Kindling the Light of Diversity

by Rabbi Matthew Soffer

Diversity

On July 8th I led my final “Soul Food Friday” Shabbat service as the Director of the Riverway Project, our community’s 20’s and 30’s engagement initiative. Unlike the 67 prior Soul Food Fridays that I led, this time I made a simple request—that instead of gathering separately at our usual 7:30 p.m. time, we take a “leap of faith” and share our worship experience with the broader Temple Israel community, at 6:00 p.m. outside on Nessel Way.

When our Temple Israel leadership founded the Riverway Project in 2001, it was a counter-cultural venture. No synagogue in America had yet invested its resources so stoutly in connecting young adults to Jewish life. But the problem was blaring and dire. You could enter virtually any synagogue in the country, look around on Friday night, and see practically no one in his or her late teens to late-30’s. That is a 20-year absence in connection to synagogues. If synagogues are meant to be centers for lifelong connection to the Jewish community, then complacency with a 20-year gap of engagement is the very definition of negligence. In the face of this reality, TI had the guts to do what no other community had done: invest; let go of the assumption that “if you build it they will come,” and instead “meet them where they’re at;” hire a rabbi to reach out into neighborhoods; build community from the ground up.

This zealous commitment to engagement is largely what attracted me to enter this community seven years ago. Nevertheless, it took me that length of time to realize that Temple Israel’s investment in Riverway wasn’t only about ensuring that young adults had a synagogue to go to. It was equally about making sure that this community had young adults among us. It was about Diversity.

Temple Israel has a prophetic hunger for Diversity. We kindle Diversity like a Sabbath candle: if we neglect it, we lose part of our soul. Diversity shines upon all areas of our community. In our education work, under the leadership of Rabbi Jacobson and our devoted lay leaders, we continually recognize and celebrate the differences among our students; differences in backgrounds, learning processes, and all sorts of identities. We see every single student as uniquely endowed with his or her own sacred gifts.

In our worship and prayer culture, our communication with God encompasses what Rabbi Zecher aptly calls “integrative theology,” embracing the wondrously variegated ways that our people connect with meaning and holiness. We also celebrate—not just tolerate but cherish—the interfaith aspects of our community. We have family members in the “Jewish orb” of TI who are Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims, and so many of these families have found peace and spiritual authenticity within the warmth of TI’s inclusive embrace.

And the value of Diversity fuels our voracious pursuit of justice. Internalizing Deuteronomy’s injunction, “v’ahavtem et hageir ki geirim hayitem b’Eretz Mitzrayim- you shall love the Other, for you were the Other in the land of Egypt” (10:19), we will never be satisfied until loving appreciation for the “otherness of the Other” becomes manifest in the streets of our cities and the social policies of our land.

In that joint Qabbalat Shabbat service, looking out upon the community of some 300 people, I saw: half were between the ages of 22-40; Jews and non-Jews, multiple races, ethnicities, gender identities, and sexual orientations. I saw congregants who are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. I saw members above the age of 80, and I saw my five-week-old daughter. I saw strangers showing up for the first time, with curiosity on their faces, as they wondered: who are these people singing in the middle of the street? And then I saw that we had volunteers standing at the entrance, smiling, ready to tell them: “welcome to Temple Israel of Boston.”