prayer and study. Jews were not members of synagogues any more than they were members of a bakery or a communal oven.

But in the 1800s in Germany, different denominations of Judaism began to appear. Now there were Reform synagogues, and Orthodox synagogues, and people who would not daven in one or the other. In the 1900s synagogues in America were very affected by the Christian model of a community parish. Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan pioneered many changes in American Judaism: the Orthodox Young Israel movement, the nondenominational Jewish Community Centers, and explicitly denominational Reconstructionist movement, all aimed at making synagogues less of a house of worship and more of a community center. And regardless of denomination, those changes took hold across the Jewish spectrum. Now synagogues are communities. The job of “rabbi in America” has gone from being a teacher and decider of Jewish law, to a part-time leader of ritual, to a full-time community organizer. Synagogues and their rabbis are expected to host dinners, parties, fun events and social gatherings that have no explicit purpose other than connecting Jews to one another. They are now communities in their own right.

So when I speak of the Agudath Achim community, I am not speaking of the Savannah Jewish community. The Savannah Jewish community is much larger than Agudath Achim, consisting of individuals across the denominational spectrum. The Agudath Achim community is smaller, a self-selecting group, as with any synagogue here in Savannah. By choosing to be here this Yom Kippur you have identified yourself, in some way, with specifically the Agudath Achim community. And to be sure, there are different levels of involvement within our community. That is why I had everyone stand and sit at certain times. But I wanted everyone to see who is a part of our community, who has chosen to be a part of our community.

And yet community does not exist in a vacuum. It is not waiting for us, like a fine meal prepared ahead of time to be enjoyed. Instead, we need to play our part in creating it. There is a reason that Yosef Karo named his monumental book of Jewish Law the Shulchan Aruch, the Set Table. He set out to, and indeed succeeded, in making Jewish tradition as easy as a table set for dinner. But unless we prepare the food, unless we furnish this set table, there will nothing there for us to eat.

So it is important that everyone here in this room have an opinion on what they want this community to be. What they want this community to look like. Do you want this to be a community that only exists on the High Holidays? There are plenty of Jewish communities around the country where that is explicitly the mission of the community, where throughout the rest of the year the members are apart, and they come together just for High Holidays. That is one type of Jewish community. Do you want this to be a community that focuses on Shabbat morning services? That too, is what some Jewish communities here in America explicitly do. Should we be more focused on social events and gatherings, or incorporate them all? These are all various models of Jewish community that you can find at synagogues right now.

But what we cannot do is hope for a community to exist without participating in it. We cannot hope for a synagogue community the hosts holidays if we do not come out to pray at holidays ourselves. We cannot hope for a synagogue community that hosts social events and wine tastings if we do attend them. We cannot put the work of building community onto others. We need to take it up ourselves. Otherwise, we will not have a community to be a part of.

I want to give you an update, as your rabbi, on the state of the Agudath Achim community. As you can see, looking around the room, we are vibrant, robust, with many members of many different ages and backgrounds. We have heimish, exciting High Holiday services. Most Saturday mornings, we get between 20-50 congregants to join us in rousing Shabbat services. In my one year here so far as a rabbi, I have never struggled for a minyan on Shabbat morning. And yet, on the other hand, our holiday attendance is quite low. We often struggle to make a minyan for other holidays: Sukkot, Passover, and Shavuot services. No one attended Tisha B’Av services this year. And Friday nights, we are lucky if we get one minyan in three months. Around half of the time, I wait twenty minutes to see if anyone will arrive, and then leave after no one shows. As for our social programming, when we do our Shabbat and holiday dinners, we get an enthusiastic turnout, but we have not been able to have them as often I would like. And some of our social programming, such as our Tequilla tasting, was cancelled last year for lack of interest.

I am not saying any of this to guilt anyone into getting up and attending all of our programming (though please, feel free to attend all of our programming). I am saying this to be honest, and so that we can be honest. We create the Agudath Achim community we would like to see. I would love to see an Agudath Achim community that never struggles to get a minyan, that has exciting holiday services and programming, that has monthly social events and functions as a touchstone for all of its members. But I cannot create that alone. The Board cannot create that alone. We need the buy-in of the community. If you are hoping that Agudath Achim can just be a community that has High Holiday and Shabbat morning services, you may be satisfied with the report I just gave. That might be the community you want, and I understand that. That is a type of Jewish community. But I encourage you to dream bigger. Agudath Achim can be more. We can do so much more! But we need the entire community to buy into that vision.

Why did I choose to speak about community on Yom Kippur? Because Yom Kippur is a day that demands honesty. It demands that we look at ourselves impartially, judge the good and the bad in ourselves, and act on in. I hope that we can look impartially at the current state of our Agudath Achim community. I hope we can judge, from what we see, what has been successful and what has not. And I hope we can choose, based on that knowledge, to move forward, to create a stronger Agudath Achim, to create a more connected Agudath Achim. To make an Agudath Achim where everyone in this room can know and feel connected to everyone else. But I cannot do that alone. You cannot do that alone. We must all join together, and engage in community building together, to make the Agudath Achim community that we want to see.