PARASHAT KI TETZE / ACCEPTANCE OF INVITATION BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF WRT TO SERVE AS SENIOR RABBI

REMARKS TO THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES

OF WESTCHESTER REFORM TEMPLE

SEPTEMBER 6, 2011

I’ll say to you what I said when I appeared before the Search Committee to interview for the job: thank you for this opportunity to introduce myself.

Only superlatives featuring the prefix “over-” suffice to convey the depth of my feeling at receiving this opportunity and this welcome. Overjoyed, overcome with feeling, not a little bit overwhelmed. It is no overstatement to say that Kelly and I are overflowing with gratitude. What’s more you’ve given my mom and dad something to kvell about over and over again, so thank you.

It’s tempting to interpret your invitation to serve as the next senior rabbi of Westchester Reform Temple as a vote of confidence in the last eight years … which have nurtured my rabbinate inestimably. I choose, however, to accept your invitation as a challenge, a summons to new dimensions in my leadership and in the possibilities for this congregation. Let your vote of confidence be in the rabbi I hope to become.

As for what lies in store for us on the journey we will take together, I am inclined to repurpose words that a groom composed for his bride at the wedding I officiated just this past Sunday:

“There will, no doubt, be detours, wrong turns, even five-car pile-ups along the way. Our intended destination might change—heck, I don’t think I either of us knows what it is yet or ever will—but I can’t wait to hit the road.”

I became a rabbi out of a desire to immerse myself in the literature of sacred Jewish tradition but it is the life of sacred Jewish connection that keeps me going. Moments like the one I shared with bride and groom this weekend, on the bimah with B’nei Mitzvah, in hospital rooms, standing by the grave--these intimate encounters are where ordinary life touches the numinous. How blessed I feel to be invited into them every day.

We live in a society that zealously protects the privacy of the individual and the part of us that cherishes our freedoms should give thanks for that; but one of the sadder trade-offs of this arrangement is that very few Americans today get to see life the way a congregational rabbi does, in all its sacred, beautiful messiness.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Our parents and grandparents lived in more intimately interconnected communities, where one person’s business often agreeably commingled with another’s, a world of mom-and-pop stores and lunch-counter conversations, where, for instance, Bar Mitzvahs were community affairs, not private life-cycle events. I say this not to romanticize the old ways, only to illustrate some of the harder compromises attendant to our pervasive pursuit of privacy.

The Torah portion this week, called Ki Tetze, shows us that the Jewish tradition seeks to find points of intersection between private and public in ways that reinforce each dimension of living, as individuals in the context of a Jewish community. Two notable examples, one negative and one positive, stand out:

The first is the infamous case of the “wayward and rebellious son,” a child so unrepentant in his bad behavior that his parents have deemed him beyond hope of rehabilitation. The Torah instructs the parents to take said wayward and rebellious son before the elders of the community, publicly declare him to be a “glutton and a drunkard,” after which all the people of the town would assemble to stone him to death. The Rabbis pay special heed to the public nature of the punishment in contrast to the private nature of the offense. This is, first and foremost, someone’s child, and what he has done only the parents know. Instead of giving him a time out or grounding him, taking away his camel for the week or whatever, the boy must appear in public and if the community wishes to dispense with the rotten egg altogether, they must join forces and cast the stones as one.

The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 71a) further suggests that no child ever went so far as to prompt the punishment, and no community could ever in good conscience have brought itself to perform their responsibility, so, crisis averted. But what endured was the understanding that in Jewish communities what one person does touches on everyone else and that kol Yisrael arevin zeh ba-zeh, each of us is responsible for every other.

In the second example, our portion permits a person to stroll into a neighbor’s vineyard or cornfield, pluck grapes off the vine or ears off the stalk, eat as much as he or she pleases, until feeling completely stuffed, so long as one stops shy of putting the grapes in a basket or taking a sickle to the corn. Can you imagine this flying in our world? But the Torah’s world envisions an ethic of “What’s mine is mine, but what’s mine is also yours,” an attitude the Rabbis would later define as the essence of religious piety (Pirkei Avot 5:14).

For me, this is what being a rabbi, and, more to the point, being a Jew is really all about: giving a community context for all the sacred, intimate, private experiences of our lives, and making every community gathering into an experience that moves us privately to the core of our being, that allows us to emerge from a prayer service, a Torah class, a social action engagement, internally transformed in the most intimate of ways.

To know that I get to do this work here, with exceptional collaborators in you, our temple leadership; and with our amazing clergy, professional, educational, and administrative staff; with the peerless wisdom that my cherished friends Rabbi Rick Jacobs and, indeed, Rabbi Jack Stern of blessed memory have imparted to me--well, that is the greatest blessing of all.

Kelly and I are so grateful to embrace WRT--the community as it is and as it could be--as our spiritual home. Thank you!