Jpod Judaism

Jpod Judaism
Yom Kippur 5758
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg

Isn’t strange how Yom Kippur is a magnet? Jews everywhere converge on the synagogues. We converge on the synagogues during the High Holidays like sparrows returning to San Juan Capistrano. The Jewish crowds that come back to the synagogue for these holidays are not unlike the Jewish pilgrims of antiquity who ascended to Jerusalem three times a year to celebrate the pilgrimage festivals.

The pilgrimage is the religious experience of convergence. The religious experience of convergence draws its power from the center, a magnetic, holy place that attracts people to it. Convergence is the act of moving toward union. Convergence is the power of people coming from different directions toward one place.

Convergence is a very old and traditional dimension of religious experience, expressed in Judaism in the concentric circles of holiness.

The pilgrim was converging on the centers of holiness, getting closer to God as it were. Judaism differed from the pagan religions and their local shrines. Judaism of antiquity had a national center, a holy city, a holy temple, a holy priesthood, and a destination for pilgrimage. The Temple in Jerusalem was considered one of the wonders of the ancient world. The entire people would converge at special times of the year to share a common experience of Jewish people hood and the common worship of the God of Israel. On Pesah, Shavuot, and Sukkot, as well as the Yamim Noraim, Jerusalem was filled with pilgrims, hundreds of thousands of people.

Passover was the most popular of all these pilgrimages. Imagine you are living 1,942 years ago. It is the year 65CE and you are a young person making your way to Jerusalem with your family for the festival of Pesah. You are going up to the city with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims-Olim- to offer the Paschal sacrifice on the Temple Mount. Each family clan brings its lamb to be slaughtered, roasted, and eaten. The Temple mount is filled with the chorus of Levites chanting the psalms of the Hallel, patriarchs are retelling the story of the Exodus, repeating the Biblical verses. The smoke, the cacophony of sounds, the mass of humanity is stupendous and unforgettable. The joy and power of this moment is engraved in your memory and you will never forget it.

Little do you know that this is one of the last times that you or any of your family and friends will converge on Jerusalem to celebrate with the throngs. In five years, the Temple will be in ruins, your people will be defeated, and the future of your religion and nation will be in doubt.
The crushing of Jerusalem by the Roman armies destroyed not only the Temple but the powerful religious experience of convergence. This was a critical moment in Jewish history. This is when Judaism should have stopped breathing. It seemed that God had punished us by destroying the point of convergence where God and Israel came together.

How did we survive this historically crushing catastrophe? What transformation took place within the Jewish people that enabled us to overcome the loss of something so critical to our national identity?

Let’s jump ahead a few years to 75CE and imagine you are this young person who has now become an adult. Pesah is coming. In your mind you see the ruins of Jerusalem. The massive celebrations are becoming a distant memory. And the ritual of Pesah has become a void.

This year you have received an invitation from a Rabbi in Yavneh, the small town where the rabbis fled just before the destruction of Jerusalem. They established an academy there to keep the Torah alive. This hospitable rabbi has invited you to a special meal in his home in honor of Pesah.

You go full of trepidation and with a heavy heart, but you are surprised that this intimate gathering brings joy to you. The telling of the story of the Exodus is done like in the olden days, but the telling has some new elements you had never heard up on the Temple mount. There were lots of questions and surprises which kept the children’s attention. You eat Matzah and Maror like the old days. The Pesah-Paschal Lamb- is now only represented by a symbol. Along with your host and the other guests, you sing, you study, and you acknowledge the destruction of Jerusalem. With the others you express hope of returning to a Jerusalem and the Temple rebuilt. During the last five years there has been nothing but darkness. This celebration, while it was nothing compared to the pilgrimage, was every bit as powerful and memorable. You asked your host if you could bring it to your family the coming year.

We recognize the meal as a Seder. This simplified story highlights a theory advanced by scholars of Jewish antiquity. The Passover Seder as we know it emerged after the destruction of the Temple. It is a rite that replaced the Temple celebration. It takes elements from the original pilgrimage festival, but scales down the celebration to the setting of a home. The emerging Seder was ritually crafted by the rabbis to restore the joy of the celebration of the Passover. But the rabbis made the celebration more intimate, more accessible, more participatory, and ultimately portable for Jews wherever they wandered.

The home Seder replaced the lost practice of convergence. We could not be pilgrims, so instead there is a new emphasis on hospitality and a new religious experience centered on the table gathering. Instead of converging on Jerusalem, each household was to reach out and bring in. Each household became a source of Jewish storytelling. Each table became a source of Jewish energy. Instead of all the people gathered in one place, the people scattered into smaller groups, becoming Jewish storytelling pods where the great drama of God and the Jewish people was reenacted in living rooms wherever Jews lived. A pod is a small vessel. It is also a seed like, peapod. The Jews reacted to the destruction of their central gathering place by making every home a pod, a small vessel and seed of Jewish life. This was the Jpod generation. Except it was a 1900 year ago.

This is what the Jpod generation accomplished. In place of a single central dramatic reenactment in Jerusalem, the Jews discovered the power of the micro feast-a religious experience of unique power which could be transmitted family by family, from host to guest, from generation to generation.

Jews by necessity abandoned the Judaism of convergence for the Judaism of intimacy. We gave up the religion of mass gatherings to become a religion of dining rooms. We had to leave the central altar in favor of the family table, give up our identity as pilgrims going to high places to become sanctifiers of domestic spaces. Jews learned to cultivate religious experience around a group meal; we transferred the songs from the altar and brought them to the home table. We learned to tell our story through ritual playfulness. We realized that we could foster profound spirituality through homemade gastronomy.

The transition from Temple based Judaism to home centered Judaism forever altered the spiritual identity of the Jewish people. It is one of the greatest adaptations in the history of religion and culture.

Judaism actually never lost the spirituality of convergence. The synagogue served that purpose and we feel its power at this very moment as we converge to mark the great fast day. Yet the true uniqueness of Judaism that emerged after we lost our Temple was our capacity to locate the most powerful and memorable religious experiences in our homes and around our tables. We transmitted our religion by opening our homes and sharing these powerful experiences with extended family, friends, guests, and strangers.

Post Temple Judaism created a culture of the table: The rituals of the home Sabbath table emerged after the destruction. Festivals, once centered in Jerusalem, morphed into synagogue and home celebrations. Hospitality traditions developed around the Seders of Rosh Hashannah, the feast prior to Yom Kippur, the meals in the Sukkah and the parody feast of Purim, and the mother of all Seders, Pesah.

The Jewish culture of the table emerged as a response to crisis. Jews had to change or become extinct. We also live at a time of crisis. Sixty years ago we saw the mass destruction of ½ of our people. Over the last 100 years and especially after the Holocaust, millions of our people converged on the ancient land of the Jews to restore a Jewish commonwealth. This convergence was not a religious pilgrimage, but a powerful secular and national movement to bring power and security to the Jewish people.

We are living in the age of the third Jewish commonwealth. We live during the reemergence of Jewish convergence. But during this time of ingathering, we are also witnessing in the Diaspora an unraveling of our people . Nationally only 40% of Jews affiliate with synagogues or Jewish organizations. Of that 40%, 80% are minimally engaged by the synagogues and organizations they affiliate with or with other forms of Jewish life. Only a small number of Jews are engaged in Jewish life.

Where this is most evident is the decline of the Judaism of the table. There are many reasons for this. The loss of Jewish home practice is part of the broad decline of communal Jewish identity among millions of Diaspora Jews. Part of the reason Jewish home practice has declined is that Jewish institutions, synagogues and jccs since the 40s have emphasized building Temples and centers at the expense of Judaism of the home.
In a change with major demographic implications, Jews in America became widely dispersed. Most of us no longer live near our synagogue or in a Jewish neighborhood. American culture with its stress on individualism and the sovereign self has weakened the traditions of hospitality and the sharing of our Sabbath and festival table.

So many of don’t know or feel comfortable singing around the table. We have lost the art of Jewish table conversation. We don’t know how to share Torah with our friends and our guests. We would feel awkward having a stranger at our table for Shabbat. We are embarrassed at being too Jewish with our non Jewish friends. We are becoming strangers to the Jewish spirituality of home and hospitality.

Three years ago I left the pulpit to conduct an experiment. I wanted to see what would happen if I took a break from being a teacher from the Bimah and began to be a teacher at the table. The idea was simple. I would work with people to make their Shabbat and festival tables come alive with Jewish food, song, conversation, and fellowship. I would infuse new energy into homes which already marked Shabbat and work with less experienced households to ease them into home Shabbat meals and hospitality. I wanted to help Jews recover the capacity to make our homes a Jpod and to learn anew the mitzvah of hospitality.

For three years I convened over one hundred Shabbat feasts in homes. I worked with hosts and asked them to invite their circles of friends and guests who they thought would be moved by an authentic Jewish home experience. Many of those hosts continue to offer powerful experiences in their homes, and many of the guests who attended started to bring Shabbat and festival celebrations into their homes. I wanted to revive the Judaism of the Jpod.

I learned something very important in my initiative during the last three years. There was something special about a rabbi being a guest at a home Shabbat gathering. It subtly communicated that every Jew can bring holiness to his or her home. The host feels that the Rabbi honors our way of doing Shabbat and shares together with us the holiness of this table gathering. I knew that the admiration and support of Chabad in every community arose from the willingness of the Chabad rabbis to open up their homes and share their Shabbat tables. I wanted to take it further. I wanted to show that every Jew can do Shabbat in her home, that every Jew can make their home into a Jpod. I wanted to support my congregants committed to doing this by being there and accepting an invitation to attend and teach.

To me empowering a Jewish family to recover these Shabbat and festival table traditions and to share them with others is a far more powerful rabbinic tool than a 100 sermons. It meant compromising my long held practice of not driving on Shabbat. But if there is any chance of reviving the home as the center of Jewish life, I needed to get into homes to model what that looked like.

Every authentic and vital Jewish community I have ever seen has a strong Shabbat table culture. Dozens and dozens of households, Jpods, create beautiful Shabbat happenings and share their Shabbat with family, friends, and new faces. I would like to foster and expand our Shabbat table culture and restore the centrality of the holiness of the Jewish home in our congregation.

Our theme for the year is Jewish hospitality-Hachnasat Orchim. The core of this effort is to encourage people to celebrate Shabbat and festival meals at homes and to share these experiences with others in our congregational family and with new faces.

The Talmud speaks of the importance of reaching out to new faces. The word in Hebrew is Panim Hadashot meaning either new face or the plural, new faces. The Talmud’s teaching about Panim Hadashot reveals a core spiritual attribute of Judaism.

In Jewish tradition, a newly married couple celebrates seven days of feasts and parties after the Huppah ceremony. The name of the party is Seven Blessings-Sheva Berachot. These parties are seen as a great mitzvah and friends and the community rallied to hold them in different homes for the newlyweds. The Talmud sets two conditions for people to host a Sheva Berachot in their home. First you need a minyan, 10 Jews, to be able to chant in public the seven blessings.

Second you need to invite Panim Hadashot-a new face- to join you at the table, someone who was not at the Huppah. The requirement of a new face gets at the heart of the Judaism of Jpod. A Jewish home should ideally be a place of rich and joyful Judaism. Hospitality, the sharing of joy, follows from cultivating a warm Jewish home and table. Sometimes it works in reverse. The act of hospitality, sharing with others, brings out our best. Our Jewish celebrations become vital in the presence of guests and in sharing a mitzvah.
Judaism teaches that the best joy is the one that issues from our homes and tables, in the relationships we forge in this intimate setting and the hospitality we extend to guests and strangers.

After we lost our Temple we could not share with our fellow Jews the pageantry of pilgrimage. We only had our homes, our tables, our simchas, and our friendliness. Jews discovered that sharing joy with others during our most happy and holy times would sustain us. Sharing our joy would sustain our families, our communities and ultimately our people. Jewish hospitality centered on the Sabbath and festival table-JPod Judaism-is the time tested way Jews spread the joyful character of our unique religious tradition. It is our ethical foundation as well, for we are commanded in the Torah to treat the stranger with compassion, for we were strangers in Egypt.

As we gather together at this most solemn time, let us also not forget in this moment of convergence, in this moment of awe and self reflection, that we cannot sustain Judaism without a shared joyfulness, without opening our homes and our family table. Let us restore the joy of the Jewish home and share it with both those we love and with Panim Hadashot-new faces. Make your home a Jpod.