community comm unity review www.jewishharrisburg.org
January 3, 2020 | 6 Tevet, 5779 | Vol. 93; No. 51 Published by The Jewish Federation of Greater Harrisburg | Greater Harrisburg’s Jewish Newspaper
INTERGENERATIONAL COOPERATION IN SHUL
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BY SAM YOLEN, RABBI, CONGREGATION BETH ISRAEL (LEBANON)
ne generation comes and one generation goes, yet the Earth remains the same,” says King Solomon, the traditionally acknowledged author of Ecclesiastes. “L’dor vador nagid gadlecha,” we sing in the Kedusha section of our Amidah (translation “generation to generation will tell of your greatness”). “Shebekol dor vador omdim aleinu l’kaloteinu” or “In every generation they arise to destroy us,” we read from the Passover Haggadah. These are but a small sampling of the many intergenerational nuggets of wisdom the Rabbis canonized in our sacred literature. Whether we are fully aware of our religious responsibility to link our traditional past to the present, or whether we blithely move through the motions of Jewish ritual without deeper thought, our heritage is imparting a critical teaching regarding intergenerational dynamics. The teaching? That we’re stronger together. That somewhere between the wizened experience of age and naive foolhardiness of youth there is a living and breathing covenant. The Rabbis use ritual to call us to see that our covenant with God expresses itself in the synagogue and JCC just as much as it appears in The Bible. Go find it yourself! When I hear generationally prescient lines sung out in shul, I am moved to scan the kahal to find the community’s center. Like a math problem, finding the mean, median, or mode of a set of integers, I look for a common chord of resonance between all the individuals present at the service or ritual event. The diversity of the Jewish people is staggering. In any one given room, we can see age and experience separated by several decades. Jews by choice, atheists, and rib-rocked traditionalists all attend programs, each for a different reason. I see people whose grandparents shared the same eastern European shtetl with my great grandparents, and friends who don’t identify as Jewish at all. And all of us pray in the v’ahavta, v’sheenantam l’vanekha, “Teach them to your children.”
The Rabbis of yore knew there would be a tension between the way religion was always done and the way it would be done in the future, by our children. As we place the Torah back into the ark, we sing, “Chadeish yameinu k’kedem,” or “renew our days as in old,” which is a conscious paradox - it’s the exact inversion of the concept “old.” Old usually means never changing, always static, constant, yet here it is implied to be renewed or fresh. In the prayer, the days of old are both unchanged and brand new. Of the many paradoxes in Judaism, this is a kitsch summation of the generation gap, “Make our days new again as they were in olden times,” or how can we give our kids a meaningful heritage - exactly what we had as children? Each generation inherits Torah, and each generation safeguards its passage to the next one to renew. There’s a famous Talmudic tale of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai and his son. Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai (also known as the Rashbi) cursed the Roman government who worked on the roads because he saw that they were breaking Shabbat. God, upset at Rabbi Yohai’s unappreciation of the world, sentenced him and his son to live in a cave for twelve years. From this story we come to learn we cannot fight the way of the world, and that we need to adapt our Torah to new and unforeseen circumstances. From these early legends of Israel under Roman occupation, we learn about the transmission of Torah in times of duress. It needed to adapt to Roman occupation if it wanted to survive. And so, when we say at Passover “In every generation they arise to destroy us,” and when we recline on pillows exactly as the Roman patricians would have dined in luxury, we renew the JCC Senior Adult Club and Brenner Family Early Learning Center old. It’s a beautiful and comical nod to the past, how our Students build edible menorahs together during Chanukah with candy donated by Hershey Foods. “old days” are being “renewed” through ritual. Here’s where I point out the silver lining to the vitriolic antisemitism pervading our contemporary society: while we may be experiencing the worst spate of hate in recent memory, it is forcing us to reinvent ourselves in ways that are historically traditional. Jews have had to adapt to circumstances in which protective rulers were disposed, and disconcerting trends grew into floods. The most common ways we Jews have survived during these tight times not by creating a Golem to protect downtrodden Jews, but by renewing our days in ritual, just like how the olden days proclaim our Torah was transmitted. Just last week from the pulpit, I noted “It must have been hard for Abraham to ‘Lekh-Lekha’ or to ‘Go forth’ to the land of Canaan at the tender age of 75!” to which I was met with groans from the kahal. “So old?” A distinguished member of our board retorted, “What are you implying?” And it forced me to clarify - what was I implying? I say now, I’m implying that Abraham was old. And usually in the older parts of one’s life, beginning a new venture like a big move to a foreign land is a bad idea. I don’t know too many people of Abraham’s milieu who could have undergone a great migration. Yet a younger person will easily risk their life in a foolish enterprise, they have the resilience of youth and possibly an underdeveloped fear of failure. There are young members of our community who are unsure of their yiddishkeit. They may be estranged from shul or from the JCC or even from a shabbat dinner table. It’s up to us, as a community to find their voices and add them to Klal Yisrael, Continued on page 11