Return

Franz Rosenzweig’s decision to attend Rosh Hashanah services exactly one hundred years ago today, oddly, came down to a procedural matter. The only son of a wealthy industrialist, Rosenzweig belonged to a generation of German Jewry fully integrated into the social, cultural and material opportunities of the time. His Judaism, lacking in depth and devotion, simply could not compete with his passions for music and for Goethe or with his professional aspirations – first a medical degree and then, turning to philosophy, a doctoral thesis on Hegel. His cousin had converted to Christianity, as had his best friend and intellectual sparring partner Eugen Rosenstock. Over time, Judaism’s hold on Rosenzweig became increasingly tenuous. Finally, in the summer of 1913, after an all-night conversation with Rosenstock, Rosenzweig made the fateful decision to convert to Christianity. But because he was a philosopher with too much time on his hands, he wanted his conversion to be as kosher as possible – mirroring the journey of the New Testament Paul who became a Christian by way of Judaism. For Rosenzweig, that meant going to Rosh Hashanah services back home in Kassel. The post services scene is related in Nahum Glatzer’s volume on Rosenzweig’s life. “Mother,” Franz explained, “here is everything, here is the truth. There is only one way, Jesus.” His mother, Adele, confused and I imagine somewhat irritated, inquired: “Were you not in synagogue on New Year’s Day?” “Yes,” Franz replied, “and I will go to the synagogue on the Day of Atonement, too. I am still a Jew.” At which point Adele told her son that she was contacting the synagogue to make sure that he not be allowed in: “In our Synagogue,” she said, “there is no room for an apostate.” (Glatzer, 25)

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the Rosenzweig household! Not surprisingly, young Franz did not stay in Kassel that Yom Kippur. He left for Berlin and found a seat in the synagogue led by Rabbi Markus Petuchowski. Nobody knows exactly what took place during services that day. Rosenzweig never spoke of it openly nor did he ever write about it. What we do know is that Rosenzweig left those services a changed man, informing his friends a few days later: “I shall remain a Jew.” What had been intended as a final Jewish pit-stop on the road to Christianity, became a first step back into Jewish life. But as many of you may know, Rosenzweig’s spiritual odyssey was not only a personal one. On the back of postcards, literally from the trenches of World I, he wrote his book The Star of Redemption, a momentous contribution to modern Jewish thought. He turned down a prestigious university post, turning his energies towards revitalizing German Jewish life. In 1920, he founded the Lehrhaus, a center of Jewish learning in Frankfurt, whose institutional mission was to facilitate the journey of assimilated German Jews, as he himself once was, back into their ancestral patrimony. The force of Rosenzweig’s vision, his flair for public relations and “big lectures,” assembling a veritable who’s who of intellectual muscle – Buber, Nobel, Oppenheimer, Scholem, Agnon amongst others – created a magical atmosphere of learning; the Lehrhaus drew hundreds of Jews enthusiastically returning to the heritage from which they were estranged.

Rosenzweig would not live to realize the fullness of his vision. Stricken with ALS in 1922, he endured a debilitating seven-year struggle until his tragic early passing in 1929 at the age of 43. His vision for a revitalized German Jewry, we know, would be cut down with the rise of Hitler just a few years later. “The Pity of it All,” to borrow Amos Elon’s words: a would-be renaissance stopped in its tracks, an inspired vision of return never fulfilled.

When we enter the synagogue on the High Holidays, we are on a journey of return. There is no exact English word for teshuvah, often translated as “repentance” or “remorse,” but it is perhaps best explained as “return” or “homecoming.” Which is, of course, precisely the sentiment we should be filled with at this moment. We have returned to this sacred space, this holy moment on the Jewish calendar knowing we have been away too long. The melodies, the foods, the faces, the traditions – in the year gone by we have grown distant from our heritage and on these holidays we seek to return to a warm embrace. But we know, as Rosenzweig himself came to discover, that the return is also one of far deeper significance. Today, we ask for one thing, ahat sha’alti, to return to our best selves, to our former selves, and to our God. Unhitched from our moorings, we have been spiritually displaced long enough, and today we begin the journey home.

One hundred years after Rosenzweig’s momentous homecoming, I believe that his vision remains just as – if not more – instructive, inspiring and applicable to us today as it did to his community then. On this day when we gather as a Jewish community to articulate our path forward, if I could distill our mission into a single word, it would be what Rosenzweig discovered, and that is: “Return.” Not just today, but every day of the year: to facilitate the return of an alienated American Jewry back to the Jewish tradition, God and peoplehood that is their rightful heritage to claim. Those of you with a scorecard may recall the very first sentence I spoke to you when I was installed as your rabbi: Hashiveinu Hashem elekha v’nashuva. Hadesh yameinu k’kedem, “Return us Lord unto You, and we shall return. Renew our days, as in days of old.” (Lamentations 5:21) The song, as it goes, remains the same, but the urgency and conviction with which we must embrace this mission has never been greater. The time is now. With deep humility, with profound love and concern for the Jewish people, as your Rabbi, I call for a bold paradigm shift in how we define our mission. Today – Hayom – as the holiday instructs, we must be willing to break with the past. We must be attentive to the present – Hineni – and most importantly, we must be willing to imagine new worlds of possibility for the future.

This year not only marks one hundred years since Rosenzweig’s decision to return to Judaism, it is also one hundred years since Solomon Schechter founded the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, of which Park Avenue is a card-carrying, dues-paying member. Schechter, the head of the Jewish Theological Seminary, understood the tectonic shifts taking place in American Jewry between 1880 and 1920 as millions of Russian and Eastern European Jews arrived on American shores. The ideology of the Conservative movement, the educational vision of JTS, the blossoming of the United Synagogue, all reflected the arrival of an immigrant population to its new environment – not just geographically, but culturally, linguistically, economically and otherwise. As Schechter himself put it: “In order to be a success in the American rabbinate, you must be able to talk baseball.” Schechter’s brilliance was that he created a movement, ideologically and institutionally, that was right for its moment. What are the great Conservative synagogues of Great Neck, Shaker Heights, Pikesville, and Paterson – if not the communal structures by which an upwardly mobile American Jewry reconstituted itself in suburbia? What is the Conservative Movement’s signature focus on the tension between scholarship and faith if not a window into an old world/new world, Chaim Potok-esque experience of the children of a yeshiva-trained generation receiving a secular education? Whether we do or do not introduce instrumental music into our services, whether you can or can’t drive to synagogue on Shabbat, is swordfish kosher or isn’t it? Every one of these conversations and a million others reflect a movement that emerged in response to a specific set of historical and sociological circumstances. In the words of the famed observer of American Jewry, Marshall Sklare, “…the signal contribution of Conservatism would seem to be that of offering an acceptable pattern of adjustment to the American environment for many East European-derived Jews.” (Sklare, 249)

I am not supposed to pick favorite congregants, but if I did, it would be my oldest – Irene Eisenberg. At 102, you should live to 120! Every time I visit Mrs. Eisenberg, after she has offered me a drink, and after she shows me the letter from President Obama wishing her a happy 100th, after she shares that she still worries for her children – all now in their late 70s with grandchildren of their own, she always tells me the same story. It is the story of how she and her late husband Alex – both products of Orchard Street on the Lower East Side – fell in love. They couldn’t afford a honeymoon, so they took a carriage ride on their wedding day and went all the way up to Fifth Avenue. On that day, Irene turned to her groom and said, “Someday my love, we are going to live on this street.” And every time she tells me this story – as we sip our soda and look out her window onto Central Park – in all the emotion, I am struck by the journey of American Jewry. From the Lower to the Upper East Side, or from the Bronx, or Brooklyn, direct or by way of Riverdale, Scarsdale or Farmingdale, it is a journey that one hundred years ago, Schechter prepared for, a journey that today, Irene knows, we know, has found fulfillment.

Schechter and Rosenzweig were prophetic leaders. Their visions are not in competition; neither one is better nor worse. We remember them both because they did the very thing that visionary Jewish leadership does in every generation, the same thing that we must do today. Namely, ask the question: Given the condition of contemporary Jewry, what is the ideological and institutional path that will best ensure a vital Jewish future? One hundred years later, I can say with absolute surety that the immigrant experience to which Schechter responded is no longer our own, but Rosenzweig’s program of return is altogether resonant. The differences between Rosenzweig’s Germany and our America are as profound as they are numerous, but his assumptions about the Jewry of his day and his spirited efforts to win back a secularized community are instructive for us. According to my teacher Paul Mendes Flohr, Rosenzweig’s gift was that he “neither condemned nor stigmatized the alienation from Judaism of the acculturated Jew – indeed, in some sense he even honored it.” (German-Jewish History in Modern Times, ed. Michael Meyer, v. 4, p. 140) He understood the alienation of the modern Jew – after all it was once his own – and he provided the tools by which the Jews of his time could return home. And so too, must we today. The educational mission of this and like-minded congregations must be to create a dynamic, authentic and compelling model of Jewish life and living that will meet the searching American Jew where she or he is, and provide the path for return.

I promise you, the return of the contemporary Jew standing at the periphery of Jewish life is not contingent on whether swordfish is or isn’t kosher, under which circumstances it is or isn’t permissible to drive on Shabbat, and who did or didn’t write the Torah. If we want an American Jewish renaissance to occur, we need to explain the power of kashrut, the sanctity of the Sabbath and the thrill of reading a sacred text that though written long ago speaks to our souls with an unnerving intimacy. We need to spend less time debating modifications to the prayer book and more time teaching people how to pray. Less time debating who wrote the Bible and more time helping people read the Bible with passion. Rosenzweig envisioned a model of Jewish learning “in reverse order.” Meaning Jewish learning that begins not by flinging a page of Talmud in front of a Jew for whom that page has no meaning, but by first seeking to understand the concerns of a secular Jew and then establishing the relevance of our sacred texts as they apply to those very concerns. A Judaism that is both traditional and liberal in its inclinations, unapologetically claiming the mantle of authenticity, but eyes wide open about the condition and leanings of the American Jew. Gone are the days when a synagogue – ours or any other – can assume an insular, parochial and tradition-bound community. Judaism functions in the marketplace of ideas and consumer choice. We cannot assume that the Jew in the pew, if he or she is in the pew at all, is remotely at home with the language, rituals and associations of Jewish life and living. I am, nevertheless, entirely optimistic. I do not believe for a second that contemporary Jewry has rejected Yiddishkeit. We are just as thirsty for spiritual sustenance, for communities of meaning, for a connection to an everlasting tradition as any generation of Jews. We just do not know how to get our foot in the door and we are stuck in the assumptions of a bygone era. Our synagogue must provide the portals of entry, show the relevance, direct Jews out of their spiritual cul-de-sacs and mark out the path forward – the path of return.

If there is one message of the High Holy Days, it is that before we change the world, we need to change ourselves, or as the book title goes, “Foreign Policy Begins at Home.” The best form of leadership our shul can provide is not to tell people how they should conduct themselves, not to tell the Conservative movement how to recast its mission, but to model something worthy of emulation, to become a laboratory of Jewish life and living from which ideas emerge that will ripple well beyond the four walls of our  synagogue. Everything we do should be aimed at facilitating the return of American Jewry to its Judaism, a mission that begins right now.

Why is The Park Avenue Synagogue Lecture Series this year not on Israel, anti-Semitism or the landscape of American Jewry, but on living a meaningful life? Because I want our congregants and would-be congregants to know that our tradition has something to say about ethics, about aging, about addiction, about love and laughter, about all the things you and I go to sleep and wake up thinking about. Our tradition will, if we let it, speak with a relevance and urgency to our searching souls.

Why is the congregational school in the midst of an evolving process of reinventing itself? Because the idea that our children can just be dropped off between 4:00 and 6:00 on a Tuesday afternoon and emerge with a literate and loving relationship to Jewish life is an idea that arose in a different time and place. We must continue working towards a model of Jewish education that sees the Jewish learner not just as the student but as the entire family, a model of education that is experiential, experimental and all embracing. Technology has given us incredible tools with which a family can learn to recite Kiddush at home, say blessings or study the weekly Torah portion. The cantor’s new Family Siddur and CD is but one step in a far grander vision of transforming how and to whom Jewish educational content is delivered. We need to see our learners, as Rosenzweig understood, not merely as children (banayikh) – passive recipients of tradition – but as builders (bonayikh) – builders of a knowing, believing, doing and belonging Jewish future.

Why are we spearheading an Upper East Side Hebrew Language program this year? The great poet Bialik once remarked that “Reading the Bible in translation is like kissing your new bride through a veil.” Hebrew literacy is the gateway to Jewish life, to our heritage, to world Jewry and to our present commitments to Israel. It means you can open up a prayer book, a Bible, an Israeli website and you are a stakeholder in that conversation. I can think of no better personal educational resolution for you to make this year than committing one night a week to the study of Hebrew.

And while I am getting it all out, why will we continue to push the envelope on embracing the non-Jew in our Jewish family? Because I know, and so do you, that neither you nor I can control who our child sits next to in freshman English, first year Torts or the first day on the job. Our community will continue to unapologetically preach the value of endogamy – marrying within the Jewish faith – and we will unrepentantly work to facilitate the journey of would-be Jews into our Jewish family. I am, we are, in the business of creating Jewish homes! Our communal culture must be one that facilitates, celebrates and supports the establishment of Jewish homes – Jewish by birth or conversion, straight or gay, single or married, with or without children.

Facilitating our return to Judaism is why, in the coming weeks, months and years, we will transform what happens here on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. Beginning on Friday night October 4 when Henry Kissinger speaks, you will see the start of a new model of a Friday night service. I have the best cantor in the world, I know a thing or two about giving sermons, and as Shabbat morning kiddush goes – ours is pretty good. But we have yet to fundamentally change the culture of what takes place here on Friday nights and Shabbat mornings. We sell ourselves – and even worse, our children – short, if all we do is put in a little more or less music, Torah reading or egg salad and claim to be a flagship synagogue. I refuse to believe that the outstanding contribution American Jewry has to make to Jewish prayer is the responsive reading. We need to reconsider fundamental assumptions: timing, length, music, content and context. All of it needs to be assessed and re-assessed, constantly evolving into the decades to come. We need to create a service for the heart and the soul, for you, your children and grandchildren. The kind of service that were Rosenzweig to walk in, he might just be inclined to stay a while, find his place and know that unacquainted as he may be with the service – he had come home – and it may just be worth coming back again the next week.

I could go on, and I will – please God – into the years to come. Israel engagement, social justice, arts and culture, Jewish camping, what a Bar or Bat Mitzvah should look like – all the pathways that give voice to an authentic, accessible and relevant vision of Jewish life. But everything on the list must fall under the umbrella mission of “return.” If it doesn’t, well, then it is doesn’t get to wear the “Park Avenue Synagogue” label. Like a true laboratory, we will experiment. Some things will work and some won’t. But we will forgive, we will learn, we will pick ourselves up and try again and we will know that we left it all out on the field. We will create a laboratory whose work has implications well beyond these walls. Walls, mind you, that in the coming years will need to expand to house our growing and renewed vision.

But the most important player in making all this happen is not me and not the cantor. The most important player in this whole equation is you. You coming to shul, you signing up for a class, you signing up for our first-ever adult learning retreat next month. You serving on a committee, performing an act of hesed, paying a shiva call, visiting someone in need of a hospital or home visit. You looking around today or any day of the year for a new face and welcoming a new congregant into the community. Telling your friends that you look forward to them coming over for Friday night dinner and you will meet them not at your home, but at shul – because that is the way you roll as a Jew. What you choose to do and what you choose not to do matters. Each of these choices signals a gesture of return, your willingness to find your way back. It won’t happen all at once and it doesn’t have to. When Rosenzweig was once asked if he put on tefillin, he famously answered, “Not yet.” It is a journey of a lifetime which may take a lifetime, but here today let’s at least agree on our trajectory and more importantly, let’s make the commitment to begin the journey.

The rabbis tell of a king, who in a fit of anger sent his son away from his kingdom to live in a foreign land. Years passed, the anger subsided and the king sent a messenger to his son that he longed for his estranged his son to return. The son sent the messenger back to the king explaining that the hurt remained, the distance was too great, he could not – or would not – make the journey. The king received the message and sent back the following reply: “Return as far as you can, and I will meet you the rest of the way.”

Friends, ours is a moment of an American Jewry in need of return. If you will take the step forward, I will, I promise, bring this institution halfway. Together we will demonstrate a model of synagogue life that is authentic, accessible, relevant, engaging, and please God, always evolving. We will create a house of learning, of community and of prayer. A portal of entry for Jews yearning to return. A place that will meet you where you are and take you to the place you long to be. A place that you knew about all along, but had been away from for far too long, a place called home.

Hashiveinu Hashem elekha v’nashuva. Hadesh yameinu k’kedem. "Return us Lord unto You, and we shall return. Renew our days, as in days of old.”