Divrei Torah - Guests/Members

Shana tova. A few years ago, at my first CDT Yom Kippur service, I was hungry and a bit confused about who was speaking during this segment and why. I've since come to look forward to this five minute break from repentance each year, because it really showcases what makes CDT special: our community. So I hope you'll permit me the five minute distraction this year. 

My name is Jeff and together with my wife Rachel and our two kiddos Jules and Sylvan, we are a proud family of both CDT and the CDT religious school. When we are not here, I am a landscape designer and a fine gardener, Rachel is a middle school teacher, Sylvan's a fifth grader, and Jules is in eighth grade (and a student in Rachel's science class!).

But it wasn't always so! I grew up in South Florida in a lovely little community called Wellington. It was a small suburb at the time, but there was a reasonably sized Jewish community, which I generally took for granted. I enjoyed our big family Seders with grandparents and aunts and uncles and various Greatest Generation folks, but I never really felt an imperative to be Jewish. In fact, I grew to resent it a bit as an additional burden that non-Jews didn't have. I remember my friend Brooke in seventh grade saying, in a class discussion about religion, "I don't believe in organized religion, so I'm actually my own religion" and thinking that that would never fly for a Jewish kid.

Fast forward a bit, and my relationship to Judaism wasn't much different in college. I remember thinking at the time that Hillel wasn't for me. My reasoning was that my alma mater Brown University was filled with amazing and passionate people with all sorts of interests and it didn't make sense for me to seek out a group who was similar to me merely by virtue of being born into a certain religion. I wanted the environmentalists, the activists, and the farmers. Hang onto that point, because I'll be back to it in a moment. Anyway, things went on like that through most of college. I knew I was Jewish, I had little objection to it, but it wasn't a thing I was going to commit very deeply to in my daily activities. 

After school, I had an opportunity to live in my grandmother's house just out of New York City in Bayonne, New Jersey. She had moved to Florida full-time and it was helpful to the family for someone to live there as we prepared to have it listed for sale. So I had this gorgeous three-story home just 20 minutes from New York City by train while I was working and preparing for graduate school. My interest in the stories and lives of the greatest generation led me to the morning minyan of the small Jewish community left in this demographically shifted city. Five days a week, for 20 minutes, I helped to make a 10 person minyan with, among others, my mother's high school math teacher. Each day, this 94-year-old man arrived at 7:30 AM to be a minyan maker. Inside his prayer book was actually the comic section of that morning's paper, and he would sometimes laugh at inappropriate times during the 20 minute service. I once asked him: "Max, why do you always come to this minyan if you're just here to read the comics?" He answered me with a quote from Harold Kushner, rendered beautifully: "Judaism is less about believing, more about belonging. It's less about what we owe God, and more about what we owe each other."

That stuck with me. I began to think of Judaism as a generations-long relay race. You run the track, hand the baton to the next generation's runner, and then sit on the stands to cheer the new runners on. I got to thinking of all the events that have conspired to stop those runners… The crusades, the inquisitions, Goliath(?), the Holocaust… and yet somehow, limping along, fighting through pain, the past runners managed to get that baton to me. And now there are so many cheers from those previous runners and I have this baton and for the first time maybe ever there's a perfectly clear track. Do I know why this relay race began? Do I expect some sort of prize at the end? Does it matter? No, but the cheering of the crowds and the ruach they bring makes running the race feel like an honor and privilege, not a burden. And the echoing silence of the crowd– were I to drop the baton and wander out of the stadium because it was "one more thing" and I'm plenty busy already– I couldn't imagine it. 

OK, so suddenly I have this epiphany that Judaism is something powerful and important that I want to cherish and pass on. I'm 22 years old, substitute teaching at my mom's high school, and spending a surprising amount of time with World War II veterans at a tiny minyan in Bayonne, New Jersey. My plan for graduate school was still an open concern. 

But this isn't really a seminar on me, and I don't need to explain the next few years. Suffice it to say that I ended up at Cornell for graduate school. I met and fell in love with this awesome woman (we got married, she's right there), and we moved to Boston. A quick side note: we were looking for places to live where we might both get good jobs and decided on Boston after crashing on couches up and down the East Coast. Best decision we ever made, I absolutely adore the city. Rachel always jokes that I should be the official greeter for tourists, because I never run out of things to say about this fantastic place. I'm so proud of Boston.

At a certain point, we realized we were going to have to find a religious school for our kids. We had a vibrant chavurah of 4 or 5 other couples and had terrific Shabbats and seders with this chosen family. But neither of us had the patience to teach our kids Hebrew or jewish history, and anyway, we felt that a cohort of similar aged kids would take the sting out of the whole experience of religious education. Anyone who has been on this journey, knows that it is a slog to pop into all these different services and try to find the right one. And, truth be told, Dorshei Tzedek wasn't even on our radar. Not because we opposed it, but because we hadn't heard of it. It wasn't until we went to our friends' baby's first birthday party (Shout out to Arielle and Andrew and Ezra and Aviva) that we were introduced to CDT. I remember hanging out in their backyard with all of these crunchy, hippie Jews, and asking "Where are all of you folks when we're synagogue shopping?" The answer, it turned out, was CDT. Literally all of them were at CDT. Well, we checked out a few services and events, and found a warm and inviting community of like-minded Jews. Remember earlier when I said that I wasn't interested in Hillel because what I was looking for were the environmentalists, the activists, the farmers, not just the Jews? Well, it turns out you can have everything if you find the right community. CDT is full of caring and kind people. They are doctors, teachers, activists, professors, some of them may well be substitute teaching at their mother's old high schools. This is a place for everyone. And now, our daughter Jules is voluntarily – VOLUNTARILY! – participating in high holiday services, even after her bat mitzvah, because she gets to spend time with her religious school class. Through CDT, we also discovered camp Havaya, the Reconstructionist summer camp in Pennsylvania, and the kids get to have a top notch camp experience as well. 

Would I change anything about CDT? Sure, I'd have the huge group of you who are only here for the high holidays show up on the regular. I'd encourage more families to enjoy the religious school, and I'd put Gann about 9 minutes closer to our house, but otherwise, we've got a pretty good thing going here. 

And so I'll leave it there for now. I wish you all an easy fast and hope to see you around the neighborhood before we all hibernate for winter.