My Tzaddikim Are Always Building / My Tzaddikim ARE the Building - Kol Nidrei 5780

Rabbi Noa Kushner

1. Tree of Life is Closed

I read about it in the newspaper.

Maybe you knew, it was just the anniversary of the Pittsburgh shooting and so a reporter went to Squirrel Hill, where the anti-semitic violence of last year took place.

He reported that the synagogue, Tree of Life is closed, locked. Only a single caretaker goes in and out these days. A chain link fence blocks the doors.

Jerry Rabinowitz, z”l, The Ba’al tekiah, / the man who blew the shofar,

the wake up call,

is gone, he was killed in the rampage.

Now they have to find someone else to blow shofar.

Never in my life did I think I would be describing this scene in modern America.

But somehow, this past year, against the backdrop of increasing frenetic noise

New versions of good old, classic anti-semitism

Wound their way in, made themselves comfortable

And presented themselves, unashamed, right in the light of day

Or who knows, maybe anti-Semitism was just part of a general revival,

the resurgence of stronger-than-ever, back-with-a-vengeance, intolerance

Either way, when combined with the gun violence epidemic,

We now personally feel the effects of that hate

Slowly encroaching,

Now reaching inside our orbit,

Until what was once unthinkable

A synagogue massacre

Is now somehow not only plausible, but a historical fact.   

And so we describe the reality

but internally, the words seem to make no sense: The tree of life is closed. The Ba’al tekiah, / the man who blew shofar, our wake up call, is silent.

Because he was killed for being a Jew.

2.  Flavors of Nihilism

Sometimes, maybe it is the same for you, I cannot hold pretend to hold even a piece of this world together a second longer  

And this year especially, we might be tempted to just sit here in silence /

To just remain in grief for all we have lost

Why try to say anything in a world that seems broken beyond repair?

Or, maybe we’re tempted to re-engage our Jewish Trauma Button

You know the one,

That little voice that says, “This is just like before the Holocaust,

The world is out to get us, maybe it’s 1942, or maybe this is like the Spanish inquisition, Rome…”

We already have the liturgy that mourns those historic and mythic losses, we already have the text reminding us how our enemies devoured us again and again, we have everything all ready to go

We can just add these new names as if our destruction was, is inevitable, and ongoing

Because, after all, the world has always hated us.

Or, maybe we should just argue about which group hates us more and which hatred is worse, what hatred is surely the most dangerous.

Is it the insidious, maybe-even-un-self-aware,

just-how-I-was-raised,

you-just happen-to-care-about-the-wrong-things-hate,

or the conspiracy theory,

sit-down-because-you’ll-need-a-good-thirty-minutes-to-understand-this

do you have access to my charts hate?

When was it that we started having these conversations about who hates us more all the time?

And Just remind me, why do I have to fight to stop one kind and not worry about the other kind again? Sorry, I got lost in the thread.

Or, maybe we should just forget the whole thing. Literally.

Whether it is about anti-semitism or gun violence or both

Maybe it’s not even a conscious decision

Time passes, we acclimate:

Another shooting, another day. So sad. But I still have to get to work.

Once we were scandalized, but now many of us are worn down, resigned.

If you had told us in the early nineties that

There would be 22 Church related shootings from 1999 to now with a total of 91 congregants dead, 99 if you count the gunmen, I don’t think we could have even generated a coherent response. The shock would have been too much.

And of course that is just the shootings in some holy sanctuaries.

We didn’t talk about any of the other places

See our country is at war with itself, the battlefields now

in what were once considered the safest places 

Hospitals filled with the wounded

Newspapers following the stories of the fallen, the unlikely heros

Except the enemy is, somehow, unthinkably, us

As if we began a war with our very insides but now

no longer notice.

There’s a story about the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism

One day he forgets everything.

“I know nothing anymore. Everything has been taken from me,” he says.[1]

Drained of koach / strength; this too is how we feel, we seem to have forgotten everything we once knew

In the story, the Ba’al Shem begs his student to remember something, anything he once taught

to try and help him recover but

We are feeble, remembering how we used to be takes so much out of us

No one seems to remember anymore anyway

So we pretend it was more or less always like this

And, acclimating, we begin to talk about preparing ourselves for unspeakable things

Scenarios I cannot even bring myself to say out loud

3. Exile

I don’t want to talk about any of this

I am so angry that evil seems to get whatever it wants so easily, without so much as a struggle, without seeming to exert any effort.

I am so angry that the impossible now nests comfortably within the realm of reality

But as angry as I am

Our responses – all the varieties of regression, blame, resignation –

I know these might temporarily help stave off the pain but they won’t really help us grow

You could say, if we keep to our current course, the tree of life will remain under lock and key.

After the the Holocaust

R. Abraham Joshua Heschel

A scholar and activist, someone who lost many members of his family in the Shoah

Sympathized with the widespread heartbreak after the war

But he still taught relentlessly about the danger of skepticism and despondency 

He taught that our alienation from the very possibility of redemption --

our feeling that the world was irretrievably broken –

That this was the most dangerous of all

Because from there, nothing can grow. 

Not only that, Heschel taught that this very common, even unremarkable disposition

(Who really believes in anything anymore?)

This cynicism meant we were not only exiled from our own dreams of justice and righteousness

But God was exiled in equal measure, God was banished

God’s self was not at home in the universe

And the universe itself is not at home.”[2]

4. God goes with us

But there is another related teaching

That when we are deep in exile,

distanced from even the possibility of redemption, the possibility of faith

It is not that God is exiled separately, away from us, but instead, God goes into exile with us.

Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai says: Come and see how beloved the Jewish people are before the holy one. Every place [we] were exiled, the divine presence went with us.

When we were exiled to Egypt, the divine presence went with us…

when we went to Babylonia, the divine presence went with us,

and in the future, we will be redeemed and the divine presence will be redeemed with us.

[Now] Torah doesn’t say …God will bring us back or God will cause us to return, rather, Torah says the Holy One will return – that is, when we come back from exile, God will also return, with us, from exile.”[3] 

So when we dare to end our unexamined dependency on cynicism, skepticism

When we dare to return from exile and admit that our longing for righteousness is deep, severe

Even if this brings us anguish

God returns with us

In fact, this is the only way for God to return.

And for the universe to be at home once again

5. Are you hiding?

When we first started The Kitchen

The number one question people asked was

Whether or not we were going to have a building.

At the time, I thought, and I said publically, “The fact that this is the first question, this is bad for the Jews”

They are not asking about our prayer or our relationship to Israel or Torah, if we have a position on any number of issues?

Why does everyone act as if we’re a real estate company?”

But after this year, I now understand the question differently

(and no, this is not a build up to a capital campaign, I thought we knew each other)

Now, after Tree of Life, I understand the question differently

Maybe after tragedy all questions are understood differently

I think when they asked about a building they were trying to gage the seriousness of our intent

They wanted to hear if we are willing to commit and to express ourselves in ways that could be easily seen, identified, and yes, marked.

They wanted to know if we planned visible, demonstrable actions to match our lofty language and aspirations.

They didn’t say it in so many words, but they wanted to know if we were “out.” If we were for real, serious.

6. Come Closer

I wonder

Is building a building the only way to express seriousness of our intent?

Is building a building the only way to demonstrate our Jewish self-respect to the larger world?

You know, according to Talmud, if you’re a guest, you’re supposed to do whatever your host says, except if your host tells you to leave. If your host tells you to leave, you are not allowed to go. It is the one case where you override the wishes of your host.[4]

This may explain why some of us overstay our welcome at parties.

But in seriousness, the Hasidim taught that the host in this text is none other than God. None other than the universe.

“And, no matter what the world may seem to say to us, “Give up, leave, go away.” we are not allowed to leave.[5] We have to find a way to stay, even to come closer.

What if the choices were not leaving, going into one exile or another 

Or, building another building?

What if there was a third choice? A third way to stay and come closer?

What if we dafka took our shock at the violence, inequality and oppression in our time

And used it to try to find another way to build serious Jewish life?

After all, since we’re shaking our heads every day at the news, holding our hearts

After all, since the impossible has somehow become possible, even expected

Maybe then, our impossible dreams,

our battered, barely there, yet still somehow surviving dreams

of redemption, and of righteousness

Maybe those can somehow become possible again, too.

What if we built our lives around this possibility?

6. Make me a ‘sanctuary’

In Torah, after we have built the ultimate idol

Golden calf

from a mixture of despair, fear, a lack of trust in ourselves and in God

An idol literally made of gold (waaaaaay before Trump tower)

We were ashamed, afraid

Absorbing the shock waves of what it was we had done

And it was right then tradition says that God asks us to build a sanctuary

Why? Because God knows that in order for us to find our way back,

We needed to do something (!)

we needed to build something together that could be a conduit for righteousness

We had to act our way into believing again

But see, God has to convince us, we are so afraid, so ashamed in that moment to return, to come back and try again

So, according to the midrash, God says to us:

“C’mon…How long shall I wander outside homeless?

‘Asu li mikdash’ / ‘Make me a sanctuary’ so I (don’t have to sleep out on the streets).[6]

It’s not that God needs an air b and b.  

God is helping us get back in the game.

And the command is so literal (‘Build me a sanctuary’) it’s understandable that we get confused.

Sure seems like we’re supposed to build a building!

Now, that is one good interpretation! Don’t get me wrong. I have enough enemies. Buildings can be transcendent.

It is just not the only interpretation, it is not the only way.

Another way to read the same midrash, The Kitchen way is:

God is saying,

“…How long shall I wander outside homeless?

‘Asu li mikdash’ / ‘Make me a sanctuary’ so I (don’t have to sleep in the streets).[7]

What if, instead of building a sanctuary, we considered each person who is sleeping on the street right now as one of the faces of God?

No matter how difficult that information might be to assimilate,

No matter how ashamed it might make us feel when we consider the conditions of each and every person

Maybe the Kitchen way to be Jewish and accountable and visible

Is to work against the systemic desecration of human life,

To make sanctuaries for all the faces of God.

Now that is what I call a capital campaign

That is path towards righteousness, pretty direct path, I don’t have to spin it

That is our way of re-claiming our place in the tree of life,

That is worth a generation of energy

That is how I want us to be remembered when we’re gone:   

“They were the ones who built the homes for the many.”

It was a kiddush ha-shem / a sanctification of the Name.

7. Three Directions:

But if we’re going to build our metaphorical sanctuary, we’re going to need three metaphorical things: Windows, Tables, and an Ark.

(1). WINDOWS

We’re not allowed to pray in a room without windows. Because what we’re doing inside and what we’re doing outside needs to be connected.[8]

And if we look out the window, any window

We know that the homeless

What Toni Morrison z”l called, the unhoused –

this population is growing in San Francisco

.

Josh Bamburger, Kitchen-ite and Associate Director of UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative told me that

Up until about five years ago, San Francisco was adding 150 new units a year of permanent supportive housing to keep up with demand,

but in the last five years, there’s been almost no increase.

Add this to the fact that, for almost fifty years, our federal government, unlike governments in Western European countries, has not prioritized social services or provided aid in this arena, and add that to the fact that the recent “improving” economy

has priced out many, many people who could once make a life here –

so that twice as many more people now head to the shelters than even a few years ago

And we’re not even talking about the lack of affordable housing

But I don’t need to tell you any of this

You see the people, they are amongst us, in every neighborhood

You see the tent cities blooming,

the sleeping bags in the doorways,

the make shift tarps over wheelchairs,

the strained looks on the faces of God,

the requests for help

I know you see them when you go out, and tonight I want you to also see it, to feel it from right here. 

Many of you know

Kitchen has a growing partnership with GLIDE,

GLIDE provides meals, clean needles, programs in literacy, anti-violence education, health services, a legal clinic, medical care

This is not cosmetic. We are building relationships, we’re starting to know the people who work there, the clients and congregants and they are starting to know us.  

About 50 Kitchen-ites are there helping or connecting in one way or another a week

Dozens of people meet for services, classes, our teens learn there for Freedom City,

We’re there for Freedom School and Shabbat mornings throughout the year, many more things I can tell you

It is a strong beginning but this is Kol Nidrei

I need to tell you

It is not enough

Not when the face of God sleeps on the pavement night after night

More of us must do more

If we were building a building and making a permanent mark on this city, this would be a beautiful start but not enough to break ground

If this were a capital campaign we would’ve hired someone to knock on every door

We would pressure you all into 100% participation, you know how it works

So for those in this room who are waiting to be called, to be tapped

I’m telling you

You can volunteer, fill shifts to cook, to prepare, to teach

You can get involved with the people who are already on the ground investing in increasing health services, getting shelters built

Or / and you can join a new Kitchen group that will advocate for a huge expansion in affordable housing in San Francisco.

Consider yourself called

Consider yourself tapped

(2). TABLES

Talmud teaches that since the Temple was destroyed, whereas the alter used to atone for us, that’s where we brought our sacrifices, 

now we atone at the table.

Because instead of guilt offerings, sin offerings, now we resolve our guilt, aveiras, sins, through conversations, apologies, learning, singing and even arguments at our tables.[9]

And the essence of what happens at our tables at The Kitchen is decidedly not based on titles or accolades but instead on things like

how her face looked when she was telling us about her mother who died last year,

Or the way he smiled when his husband said the b’rakhot / blessings for the first time,

Or the way they met over studying great Torah,

Or how their parents from Jersey reacted to our West Coast Purim,

Or how we all wept after Parkland,

Or how her baby used to laugh whenever we would light the candles on shabbat.

And it turns out, you spend enough time singing and talking and celebrating at the table

You can begin to counteract the infatuation San Francisco has with exceptionalism,

we can begin realize we are wholly dependent on one another

That these rituals that we did not invent bring the highs higher and allow us to feel the depth of the lows

Together, we can begin to counteract the lie that we were created to be self-sufficient.

We remember that we’re here only because of the efforts of those who came before us

Just as we have a responsibility to those who will come after us.

In other cities they call this collection of experiences and ideas ‘organized religion.’ Here, you may call it whatever you want, as long as you show up, as long as we can count on you to make a minyan, to set the table and help clean up.

(3.) ARK 

A story:  When we were building the sanctuary, and everyone was bringing and bringing and Moses says to stop, there’s enough

There’s a famous line in Torah,

Hamlacha hayta di-yam / The[ir] work was enough,

 l’khol hamlacha la’asot otah /

to get the job done

…v’hoteir and it was… extra, more than enough, too much.

It was “sufficient and too much.”[10]

And there’s a Hasidic tradition, that it was precisely with that “too much,” that “extra”

What we might even call “left over”

This “too much” is exactly what God told Moses to use to make the ark,

the most intimate, holiest part of the whole endeavor.

If we’re in a mindset of necessity, we just recycle the “too much”

But this “too much,” see, this is what drew God closer to us,

This “too much” is what engaged heaven

Because God could see that we were not building something out of fear, it was not even out of solidarity with an important cause,

but rather out of overflowing dedication, we were giving beyond what was necessary, it was beyond necessity

The kind of dedication and commitment stems only from love

The kind that keeps you up all night because you cannot bear to end the conversation

The kind that makes you drop everything and show up

The kind that makes you stay in the hospital and then again the next day and the next

The kind that makes you fly across the world just to see a person’s face, just to make sure she is okay

This is what God wanted most.

‘The overflow of the innermost heart of Israel.’[11]

Those who remain after the party is over and the guests have gone,

Those who come out of hiding, even with the world as broken as it is, because we refuse to stop trying  

This is what makes us precious to God,

What is left over in the bottom of the heart and cannot even be expressed in words.[12]

And so we learn that, somehow, in the holy of holies itself

The holiest things in the holy of holies

The cruvim / the angels, the people, none of this is included in the measurements of the ark given in Torah

And, in fact, if we included all these things in the measurements, we know it would not all fit, we would not fit, nothing would fit and yet, we know, even when everyone was bowing, there was more than enough room.

Because it is only when we begin with this kind of generous love that we are able make an infinite amount of room, with space for everyone.[13]

If we are to break any kind of religious ground

If we are to exemplify what it means to be a serious Jewish community in these times

If we are going to build a modern vision of a sanctuary that spans the city

We cannot start with what is necessary,

We cannot ever start with what’s wrong because then we’ll never get there

We must instead start with that which is immeasurable

We must start with what is overflowing, “Too much.”

7. The Tree of Life is not closed

In the book, The Oldest Living Things in the World

I learned about

A Pando (which is also called a “Quaking Aspen”).

It is a single organism that is 80,000 years old.

It looks like a colony 

But because of its massive root system

47,000 trees in Utah

it is actually a 106 acre being

Water can get from tree to tree and

The colony as a whole can migrate, albeit slowly, over time

It made me think:

Maybe the tree of life is not entirely closed – locked with a chain.

Because maybe the Tree of life isn’t a tree at all. Maybe it is an enormous forest.

And you and I, we’re a part of it.

[1] Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, “A Halt is Called,” Vol.1, p. 78.

[2] Edward K. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, p. 148-9.

[3] BT Megillah 29a:4

[4] BT Pesachim 86b

[5] My paraphrase, Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, “The Heavenly Voice,” Vol. 2, p. 293)

[6] Shemot Rabbah 33:3

[7] Shemot Rabbah 33:3

[8] BT Berakhot 31a:18

[9] BT Menchot 97a

[10] Ex. 36:7

[11] Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, “The Dwelling,” Vol. 2, p. 296-7.

[12] Edward K. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, p. 60.

[13] BT Bava Batra 99a:2, Genesis Rabbah 5:7.