One of the more curious, if not downright peculiar, quirks of Jewish life is our repeated tendency to invite guests who never seem to actually show up. Most famously, and apropos of this time of year, the prophet Elijah. For thousands of years, across the globe, at every seder table, a cup of wine is poured, we stand up, the door swings open, we sing a song , and . . . we are all still waiting. Multiple bris celebrations in our community this past week: the chair is set, the same song is sung (at havdalah, too), and yet – check the footage from the security camera – Elijah is a big no-show.
The same goes for the Sabbath Bride. The cantors sing their hearts out, we reach the final verse of L’kha Dodi, we all stand up, turn around, face the door, bow to the left, bow to the right. and . . . there we stand, like grooms waiting on a runaway bride. The list goes on. Every Friday night we welcome mystical angels with Shalom Aleichem. Every night of Sukkot we welcome the ushpizin – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and the rest. Again and again we welcome them, and again and again we wait for them to show up.
It is not just, as the old joke goes, that Jews are people who say goodbye but never leave. Jews are also people who welcome guests who seem never quite to arrive. This observation – a touch comical and not a little bit paradoxical – is, of course, also deeply theological. Because here, jokes aside, we arrive at one of the fundamental truths of Judaism: presence and absence are not opposites; they are partners.
Whether Elijah, the Sabbath Bride, or the ushpizin are actually present is a question we will leave, for the moment, unanswered. What I can say is that Judaism expects each of us to be willing to summon forth the presence of what we seek – whether what we seek is physically present or not. It has long been noted that embedded in the word “religion” is the root lig,”to connect,” from the Latin ligare, as in “ligament” or “obligation.” It could be connecting a person to another person, to God, or to a sacred text. That much is true of many religions. What makes our religion, Judaism, distinctive is that we connect with things – people, places, or ideas – even when, and sometimes especially when, they are not physically present.
The most obvious example is the Land of Israel. For thousands of years, but for a few small communities, the vast majority of Jews lived in exile – not in the Land itself. And yet in every prayer, on every holiday, at every breaking of the glass at every wedding, Israel was not just close to our hearts but in our hearts. Libi ba-mizrah, “my heart is in the east,” wrote the poet, “while I am at the end of the west.” Ours is a religion centered on the presence of a Land, despite being developed in the absence of that very Land.
Another example: today, Shabbat ha-Hodesh, we read an additional Torah reading all about the rituals of Passover. The Paschal lamb, for a sacrifice that is no longer offered. The bitter herbs, for an affliction of yesteryear. The matzah, a stand-in for the haste with which we left Egypt. At this time of year, everything is zekher, a remembrance of something that is not actually present, reminder of that which once was, that we summon forth even in its absence.
The most famous example is today’s Torah reading itself, all about the mishkan, the desert tabernacle built by the ancient Israelites, a place where God’s presence could dwell. The mishkan accompanied the Israelites through their wilderness wanderings and later stood in Jerusalem as the mikdash, the Temple, but it stands no longer. The ancient Temple is no more, but God’s presence – God’s presence remains. The system of mitzvot, as the rabbis explained, provide us countless opportunities to draw God’s presence closer to earth. The Sabbath, as Heschel famously taught, is a sanctuary in time in which God’s presence can dwell. And our Shabbat tables themselves. In the rabbinic imagination, every table is a mikdash m’at , a sanctuary in miniature. Not only in Jerusalem, not only through a high priest, but wherever we may be, through each one of us, Judaism is globalized and democratized. We are all authorized, in our own way, to summon God’s presence from the heavens down to earth.
These, I believe, are the two fundamental and interconnected building blocks of our faith: first, the capacity to connect to a person, a place, or an idea whether it is physically present or not; and second, the conviction that each one of us is equally empowered in that sacred work. Think of the mishkan itself. Of all the elements that went into its construction – the gold and the silver, the acacia wood and the woven wool, the artistry and craftsmanship – the most frequently mentioned component is neither the most beautiful nor the most visible. It is the adanim, the sockets or bases that hold everything together, that are mentioned one hundred times. Each one of the adanim was cast from the collection of half-shekels contributed by every Israelite. Every socket joined one thing to another: wood to metal, beam to curtain, board to board; this to that, one to the other.
And, as noted by many, the fact that that the word for these sockets, adanim, echoes the word Adonai, meaning God, is precisely the point. The holiness of the mishkan did not stand on marble or granite, but on connection, connection forged from the equal offerings of the people themselves. The presence of God, Adonai, was felt precisely at those points of contact, where one thing joined another, where heaven and earth touched, when physically present, of course, and even when not. What is the mishkan, the desert tabernacle, if not one great socket, by which the presence of a God in the heavens could be connected to earth
And as with the mishkan of old, so, too, our community today. As I have said many times before, as much as our community is about reaching vertically toward the heavens, it is also – perhaps even more so – about reaching horizontally toward one another. We search for God in prayer no differently than we reach out to God in each other. The adanim we need are everywhere around us: the sockets, the connections through which holiness flows between all of us.
And it is a truth that holds just as much for those who are not in this room as for those who are. Those for whom we say Kaddish, those whose memory we hold dear. We remain connected to them, and they remain connected to us. It does not matter whether you are physically seated in this sanctuary or listening from Israel’s Arava. Kol Yisrael, all of Israel, are arevim, interconnected, zeh ba-zeh. In our community every person here and every person not here is counted present. It is what makes our community sacred. And, we know that a person’s presence does not end when they take leave from this room or this world. Presence continues – in our deeds, in our memories, in the ties that bind. Not just Elijah, not just the Sabbath Bride, but all those we are thinking about in this moment, are present here – in this sanctuary and in the sanctuary of our hearts.
This is how sacred communities work, be it the desert tabernacle, Jerusalem’s Temple, or our synagogue today, this very day. It is not marble pillars or towering walls, but countless quiet points of contact – adanim – where one life touches another. Adonai appears wherever we connect, when one person reaches out to another, when one heart opens to another, when one soul reminds another that they are not alone. Because when that happens – when we show up for one another – the world changes. What is absent becomes present and the heavens above, bimromav, are drawn a little closer upon us, aleinu, here below. And this world, while not quite perfect, becomes, quite simply, a better place.
[Rabbi Cosgrove welcomed Broadway star Arielle Jacobs to sing “Better Place.”]