The Company We Keep
![Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove: To Life! - April 17, 2021](/sites/default/files/styles/teaser_image/public/2021-04/Sermon4.17CalendarLanding564x376.jpg?itok=hRmwXZo3)
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God commanded the mishkan to be built at this moment, because God understood that Israel needed a sacred center, a place that would remind them of the commanding voice of Mount Sinai, remind them of the spark of the divine within each of them, remind them of the people that they sought to be, but because of their slave experience, because of the rigors of the desert, they couldn’t be. “Bring forth the best of yourselves,” God commands them, a collective effort that provided a dwelling place for God’s presence, but more importantly, provided a place where the Israelites could be good . . . together. It was not foolproof. There would be plenty of setbacks and ultimately, we know, the first desert generation would be deemed unfit to enter the Promised Land. Nevertheless, the commandment to build the mishkan did signal a Copernican revolution in the religious life of ancient Israel. Not in any one sacred mountain, nor in the performance of any particular commandment was religiosity to be found – rather, in the creation of sacred community, first in the desert, then in the Temple in Jerusalem, and now in any house of worship. Wherever people gather their best to be the best that they are capable of being – that is where God’s presence is to be found.
Every year around this time, for obvious reasons, I give a sermon on the importance of the synagogue in our lives. As a place to experience God’s presence, as a generator of Jewish identity, connecting the Jewish people world-wide and one generation to the next, or perhaps as a place to make sacred the joys, sorrows, and passages of our lives over the course of a lifetime. While all these arguments stand, of late I have found myself drawn to the notion of the synagogue as the behavioral tuning fork in the lives of its membership. Our world is getting more complex, not less. The quality of public discourse is getting worse, not better. We need a place that can remind us not how the world is, but how the world, to use Dewey’s language, “ought” to be. This past Thursday night at our annual Gala, a member greeted me with a big hug and explained that he loved coming to this place, because whatever the challenges he felt at work or at home, he felt elevated being here among community. And just yesterday I was speaking to a congregant who had suffered a painful loss in the previous week; he concluded the conversation with the words “Rabbi, I will be coming to synagogue this week,” the implication being that when the world comes unhinged, it is to the synagogue that he turns to get his bearings. Neither this synagogue, nor any synagogue for that matter, can right the wrongs of the world or make the pain go away. But what a synagogue can do, a good one at least, is direct a community’s attention to the world as it ought to be. To hear the beauty of the cantor’s voice, to be challenged or inspired by the message from the pulpit, to surround oneself with people committed to the proposition that each one of us is created in the divine image and therefore of equal and infinite worth and concern is to remind oneself of the best that is possible. And yes, when we leave this building, we are inevitably and immediately reminded of the gap between the world is as it ought to be and the world as it is, which is exactly the point. Because in identifying that gap, we are prompted to close it and to work both as individuals and as a community toward creating a more just, more compassionate, and more caring world. The cycle is a virtuous one. Come to synagogue to surround yourself with people who remind you who you ought to be and how the world ought to be. Leave the synagogue so filled by that spirit that you cannot help but take action to heal this broken world, and then return to the synagogue to be reminded and recharged yet again. You are changed, the community is changed, and the world around is changed. Wash, rinse, and repeat over and over again throughout a lifetime.
About fifty years ago, in an essay called “The Vocation of the Cantor,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel asked the question “What does a person expect to attain when entering a synagogue? In the pursuit of learning one goes to a library; for aesthetic enrichment one goes to the art museum; for pure music to the concert hall. What then is the purpose of going to the synagogue?” Heschel’s answer, and I encourage you to read the entire essay, is that in a synagogue we develop a sense of reverence. It is here that we foster compassion; it is here that we cultivate a social conscience. It is here, I would add, that the young learn to respect the old, and the old learn to invest in the future of the young. It is here that we build up generations of menschen because it is here and only here that we declare to the world – to each other and to our children – that there is no greater title a person can hold than “mensch.” It is not something we can do on our own. In Heschel’s words: “To attain a degree of spiritual security one cannot rely upon one’s own resources. One needs an atmosphere, where the concern for the spirit is shared by a community.” Friends, that community of concern, that community of spirit is right here: your synagogue. We need it, and it needs you. Bring the best of your self here, and together we will make this synagogue a place in which God’s presence shall dwell.