by Dr. Jonathan Woocher, Chief Ideas Officer

Our synagogue has been undergoing renovations.  Last fall, we held services in a nearby middle school.  The space was different, but the services themselves were pretty much as they had been.  This year, we will be back in our new sanctuary—but we won’t have access to the auditorium where we typically hold a second, congregant-led service on the first day of Rosh HaShannah, Kol Nidrei, and Yom Kippur.

So, for the first time, we’ll be running “split shifts” (an early service and a later one) in the sanctuary for some of the services and combining others that have heretofore been separate.  The time constraints in each split service don’t allow for doing everything we’ve been accustomed to, so the inevitable question was raised: what do we shorten or skip?  For the combined services the question was: whose “minhag” do we follow—the “sanctuary’s” or the “auditorium’s”?

And that’s where the fun started.  After all, we know that some attendees come primarily for the rabbi’s sermon.  For others, the sermon can’t be short enough.  Some like a full, traditional davening.  Others want lots of English and interpretive readings.  Some look forward to hearing the Hazzan and the choirs.  Others go out of their way to avoid the services where the choir (especially the professional choir) “performs.”  Some relish having fellow congregants deliver divrei Torah and tefillah.  Others cringe and would rather get their explanations and insights from the rabbi.

It’s a microcosm of the Jewish world today:  We’re a diverse population, with many different sensibilities about a host of issues (well beyond how to run services).  Yet, we also know that we’re supposed to be a community, one that can come together to do the things Jews have always done as a collective (like praying).  The fact that we are different in so many ways makes community-building a challenge.  How do we tailor our shared activities to make Jewish experiences maximally meaningful to individuals so that they will continue to participate in them enthusiastically?  How, at the same time, do we reaffirm that it is only in and as a community, with the inevitable compromises this entails, that individuals can achieve their full human and spiritual potential?

The Yamim Noraim are an especially appropriate time to consider this dilemma.  They are, one could argue, the most individually oriented of all the holy days on the Jewish calendar.  Unlike nearly every other holiday, they commemorate no historical event (except creation itself).  Rather, they are occasions when each of us stands directly, as an individual, before God to have our merits judged, our wrongdoings forgiven.  Each of us must do teshuvah; each of us must contemplate the contingencies of life and death personally.  Even the High Priest, charged with making atonement sacrificially for the entire community, had to first make atonement for himself.  And today, with no scapegoat, no surrogate available, it is only our individual prayers and deeds that accord us the opportunity to make our lives right, to set ourselves on a better path.

It is no wonder, and to be commended, that people take very seriously and personally what happens in synagogue on Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur—how the service is conducted, what the experience of prayer is like.  Yet, this highly personal experience, paradoxically, is also one of our most collective.  There is, first of all, the obvious fact that at no other time in the year will as large a congregation be gathered to pray together (at least in most synagogues).  I know many individuals for whom the coming together of the community each fall, seeing rows of fellow worshippers, friends and bare acquaintances, is itself a powerful experience, eagerly anticipated.

Beyond that is the omnipresent reminder built into our liturgy that though we pray personally, we do so (with rare exceptions) always as a “we,” not as an “I.”  I acknowledge God as “our parent, our ruler,” not just mine.  I confess “our sins” (including ones I have never committed—or at least can’t recall committing), not “my sins.”  Even as I contemplate my own mortality and the urgency it should lend to my efforts to live a better life today, I do so with the awareness that I am being judged not only together with my fellow congregants, nor even all Jews, but with all living beings—we are all sheep passing before the Shepherd to be counted and accounted (as the beautiful poetry of the Unetaneh Tokef puts it).  The Yamim Noraim are intensely personal and utterly universal.

I would suggest that the experience of these days must be part of our consciousness as we do our work in Jewish education throughout the year.  Striking the balance—even better, forging the connection – between engaging the individual learner in her singularity and uniqueness and helping him to discover the meaning and fulfillment that come from being part of a larger community is at the heart of the challenge facing Jewish education today.

Many voices have expressed concern in recent years that young Jews no longer feel an innate sense of connection to the Jewish community and Jewish people.  Certainly, this sensibility is no longer a given in our age of personalism.  But, I would suggest that what we can learn from the experience of the Yamim Noraim extends beyond our interest in sustaining a strong Jewish collective.  Ultimately, the question we all face as human beings is how to live a life that we feel good about, one that satisfies and fulfills us in a profound way both as we live it and as we look back upon it.  Judaism, I believe, endorses this quest, but it also offers a firm answer to the question “how?” that reshapes the endeavor.  Its answer is that only when the “I” becomes a “we” can we truly find the fulfillment we seek as individuals, and, not coincidentally, can we have a transformative impact on the world.

This is a message that we can teach with confidence.  It asks the community to take each person seriously, to understand that each day we face choices that cut to the heart of who we are as individuals, choices that shape our fate and our destiny.  And, it asks us as individuals to remember that we are not alone in facing these choices, that this is the lot of all humans, and that there is strength in sharing our existential joys and anxieties with others.

As you sit in synagogue this Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, whatever service you attend, I hope that it is one that speaks directly and personally to your heart, mind, and soul, that inspires you and sustains you for the year ahead, and that connects you deeply and meaningfully to those who sit alongside you, to your fellow Jews, and to all humanity.  May it be a year of goodness and sweetness, peace and fulfillment.  Shanah tovah umetukah.

Seder veterans are familiar with the fact that the central narrative of the Haggadah is preceded by two quite different introductions, attributed to the sages Shmuel and Rav. The first introduction, “Avadim Hayinu,” seems quite apt and straightforward: “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Mitzrayim, but Adonai our God brought us forth with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm.” The second, though, is a bit more puzzling. It reads: “In the beginning our ancestors served idols, but then God embraced us so that we might serve God.” The initial focus here is not the enslavement or exodus from Egypt at all (though the passage gets there eventually), but the “slavery” of idol worship.

According to some scholars, the origins of this “double beginning” go back to the time when the Seleucids (Syrian) and the Ptolemies (Egypt) fought for control over Palestine and each preferred to identify the Jews (and hence their territory) as being connected to their respective centers of power. However, the Talmud attributes the double beginning to Shmuel and Rav’s disagreement about how to apply the Mishnah’s injunction that we “begin (the Pesach narrative) in degradation and end in glory.” For Shmuel, that degradation is the physical enslavement in Egypt; for Rav, it is the spiritual enslavement of idol worship. We, of course, in good Jewish fashion, see truth in both their claims, and hence both passages have made it into our Haggadah. Pesach celebrates, therefore, not only political liberation, but spiritual liberation and growth as well.

Yet, there is another dimension to the story here that invites further reflection. As the second of our introductory passages states explicitly, and the first (and, indeed, the entire Haggadah) does implicitly, our liberation from one form of avdut (slavery or servitude) is liberation for another form of avdut: service to God. The Hebrew root avad, even more than its English counterpart, carries a powerful double meaning. On the one hand, servitude is bad, and we celebrate that God brought us “me-avdut l’herut,” from slavery to freedom. But, service, especially being an eved hashem, a servant of God (like Moses), is also our highest calling. Avodah is worship – sacrifice or prayer – one of the three pillars on which the world stands, according to Pirkei Avot.

So, though the dominant theme of Pesach and the Seder is that of redemption from enslavement, and by extension from all threats to our physical security and well-being, our second introductory paragraph reminds us that liberation is not the end of the story. Just as the Exodus leads inexorably to Sinai, our freedom from human servitude, or from the false worship of idols, is designed to enable us to embrace a more worthy form of service, to God, to Torah, to the moral values that give life dignity and direction.

There is a lesson here, I believe, for us as we look at Jewish education and its mission in the contemporary world. It is by now a truism, but no less true, that North American Jews today are blessed and perhaps burdened with virtually unlimited choice. We are free to be Jews, or not to be, and – even more important – free to make of and do with our Jewishness what we wish. We are past the time, I would suggest, when we can frighten or shame Jews into “staying Jewish” by appealing to anti-semitism or the travails of previous generations. I earnestly hope that the power of the Seder ritual helps us, as it is designed to and as the Haggadah enjoins, feel as if we personally were both enslaved and redeemed from Egypt. But, candidly, I wonder if this message indeed resonates with today’s Jews for whom freedom is a reality on so many levels.

But if “freedom from” is easy for so many to take for granted today (and may that continue to be the case), “freedom for … what?” remains very much a burning question in our lives. We are seeing today among many young people and others a tangible desire to be able to “serve” in both the immediate and the broadest sense – to attach themselves to worthy purposes and devote time and energy to noble causes. The question for us is whether we in the Jewish community, in Jewish education, are providing the concrete vehicles through which Jews can (to quote the Haggadah) “be brought near to HaMakom (one of God’s names) to serve God.” The dramatic growth of Jewish service and service learning programs in recent years is one encouraging sign that we are responding to this challenge and opportunity. This is, however, only one form of “service,” one way of worshipping God and enriching God’s creation. We need to be vigorous in identifying many ways in which we can offer positive purpose to Jews today, and it is in offering such purposes – in demonstrating what it can mean to “serve God” in today’s world that we are most likely, I believe, to secure the Jewish connectedness of another generation as the Seder asks and assists us to do.

So, this year, I plan to recite both Shmuel’s and Rav’s introduction to the Haggadah narrative. I will think about what I have been freed from (and what I have yet to be freed from, for we all still have our Mitzrayims, our “narrow places”). And, I will also think about what I have been freed for – how I can be a better servant in the positive sense. May this Pesach be one that liberates you from servitudes that oppress, and liberates you for connections and commitments that enrich your life and the lives of others.

Chag kasher v’sameach.

August 24, 2010 (Fort Lee, NJ) — For the first time on national cable television, Jewish High Holiday services will be carried across the country on Shalom TV, the free Video on Demand Jewish cable network available in more than 38 million homes. Designed for those unable to attend a synagogue service, the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur congregational programs begin airing on Shalom TV the week of September 5.