LESSONS OF THE PAST YEAR
ROSH HASHANAH 5765 (FIRST EVENING)

By Rabbi Gershom Barnard

You have probably heard of the ironic wish, “May you live in interesting times.” This is supposed to be a Chinese source, but, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been able to trace it to a Chinese source. Whatever the origin of the saying, we understand the point. Times of change and transition, even if they are apparently times of change for the better, are very stressful. I am sure that you will agree that the past year has been interesting. I don’t know how many times I said “This is this the last (whatever) at Fleming Rd.,” only to do “whatever” again there.

However, we have really moved, and I can say with absolute confidence that this is the first Rosh Hashanah that we are observing on Fields Ertel Rd. Despite, or, perhaps, because of, the difficulties of the past year, many of the feelings, the good feelings, from the earlier days of the congregation have come back. Part of our tradition is moving chairs and tables – especially moving chairs out of the Fleming Rd. sanctuary after the end of Shabbat services, and then moving tables into the Litz Auditorium (which was the same space under a different name) for a bar/bat mitzvah luncheon. We had several opportunities to make such quick changes during this past year (for example, on Purim at JVS), and we did it. In fact, our experiences brought back memories of the very early days of the congregation, before I came here, when NHS didn’t have its own building, and the congregation held services at various places, moving the necessary supplies from one place to another.

For the benefit of newcomers and very-newcomers, let me tell you some of the relevant details. NHS was founded in 1960. It did not have its own synagogue building, however, until 1964. For those first years, services, Religious School, and other activities were held either in members’ homes or in rented facilities. The 1964 building, at 715 Fleming Rd., even after an expansion in 1973, did not have separate sanctuary and social hall areas. The same space had to serve both functions. It was not until the construction of the Goldstein Building and the Roth Sanctuary in 1988 that we could have a luncheon or other function after services without doing the chair-table switch.

For those of you who have joined us since we came out here, let me say that we tried to synchronize our departure from Fleming Rd. with our occupancy of the new synagogue here, but it didn’t quite work out. Fortunately, we found a buyer for the former synagogue building in good time, but it turned out that we had to vacate the Fleming Rd. facility by January 15, and this building was not ready then. For two months, we held Shabbat services at Yavneh Day School. (For that period, by the way, Sarah and I spent Shabbat at the Hannaford Suites Hotel on E. Galbraith Rd.) We held weekday services for a while at my house, and then later at Jewish Vocational Service. We held Religious School at Jewish Family Service on weekdays and at Jewish Vocational Service on Sundays. We held Purim services on Saturday night at Yavneh and on Sunday morning at JVS. We held a bat mitzvah in the main sanctuary of Temple Sholom, while that congregation used its chapel. The synagogue offices were in the offices of Landrum and Brown Co. in Blue Ash. It was absolutely insane!

These have been interesting times, and this has been a learning experience, so I would like to share with you some things that I have learned during the past year.

The first is to have patience. Things, especially important things, take a long time to get done. Furthermore, even when they are taking longer than they reasonably should take, the reality is that they take as long as they take. Sometimes, we can do something to make them happen faster, but often we can’t. There was absolutely nothing that I, or most of us, could do, to make the new synagogue building be ready any faster, so we had to be patient. (That is, we tried to be patient.) Being impatient in situations like these does not get things done any faster, and it is bad for our health. Our tradition has recognized the virtue of patience in several places. For example, at Proverbs 25:15, we read, “Through forbearance, a ruler may be won over”. In Avot deRabbi Natan (Appendix 2 to Version A), we find the following parable about Rabbi Akiva’s patient and painstaking method of Torah study:

Rabbi Shimon ben Eleazar said, “Here is a parable about Rabbi Akiva. He is like a stonecutter who was working in the mountains. He took his chisel and chipped away little pieces of stone. People asked him what he was doing. He replied, ‘I am going to move this mountain into the Jordan.’ Eventually, he did exactly that.”

We have many opportunities in life to apply the lesson of patience. One day, when I was starting work on this sermon, I had to go to Hot Bagels and the Post Office. Between the traffic and the lines at both of those places, I spent a lot of time just waiting. I was fuming, when I remembered that I was working on a sermon about patience. “Aha!” I said to myself.

Patience is necessary in education as well. We read in Avot 2:6, “[Hillel used to say], ‘An ill-tempered person cannot teach.’” For one thing, an irascible teacher will intimidate his or her students, and, in their stress and fear, parts of their brains will shut down. Also, if we are showing someone how to do something, we have to let the person actually do it, even though he or she is liable to get it wrong for a while. When the teacher steps in and does the task, a teaching moment is lost.

We have to be patient about the development of our synagogue as well. As part of our relocation effort, we made all kinds of timetables and projections, and doing so was necessary. However, I think that I can say that none of them, certainly not those which related to the building itself, but also not those related to membership and finances, have been met. We need to watch how things go, but we also are going have to be patient. All of our goals are probably going to take longer to accomplish than we thought 5, or 3, or even 1, year ago.

The second lesson which I have learned from the experience of the past year is flexibility and resourcefulness, the importance of having a Plan B, and even a Plan C. Some time in 2002-2003, our congregation asked to be the host of the CRUSY Senior Retreat, an important event of regional USY. That retreat was supposed to take place on March 12-14, 2004. We thought, in 2002: “We’ll surely be in the new building by then.” Well, it was very close. Until January, or maybe even February, of this year, we thought that we might make it.

However, at some point, we had to make a decision, and we decided, correctly, as it turned out, not to take a chance. We hosted 40 USYers and their advisors, held services, served meals, and had activities, for a weekend at Yavneh. All of our plans had to be revised virtually from scratch in a few weeks’ time. We did it. On March 22, on the Sunday morning of our dedication weekend for this building, we scheduled our morning service for Yavneh, because that is where we had been holding services for a while, and we wanted to march with our sifrey torah from that location to this one. At the end of the day’s events, we said minha here, in order to show the continuity of religious life.

In any case, even though we had made arrangements to have access to Yavneh, when we got there at 8:45 on that cold and snowy Sunday morning, we couldn’t get into the building. Doug Mossman, who lives close to Yavneh, offered us the use of his home for the minyan, so we went to Doug’s, dovvened¸ and then returned to the Yavneh parking lot to begin our march to 5714 Fields Ertel. When we have to go to Plan B, we have an excellent model. We read in the Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 3:7 that, before He created this world God created many others and destroyed them because He was dissatisfied with them. Also, when God spoke to Moses at the beginning of his mission, He said:

If they do not believe you or pay heed to the first sign, they will believe the second. And if they are not convinced by both these signs and still do not heed you, take some water form the Nile, and pour it on the dry ground, and [it] will turn to blood.

There are, naturally, many applications of this lesson in our lives. When kids apply for college, they apply to a place or a few places that they would really like to go to but are not sure that they will get in, and at least one “safe” place, that they are confident of being admitted to. I often hear people say, when they encounter some unexpected problem, “I didn’t plan on this.” Some of these unexpected problems are truly personal calamities, and those of us who hear about them shouldn’t minimize their impact, but the reality is that many things happen that we don’t plan on. The popular saying, “If life deals you a lemon, make lemonade,” is apposite.

The third lesson that I learned from the past year is the importance of focus and priorities. When we were in the midst of relocation, there were so many things going on simultaneously that one could easily go crazy. I decided that I had relatively little to contribute to the processes of building the new synagogue, selling the old synagogue, and arranging the physical move (although, obviously, I had to be consulted on various details in all of those areas). There were other people in the congregation who could deal with those much better than I, and who were, in fact, working very hard on them. The area in which I could make the largest contribution was keeping the synagogue going, with its religious services and other activities, in the transition. I concentrated on that matter, and I think that things worked out well. The traditional saying which comes to my mind in this connection is “Tafasta m’rubah lo tafasta. Tafasta muat tafasta,” from the Talmud Yoma 80a: “If you take a lot, you have taken nothing. If you take a little, you have got it.”

Needless to say, the matter of priorities runs all the way through Jewish tradition. For example, there is a principle of Jewish civil law, “shema uvari, vari adif.” If one alternative or claim is certain, and the other is uncertain, the one which is certain is to prevail. Another principle, applicable to ritual law is “tadir v’sh’eyno tadir, tadir kodem.” If there are two rituals to be performed at the same time, and one recurs frequently and the other doesn’t, the one which is more frequent comes first.

The applications of this lesson are many. The first one which comes to my mind is how to manage the “To Do” list. A few years ago, Sarah gave me a Palm for my birthday, and I can no longer imagine how I lived for 50 years without one. One of the peculiar side-effects of that gift, however, is that I can record many more things to do than I ever could before. My task list has 417 items on it. Prioritizing them is essential, but assigning numbers 1-5 to tasks is really only the first step. I try, with varying degrees of success, to follow the advice of my colleague Rabbi Eric Silver, to compose a list of basic values, a list of major goals, a list of objectives for the near and middle term, and to generate one’s real “To Do” list from that list of objectives. The congregation has to do something similar. The composition, about a year ago, of a document of congregational core values was a very important step in that direction, and I hope that we shall refer to that document regularly when we make synagogue plans and decisions.

The fourth thing which I learned, the last one which I shall mention this evening, is the importance of community. During our transition, we were given invaluable help by other organizations in the Jewish community: Yavneh Day School, Jewish Vocational Service, Jewish Family Service, and Temple Sholom notable among them. The well-known saying from Avot 2:5, “Do not separate yourself from the community,” says it all.

The reality is that everybody gives lip-service to the ideal of community, but we are constantly being tempted to undermine that ideal, in order to get some advantage for our own synagogue. Organizations, like individuals have a right to look after their own interests, but, just as human society is supposed to take us out of the Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all, so we should recognize in the Jewish organizational world that we shall all do better if we cooperate and compromise than if we all go our own ways. Indeed, one of the congregational core values to which I just alluded is that “the congregation and professional staff actively support Israel, the Jewish community of Cincinnati, and the Jewish community worldwide.” We must take that value statement seriously and resist the temptation to consider only the interests of NHS.

Let me conclude with one more quotation from Avot. It is 4:1: “Who is wise? One who learns from all persons.” I would paraphrase that saying as “Who is wise? One who learns from all experiences.” I would add that we should cultivate the kind of reflective attitude which helps us learn from experience. If we do so, then we are likely to learn, among other important lessons, patience, flexibility, focus, and commitment to community.

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