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Synchronicity is the idea that coincidences can have greater significance, not be coincidences at all. Many of us experience these kinds of things - thinking of a person right before they call us, talking about a particular subject and then seeing it come up over and over in multiple other settings, etc. When things happen once and then keep happening, we often seek out deeper meaning.
This past week was a week of synchronicity for me. It started early in the week, when I heard from an old friend, someone I used to teach with. He left our former school to pursue theological studies and is about to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. He sent me a text message inviting me to his ordination ceremony. We hadn’t been in contact in months, but it was delightful to hear from him. The timing of his message was also a lovely coincidence. I’ve been working this summer with another former colleague and mutual friend from the same school who has a personal training business. The message came in right in the middle of a training session. We were both tickled to see it and learn about the upcoming celebration. One of the things I had been discussing with my trainer friend in between circuits was my plans to spend this Shabbat with another former colleague and mutual friend. With my connections and friendships from this former position on the brain, it wasn’t really all that surprising that more and more reminders of those connections kept bubbling up. Later that day, an old friend who lives in Israel messaged me out of the blue to ask about something happening in her former community here in the States. She’s a close friend, someone I’ve known since college, but we don’t have the chance to speak that often, so it was a joyful surprise to hear from her. Our conversation naturally turned toward catching up on our own lives and checking in on other friends from our college circle. Not even 24 hours later, I met someone new to me - or so I thought. This person looked sort of familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him, so we played a game of Jewish geography. We quickly figured out that we had both lived in the Boston area around the same time 15+ years ago and shared a friend in common from that time, which meant that we certainly ran into each other socially and at shul during those years. The common friend - one of the people from my college circle that my Israeli friend and I had been discussing. Synchronicities are all in the eye of the beholder. Certainly they can simply be explained as coincidences, with no causal relationship whatsoever. The meanings we choose to ascribe to them are what give them deeper meaning. What I see in my synchronous experiences from this past week is the inevitability of connections between people. We can never not be in relationship with each other. The threads of our lives are always tied together at some point. I see the same phenomenon when we gather together as a minyan for tefillah. People are sometimes surprised to learn that the rabbinic explanation for why we need a minyan of 10 people derives from this week’s parashah. The Talmud (Megillah 23b) connects the idea of a community (עדה - edah) to the description of the community of 10 spies (also called עדה - edah) who cast aspersions on the Land of Israel and lead the people astray in Parashat Shelah. 10 spies, 10 people for a minyan. A minyan is an edah, a community. Coming together as such connects us to each other and in that connection is power. In our parashah this week, that power was used to sow chaos and discontent. Thankfully, our experience of minyan is quite the opposite. When we gather together in a minyan, we prioritize the way that the threads of our lives are tied together. We utilize those connections to nurture spaces of song and yearning. We hold each other during tender times and lift each other up during moments of celebration. We enable those among us who know grief to say Kaddish, and allow us to teach and hear Torah in the fullest way possible. Over the past few weeks, I have noticed in shul the power of our minyan, of our community. I will miss being with us this Shabbat and look forward to reconnecting when we next gather for services. Shabbat shalom.
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About a month ago, I wrote about Pesaḥ Sheni, the second chance opportunity to celebrate Pesaḥ set aside for those unable to make their Passover offerings at the proper time. The source for this holiday comes from this week’s Torah reading, Parashat B’ha’alotekha. What I find most interesting about the Torah’s narrative around Pesaḥ Sheni, especially this week, is that it describes a holiday in formation, one whose story is in the process of being created.
In the Torah’s telling (Numbers 9:1-14), those who are unable to make the Passover offering at the appropriate time due to being ritually impure are at first left out of the command to celebrate Pesaḥ in the second year of their journey. They are then given an alternate date for celebrating, complete with specific rules and rituals. They get a Passover do-over, which, through the passage of time, has become a holiday in its own right. This week when we read about a new holiday in the Torah, we also celebrated a newer holiday as Americans - Juneteenth. This day, which marks the day in 1865 when General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, finally enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation that had become the law of the land two and a half years earlier. Juneteenth was for a long time observed in Texas and spread throughout the country as an important day in the African American community in the years following the Great Migration - although it still wasn’t always widely known or marked. It wasn’t often a part of the American history curriculum taught in schools; people often found out about it as young adults. Most recently, Juneteenth gained national attention as it became an official federal holiday in 2021. It is a day with real significance for the African American community and for our nation as a whole, a day whose celebration and observance are also continuing to evolve. I want to highlight an article I read in Tablet Magazine this week, “Jewish Juneteenth,” by Shoshana McKinney Kirya-Ziraba. Rather than restate and interpret Kirya-Ziraba’s words here, I strongly encourage you to read the article, which I’ve linked above. However, I do want to highlight a couple of points she made that were illuminating for me. She spoke about how Juneteenth is being celebrated in some Jewish communities, inspired by the work of Black Jews to give expression to all aspects of their identity in their sacred spaces. One person featured in the article, Tameika Minor, brought a Juneteenth celebration to her synagogue in New Jersey. Unsurprisingly, she and her fellow planners first promoted the event celebrating African American culture as a summer solstice celebration, due to their uncertainty about how something directly tied to Juneteenth would be received by other members of their synagogue. The success of the event gave them the confidence to celebrate Juneteenth more openly in their Jewish community ever since; however, that story highlights the challenges of building truly open communities. Another person featured in the article, Rabbi Heather Miller, is a direct descendant of people freed on the first Juneteenth - and this connects us back to our parashah this week - and is the author of The Juneteenth Haggadah. The Juneteenth Haggadah, much like the Haggadah for Pesaḥ, tells a story of liberation through ritual, food, and song. It takes the themes of Pesaḥ, freedom from enslavement, a journey toward a promised future, themes that are essential to Jewish identity, and refracts them through the lens of the African American story. It seems a powerful, uniquely current way to give Passover a do-over. Shabbat shalom. This past Sunday, we held our spring community meeting. Each of the agenda items for our meeting connected, on a conceptual level, to this one idea: planning for our future. There was the budget discussion and approval, allowing us both to articulate and achieve our goals and plans for the coming year. There was voting in our new slate of officers, offering gratitude to our outgoing Chair and Vice-Chair and welcoming our new Chair and Vice-Chair. There were our round-robin committee conversations, helping everyone learn more about the incredible work of our committees and bringing new people in to serve on them, enriching them with new energy to keep moving forward. And indeed, this final part of Sunday’s gathering was full of excitement and forward-thinking energy.
The parallels between our community meeting and the events of our parashah as we start the book of B’midbar present themselves readily. The Torah reading begins with a census, the accounting for which matches the accounting from the census back in the book of Shemot, when each person made a donation to support the work of the community. That’s the budget. In counting the people in each of the tribes, the text calls forward the head of each tribe by name. That’s our leadership transition. Later in the parashah, we learn how the different tribes were arranged when encamped and how they marched when the people traveled. It describes the organization of the community and the different roles that each segment performed. That’s our committee round-robin. Both the parashah and our community meeting demonstrate the importance of seemingly mundane details for ensuring the sustainability and vitality of a sacred community. I want to zoom in on one aspect of the census from the Torah reading. B’midbar 2:33 notes: “The Levites, however, were not recorded among the Israelites.” Although the various essential tasks and roles of the Levites are well enumerated in the parashah, the actual Levites are not counted together with their fellow Israelites. They are the leaders of the community in many ways, yet they are also invisible. This detail of our Torah reading speaks to something deeply true about serving in a leadership role. Good leaders - the Levites, our own officers and committee chairs, and many others - do not serve in positions of leadership for accolades or attention. They are motivated by a sense of purpose, obligation to the community, love for the work that they do, among other things. Often they work behind the scenes, making the trains run on time, as it were. Their role in supporting the life of the community is sometimes only noticed when the “trains” are late, which is inevitable. When things are running smoothly, their skilled leadership can remain invisible. But without the Levites, the spiritual core of the nation would be hollow; there would be no one to manage ritual matters or inspire connection to the Divine. Without our officers and committee chairs, so much of what makes our community special would similarly be missing. It is with this in mind that I want to offer my gratitude to all who serve our community. From those who think about our financial future to those who care for us in times of grief, from those who plan programs and events that express our most deeply held values to those who seek out opportunities to engage folks on the margins, from those who bring us stimulating speakers to those who manage our communications (and hock me a tshaynik to get this weekly message in on time!) - I say thank you, and we see you. We count on you, and your tremendous contributions count beyond measure. Shabbat Shalom. |
Shabbat MessageA message from Rabbi Jacobs to the Congregation each Shabbat. Archives
November 2024
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