Entering a Synagogue

On a hot day this past July, my brother Danny and I accompanied our father to the city of his youth: Glasgow, Scotland. Our whole family had planned to visit in the summer of 2020, a trip that, due to the global pandemic, never came to be. This past summer we were all in London for a family bat mitzvah. My mother had set the day aside to be with her sister, and so the three of us boys decided to take the short flight to Glasgow to visit the city that gave life to my now 87-year-old dad.

We had twelve hours and quite a bit of ground to cover, so our itinerary was divided into “nice tos” and “need tos.” We needed to see the home into which my father was born. My brother Danny, the family pride and joy who has taken over my father’s medical practice, knew he needed to see the Royal College of Surgeons where my father was trained as a physician. It would have been nice to visit Glasgow’s Auchentoshan whiskey distillery, but we never got there. I only bring it up now because I am curious to see whether the person doing our closed captioning this year is able to spell Auchentoshan the way Auchentoshan is supposed to be spelled. 

The one stop that was nonnegotiable was Garnethill Synagogue, the synagogue where my grandfather served as rabbi from 1935 until his death in 1973. It is a spectacular synagogue, consecrated in 1879, a blend of Moorish and Gothic style. Its ornate design includes pointed arches, intricate stained-glass windows, and a central dome with a star of David. In more ways than one, it was the Park Avenue Synagogue of its time. As the immigrants from Glasgow’s South Side entered the professional, business, and academic worlds, Garnethill’s membership and clergy represented the high-minded and upwardly mobile aspirations of the community. Although the community has since dwindled and moved away, the sanctuary remains in pristine condition, updated and maintained, as all sanctuaries must be, as befits Garnethill’s founding splendor.

But when we entered the sanctuary, my father’s focus was not the architecture. It was the memories. He pointed out where his mother – my grandmother, the rebbetzin – sat up in the balcony. He showed me where his father would sit, not on the bimah, but in the pews next to his sons. How my grandfather would leave his aisle seat, ascend the steps to the bimah, and deliver his sermon. He spoke of the synagogue leadership who sat in seats of honor in their silk top hats. He reminisced about the short fuse of one president – Jack Levine – who never raised his voice or clapped the table to shush the chatting community; rather, when his face turned purple and his neck beet red, everyone knew it was time to get back to praying. 

My dad knew every nook and cranny of the building, but it wasn’t the vestry or the choir loft that he talked about. He talked about the war years, the Blitz, the Kindertransport children who were raised by the community. How the congregation came together for the highs and lows of our people’s history: 1948, 1967, and as I spoke of last year, 1973, just a month prior to my grandfather’s passing. The luminaries who would visit, the interfaith gatherings that were hosted, and the Purim plays that were performed. How on the holidays everyone knew to show up on time and dress in their finest, connecting to God and reconnecting with each other. And how at the end of Yom Kippur, the phone would ring with congregants calling to thank his father and wish him and my grandmother a sweet year. Standing on my grandfather’s pulpit in the presence of my father: that was a moment I will not soon – not ever – forget. 

To enter a synagogue, any synagogue, on any day, is an act pregnant with meaning. We feel it this evening, entering not just this sacred space, but a new year. The floodgates of memory open, flowing with memories of this synagogue and of all the synagogues represented by all those present this evening. This year, the first Rosh Hashanah since the passing of my distinguished predecessor Rabbi David Lincoln, is especially filled with sacred remembrances; zikhrono livrakhah, may his memory be for a blessing. To those who are here week in and week out, to those who are here for the first time or the first time in a long time – with a full heart and a warm embrace I welcome you and welcome you back. To those who grew up here or in another synagogue or not attending synagogue at all – my welcome is the same. May you feel the warm embrace of our synagogue, of this sanctuary, and may the year ahead be a year of health, blessing, and most of all, peace.

It is the call of the calendar that brings us here tonight. We have physically entered this sanctuary, and metaphysically other ones as well. We know the why. The question I ask you is a different one, as once framed by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “What does a person expect to attain when entering a synagogue?” I spend so much of my time in this space, in this sanctuary, that the act of entering risks becoming commonplace. My Glasgow experience reminded me that it should be anything but. For me, but really for all of us, what are we seeking when we enter a synagogue?

At the most basic level, entering a physical sanctuary signals the human need to find a spiritual sanctuary. This year has been a difficult one, perhaps the most difficult year many of us can remember, a subject which we will talk about over the holidays. The world, it turns out, is not as hospitable to the Jewish people as we had hoped. We are exhausted and we are emotionally threadbare. Why do we enter the sanctuary? Why have people done so this past year in unprecedented numbers and intensity? There are many reasons, but for most it is to find comfort, even refuge, to be affirmed in our values, and to be surrounded by those who share our values. We enter this sanctuary inspired by its beauty, its melodies, and its message, and we are reminded of the world not as it is but as we pray it can be. We take comfort in our prayers, and we are inspired to aspire to heal our broken world. 

Our physical sanctuary offers spiritual refuge, but at this time of year, it also serves as our wayfinding guide, our spiritual tracker, a lost and found of the spirit that we turn to find ourselves or seek to be found by God. In many synagogues the ark is adorned with a biblical verse, sometimes: “Know before whom you stand” or “I have set God before me always.” At this time of year, we return to this sanctuary in order to do teshuvah – literally – to return to our better selves, our higher selves, the people whom we aspire to be but too often fail to be. 

There is a Hasidic parable of a man searching for something by the light of a streetlamp. A passerby asks, “What are you looking for?” 

            The man replies, “I’ve lost my keys, and I’m trying to find them.” 

            The passerby offers to help and asks, “Are you sure you lost them here?" 

            The man responds, “No, I lost them elsewhere.” 

            Confused, the passerby asks, “Then why are you looking for them here?” 

            The man replies, “Because it’s easier to search where the light is.” 

In the year gone by, we have all strayed from our path; we have hurt and we have caused hurt. Why do we enter this sanctuary? Because the light of this sanctuary reveals our humanity and bears the promise of teshuvah – of return – of finding our way back.

The word synagogue derives from the Greek meaning “to bring together.” It is a place of assembly – in Hebrew, beit knesset, a house of gathering. In other words, while some may enter the synagogue seeking to connect with God in heaven, all of us enter intent on encountering the divine spark in each other. Familiar faces and new faces – each one bears the divine imprint. Of all the ingredients that make for a vibrant synagogue, perhaps the most important is its spirit of hospitality, of welcoming, hakhnasat orhim in Hebrew. As I have shared with the community on more than one occasion, the direction of my life was forever changed at one Friday night service in my junior year of college, when the then Hillel director, Michael Brooks, noticed me – a young man who had never entered the building before. He said hello, invited me to Shabbat dinner, and when I lied, telling him I already had plans, proceeded to invite me for Shabbat dinner the following week. It is not easy to be as welcoming as we would like to think we are. Given the size of our community, our online presence – welcoming remains an ever-unfinished task, and we can always be better. But it is the essence of who we are, and it holds the promise of our future. Our business, the synagogue business, is a retail business – one soul at a time. No different than Abraham and Sarah at the side of the road welcoming in the wayfarer, so too all of us. The hellos you extend to faces new and familiar over the holidays are the most tried and true instrument to bring searching souls into, or back into, the fold. 

A place of refuge and renewal, a lost and found for the soul, a site of community gathering and connection – for these among other reasons, we enter the synagogue. But as I reflect on my visit with my father to my grandfather’s synagogue, it strikes me that there was, and is for us tonight, something else afoot. On that day in Glasgow, we touched far more than wooden pews and stained-glass windows. On that that day we touched, as it were, eternity. My father was reminded of an earlier time of his life, reminded of the people – his parents and the community that gave him life, a sense of self, and direction. Warmth, gratitude, a remembrance of a different time. Nostalgia, maybe; attuned to his own mortality, likely. But it was more than that; it was a connection to something larger than his personhood. A connection to a long line of ancestors dating back as far as the mind can imagine. And then, undoubtedly, a connection to a future line of descendants that extends as far forward as the heart can hope. As powerful as it was for me to stand on my grandfather’s bimah with my father watching me, I can only imagine what it must have felt like for him to see me, his son the rabbi, standing there.

My father expressed no interest in visiting his parents’ graves; he wanted to remember them in life. But my brother and I, who had never been to the cemetery, insisted. Our dad relented, and on our way out of town, we made a visit. We paid our respects, we placed stones on their headstones, and with his son the doctor on one side and his son the rabbi on the other, we put our arms around each other and recited the memorial prayer. Honoring what my father received from his parents, that he passed on to his children and that one day, please God, will be passed to his grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and beyond. The visit to the cemetery, as it turned out, was well worth it.

“One thing I ask,” writes the Psalmist, “this I do seek; To dwell in the house of the Lord . . . beholding God’s beauty and visiting God’s sanctuary” (Psalms 27:4).

No matter our age, no matter our stage in life, no matter the diverse paths that bring us here this evening, we enter this synagogue and usher in the new year bound together by a common hope and shared charge. That our time together serves to clarify what matters most to us, that for which we are most grateful. That our time together roots our gratitude in those who came before, without whom we would not be who we are. Finally, and most importantly, that our time together prompts us to affirm our values in the present, filled by the hope that they will bear fruit into the generations to come.