Dear Friends,

Tonight’s 6:30pm Shabbat service, as always, is our monthly family service.  Congregants and friends with young children are especially encouraged to attend, and B’nai Tikvah being the kind of synagogue it is, the rest of our community is also welcome.

We will also be participating in Solidarity Shabbat, along with our neighboring congregations and too many more to count across the country.  In the wake of last Shabbat morning’s terror attack at Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh, synagogues taking part in Solidarity Shabbat have committed to one or more of the following: inviting friends and members of the interfaith community to be with us, including a sermon/D’var Torah on this tragedy and its aftermath, or simply opening our doors and hearts – affirming that we will not back down to forces of hatred, bigotry or fear.

Because ours is a service geared for younger congregants, please know that references to the attack will be age appropriate and will not go into upsetting detail.  Rather, we will focus on being there for each other and affirming Judaism’s highest values for all of us.

I hope to see you tonight.  May the coming Shabbat indeed be one that will hold some measure of Shalom… of wholeness, and peace.

Rabbi Rebecca Gutterman

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     In 1991, the groundbreaking play “Angels in America” by the phenomenally gifted Tony Kushner premiered at our own Eureka Theater in San Francisco.  Part One, called “Millenium Approaches” opened perhaps ironically and perhaps not, with a funeral.  The grandmother of one of the main characters was eulogized as one among many who risked everything in order to make that perilous crossing to these shores, leaving behind the only homes in Europe they had ever known.  They hoped to escape conditions that had become barely survivable for Jews in the hopes of building better ones here.  And so she did.  And so her entire generation of immigrants did.  And we know now what they only learned later, or perhaps never had the chance to find out: that these waves of immigrants were the lucky ones.

Speaking in her memory, the fictitious and elderly rabbi (in other words, a rabbi nothing like yours!) said that while he did not know her, he knew her.  “She was not a person but a whole kind of person,” he said.  “She carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home.  You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist.  But every day of your lives the miles of that voyage between that place and this one you cross.  Every day.  You understand me?  In you that journey is.”¹

II

     We know her too.  No matter who we are, no matter what each of us is thinking, hoping, praying for, celebrating this Rosh Hashanah morning, we have all come here from somewhere else.

From southern deserts?  Or eastern shores, which as Jeremy pointed out so aptly, have their own way of feeling foreign at times!  Think further back to other voyages, crossings, stories.  Black and white photographs in silver frames of bubbes and zaydes and their bubbes and zaydes who risked everything.  Many left behind gravesites and relatives they would never see again.  Who were they?  What were their names?  Some we may never know.  Some were welcomed here.  Some were taunted.  Some worked hard and some languished, never quite feeling at home again.  Some fought for everything they had so that their children might not have to.  Some never quite figured out how not to fight when they didn’t have to.  Some threw themselves into the labor movement and resettlement of other refugees, understanding how hard it is to become one.  Others couldn’t bear to remember, and others couldn’t forget fast enough.

What they all have in common is that they were border crossers.  And the commonality they bequeathed to us – stubbornly, determinedly, mythically — is their journey.  Every day.  In us, that journey is.

III

     It’s a story that begins even further back, at the very beginning.  The settled quality life might have had in the Garden of Eden flipped into expulsion and wandering almost in the next breath.  The narrative theology of Torah has always concerned wanderers — journeymen and women who by choice or circumstance were on their way to somewhere else as a rule, not an exception.  Torah moves!  In their places of origin, on their journeys and upon reaching their hoped for new destinations, our forebears discovered nearly boundless resilience.  There was conflict, there were wars, tragedies; dreams unfulfilled, ordinary sadness. There were also moments of great spiritual epiphany, of individual blossoming and communal growth.  All because in crossing a border – any border – slavery to freedom to wilderness, Jerusalem to Babylonia and back, land to sea to land again, we become something other than who we might have been.  We carry the poetry of borders with us in the Psalmist’s lament: “How can we sing God’s song in a foreign land?”² The answer came slowly, haltingly, but it came.  We sang.  Still we sang.

Borders are complicated, to be sure.  Look at Abraham, such a consummate journeyer that the term is etched into his very name, as in Lech L’cha the Torah calls him “Avraham haIvri.” Abraham the Hebrew, and quite literally according to the root of the word Ivri, “the one who crosses over.”  It’s not difficult to be inspired by his late in life willingness to leave the familiar behind and make a passage to the great unknown.  But this morning, in the Torah verses we just heard, he crosses a very different border.  Emboldened or perhaps blinded by faith, he took his treasured son up that mountain determined to heed God’s word once more, but this time to sacrifice the boy.  In his mind, each step forward may have been bringing him closer to the Divine, while in reality each took him further and further away from his better self.  True, Isaac was saved at the eleventh hour by the voice of an angel calling out, “Don’t lay a hand on that child; don’t put even one little mark on him!”  Isaac was unbound.  And together they walked back down the mountain.

Can you imagine?!  Could Abraham ever have been the same?  Could Isaac, on the other side of a border no child should know?!  The Torah never tells us, but the stories of Isaac’s future as a husband and father suggest that the echoes, the trauma of this particular crossing never really left him.  And Sarah?  A midrash suggests that upon seeing her husband and son making their way back to her, she was so overcome she died on the spot!  Some borders are almost too dark to bear.

What of another triangle, this one described in our Haftarah reading?  Hannah, wife of Elkanan, so desperate for a child that her fervent prayer in the Temple was at first thought to be a drunken rant by Eli the Kohen.  How her honesty floored him, and brought his compassion to life.  That was a border crossing too, for both of them.  And when Hannah became a mother at last, when her son Samuel was old enough, she brought him to Eli’s service for the rest of his days, eventually paving the way for him to become the leader and teacher of his people during the age of the Prophets.  Some borders hold light, and hope.

IV

     We are heir to a heritage of borderlands and possibilities, of dreams made manifest and creativity born of questioning and restlessness.  Yet some of the most significant border crossings we know are also the least visible.  Those are the ones that happen inside of us when we face seemingly ordinary passages.  To become a parent, or to lose one, or to lose the remaining one is to cross a border.  To drive away from the family home for the last time because it’s been sold to another family with little ones of their own, and downsizing is the best choice anyway, and how long were we going to keep storing multiple sets of holiday dishes that the grown kids didn’t want?  Look around for a moment.  Empty nesters, nestlings starting kindergarten (or college!) recent B’nai Mitzvah, transplants to California, Jews by choice, non-Jews raising Jewish children.  Those who are transgender.  Those facing infertility much like our Haftarah’s Hannah, with no clear picture of what might be, only the pain of feeling it was never supposed to be like this.  Hearts sore from divorce or separation or loss of work… to live and breathe in this world is to cross borders.  Every day.  In her book Truth and Beauty, writer Author Ann Patchett evokes this truth beautifully, as she reflects on the night she learned her best friend and fellow writer, Lucy Grealy, had died of an apparent overdose.  “At three o’clock in the morning, I drove to (my boyfriend) Karl’s house and when I woke him up and told him what I knew I started to cry, because I had just begun the second half of my life, the half that would be lived without Lucy.”³ Sooner or later we all cross a border like this one.  Whether through joyous or painful life cycle events, or experiences and transitions we never saw coming, whether we chose a particular border or had it thrust upon us without warning… we cross.  And we come out different on the other side.  Everything is suddenly demarcated into a before and an after; We wonder if we, or if life will ever feel the same.  Hint: no.  Never quite exactly.

V

     On this ground, a new year begins.  Rosh Hashanah is everything we say it is: the birthday of the world, a fresh beginning, a time to deeply consider and reconsider our lives, our actions, our choices.  And it is one thing more.  Rosh Hashanah is the act of making borders permeable.  When we risk a new possibility even if it flies in the face of all the voices that would tell us we’re too old, it’s too late, this friendship is done with, that next step just disappeared… and instead we remember that we are children of Abraham the Ivri, and that means we too are intrepid ones, ones who cross over.  So we take the first step on a trail not yet blazed.  We extend a hand across the breach of silence and misunderstanding and offer humility, and our willingness to participate in teshuvah instead.  And sometimes we acknowledge that there are acts or people we have tried to forgive, but we just can’t.  And we need to stop trying.  Letting go is crossing a border too.

On Rosh Hashanah our borders shift and our hearts are made larger, opening to more compassion than we might have thought possible.  Maybe that’s why through all our wanderings, all our journeys and our crossings, there is one border we are admonished not to violate.  That’s the one whose other side has no memory.  The one that would beckon us into a false sense of security, as if to say “this way lies sameness and comfort and no obligation to the vulnerable around you.  You’re not like them!  That was such a long time ago, after all.”  Not for us, that border.  “Remember the stranger,” we are reminded instead.  Again, and again … and again.  The Torah does not tell us to remember the stranger regardless of ethnicity or religion or customs or educational background or language, because it doesn’t have to.  We are asked to do but one thing: to understand that the struggles so many face now are the struggles we faced then.  And when cries of pain and vulnerability from the borderlands – any borderlands – reach our ears in settled places – any settled places – we remember.  In us that journey is… still.  We empathize.  And we the Ivrim, the ones who cross over work for the day that our borders here (gesture in) and there (gesture out) may ever be ones of safety and sanctity… and never ones of cruelty and injustice.

When I was about four, I attended our local JCC Nursery School with a young Asian American boy named Vincent Ho.  Along with finger-painting and how to make buttermilk, we learned the rituals around the cycle of Jewish Holidays, starting right about now.  Vincent went home excitedly, as we all did, impatient to tell his mom all about how Rosh Hashanah was coming and soon they would eat apples and honey for a sweet year.  His mother was faced with the task of having to utter a sentence she probably never saw coming.  “Oh, that’s lovely but the thing is, Vincent… honey, we’re not Jewish.”  Without missing a beat, my friend countered, “How do you know?”

Where Vincent Ho is today I’m not sure, but I like to imagine that this story is remembered as affectionately in his family as it is in mine.  And that somewhere, somehow, it planted a seed of understanding that in questioning who we are, discovering what we are not, and questioning that too, we all have the potential to create something vital and interesting and new.

As this parent told her son he wasn’t Jewish, all these years later, her response begets another question.  How will we show our children that we are?

By pursuing justice.

By telling and retelling old stories.

By creating new ones.

By demonstrating that as long as we’re breathing it is not too late for honest teshuvah… for another start.

By helping others whose feet stumble at the border.

By being compassionate with ourselves compassion when we cross, and it is painful… and we need help.

Blessed are You, Eternal One our God, Ruler of time and space, the Transforming One to those who cross over.

As we walk forward in the footsteps of our ancestors, Ivri’im and Ivri’ot, dynamic border crossers, all – bless us with courage in this new year – to embrace new paths, to be loving guides to our fellow travelers, and to lift up this beautiful, difficult, wondrous world, hold it close and make it better.

In us may this journey be.

L’Shana Tovah.

     Ken Y’hi Ratzon – let it be God’s will.

¹ “Angels in America,” pp. 10-11.

² Ps. 137:4.

³ Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty, p. 252.

The post Rabbi’s Rosh Hashanah Morning Sermon – 5779 appeared first on Congregation B'nai Tikvah.

     There is a story told long ago of a bird — the most beautiful bird in the world — which flew into a kingdom. The king immediately took notice of the bird, for its feathers were radiant and it flew swiftly and with great majesty.  The king realized that although he owned many riches and could travel to nearly any place in the world, he did not have a beautiful bird such as this one.

He saw that the bird had perched itself carefully atop a very high tree, and hoped that if he could somehow capture this bird, then he would be part of the most beautiful thing in the world. He stood atop his royal ladder and reached but couldn’t quite get to the bird. So he ordered the people of his kingdom to capture the bird for him.

First, the kingdom’s finest scientists came together and they created a device that would imitate the sounds of fellow birds encouraging the beautiful bird to come down from the tree. They tried, but it did not work and they had to return home.

Then the king’s magicians created a spell to make the bird come down into the king’s cage so he could have the bird as his own. They tried and tried. But their spell did not work either. The bird stayed perched atop the highest tree in the kingdom.

So the king approached all of his people and challenged them. He told them to join together and reach, forming a human ladder with the strongest of the people on the bottom, the next group on their backs and shoulders, then another level of people and so on, until they could reach the top of the tree to capture that bird.

So that’s what they did, every single person in the kingdom. Finally the youngest, smallest child of all climbed on. She climbed shoulder after shoulder upon the members of her community and finally got up to the top of the human ladder.  Held up by the strength of her people, she went to reach for the bird and…she reached and she reached and …

II

     She reaches still.  Tonight she is all of us, stretching – beckoning – towards another New Year.   Some years that stretch is invigorating; other years it is decidedly painful.  Some of us are looking back fondly on a year that held a special simcha or two, an important milestone, a grand achievement.  Others are reeling from a year that took more than it gave.  Still, we do what we have always done: we hold it all.  We reach for each other, hoping to bring some sweetness to those who are stung… and just maybe a bit of a sting to those whose cups are overflowing.  Because life changes on a dime; we know it well.  “Cambia, toda cambia,” goes the chorus of a song by the late Argentinian singer Mercedes Sosa.  “Change.  Everything changes.”  Is it any wonder that a variation of the word Shana is “l’hishtanot…” to change?  May it be so for us all – a good turning.  A good change.

In his book The Power of Hope, Rabbi Maurice Lamm points out that “hope injects tension into our beings.  The tension of the bow that stretches to propel the arrow.  But the tenser the string,” Rabbi Lamm adds, “the more powerful the arrow in flight.  And you don’t always have to go it alone.  One of the things that gives us hope is community, after all.”¹

With the awareness that this will be the first New Year that you and I start in the same place and will complete in different ones, I have so many hopes for you.  My heart is also filled with all I have seen in you, and learned with you in the past four years.  I give you these recollections and these hopes tonight.

III

     It’s not unlike turning a kaleidoscope, this prospect of looking at ourselves from the outside in and asking, who have we become together?  I have seen you come to take yourselves more seriously without losing any of the lightness and joy that are hallmarks of B’nai Tikvah.  You know it for sure now: that being part of a community… part of a holy venture… is not just about coming together to pray.  It’s also about helping each other to be better.  It’s about listening to our highest selves; the ones we mean always to be!  And it’s about seeing those heights, those aspirations in each other.  Sometimes it’s easier to draw that best out of someone who isn’t, well… us.  This is sacred work; never doubt it.  There is a Talmudic saying which teaches that “every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, Grow!  Grow!”  You have been each other’s blades of grass, and you have been each other’s angels.  I have seen it.

I have also seen you grow from your grief.  For some of you, new family ties and configurations have risen from the ashes of the old.  For others, the loss of a spouse, a sibling or a dear friend still has a surreal quality that leaves you reeling.  As our congregation ages – just a little – I have witnessed many of you navigate the new ground of a life without parents; what the poet Linda Pastan calls “the place in books where part one ends, and part two begins, and there is no part three.”  Mourning and absence are not questions to be answered, but valleys to walk through as the Psalmist so wisely taught.  I have seen you comfort each other, and I have seen you receive comfort from each other.  You have given life to the teaching in our prayer book which holds that “in truth grief can be a great teacher when it sends us back to serve and bless the living.”  For those of you who are walking through that valley still, on this night, I believe that you too will know some measure of healing in time.  Know that I hold that faith for you on any day that you cannot, whatever separate paths we travel.

I have seen you grow stronger in your collective belief that you are a force for good, understanding and blessing in our wider community and world.  Whether through the hands-on acts of lovingkindness B’nai Tikvah has always done, new forms of social justice work on the front lines, or simply making our synagogue greener, I have seen you become more than you have been.

I’ve learned from you too.  I’ve learned that coming to a new place in the spirit of curiosity and commitment is never wasted.  And that the venture that follows is fruitful indeed.  Thanks in particular to the characteristically understated and always magnificent guidance and capacity for listening of our Rabbi Emeritus, Raphael Asher, I learned that I could step into your story.  I learned that I could try new things that would soon come to be regarded as traditions.  And I learned that I could make mistakes and be given the space to try again differently.  I learned that in time… only in time… we would knit ourselves together, and write the next chapter of our story.  I learned that whatever happened, we would remain part of each other.  And so we have… and so we will

I learned what true generosity looks like from you when Jonah came into our lives.  It wasn’t just the blankets or the books or the outfits, though I will say thanks to you, he has been cozy, well read and an exceedingly sharp dresser since the day we brought him home!  It was the cards and letters telling us that you adopted your children too.  Or that you yourselves are adopted.  That the three of us would never be alone in navigating this uniquely miraculous, joyful and challenging journey into family life.  What’s more, you surrounded Jonah with the kind of love Michael and I had only dreamed of.  To watch him tear around after many of your children while they laugh together now is to watch someone feel in his bones that Temple is his home.  And that’s the wish I have for all of us.  No congregation could have been more understanding or expansive than this one in modeling not only what a Jewish community is, but also what one does.

So returning to the words of Rabbi Lamm, and the tension and excitement of hope that he muses on, what are my hopes for you in this New Year, and in the new years to come?

Because make no mistake: the challenges ahead are formidable.  “Ein kemach, ein Torah,”² our rabbis taught.  Without bread, there is no Torah.  Without enough material sustenance, there is no learning, no prayer, no communal good to stay committed to.  We do always seem to have about half as much money as we need… half as many volunteers and staff as we wish for.  The inventiveness and individual ingenuity that animates the Bay Area too often dominates to the understanding, taken for granted in generations past, that synagogue affiliation is good for the soul – not to mention a gift for the generations to come.  In short, it is all too easy to feel that we are straining under the weight of that human ladder, reaching for a singularly beautiful bird, but too insubstantial to bear the weight of those limbs above us!  As the New Year comes into focus, what we see together, what we learn together and what we hope – together – is that we are now and always in it together.

I hope you will keep reaching.  Like that unnamed girl balancing precariously, yet held steady by the foundation of her people, I hope that you continue aspiring to joy, understanding, and menschlichkeit. I hope you will continue to have conversations that matter, even when they are hard.  I thank you – how I thank you – for giving me a place, a voice, a chapter in the story.

In the chapters to come, you will find more stories, more voices, more wings waiting to take flight.³  You will find the ending you need most.  You will find the beginning too.

L’Shana Tovah.

¹ “Sound and Spirit: Borderlands.”

² Avot 3:21.

³ “Little Women,” adapted by Heidi Thomas.  Masterpiece Theater production, 2017.

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The following message is comprised of reflections on our High Holiday services over the past two years. Guess what? With all that has changed and will change in our community, they still hold true. I hope reading them again sets the stage for a Shana Tovah for all of you.

It is told of Rabbi Israel Salanter that late one night, he was passing through a main street where a cobbler of his acquaintance lived. He noticed through the window that the candle that gave the shoemaker light was flickering and would soon go out. Rabbi Israel entered the cobbler’s hut and said to him, “My friend, why do you sit up so late? You worked all day long; the candle’s light is almost out; it is in its last flickering. Isn’t it better for you to go to bed and rest?” “Well rabbi,” responded the shoemaker, “as long as there is light in this candle, I can still do some mending.” Rabbi Israel then, so the story goes, kept on repeating: “As long as the light of life is burning, one still has time to mend one’s ways.”

This is one of the readings that we share at our Selichot service, which takes place every year on the Saturday evening before Rosh Hashanah. Selichot is comprised of traditional penitential prayers, and our particular service brings in poetry and contemporary reflections as well. The lights in the Sanctuary are dimmed, the atmosphere is reverent and the music is spectacular. It’s the perfect way to orient our inner compass towards Rosh Hashanah, and the continued introspection and renewal the High Holidays usher in.

On Saturday September first, as part of Selichot, we will be holding a dedication to our beautiful new Sanctuary, fresh from the summer’s renovations. Join us at 7:00pm for informal study and discussion, then at 8:00pm for dessert, Havdallah, dedication and service.

As a famous proverb is fond of reminding us, it’s never too late. It’s never too late to change, to start something new, to do good in the world, or in the words of George Elliot: “to become what we might have been.” By the same token, it’s never too early either. One of our favorite High Holiday pastimes is to comment, assess, or some years lament the “early” or “late” placement of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur on the secular calendar. The irony of course, is that the Hebrew date is the same each year: the first day of the new month of Tishrei. In the best sense, no matter when these days find us, they are right on time.

As we prepare, here are a few ways to bring focus to these final days of Elul:

– When you enter the sanctuary on Rosh Hashanah, bring your receptivity to change along with your attachment to tradition. Cantor Chabon and I understand the importance of both, and are grateful every day for this congregation’s enthusiasm when it comes to stretching our spirits and trying different things. At the same time, we understand that no time of year calls us into our relationship with sensory and liturgical memories of the past quite like this time does. As always, it will be our mission to honor the sacred blend of what has been and what is yet to be.

– Give some thought to your High Holiday contribution before Yom Kippur. At our Yom Kippur morning service, Congregation B’nai Tikvah’s president Dan Lapporte will speak to us about the highlights of the past year, and all we have to be proud of. As we well know, our ongoing work is strengthened by the incredible dedication of our lay leadership and the support of our congregants. I ask you to consider your Yom Kippur gift before arriving at services. Each contribution will ensure that our synagogue continues to nurture us and the generations that follow us. That’s why each one is so meaningful.

– Remember when you were a brand new congregant. One of the sections of the Shofar Service on Rosh Hashanah is called Zichronot, or remembrances. For some, that first High Holiday season at B’nai Tikvah is a distant memory. Others may be joining us for the first time this year. Be ready with a “Shana Tovah” and a welcoming smile when you see faces in the congregation you don’t recognize. You can’t imagine how significant such a seemingly small gesture is to the person who receives it. Or how it will be remembered for years to come.

For all of us – may 5779 be a year of sweetness, of good health, of dreams realized, and of peace.

L’Shana Tovah,

Rabbi Gutterman

The post Setting the Stage for High Holidays appeared first on Congregation B'nai Tikvah.

In Pirkei Avot, a section of the Mishnah which contains various Rabbinic sayings and teachings, one of them reads as follows: “”I have learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues, and the most from my students.” This wisdom is truly being put into practice at B’nai Tikvah this month.

On Friday night July 13, Louis Polcin, one of our returning college students who you may know from our High Holiday choir and from his participation in Tikvah Tones gave a D’var Torah that was heartfelt, articulate, and wise beyond his years. He is an exemplary community member in whom we can all take pride. Everyone in attendance, including your rabbi, learned something from him about the multi-faceted dynamics of being Jewish on campus in 2018… including the fact there are blessings along with the struggles. I’ve taken the liberty of excerpting some of what he shared at the end of this email.

This coming Shabbat will be our third annual congregant-led summer service at 7:30pm, with Donna and Barry Brian. Please come and share the joy and much needed peace of Shabbat together while supporting your fellow CBT members at the same time. What could be a more winning combination?!

And finally, on Saturday July 22 from 7:00-8:30pm, my colleague Rabbi Jay LeVine and I will be leading a new program called “Beyond Brokenness: An Exploration of Tisha B’Av Through Poetry, Song and the Practice of Justice.” Our observance of this traditional day of commemorating the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple will reach back into our history and forward to touch on the ways in which personal and communal brokenness impact us today. It will be a memorable and meaningful evening. We’ll be meeting at Temple Isaiah (specifics) and I very much hope to see you there

With best wishes for continued rest and rejuvenation this summer…

Rabbi Gutterman

And now, as promised, a few words from Louis!

Last May, I got back from my first year of college at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. I vividly remember waiting to board my plane to Portland in August. I had no external guidance of the future; I was walking into something completely unknown. I had no idea what to expect, or how I would fare with the solemn task of re-creating my life in a place I had never been before. Everything from my friendships to my networks of support to my Jewish identity itself would have to be reconstructed.

As daunting as this journey may seem, it is possible. This year has been one of the happiest and most fulfilling years of my life.

There are lots of horror stories about what happens to Jews on college campuses, which usually point to Christian fundamentalism, BDS and anti-Zionist movements, and flagrant anti-Semitism. I am not here to deny these challenges; they are real. But what I can also say is that there is another side to Jewish college campus life that unfortunately is much less seen; one of acceptance and tolerance by non-Jews, support from the Jewish community, and even great spiritual growth. If we can look just a little bit further than the Israelites did in this week’s Torah portion, we will notice that after a period of difficulty comes a period of great growth and happiness, and I know that, as much as it may seem impossible, we can get there.

The post Learning from Each Other This Summer appeared first on Congregation B'nai Tikvah.

This coming Shabbat morning, we will have the honor of hearing the weekly Haftarah portion chanted by a young woman becoming Bat Mitzvah. Thankfully, this is not a rare occasion in the life of our synagogue. However, the contrast between the words she will chant and the conditions of the world in which she will chant them is rare.

The words are from the prophet Micah: “God has told you what is good and what is required of you/ To do justice/ To love mercy/ And to walk humbly with your God.”[1]

The calamity unfolding at our southern border flies blatantly and violently in the face of Micah’s verses. Congregation B’nai Tikvah joins with synagogues across the country, with our Contra Costa interfaith community and with the leadership of the Reform movement in soundly condemning separation of children from their parents crossing into our country to seek asylum from life threatening conditions in their own.

Rabbi David Stern, president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, writes with his typical eloquence:

“… If witnessing (this) has been traumatic, we can only begin to imagine the pain of those who suffered it directly: the parents and children whose wails tear at our hearts. The name of this policy, “Zero Tolerance,” is Orwellian at best. The practice of ripping children from their parents at the border is not Zero Tolerance. It is Zero Compassion. It is Zero Wisdom… It is Zero Coherence because it expends security resources indiscriminately, instead of focusing them on the populations who might put us at risk. It has been a violation of core Jewish values, and an affront to the American values of which Dreamers dream.”

Our congregation is one that is already driven by Judaism’s conscience and moral anchors. We do not lack for members who are energetic and eager to help. Different modes of engaging abound to fit the many needs (see the end of this message) engendered by this crisis: legal aid, gathering and sending practical supplies to Texas, calling our elected officials, and rallying in every sense of the word. Our hearts are broken, but our hands will be compassionate, and our voices will be heard. As descendants of immigrants ourselves, as part of a people who were nearly annihilated and do not forget, the time is now to walk in the footsteps of our prophets like Micah, to recognize a common humanity in the face of the other, and to counter cruelty with love and hope.

Rabbi Rebecca Gutterman
Cantor Jennie Chabon
Dan Lapporte, President of CBT
Alison Negrin and David Ratner, Co-chairs of CBT’s Social Action Committee

The following is an edited list of ways we can take action from our Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center. For further actions and updates, or to sign up for anything below, please visit https://rac.org/blog/2018/06/19/eight-ways-take-jewish-action-around-family-separation.

1. Provide tangible support to detainees and separated families by gathering and sending care packages to the border. See below for needed items (new or gently used only, please). Send care packages to: Michael Blum Social Action Chair, Temple Emanuel, 4300 Chai Street (North C Street) McAllen, Texas 78504.
   • Deodorant for men and women
   • Women’s underwear in sizes 5-6
   • Women’s bras and sports bras in 32-36
   • Maternity pants
   • Women’s pants in sizes 7 and below
   • Women’s tops in small sizes
   • Children’s shoes in all sizes, particularly athletic shoes
   • Toiletries (must be new)
   • Pedialyte

   You can bring anything from this list to CBT, where we’ll have a box outside of the office for you to leave it until Tuesday July 3. On Friday July 6 at 3:00pm, join us in the Social Hall where we will package up items and deliver them to the Post Office together. We’ll then meet back at Civic Park at 5:45pm to celebrate Shabbat together.

2. In California join our allies at Faith in Action (PICO California) for a weekend of faithful action at the border in San Diego to protest the immoral and inhumane policies that have caused family separation.
3. Send a letter demanding that President Trump, Secretary of Homeland Security Nielsen, and Attorney General Sessions end family separation now. Tell them the Reform Jewish community rejects this inhumane policy.
4. Organize or join a rally outside your local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.
5. Register for the North American Immigrant Justice Campaign’s Deportation Defense Training on July 10, 2018.

[1] Micah 6:8.

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In Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book Of Hours, the poet refers to God as “the great homesickness we could never shake off.” There is something effortlessly resonant in that mysterious image for us, given the number of names and ways of referring to God that are part of Jewish tradition. Our God is at once called a still, small voice, an everlasting rock, the One who formed us all, and many other names. Why not the great homesickness as well? Especially during this particular season. Depending on our life stage, one of the primary things summer means to many of us is camp.

Below, I share a piece with you that I’ve written for Camp Newman’s weekly blog. During the last week of June I’ll have the pleasure of spending some time there assisting staff with programming and tefillah. Many area rabbis in California (as well as rabbinic colleagues across the country) set camp time aside during the summer months. For the first time in a number of years, it’s my good fortune to be among them.

On Friday June 29, at the end of that week, in addition to our regular 6:30pm Shabbat service led by Cantor Chabon at Temple, CBT congregants are warmly invited to experience a Shabbat at camp (hint: they are unforgettable!) with Newman at its temporary Vallejo location. Details on timing and other practical matters are forthcoming. I hope you’ll be able to join me to welcome Shabbat and to celebrate the resilience of this camp, its staff and its campers who are making sure that joy and learning flourish following the all-consuming wildfires of last fall.

Providing our children with Jewish camping experiences is one of the ways we take care of them and promote the passing on of our primary values. On the subject of both of these things, there’s not a person I know who isn’t sick at heart at the news coming from our borders. Separating parents from their children is anathema to our most fundamental principles as Jews and members of the human family. Every child deserves to be treated with basic decency, to say nothing of the loving care and creative resources like camp that most parents in our community are blessed with the ability to provide. At the very end of this message, you’ll find an action alert from HIAS, an organization that protected our people when we were immigrants, and now makes sure we remember to do the same.

May our hearts be with all of our children this Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Gutterman

https://campnewman.org/2018/06/15/has-camp-changed/

ACTION ALERT

https://www.hias.org/blog/slideshow-hias-joins-families-belong-together-rallies

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In this week’s Torah portion, Beha’alotecha, the Israelites experience a unique retrospective journey into their past, defined as it was by nostalgia and mythic imagination. Frustrated by their journey through the wilderness that seemed to be leading them nowhere, they fondly remembered the delicious food that used to be theirs for the taking: “the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” (Numbers 11:5). Granted, their idealization of slavery’s culinary delights was fueled by their present uncertainty and fear. But the color, texture and passion conveyed in their words is arresting. It speaks to the ways in which memory gives us roots and animates our sense of home.

So it is all the more distressing when we face destabilizing experiences that cut away at our sense of routine and predictability. Some of them go further than that, taking away pieces of our core identities and replacing them with… well, we don’t know yet! It’s possible that some pieces may not even be replaced at all.

The Israelites felt this all too keenly in their journeying, and we feel it as we walk forward too.

On Sunday June 3, our synagogue will be host to two different programs that speak to dislocating experiences with honesty and hope.

The first is from 3:00-5:00pm. Our Immigrant Accompaniment Team invites you to Sanctuary: An Accompaniment Story to learn about one family’s experience with our immigration system. We and our neighbors from Orinda Community Church have been helping a local family, Leandro and Gaby, and their son Andrew. Come meet them, hear directly from them about their experiences and share a light dinner featuring Gaby’s home cooked tamales. All are welcome. If possible, please RSVP to Michael Fischer at mjf1155@gmail.com.

The second program is a Healing Service led by one of our congregants, Gerri Levitas, from 5:00-5:45pm in the Library. We held the first one at the end of April and it was tremendously moving. This is a service for anyone who is facing illness or emotional difficulties, or who is caring for someone in those circumstances. You will be surrounded by warm and caring people who will understand what you are experiencing.

These two programs are an index of just how many wonderful things are happening at our synagogue. Our hope is that through participating, you will enrich your own Jewish journey and come to feel that CBT gives you even more of a sense of roots and of home.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Gutterman

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I write to you on the day before Erev Shavuot – that’s Shavuot Eve, the beginning of the festival which celebrates the revelation of Torah. We’ve been counting the days until this night – literally – as the days, then weeks of the Omer have passed. Now is our opportunity to reap that harvest, and to recommit to hearing and learning from the words of Torah in our own time.

The coming weekend in our community is filled with ways to celebrate this beautiful and undersung holiday. Before giving you a final reminder of these events, I’d like to share a few of my favorite things about Shavuot:

— It is a holiday of multiple meanings. Originally celebrated as a harvest festival, Shavuot was one of three times during the year that the Israelites would make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem to present an offering of their first fruits. As commanded by Torah, farmers would recite a brief passage we now read in the Haggadah at Passover, linking their current good fortune with God’s redemption from Egypt. Over time, as we moved away from our agrarian roots and the Temple was no longer our anchoring holy site, we have kept the idea of Shavuot as a harvest alive. Today we harvest ever growing relationships with our sacred texts and traditions, and the new growth that consistently brings.

— The Book of Ruth. Traditionally read on Shavuot, it is a gorgeous, lyrical story of one young woman’s choice to cast her lot with the Jewish people. Through her devotion to her mother-in-law Naomi, Ruth’s story teaches us about the transformative power of kindness. It teaches us about how families are born and how they are made. Ruth’s story invites us to reflect on how grief and mourning reshape us, and how decisions we make take us places we may never have expected to go. No wonder the story of Ruth is held especially dear among many Jews by choice; individuals who find that Judaism is their true calling, bringing them home.

— Dairy! Calling all aficionados of blintzes and cheesecake… it’s a tradition to eat dairy on Shavuot as a symbol of the sweetness of Torah. It’s hard to argue with that!

Please join us for Shir Joy tonight at 7:30pm, at which time we will honor our seventh grade class who will be graduating from Religious School on Sunday, thus ending one path of learning and starting another. Tomorrow morning is our library minyan at 10:00am, and on Sunday morning we’ll be going on an early hike (meet at 6:00am at Briones Lafayette Ridge staging area on Pleasant Hill Road across from Acalanes High School). From there we’ll make our way up the mountain, sharing words of Torah at the top. Later that morning at 9:30am, we’re meeting back at CBT for our Day of Learning, followed by a light lunch and cake in the Social Hall at 12:00pm.

After all that, a well-earned nap! Until then though, let us mirror the experience of our ancestors and stay awake – in every sense – for new revelations of Torah and new harvests to come.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Gutterman

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In his book Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us About Building Vibrant Jewish Communities, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer introduces the idea of auditory sacredness. What this can mean, he explains, is that being a part of what is sacred need not always be triggered by grandeur or expertly polished, manicured environments. We can be transported just as powerfully – often even more so – by sound. When our Religious School students belt out Dan Nichols’s song “B’Tzelem Elohim,” when our congregation joins in readings and music both familiar and new, and when the notes of traditional High Holiday melodies coupled with lyrics by Leonard Cohen fill our High Holiday Sanctuary away from home, the thought rises up unbidden: “This is what Judaism sounds like.”

The Torah portion Emor which we read this week opens with a variation of the Hebrew word for sound, or speech. This is a tacit reminder of just how important words are to the roots and evolution of Judaism. Ours is a tradition built on generation after generation of passionate arguments and verbal wrestling. When Jews were barred from certain ways of earning their livelihood, the written word saved us, creating roads to education and better times. To this day, teaching, learning, listening and adding our perspectives to the collective story we share are the common hallmarks of Jewish communities, no matter how different they may be from one and other.

Take one teaching in particular from Emor. The portion reminds us not to insult the deaf, or to put a stumbling block before the blind. The admonition not to insult of speak belittlingly of the deaf is curious. Crass though it may sound, there are commentators who have asked, “does it really make a difference, since such insults would not be heard by the one targeted by one who is deaf?”

Of course it makes a difference, because as our rabbis go on to teach, language that inflicts pain diminishes both the speaker and the one spoken about. When we are the speaker, we are allowing ourselves to sink to a level that is coarse and dismissive, where our fellow human beings and their feelings are indispensable. When we are the one spoken about, the scars often follow us beyond childhood and adolescence, leaving us haunted by memories of being bullied or mocked without the resources to deal with it. Contrary to the old adage, words do hurt.

Words also help. As another wise rabbi remarked, “it takes so little to make another person feel so good.” Words bolster us at times of loss when someone speaks consolingly to us. They lift us up when we find ourselves questioning whether our work or contributions are making any difference, and someone lets us know that indeed they are. And words spoken and sung help all to create the sense of sacredness and community at B’nai Tikvah that we treasure most.

Let words of kindness, sensitivity and inclusivity be the ones that help us to say, always: “This is what Judaism sounds like.”

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Gutterman

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