Hope and Community in the Secular New Year

I am re-posting my weekly message to the Temple Israel community. At this time, the TI Times, our weekly enewsletter, does not have an online archive. I wanted to share these thoughts with my wider community.

I was not expecting December to unfold as it has. For me, Judaism creates space for soul-expansion. By sinking into Jewish wisdom, I’ve learned how to move through the ups and downs of life. I relish communal prayer and study, because through those collective actions I am deepened. 

So it has been with some trepidation that I stood up at the December school board meeting to denounce anti-Jewish graffiti and to call for the recreation of the Jewish roundtable. Almost immediately, I was confronted by people’s sincerely held beliefs that Zionism is the realm of politics and that we Jews should not get to define what anti-Jewish bias is. 

Here’s what I know for sure: Temple Israel is home to people across the political spectrum. We are a Zionist community because we are a community that believes in Jews’ collective right to self-determination. We chose the name Temple Israel because Israel has been our collective name for longer than we’ve been known as Jews. That said, as American Jews, we are not responsible for the outcome of elections in the state of Israel or the policies of the Israeli government. We do know that just as the Church of England exists, just as Muslim countries exist, so too does the state of Israel exist. 

In January, I will be putting forward a call to parents and students in the Alameda Unified School District to recreate the Jewish roundtable. We’ll be meeting via Zoom. If there is a school night that works better for you – or if you’d like to volunteer as part of the roundtable, please email me. I think the Jewish Roundtable of AUSD and Temple Israel could cohost some conversations for the Alameda community. I think we need to look directly at the various perspectives on Zionism, the rise in anti-Jewish speech locally, nationally, and globally, and how we hold space for complexity. 

As your spiritual leader, I’d like to leave you with some of the words I spoke at last Friday’s Shabbat service. 

We can choose the path of cynicism.

Or we can choose the path of authenticity.

We can choose the path of sarcasm.

Or we can choose the path of whole-heartedness.

We can choose the path of despair.

Or we can choose the path of hope.

There’s a simple reason I have the honor of serving you. I found my best self by immersing myself into the depths of our wisdom tradition. 

My most fervent prayer is that we each find even more to love about being Jewish in the coming secular year. 

I pray we continue to elevate one another and help one another live into our authentic selves. 

May we remember our obligation to tzedakah: money we are obligated to give for the communal good.

May we remember our obligation to learning: embracing our minds as a way to expand our hearts.

May we hold out the possibility of personally meaningful prayer: poetry weaved across generations to help us live into ourselves more deeply.

And may our community be a place where we collectively engage in acts of lovingkindness, tzedakah, learning, and prayer. May Temple Israel continue to be a beacon of hope and love for the East Bay and beyond.