Installation Remarks - Friday, May 11th, 2012

INSTALLATION REMARKS - May 11, 2012

Hinei Ma Tov--how good it is to stand on the bimah of the congregation that I feel so grateful to serve and share this Shabbat with so many cherished congregants, family members and friends, representing every age and stage of my life, from childhood through college and after.  To my colleagues who came this evening, I must compliment you on your “Friday night off” strategy. 

I honor this moment by sharing a little teaching by Rabbi Nehemia Polen who is a leading expert in Hasidism and Jewish thought.  Polen went to a Harvard ethnomusicologist, asking him how it is that the niggunim, the wordless melodies, of the great 20th Century master Shlomo Carlebach have such spiritual power.  The expert concluded that he did not find anything special about them.  At which point Rabbi Polen said, “I think you don’t understand….”

“You see, every note in a Carlebach niggun looks at the note that came before it and says: ‘Thank you for being my teacher.’  And every note in a Carlebach niggun looks at the note that comes after it and says: ‘I give you permission to be even more beautiful than I am.’”

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, thank you for being my teacher.  For more than eight years you nurtured my professional growth, challenged my assumptions, modeled for me an ever-evolving rabbinate, and inspired me to advance the mission of this groundbreaking synagogue.  To stand here and receive your blessing is an incomparable honor.  

I want you to know that even though you are now officially my congregant, along with Susie, the kids, and your extended family, you will always and ever be my rabbi.

To all of my clergy colleagues, thank you for being my teachers.  I came here to work not only with Rick but also with my cherished classmate, the magnificent Angela Warnick Buchdahl who taught me that little story about Nehemia Polen, and with Stephen Merkel whose memory and music are enduring blessings.  I venerate the memory of my friend Rabbi Jack Stern and feel his compassion and wisdom embedded in the fabric of our congregation.  Along the way I have worked alongside so many gifted interns, cantors, and rabbis.  Rabbis Jan Katzew and Aaron Panken, thank you for nourishing us with your teaching and preaching, especially in this transitional period.  

Mia Davidson, you bring intelligence, dedication, and personal warmth to your cantorate.  Your communicate a love of Jewish music to young and old.  You take organization to a whole new level and recognize the impact of the little details.  Thank you for keeping the team on track and for lifting our spirits.  

Dan Sklar:  Temple Israel of Westport has selected one of the most talented musicians our Movement has ever produced to be its next Senior Cantor.  Of course you are so much more than a singer; your gifts extend to wordplay, technology, home repair and most of all, a special ability to connect with other people.  I speak for all of us when I say how much we will miss you, but we also acknowledge that you accepted this invitation not only as a professional attainment but also because it’s the right thing for your family.  I can think of no more Jewishly honorable decision than to choose to have Shabbat dinner every week with your wife and three-year-old son even as you rise to new heights in musical and spiritual leadership.

Jill Abramson, thank you for being my teacher.  Every day I learn from you how to be a clergy person.  You are a sensitive listener, an inspirational teacher, a deep thinker, a soulful singer, and somehow you stay grounded, graceful, and giving even when we’ve had a week with four bar and bat mitzvahs, three funerals, no internet connection, and in your case, an infant at home.  I don’t know how you do it but I feel grateful for our sacred partnership and the laughter we share.  

Sorel Goldberg Loeb, thank you for being my teacher!  Your creativity and unflagging dedication to excellence combine to produce students who graduate from WRT, go off to college and adulthood and actually miss their temple, their religious school teachers, and their WRT community.  I love collaborating with you.

To our religious school faculty, and our bookkeeping, custodial, and administrative staff, thank you for everything you do to keep this 1,200-household congregation running smoothly even in a week like the one I just described.  Marilyn Master, you are a living repository of information about our families and I rely on your mathematical brain to figure out how to pair hundreds of B’nei Mitzvah students without sparking a nuclear conflict.  

Suzanne Saperstein and Amy Rossberg:  you not only provide administrative support but interact lovingly with the congregation as an extension of the clergy.  You are often the first point of contact when a congregant needs anything from a Hebrew name to a shiva minyan.  Amy, I have already come to rely on you for advice and the occasional Aramaic translation.  

Sue Tolchin, your love of young children and your caring ways with their parents are nurturing the next two generations of Jewish leaders.  

Yoel Magid, I am still not sure how a person with an advanced Ivy League degree in metaphysical poetry goes off to serve in the Israeli army, live on a kibbutz for 25 years, become its chairman, and then when most people would want to slow things down, to initiate a whole new career as a synagogue director, eventually serving WRT during years of monumental transformation... but here you are.  Thank you for every labor of love on behalf of this congregation.  

Of course none of us professionals could do any of our work without the partnership of our exceptional lay leaders.  No mere cabinet of figureheads or bean-counters, those who serve this congregation on our Board of Trustees and in countless other volunteer commitments embody wisdom, responsibility, and Jewish values.  We cannot do what we do without your guidance, support, and vision.  

If they gave out medals for synagogue presidents then the ones with whom I have served could not stand up under the weight of them.  Amy Lemle and Ellen Sunness, the support you have given my rabbinate is only a mirror image for your unstinting service to WRT.  

And Lisa Messinger, you keep me on my toes even more, if it is possible, than does my physical therapist.  Our temple president is fluent in the languages of Reform Judaism, Jewish organizations, Jewish philanthropy, staff management, and community institutions.  She understands rabbis intuitively, perhaps because she married a terrific one.  Everything you do, Lisa, you do with energy and imagination.  Most of all, in this eventful synagogue presidency, you have ever embodied that wonderful British maxim, “Keep Calm and Carry On.” 

Like a note in a Carlebach niggun I look back at all the ones who have come before and say, “Thank you for being my teachers.”  I am blessed to stand here tonight before my parents and sister who gave me the incomparable gift of a loving, happy family that cares about God, Torah, and Israel, infusing my upbringing with a love of Reform Judaism and a passion for keeping our faith and our people strong.  

In my life, no note resounds more beautifully, no teacher has provided more inspiration or support, than the one I was blessed to marry ten years ago this month.  Kelly, from our first “not really a date” date at the luncheon following my fourth-year sermon at HUC to these remarks, you have been there to support me.  But you have not merely stood by my side; you have in many cases taken the lead, pursuing conversion to Judaism of your own initiative well before I was ordained a rabbi; conveying a spiritual depth and wisdom reserved for the most enlightened human beings; offering your gifts to audiences everywhere--not only onstage, but backstage, where your colleagues all come to know what I understand about you--that you are not only by career a phenomenal performer and consummate musician but also by innermost nature a caring, honest, and intensely loyal friend who helps others to be their best.  Thank you for being my partner in friendship, in love, and in life.

You are also a dynamite sermon editor, and this paragraph may be the only one in more than twelve years that you have not proofread.  I hope you liked it.  I know I speak for the two of us when I express how grateful we feel to call WRT our home and we look forward to greeting you after the service.  

Let me add that it is especially sweet to be joined tonight by your mom and her husband Tom who came in from Michigan.    

“You see, every note in a Carlebach niggun looks at the note that came before it and says: ‘Thank you for being my teacher.’  And every note in a Carlebach niggun looks at the note that comes after it and says: ‘I give you permission to be even more beautiful than I am.’”

Dear friends, we stand poised at such a special moment in the life of Westchester Reform Temple.  Like a note in a niggun, we all look back with gratitude at our teachers, all those in our almost sixty-year history who sought to establish and safeguard a sacred congregation in the heart of Westchester County.  

And we look ahead to a congregational future that yet glows with the promise of being even more beautiful.  In the coming weeks, two gifted rabbis will join our clergy team.  In February, impressed with his gifts in teaching Torah, in information technology, and in cultivating deep and caring relationships, we invited Rabbi David Levy to be our next assistant rabbi.  And just this week we announced the partnership of Rabbi Marcus Burstein who will give strength to our team and our congregation with his thirteen years of experience in the field, his advanced training in pastoral care and synagogue transition, his ease with people of all ages, and his passion for creating lives vibrant with Jewish meaning.  Ashreinu, how fortunate we feel to welcome you, David and Marcus, and your families!

In notating music, each note is of course suspended in something called a staff, five horizontal lines that provide the organizational framework around which the melody flows.  Here at WRT,  the lines of our staff are our five pillars:  Chavurah, community; Avodah, spirituality; Talmud Torah, learning; Tikkun Olam, reparing the world; and K’lal Yisrael, the Unity of the Jewish People.  These comprise the values that give shape to the melody of our lives.  Like the lines of a staff, our values hold the melody in place.  The values themselves remain fixed, steadfast.

But the melody keeps coursing through this community of faith and action, taking shape as it goes and grows.  We will find new ways to express the foundational values of our congregation.  Our community will grow--not just by outreach to the unaffiliated but by deepening the experience of belonging for those who affiliate.  Our worship will evolve as new prayers are composed and new songs are sung.  Our ancient tradition will still summon us to learn, but in new ways, with new teachers and new technologies.  Our world, with all of its brokenness, from the violence of the Middle East, to entrenched poverty and inequity in our own county, to the ravages of environmental neglect and disaster, will not relent in giving us new opportunities for Tikkun Olam.  And our fellow Jewish brothers and sisters the world over, especially in Israel which needs us now more than ever, will make unprecedented claims on us, requiring us to unite with our people everywhere.  We will fulfill all of these sacred responsibilities with eyes and ears attuned to Jewish arts and culture, the harmony to our melody, those notes that make what we do not just consequential but beautiful.  

We will never abandon the foundational values that make WRT such an exceptional congregation.  But the melody will continue to change, and new singers will lift up their voices to make it heard.  I don’t mean new clergy.  I mean you.  Because you are the ones who make the music. 

As we look with hope to the future, we echo the blessing that one note sagely intones to the next:  ‘I give you permission to be even more beautiful than I am.’”

Amen