One of the shortest and oddest Hebrew words is “ee” -- or island. The plural, ‘ee-yim’, shows up in Psalm 97, from our kabbalat Shabbat service: yism’chu ee-yim rabim, it reads. ‘Let the many islands be glad,’ for God rules.
I know something about islands. It’s strange, but at 34, I’ve pretty much cornered the rabbinic market on US tropical island communities. The pulpits I’ve served besides Adat Shalom have been St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands, as a student; and -- though briefly, at this time last year during my sabbatical -- the island of Kaua’i, in Hawai’i. (Tough jobs, I know, but someone had to do them!).
Though nearly half a world apart from each other, these two islands are remarkably similar -- both have populations near 60 thousand, with just a few dozen Jewish households. Both have rich histories and ongoing stresses involving indigenous populations and more recent imports from the mainland. Both have huge numbers of endangered species, hosting much research as well as eco-tourism. And so on.
As some of you may know, St. Croix’s east end at Point Udall is the easternmost spot in the U.S. -- which makes the shul in Christiansted, St Croix, the first place in America to welcome in the Jewish new year.
And Kaua’i is the western-most of the major Hawai’ian islands, making the shul in Lihue on Kaua’i the last place in the US to blow shofar at the end of Yom Kippur! (“The sun never sets on the Fred -- er, American, empire!”)
My time on St. Croix was formative; and long ago: years two and three, at seminary. But one year ago today, I was leading Rosh Hashanah services in an open-air sanctuary in the coastal town of Lihue, for a lovely, diverse bunch of a hundred or so Kaua’ians. My wife, Minna, and I were down there for the whole Yamim Noraim, leading services, offering programs, trying to build up their community, and occasionally being tourists on one of the most gorgeous islands imaginable.
The Jewish community of Kaua’i -- whose synagogue is creatively named JCK, “Jewish Community of Kaua’i”! -- felt like it was 6000 miles from DC and Adat Shalom. Which it was.
As organized as we at Adat Shalom are, they could hardly put together a schedule for the High Holy Days. As well-staffed as we are, they only bring in one clergy person, once a year, for these 10 days of repentance, and besides that meet maybe monthly, rarely with an oneg. As empowered as we are, organizationally and spiritually, a handful of Kauai’ans do all the work and make all the decisions. Our Torah School is a (mostly) well-oiled machine (thanks to master mechanics like Toni Grossman & Judy Veis), with hundreds of students and dozens of teachers; there, I had to pull teeth to gather, just once, with six or seven kids.
The most striking difference was this: focused as we are on creating an intentional sense of community, they lacked such a focus. Travel is good that way: seeing what others lack by comparison, we better understand and appreciate what WE have.
A vignette to illustrate: A few weeks before Rosh Hashanah, I sent email questions to Sally, my contact there, and got no response. Much later, after much worry, I learned that her father had died. Like most members of the community, her family lived on the mainland. When anglo Kauai’ans face illness or loss, they must travel thousands of miles on expensive airfares, to be with family. The geographic isolation of an island leads to a culture of isolation. After sitting a partial shiva with family back here in the lower 48, Sally flew back to a home where basically no one had known her father, with no communal apparatus for comforting a mourner.
The logistical side of rabbi-ing, needing information she had about the upcoming holidays, gave way to the pastoral side: how are you doing? what kind of support do you have? Can we gather folks together, ala shiva or shloshim, in his memory, so you can share something of his and your story with your community? It turned out, she was doing reasonably well. But though a long-timer in JCK, with many friends, Sally noted with regret that the Jewish community rarely gathered for support.
I had already suggested a mid-week adult education program, since they rarely get to do serious Jewish learning. [And since they were (and are still) considering Reconstructionist affiliation, I wanted to pull out all the stops, showing the dedication and resources that JRF can offer them! I figure, if I go down in Reconstructionist rabbinic history as the guy who helped make Kaua’i a perpetual sabbatical gig for my colleagues, dayeinu! A cantor from our sister shul in Portland, Oregon, as it happens, is there now…].
We decided to call that adult ed program a “building community” session. It opened with Sally sharing a bit about her dad, and a chance for others who’d suffered losses that year to do the same, and say Kaddish. Then, we turned to the nature and importance of community. After soliciting history from a feisty 80-year-old woman who claimed to be the second Jew to move to Kaua’i, a half-century ago, we asked the fifteen or so folks gathered: what do you want from community? Why don’t you yet have what you want? And what will it take for you to get there?
FREEZE FRAME: Before continuing with the anecdote, I’d like to ask us today, at Adat Shalom, to consider these questions ourselves. Yes, we are far from Kaua’i. We “do community” very well. But we’re growing. There are gaps. We must refuse to sit on our laurels.
So I ask you -- what do YOU want from community? What do WE want? Why don’t we have it yet? And what will take for us to get there? What else might we do FOR, or give TO, our community? Think about it.
Continue pondering as I take you back to Kaua’i, in the shadow of mile-high Mount Waialeale, the wettest spot on earth (550 inches of annual rainfall!)…
Tuesday night, between the Holy Days, in the living room of community stalwart Marty, with an enormous turnout by Kaua’i standards: We’re talking about community. And getting a surprising amount of resistance. Even those islanders wanting a stronger sense of community didn’t know where to begin; they were overwhelmed by the logistics of building it, and fearful of its implications. Many of them -- like many of us -- had a push-pull, stop-come relationship with the idea of community. ‘Community’ can be a rather scary concept. It can feel supportive or intrusive; rewarding or demanding; and often, all of the above.
For this island community, ideas like memorial gatherings seemed, at first glance, rather un-Kaua’i-an. So what was Kaua’ian? One member, a laid-back lawyer with a glorious three year old daughter who owned the bimah, defined himself as Orthodox. But while discussing the length of services for 2nd day Rosh Hashanah, he proclaimed that we’d have to end by noon… because that’s when the surf’s up!
American culture is famously individualistic. If true on the mainland, imagine the gumption and independence it takes to stake your claim in the mid-Pacific. My wife Minna -- who (like me) fell in love with the island’s beauty, and with JCK’s people -- noted, “You don’t move to Kauai looking for Jewish community.” And yet, all these Jews found themselves together, craving yet fearing a more intentional community.
We’re celebrating American history now, 350 years this month since the arrival of the first permanent Jewish settlers. A key theme in American history is westward expansion. Those who need lots of space -- or who took up lots of space! -- tend to drift westward. This explains California. But where to, next? How far west can you go these days, and still get by with English alone? Hawai’i!
Communal, native Hawai’ian ways were displaced by an imported, atomized, white, ranching culture -- which a century on, even Kaua’i’s Jewish accountants and teachers and gallery owners seem to have absorbed. They come together for tachlis, nuts-and-bolts needs, but rarely discuss feelings in public.
This rancher/cowboy ethos of the open spaces is American, not just Kaua’i-an: how many politicians’ careers began starring in westerns, or as go-it-alone action heroes?! At a recent political convention, one such actor-governator simply uttered the name of his hero, John Wayne, and thousands started hoopin’ and hollerin’ in praise -- this for a man who personified the go-it-alone paradigm so brilliantly, on and off screen, that his will left not one cent to charity.
Individualism runs deep -- and it hurts us. A favorite folk musician, Dar Williams, sings: “Way back / where I come from / we never mean to bother / we don’t like to make our passions / other people’s concerns. So we walk / in a world / of ‘safe’ people / and at night / we walk into / our houses / and burn.”
Community -- the only antidote to this kind of ‘burning’ -- is at the heart of the Adat Shalom and the Reconstructionist enterprise. Kaua’i has a small Jewish community, with limited resources. We can’t begrudge, or judge, their norms, which are still evolving. Minna’s and my presence surely made some difference, but we were there just twelve days. This is our home, our community. And here is where I want to see us, who already do well, do better.
John Donne, in 1624, wrote, “no man is an island.” His phrase is a sermon in itself! But the whole passage -- a classic of literature buried in his 17th “Devotion Upon Emergent Occasions” -- deserves our attention:
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Like Donne’s piece of continental earth, we may not be conscious of our interconnection with everything around us, but it’s there. We are constantly -- like it or not! -- in community. And nowhere is that clearer than around loss and death: because we are connected, the bell tolls for us all. The pain of one is everyone’s pain, if we are open to feeling it.
The Talmud says “kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh,” all of Israel are responsible for one another, mixed in with each other. 19th Century rabbi Shimson Raphael Hirsch draws on more universalistic strains of our tradition when he writes, “One glorious chain of love, giving and receiving, unites all living beings -- the one for the all; the all for the one.” In recent decades, Dr. King said it best from the Birmingham jail: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
Nice principles, and true. But as with our friends on Kaua’i, living in community is easier said than done [sic!] -- it takes work, commitment, involvement. It’s especially hard when we’re stretched across multiple communities: neighborhood, soccer league, professional, civic, school, shul. Harried, and needing or expecting to get something from these communities, too often we forget to give to them, to nurture them.
Yet community is a partnership, sacred in its own way, like marriage. We stop doing certain things we used to, the way we used to; maybe stop doing certain things we like altogether. On the face of it, such covenants involve a loss of autonomy, a diminution of power. And they do -- but this ‘loss’ is voluntary, and with the right match, oh so worth it. We give up autonomy, because we gain far more: support, comfort, trust, meaning, love. “A rock feels no pain, and an island never cries” -- Paul Simon names the folly of trying to be an island. “If I never loved I never would have cried?” No: “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
As with love, so with community. Intentional community does involve sacrifice. It means giving up something, which runs against our individualistic American selves -- but it’s about gaining something yet greater. We give up our money through dues and contributions, to support the community -- because it’s the right thing to do, and so the community is there when we, and those who follow us, need it. We give up our time by volunteering and participating -- because it’s the right thing to do, and to keep the community strong for when we need it, AND because being involved is meaningful and social and educational and growthful and fun.
Love is also a factor here, in community as in marriage. We should be in love with community, and we should love our fellow community members. Love in the philos & agape, chesed sense. Love as an emotion of ultimate worth, and overpowering strength; love as a value we hold dear; love as a reason for doing things in and of itself; love as in Rav Hirsch’s “one glorious chain of love, uniting all.” Love that makes demands. Love that gets your heart pumping, your mind moving, and your tush out the door to make that shiva call, or attend that committee meeting, or shelp out to Wheaton HS.
Speaking of: here we are in shul, in a high school auditorium, in community. Humorist Harry Golden once asked why his atheist father went to shul: “There are many reasons why one would go to synagogue,” he answered. “Take Silverberg. He goes to talk to God. Me? I go to talk to Silverberg.”
As Reconstructionists, we proudly go to shul, partly, to talk to Silverberg [and Weinberg, and Greenberg] -- since talking to them IS talking to God. A synagogue is a beit Knesset, house of assembly, not beit tefillah, house of prayer. We experience the divine through community. We hear echoes of God in the stories at baby-namings, the clanging of oneg pans, the sound of a volunteer choir, the thank-yous after a social action project or a bikkur cholim visit to the sick, and yes, even the ring of the phone next week when a member calls with the High Holy Day appeal.
And, we need Silverberg [and Silver, and Silverman, and Silberman…], in order to talk with God. Many prayers require a minyan, a quorum of ten, lest our prayers become too individualistic, too self-focused. We open our Shacharit service with “love your fellow person as yourself,” v’ahavta l’re’echa kamocha.
It’s especially true in these High Holy Days -- AviNU MalkeiNU, OUR father OUR king (or MekoreiNU EloheiNU, OUR source OUR God), chataNU lefanecha, WE have sinned before you. Born of the unique Rosh Hashanah liturgy in the upcoming musaf is “aleiNU leshabayach”, it’s on US to give praise. M’loch al KOL haolam kulo, rule over ALL the earth. ZochreiNU b’zikh’ron tov, remember US well. V’karev pzureinu, bring in OUR dispersed. Each section of musaf ends: “Accept with favor OUR sovereignty service, OUR remembrance, OUR shofrot.” Yom Kippur, the same: AshamNU, bagadNU… Al Het she’chataNU lefanecha… Even our sins are named in the plural.
Judaism names just three cardinal sins, transgressions to be avoided at pain of death: murder, adultery, and idolatry. The last, idolatry, is forsaking community with the Divine, just as murder and adultery mean forsaking community with others. Idolatry, we’re told, is seeing and adulating the part, rather than the whole. If so, then radical individualism is the collective sin of our society today -- we are the parts; the community is the whole. Untempered individualism is idolatry: idolatry of the self.
So, creating and fostering community is a mitzvah (a commandment, a good deed); avoiding or subverting community is an averah, a transgression. As Hillel said two millennia ago: al tifrosh min hatzibor, do not separate yourself from the collective.
Adat Shalom takes Hillel’s directive to heart. Our Community Life Committee, the Villages, Life Cycle, our onegs -- so many projects and groups, working just to foster that integral community. Again, though, we can’t rest on our laurels. As we relearn the importance of community, let’s rededicate ourselves to making it real. Among our new years resolutions, let me suggest: “I will join a committee.” “I will attend at least one shiva for someone I don’t, or barely, know.” “I’ll clear our schedules to stay later at the onegs, and meet more people.” “I’ll invite new shul friends to the house for Shabbos.” “I’ll take the time to hear other’s stories, and will more freely share my own.” “I will be an agent of community.”
We think we are islands, when in fact we’re clods of mainland earth. Yet sometimes we dig a moat around our little holding, turning ourselves into the islands we were never meant to be. How wide do we let that metaphoric moat become? Do we build bridges across it? Just as we open the ‘gates of repentance’ this season, we need to fill in the moat (or charter a boat, or just drop a note!). It’s our “island-ness” which drags us out of community, out of relationship, out of alignment, in the first place.
So we must bridge the moat, from both sides: making clear our need for community, and what we need from it. While respecting each other’s boundaries (tricky, to be sure!), we must reach out to each other, lending our shovels and our shoulders to anyone filling in their moat. And as a kahal, a community, we need to make the mechanisms of community transparent and accessible, so we can say to all in our midst -- as chanted in shul last Shabbat, and again come Yom Kippur – “it’s not in heaven; no, it’s very near you, to follow and do it.” Community is here. What you need should be here. And if it’s not, help us create it.
Rosh Hashanah is a wake-up call: get ready for atonement, for at-one-ment. Today it is written; in nine days, it will be sealed. We must be at one. And to be at one, we must be AS one. To atone, we must be in community. To grow, we must be in community. To serve, we must be in community. And to be our truest selves, we must be in community.
Thank you, Adat Shalom, for being my community, and Minna’s, and one another’s. After sabbatical -- more tales from that on Yom Kippur! -- it’s wonderful to be home. L’shana tova.One of the shortest and oddest Hebrew words is “ee” -- or island. The plural, ‘ee-yim’, shows up in Psalm 97, from our kabbalat Shabbat service: yism’chu ee-yim rabim, it reads. ‘Let the many islands be glad,’ for God rules.