How awesome is this place.
This is none other than God’s home and this is Heaven’s gate. (Gen. 28:17)
A while back a bunch of us were trying to formulate what Shomrei meant to us as members and what it could come to mean for others. One person recalled Rabbi Shefa Gold’s beautiful chant setting for this verse and said, “Ha-Maqom – the Place” That’s what Shomrei should be. Further reference to this verse prodded us to come up with three linked terms to describe what Shomrei is and could be:
|Sacred Place – |Home – |Gateway.
Last night I spoke a bit about what makes a place a home. I tried to say that a home cannot only be a place of comfort and security. I argued that these necessary features of a home should form a solid foundation upon which we must build the upper stories of our homes, the stories of our lives, the stories of our striving and reaching beyond ourselves.
And I called Shomrei our home. But, of course, that is a metaphor, a bit of a stretch. While it is true that we do often eat here, I really don’t give enough sermons during the year to afford you the opportunity to sleep here much. Shomrei is our spiritual home. It is where our spirits gain nourishment. But I seriously hope that it is not the place where our spirits go to sleep.
Our synagogue is our home, but it is also different from our home. One basic difference is that, no matter how comfortable we may feel here personally, it is our communal home, not our private home. This can be seen as a limitation – or it can be seen as a benefit. One benefit that I have tried to emphasize more than once is the augmented power we gain as a congregation – enabling us to accomplish so much that would be beyond our strength or, even, our imaginations, as individuals. Our prayer services are an obvious example. So is our involvement in social action projects, such as IHN. This is something we will collectively discuss later today, at 3:15, right before minhah. Everyone is invited.
And at this point I want to give a shout-out to our terrific STOM group – Shomrei Teens of Montclair – which has entered its second year and is going strong. Despite some people’s fears and doubts, and thanks to the courage and commitment of the teens and families who have joined, and to the indefatigable drive of our Director of Congregational Learning, Judy Jaffe, and the special leadership qualities of Talia Yarmush, STOM has proven itself a wonderful home for our teenagers to grow together every week as friends and as Jews. The latest exciting development is a get-together next Saturday night for a meal and havdalah at one family’s home and then a group volunteer project to benefit the Montclair Library. This is such a beautiful, mutual reinforcing of Jewish values with serving the larger community. Yasher Koach, STOM!
A shul has the special ability to expand our lives beyond the horizons of our private homes, sometimes even transforming how we experience our private homes. This special quality is strikingly expressed by one very basic feature of a synagogue, a requirement of Jewish law, that I have not found legislated with regard to a home – Jewish Law mandates that a synagogue must have windows.
Now, one could argue that this is no reflection on what a home is. We are required to have windows in a synagogue because we might think that we can pray to God just as well without windows. But we don’t need a window-law for houses because having windows is something we take for granted in a home.
But is that really the case. The windows of our homes have gradually been replaced by television and computer screens, and I-Pads and the like. The screens look like windows – some programs even call themselves “Windows,” and purport to open the world’s vistas before us. But so often those screens are precisely that – opaque screens, rather than transparent windows. I question how much we actually see through those panes of glass and plastic, how much we actually use them to look outside.
Coming at it from the other side, why do we need windows in a synagogue? Do we really think that our prayers will get stuck in our sanctuary if we don’t let them out through the window? Are windows necessary as a safety precaution because of fire, or in case the service – or the sermon – become insufferable?
A synagogue must have windows because it is the job of a synagogue – as our spiritual and communal home – to help us see beyond ourselves. We do this through prayer. We do this through Torah study. “Great is Torah study, for it leads to actions,” says the tradition. (BTQiddushin 40b) So we also do this through concerted social action. In each example we are prodded and called to see beyond ourselves so that we can see and understand that all that we see is connected to us, matters to us, is part of us. We are truly ourselves only when we are able to see beyond ourselves.
The job of a synagogue is to put windows into the walls we erect around ourselves, to let in the light and to expand the vistas of our vision. And we do this, traditionally, in one additional, crucial way: by orienting the synagogue toward Jerusalem. A synagogue is meant to help us see beyond ourselves, to see all the way to the Land of Israel.
[Ask everyone to turn their seats around to the East – ]
Close your eyes and imagine traversing the hills and dales of New Jersey. We leap across the shore, over the terrifyingly vast liquid, heaving mass of ocean that is the Atlantic. Sometimes we think we can discern land formations to the right or left of us, but our eyes are resolutely focused in front of us, until we see it! The white, sandy coast, the sails and giant ships, the gleaming buildings, past Tel-Aviv, the “White City,” over the red roofs, the fields, the flat plains, gradually rising, becoming more rocky, the vegetation tougher and more sparse. And the people, moving about. They walk and run and bow down. They drive cars and trucks and scooters and donkeys. Some are drawn and bent over, shriveled and wrinkled. Some are dressed in colors and some in deepest black. And some of them are the most gorgeous people you have ever laid eyes on in your life.
Take in the sights and sounds and the smells. We have arrived at Jerusalem of glass and metal and stone, Jerusalem of Gold. Look how things have changed over these 3000 years! There are dank, narrow alleyways and broad super highways. The sleek and silent light rail glides down Jaffa Street.
One on top of the next, we have built story upon story for our home, the home to which we have dreamt of returning. No matter how far away we have wandered from Zion, the orientation of a synagogue returns us there, homeward, every day.
Some of us have chafed at the oppressive presumption of this idea. Isn’t it a necessary part of growing up to leave home behind? To strike out in new directions and build a new home in one’s own good time and place? Robert Frost captured that feeling when he wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” “When you have to go there…” But how much better if you wouldn’t have to look back or return. To return is to regress, to fail, or, as in Frost’s poem, to die.
But if that is what it means to return home, then we have, indeed, turned our homes into our graves.
And we have done the same with our collective home, with Israel. Some of us are staunch supporters and defenders of Israel. Every hypocritical or vicious attack against Israel sets our blood boiling and mobilizes us to action.
Some of us are staunch critics of Israel. Every incident of Israeli arrogance, corruption or injustice sets our blood boiling and mobilizes us to alienation.
But either way – whether we see Israel as victim or as oppressor – we fail to see Israel as home. Each polarizing image of Israel feeds our own sense of self-righteousness. We are not looking through a window; we are preening before a distorted mirror.
What is a home? In the end a home is a house where love dwells. If there is love, then it does not matter how far away home is. We can get there in an instant. The lover in the Song of Songs rhapsodizes:
It is the sound of my beloved coming home,
skipping over the mountains, leaping over the hills …
Here he is, standing behind our wall,
peering through the windows…
(Song of Songs 2:8-9)
If we would lovingly look through the window, this is some of what we could see:
Look, over there! The Fire Department arrives to answer an emergency call this past Rosh Ha- Shanah, at the home of the Israeli Ambassador to Great Britain, previously the Principle Deputy General Counsel at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Daniel Taub. He is home for the holidays. The Fire Department rushes over there because the oven cooking the Yom Tov food has caught on fire. After everything was brought under control, as the firefighters were leaving, the Fire Chief noticed a shofar on the table. He asked Mr. Taub whether he knew how to blow shofar. “Yes, I do,” he says. In fact he blows the shofar on Rosh HaShanah at a local old age home for those who are unable to get to shul. “Why do you ask?” And the commander responded, “We have been on duty at the fire station or out on calls all day and we haven’t heard the shofar. Could you blow shofar for us?”
Or, in a less romantic mode, let’s look through the window, like the Biblical prophet Bil`am. When he surveyed the Israelite encampment, he exclaimed:
How good are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel!
(Num. 24:5)
The tents! So many of us have been paying attention to the Arab Spring with a mixture of fascination, admiration, joy and trepidation. How many of us have been following the awesome phenomenon of the Israeli Summer? On July 14th two demonstrators set up tents on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv to protest the economic hardships and social inequalities of the Israeli system. From 2 tents the demonstrators grew to hundreds and then to thousands. On Saturday night, Sept. 3 over 400,000 Israelis joined together peacefully to call for a renewal of the Israeli Social contract.
To place this in relative terms, it would be the equivalent of almost 20,000,000 Americans all demonstrating across this land at the same time.
Who came together for this purpose? Members of every sector of Israeli society – rich and poor, young and old, secular and religious, Jewish and Arab, Left Wing and Right Wing. There were differences of emphasis among the demonstrators, to be sure. But instead of letting the extremes of each position take over, the groups worked overtime to cooperate and seek common cause. This was done without violence, without police actions, without anyone getting hurt or arrested.
It was the largest gathering to protest for social justice in human history.
What was it about? Etgar Keret, the popular and edgy Israeli writer, spoke with one young demonstrator, named Alon, who was there with his wife and young baby:
As Alon said right before he disappeared into the throng of demonstrators, “The poor fight for food. I may have food but I am hungry.”
“What are you hungry for?” I asked.
“For a country that is a little less heartless,” he said, and gave the baby, who had just woken up, a bottle. “One that doesn’t try to push only a culture of power and force, but also a culture that values compassion. Being a Jew isn’t just being a settler, you know; being a Jew also means having compassion. I swear. You don’t believe me? Go home and Google it.”
(Tablet – Aug. 2, 2011 – http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/73800/in-the-middle)
For 2 months Israelis left their homes and pitched tents –
How good your tents became, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel!
(Num. 24:5)
They did this for the sake of their homes. To create a home that looks out of its windows and sees beyond the private interests of any one person or group.
I have been watching from my window as these exhilarating developments have unfolded. I am so grateful to call such a place my home. Our home.
A synagogue must have windows if it is to serve as a real Home for God and for us. Jacob had his vison of the awesome place, the Home of God, in a dream. The word for dream is halom; the word for
window is halon. May our halonot become halomot; may our halomot become halonot. May the windows of our homes become portals for our dreams. May our dreams become windows that help us see beyond ourselves. May this home that is Shomrei Emunah be a house of windows and dreams, reminding us that our home reaches beyond ourselves, all the way to Zion.
I was so happy when they said to me – Let’s go to God’s home.
Our feet stood at your gates, O Jerusalem.
May there be Peace in all around you, tranquility within you.
For the sake of my brothers and friends,
For the sake of my sisters and friends –
let me, please, speak of peace for you.
For the sake of the home of God Almighty
I seek only good for you.
(Ps. 122:1-2, 7-9)
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