ON COMMUNITY AND MEMORY

--By David Schuck

Rosh Hashanah begins tomorrow night. This is the last post for this Elul blog. It will continue on a weekly basis from now on. I want to thank all of the people who contributed to this project. Your honesty and willingness to share in the conversation has enriched the lives of the people who have been reading the blog. It was my hope that by reading something daily that touched on the themes of the yamim noraim, you would be inspired to start the work of self reflection and teshuvah, repentance, before Rosh Hashanah begins. This is what our tradition asks of us.

One of the challenges of organized religion is its need to unify. Religious communities will always attempt to unify its people through creed, behavior, and memory. There must be something that we share, otherwise we are just a group of people, not a religious community. But as has been obvious through the blog, we are all different people and our experiences of those very doctrines and rituals vary. This should be celebrated. You experience God differently than I, and I bet I can learn something from you. The reverse is also true. Alas, religious communities have been scared to open themselves to the potential to learn from the differences that we all bring to the table, so instead, they have tried to minimize them, and construct a communal memory of events and moments in time that are "shared by all." But for our community, this will never work. Our communal memory consists of shared moments, events, beliefs, and rituals, but it is also comprised of things uncommon to everyone, things that we keep to ourselves. How beautiful it would be if we could learn about these concealed and personal experiences from each other and thus give voice to the silence in our communal memory.

I want to be a part of a religious community in which we make room for these differences, and we share them. Come to synagogue with your beliefs and memories in your pocket, but make sure to be open to new ones. Don’t expect everyone to adopt your version of Judaism, but do expect yourself to encounter ideas and behavior that may have great appeal to you, and challenge yourself to see if you might deepen your own Jewish connections by adopting them. Consider making them your own. Make this a goal of the yamim noraim this year. Your life coach might suggest that you treat yourself well with a massage, but I would coach you to treat yourself well by feeding your soul: talk to people over the next few weeks about what inspires them, what fulfills their longings for meaningful connection. Ask them to share the memories that they have kept private.

Americans, especially New Yorkers, seem to be wondering how to deal with remembering the people who died on September 11th. To me, this is a question of the soul, not a question of commercial or logistical considerations. Emotional and cognitive memory is an essential part of who we are; it is the seat of the soul. Judaism has something important to share with the people of our country, something that we are about to practice ourselves on Yom Kippur: an unabashed belief that memory needs to be zealously protected. I have been so deeply shaped by Judaism that it is hard for me to even understand the argument that we need to “move on and tone down” the ways in which we remember the 2,974 people who were killed on this day. It seems that there is a fear that if we remember our loss and grief with an emotional intensity, we will somehow, be moving backwards. The goal of recovering from our grief is not to deny its existence, but it is to learn how to live with it in healthy ways. Remembering the tragic and senseless deaths of each person is healthy- it is part of what makes us human and connected to each other. On Yom Kippur, we will remember the victims who were senselessly killed from the 2nd Century CE through this past year. I see no reason to treat the tragedy of September 11th with less reverence. This is a painful day for our country, for New York, and for our community. Give voice to that pain. Pray it over the next few weeks.

I have been personally enriched by this blog, and it has helped me focus on the overwhelming task at hand. I am lucky to have friends and congregants who think about Judaism and / or God in deep ways, and appreciate their willingness to share their relefections with all of us.

I wish you all a year of physical and spiritual health; the rest is commentary. I feel blessed to be a part of your lives, and to have you in mine.

G'mar Hatimah Tovah- May you be inscribed in the Book of Life.

--David Schuck is the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center.