As the Rabbi Said . . .
AS THE RABBI SAID... God's Presence after the Earthquake The Friday night after the [San Francisco] earthquake brought the traditional observance of Shemini Atzeret, a day to look back upon the...
...I know someone who collects people, the very ones most of us discard...
...but "How can I overcome fear and loss to embrace and affirm life again...
...And so, we read: "the first," "the oldest," "the largest," "the fastest-growing," etc., as though these factors make one congregation better than another...
...Surveys show that the optimum size of a congregation is 450-500 families...
...It does not please me to say that, and I wish that it were not true, but it is...
...People teach us who we are and who we want to be...
...Promoting Jewish "Product" There is competition between congregations...
...That is so until we discover people...
...But we felt God's presence in our joy at being alive and in our pleasure in the simple things of life...
...Even hypocritical...
...And that's not altogether bad...
...Having said that— how can I say that we must work with righteous Christians lovingly...
...Finally, we felt God present in the kindness and caring which poured forth with its own amazingly powerful force, to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and rebuild that which had been destroyed...
...Simeon J. Maslin Keneseth Israel Elkins Park, Pennsylvania Opting Out of Synagogues If the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles's estimates of synagogue participation are even close to accurate, we are living in a Jewish community in which perhaps 75 percent of the Jews are opting out of synagogue life...
...But synagogues get carried away with their self-importance...
...I have come to understand that with all the tragic Christian-Jewish conflict that has darkened the history of Western civilization and shrouded the presence of God—with it all, my faith and my hopes for the future of our civilization are closer to those of my liberal Christian colleagues than they are to the Chassidim of Williamsburg and the black-hatted zealots of Mea Shearim...
...As we sat together, we read the prayer the High Priest would recite, blessing the people for the coming year...
...he never discards an acquaintance...
...We humans are like buttons...
...How many people do we let slip through our fingers...
...The rabbi can still relate to his members, including the children in the school and youth groups, and the members can feel a sense of belonging and identification...
...through our lives...
...After a long list of requests for material blessing and prosperity, he would conclude with a simple request for the people of Sharon who lived along the sides of hills where the earth was unstable, "that their homes not become their graves...
...We must face that fact honestly...
...Am I, perhaps, being patronizing...
...He holds on to companions from grade school and high school, from graduate school and camp, people from the old neighborhood and people whom he meets casually...
...We felt God's presence in the deep calm that was brought by our grieving and mourning openly as we shared and supported each other...
...Men/in B. Tomsky Burbank Temple Emanu El Burbank, California...
...We go through life seeking bonds, greeting shadows, fascinated by old pictures, looking up our own name in foreign telephone directories...
...As we "benched gomel" (the blessing for deliverance from danger) together we knew God didn't send the earthquake or save any of us with individual intention...
...And the obverse truth is that the superstition, the obscurantism, the self-righteousness and the blind fanaticism of ultra-Orthodoxy are more in tune with born-again, Bible-thumping, charismatic Christianity and with Shiite Muslim fundamentalism than they are with contemporary American Judaism...
...Until we discover others, we know but one dimension of our existence, only one dimension of who we are...
...Our real value is not apparent until we become attached...
...We scan crowds for familiar faces, looking for people we know, because they know us...
...God's Presence after the Earthquake The Friday night after the [San Francisco] earthquake brought the traditional observance of Shemini Atzeret, a day to look back upon the past celebrations from Rosh Hashanah through Sukkot and to carry their meaning forward into the new year...
...Richard M. Litvak Temple Beth El Santa Cruz, California Working with Christians The fact is that almost all of [the killers of Jews in the Shoah] were raised as Christians and most of them thought of themselves as Christians...
...By no means...
...We fool ourselves into thinking we are independent, self-made...
...Stephen Carr Reuben Kehillath Israel Pacific Palisades, California A Collector of People So many people today are collectors: of baseball cards, teacups, political buttons, bottles, cups and saucers...
...The real question for us was not "Why did God do this...
...he never loses a friend...
...Their absence is nothing short of a silent cry of condemnation, which we in leadership positions in the Jewish community must either respond to creatively, or find ourselves watching as our institutions continue to be relegated to the back pages of people's lives...
...After all, we do have a "product" (Judaism) worth promoting...
...He keeps in touch...
...Jeffrey A. Wohlberg Adas Israel Washington, D.C...
Vol. 15 • February 1990 • No. 1
