Annual Congregational Meeting, April 25, 2013

Before I get to my prepared written remarks, I want to just take care of some other business.  Where’s Livia?  Livia, I win—you lose.  We always have a bit of a lottery as to how many people will come to this annual meeting, and I just want to tell you how nice it is to see you who are here representing the congregation and congratulate our new trustees, our newest trustees, and thank Janet who’s been on the board for almost as long as I’ve been here. We’ll miss her and I think she’ll miss us, too.

I also want to say, you know, it’s one thing to be a professional in the congregation and to have this as the single focus of our life.  But for a person like David and the other members of the board, the time that they give—and David has another job but his vigilance to this congregation his ongoing love for this congregation is really notable, and that’s true of all the people that work with David.  You’ve given discretionary time to support this congregation, and we who are professional leaders don’t take it for granted, so I thank David.

On behalf of all my colleagues, I also want to thank our spouses, or best friends, for supporting us because as we go forth and sally forth into the vineyards of the Lord, they’re the ones making sure that we have clothes to wear the next day.  Kerry knows my love and I think I speak for all of us who are clergy in expressing our gratitude to our spouses who stand with us.

This message is actually quite different from other messages I’ve given because… because.  And in talking about what I’m going to talk about, I just want to project it as a somewhat more global view, or time-global view.  And it’s really in a way a reflection for me both for good and bad as well as for our congregation.

So to my way of thinking, I imagine what happened on Mount Moriah this way: it was in God’s witnessing Abraham’s willingness to forgo his own legacy and hope for a future by holding the killing knife over his son Isaac, it was in witnessing that that I believe God was repulsed by the trial by which Abraham was being tested by God himself. And God recognized that the only hope for the world to be witness to the existence of Adonai was this people that would be born out of Abraham and Sarah’s loins and launched into existence. We who know ourselves as Jews were going to be a people that according to God’s improbable promise would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sands on the shore.

Well, we know that didn’t happen.

But I suspect that God also knew it was never going to happen and that the numerical counting of our people was never going to be a proper measure of either God’s or our success. What replaced the promise of our numerical superiority as witness to God was rather an aspiration embedded in the prophet Isaiah’s book:

“I, the Lord, in my grace, have summoned you, my people, and I have grasped you by the hand. I created you and appointed you a covenant people, a light of nations, opening eyes deprived of light, rescuing prisoners from confinement, from the dungeons those who sit in darkness.” (Is 42:6 f.)

It was then in Jeremiah’s words a “new covenant,” no longer a dream of Jews teeming as an immeasurable multitude across the face of this earth but rather God’s longing for the depth of our faith and the character of our people. In these words, Jeremiah intoned God’s promise: “I will put my teaching into your inmost being and inscribe it upon your hearts.” (31:33)

It is these guiding texts that propel me to speak with you this evening not as a reflection of the past year, as I usually do, but with heartfelt consideration of who we are as a congregation and what we have become as a synagogue.

According to all reports and reflections from others, we are an amazing congregation, spoken about across this nation and within the Reform community around the world. We are looked to for leadership and lessons for how a congregation can attain success and establish a vision. We are admired by the community we have built and the role we play in the city. Our membership roles are robust, our finances are amazingly healthy, our lay leadership is dedicated and caring, and our professional team is exemplary.

But there are some of you here who know it wasn’t always this way. I remind you that when I arrived here twenty-two years ago, this congregation was recovering from an internecine conflict. Its membership count was low, less than half of what we are now. There was pain on both sides of the battle that had occurred and ripped this congregation apart. Few people attended services and the average age was…well, way older than I am now.

I cannot surmise what happened at the Board meetings in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There are actually some who could tell us, but I wasn’t there. But from what I do know, I presume that the leadership of this congregation at that time had the bold aspiration that this congregation could be different, that it could be reinvented, that in ways that could not be imagined it could heal its soul, define its character, and eventually emerge from the doldrums and destruction that had engulfed it.

This I do know: Central Synagogue’s Board at that time was willing to take a chance on a west-coast rabbi who told them that when leading services, he wore a tallit and a kippah. Now, that would seem the most pedestrian of all expectations. And yet back then, my two immediate predecessors had been prohibited by either policy or precedent from wearing what in the board’s words was a “head-covering” on the pulpit. It was a difficult for the search committee even to use the word kippah or yarmulke.

Given the ritual inclination of the congregation, the Board of Trustees correctly foresaw that their senior rabbi walking out on the pulpit with a kippah on his head would cause disruption, perhaps even eruption. So, before extending an offer to me, they polled the entire Board to see whether the wearing of a kippah should be the litmus test for engaging their next rabbi.

Fortunately, they were willing to take a significant chance.  What they knew is that many of their members would be uncomfortable, even irate, with this new ritual tradition. They knew that the congregation would probably lose some members who would migrate to a neighboring congregation, to the north temple where the forms of Classical Reform Judaism would continue to be sacrosanct and immutable.

In hindsight we could say, “Well, it was no big deal.” But I tonight want to honor those who were part of that leadership, because the leadership of the congregation believed as we must continue to believe that staying safe and not rocking the boat for the purpose of keeping comfortable not only assures mediocrity but guarantees stagnation.

We live in a society in which everything is measured. We live at a time in which growing numbers define success. Our children are measured by their IQs and GPAs. Corporations are measured by their market share and profits. Websites are measured by their hits. Individuals on social media and even within organizations are measured by their friends they have online and their rankings. And business people are measured, and sadly even measure themselves, by their net worth.

Our success as a people and a congregation is defined entirely differently. Our triumph, I believe, our very existence as a Jewish people is anchored not in numbers, but the in strength of character, the depth of soul, and the power of relationships.

We never set out as a congregation to grow our membership. We never had a membership drive. We committed ourselves to creating relationships one person at a time. We promised to be there when you needed us. We vowed to build quality and excellence into everything we did. And above all, we were going to be courageous, taking chances on accomplishing the impossible, even if meant falling on our face every once in a while.

Without the willingness to fail, without the fortitude to move ahead with no guarantee of success despite all our vetting, without the faith to be courageous and bold we will be stuck in the muck of mediocrity. We cannot be content with just being average. For me and the future of Jewish life and our movement and especially of this synagogue, timidity is untenable and staying safe is catastrophic.

We hired an executive director who was a lawyer, and had absolutely no experience with the administration of a synagogue. She had no track record or history—what a daring chance we took. And I promise you there is no better senior director in this country than Livia Thompson, who grew from excellent to extraordinary. But the fact is there is no way we could have known that when we first hired her twenty years ago, this being her twentieth anniversary.

And we hired a senior cantor who had only been an assistant cantor-slash-rabbi, had never officially worked full time, and had never been singly in charge of the musical program of a congregation. But when she asked us about it, we assured her with unbridled enthusiasm that if she came to Central, the only limitation for her was her own imagination, and that we yearned for her to be courageous and forceful and inventive. And she has been that and even more. But none of this was assured or guaranteed when we offered Angela a position. She and we took a chance on each other, and can we imagine it being any better?  And I thank Angela for that.

We have taken chances beyond the hiring of our professionals. We challenged the assumption that formatted tradition is good.  I do not believe that tradition is innately good, especially in worship. And so we have intelligently and passionately tampered with our liturgies so that, we would hope, they tug at your heart and your memory. We have redefined the Kol Nidrei service so that it responds to our longings. We re-imagined the Shabbat morning service so that it creates an unforgettable narrative in each of our lives.

And for those of us who were around when we rebuilt this building, we formatted this Sanctuary upstairs for flexibility, because we knew that none of us could foretell the future possibilities of worship. And so we created it so that a third of those pews upstairs are movable and removable, and we have experimented with them.  We knew enough to know that we didn’t know what the future would hold.  We wired this building for the use of what was then unimaginable technology, never envisaging that we would one day live stream to twenty-thousand far-flung Jews and non-Jews around the world on the High Holy Days.

And in the Religious School, we trashed our typical religious school program and instituted a previously-nonexistent full-time teacher program, which I promise you made absolutely no financial sense, bucked every religious school educational trend, and toppled every safe assumption about afternoon supplemental education. And while we’re continuously exploring and upgrading, because before anybody knows we know that something is not doing as well as it could, but we upgrade every one of these conceptual models and we continue to aspire to do more and attain the unattainable.

We also decided that it was inauthentic for our synagogue not to care for those outside these walls, and so we care about taking care of small synagogues in the South, in Minsk, in Israel. It would be duplicitous for us to speak about the importance of Reform Judaism without supporting our movement around the world and challenging the purpose and assumptions of our movement’s institutions and even our movement’s synagogues throughout this country.

We’ve also reengaged with the essence of relationships and community building within our own synagogue with the emergence of the Central Conversation because we know that each of us needs greater intimacy and immediacy in our relationship with each other and this synagogue.

And we continue to support in every plausible and sometimes implausible outreach to those who have been devastated by hurricanes, massacres, earthquakes, and tsunamis. We cannot tolerate, I would pray, staying safe within these wall when people are suffering outside these walls.

For us, lack of Jewish authenticity is intolerable and nothing but courage, boldness, and outrageous audacity in dreaming larger than ourselves, taking chances on emergent excellence and grasping for the star beyond our reach, nothing else is bearable.  For that is what it means to be a Jew. And that I would pray for us is what it means to be a synagogue.

You see, in the end, no numbers will tell our story. That’s not how we measure ourselves. A first night Seder will be no more successful if we have an oversubscribed event, as we did this year, rather than twenty-five individuals who, because they are alone, need a Seder to attend.  In the end, we will be judged by our character and soul and passion and courage as we break too-well-formatted models in order to attain the unattainable and manifest the unimaginable.

Our intrinsic value is measured by whether we matter. That is the focus which has made us this incredible synagogue, this improbable congregation. For me, God gave the Jewish people a dream and I believe that our mission needs to be making that dream our existence. Because I would hope you would join me in believing that Judaism matters and we had best continue to make Central matter for the sake of our Jewish future.

God willing, we’ll be up to that challenge.