Are you friend or foe? Or, in current terms – are you friend or un-friend? These are days of fear and suspicion, contempt for the other and what seems like a complete breakdown in our hope to have conversations with anyone who is not our friend. “Feeling safe” is a primary concern and that concern has spread way beyond those individuals who have very real reason to feel vulnerable – those who are threatened by hateful bias, cruel and thoughtless social policies, and violence, pure and simple. The feeling of vulnerability has spread to all of us, including we who are privileged to live lives of relative comfort.
It is uncomfortable, if not downright painful, to feel exposed and vulnerable, unsteady on one’s feet, unsure of acceptance or even respect from others. So we seek consolation for this malaise by closing our circles as much as we can. No one wants to be assaulted verbally, let alone physically. So we seek out friends and avoid the risks that come with leaving our safe spaces. We stick with the known and avoid or fear the unknown.
What role does a synagogue play in such a time? Some call for making our shuls into safe spaces by avoiding discussions or actions that bring us into the partisan political atmosphere engulfing our country. “Let’s leave politics at the door,” they say. “Let’s concentrate on what unites us – our religious traditions and our Jewish identity.” But others counter that if we, who are relatively fortunate, can experience how miserable it is to feel vulnerable, then how can we ignore those people and groups who actually are extremely vulnerable? Doesn’t our Jewish tradition, that is supposed to unite us, teach us that we must unite to reach out a helping hand to others?
And the argument proceeds to spiral. Shall the synagogue become a place, in the name of safety and consensus, where no challenges are confronted? But what shall we do with the inherent potential, the augmented power, that inheres in community? How should it be exercised? Toward what ends? So some then argue that the focus should be on internal strengthening. And others argue that we must also look outward and not only inward. But the disagreements persist and they are, well, disagreeable. So, even within a congregation we find a drifting into friendship groups, circles of engagement in which we can feel safe and accepted, where we can be with friends.
But a synagogue community is not about being with friends. Friendship is, indeed, a precious gift; it is about being connected with friends. Community is also a precious gift; it is not about being connected with friends. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner once explained it this way:
“Home is where they have to let you in simply because you’re you. And family are the people who live there. They are the ones whom you get whether you like them or not…
The power of congregational life comes precisely from this involuntariness of association. We look about the room and realize these people are not friends or even acquaintances; we do not agree with them about much; these are simply people we are stuck with…
These members of our community, just like members in our family, literally make us who we are.”
(Lawrence Kushner, The Book of Words, pp. 43 – 44)
Rabbi Kushner speaks of the “involuntary association” that characterizes family and also congregations. Yet, we associate congregations with voluntary association – we choose to join a congregation, right? Well, we also have moments when we choose to join or create families – as we do when we marry and thereby enlarge our family by connecting to another one. There is an initial act of choice, but the full measure of the results is not up to our choosing. When we join another family we understand this to some degree.
But we need to understand that this dynamic of a voluntary choice that leads to involuntary association is essential to our decision to join a congregation. It is actually much more radically essential with regard to synagogue affiliation, because, no matter how much we may be smitten by a particular congregation, choosing to join that community is not tied to an immediate romantic choice that can often override all other considerations.
To choose to be part of a synagogue community is to choose to join a community of un-friends! It is a choice to be connected to people who we would not necessarily choose to be our friends and who may never become our friends. We join a community because we wish to enter a social group that lives in another dimension, the dimension of inter-generational ties. These intergenerational ties are ties between people who are of different ages in the present moment. But the intergenerational family also consists of generations who have come before us and who will succeed us after we are gone.
To join a shul is to choose to join an intergenerational family branch of an even larger family, the family of Israel, the Jewish people. It is a family with a sense of destiny and a sense of values. It is a family that constantly argues about those senses. And it is a family that, since it is ever dependent on people making a choice, creates moments of reaffirmation of itself, of reinforcement of its sense of congregation. The strength and health of any such community will ride on the choice of its members to participate in those moments of reinforcement.
Why would anyone choose to join such a group and relinquish one’s own freedom for the sake of an involuntary and demanding set of associations? Each person may have their own reason for making the choice. But one reason is that feeling that one is part of a big family can offer a sense of comfort. And it is in this realm, as in others, that our tradition creates various ways for community to become a vehicle for comfort and consolation.
This is particularly true in times of personal and familial loss and mourning. Judaism stresses that, whatever may be one’s personal and completely private emotions regarding one’s loss, the loss triggers an inherent dimension of community connection that is to be expressed and renewed. This means, for instance, that one is obliged to pay a condolence call –a “shivah visit” to someone in the community who is in mourning. And, because community has nothing to do with friendship, the obligation does not have anything to do with whether the mourner is a friend or not, or even someone one knows. If the mourner is part of the community, then everyone is connected to that mourner. Everyone is called upon to offer support.
The wisdom of this approach has been proven time and again. Innumerable mourners have expressed their great sense of comfort and consolation from visits by people who were completely unknown to them. Because a congregation is a community of un-friends, it shows us that the unknown does not have to be a source of fear. The community connection makes it possible for the unknown to be a source of comfort. The outpouring of care and support from such a community elicits feelings of gratitude and awe.
How fortunate are all of us who have chosen to join and participate in a community of un-friends!
Image: “The group” by Greg Lobinski is licensed under CC BY 2.0
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