Rabbi

Melissa Klein

President

David Smith

Vice President

Madeleine Langman

Vice President

Bronek Drozdowicz

Treasurer

Izzy Studzienko

Recording Secretary

Barbara Katz

Corresponding Secretary

Anita Goldman

Past President

Cary Oshins

Board Members

Gwen Greenberg
Janet Glassman
Julie Mackey
Leslie Collins
Lisa Schnell
Mark Stein
Sharon Minnick
Sylvia Sussman
Rochelle Topolsky

Voice Mail

610-435-3775
Leave a message and we will return your call (we may pick up only once or twice a week, please be patient)

JCC Front Desk

610-435-3571
Talk to Gail or Norma, who have a schedule of our events.

Email

http://listserv.shamash.org/
archives/ahpa.html. Click on AHPA, then click on "Join or leave the list." You will receive email updates of upcoming events.

Donations

Please mail all donations to
Am Haskalah c/o
Ignacy Studzienko
Treasurer
911 Hawthorn Road
Allentown, PA 18103-4677

Kol Nidrei Sermon [cont'd]

The Sukkah is a temporary dwelling that must not have a solid roof, and rather has a roof made of schach, materials that grew in the earth but are no longer attached to the earth, such as tree branches and bamboo. The Sukkah is a reminder of the huts we lived in during our forty years in the desert. I started thinking this year how interesting it is that we Jews focus on celebrating and commemorating the years wandering in the wilderness—part of our essential nature as a people is that we are not rooted in a particular location.

Our ambivalence about being rooted in space at least partly stems from the Jewish people’s long history of living in exile--in Persia, in Babylonia, in Europe, in America. Ours is a rich history of the creativity and adaptability of a civilization that has developed in numerous locations over hundreds of years. Even at times in history when Jewish life was thriving and flourishing, our ancestors never quite knew how long they could stay in a particular location. For example, in medieval Christian Europe, Jews were required to obtain a permit to live in a particular town and at the whim of the local official, they could lose this permit and suddenly be forced to leave their home of twenty years. I imagine that many of us are here in this room today because life in the Old Country was so difficult for our parents, or grandparents, or great-grandparents, and the difficult journey across the ocean, leaving behind everything that was familiar, was more enticing than staying put.

We are blessed to live in a time in history when the Jewish people have returned to the land of Israel, and for all its challenges, have built a thriving, beautiful country. We as Jews have the opportunity to return to our homeland, to experience living in a place structured around the rhythms of the Jewish calendar and being part of the majority culture. As an American Jew, I have always felt torn about where my home is—is it here in America, where I have lived most of my life, and where I am respected and valued as a woman rabbi, or is it in Israel, where I lived and studied for a number of years, and where I feel a deep sense of home and belonging and connection to the people and the land? Perhaps the teaching of Sukkot, that it’s about the wandering and not the arriving, can help us as we struggle with how rooted to become in a particular location.

In contrast to our ambivalence about being rooted in space, we Jews have very little ambivalence about our relationship to time. We are rooted in Jewish time. Jews all over the world are celebrating Yom Kippur tonight—this is for all of us our most sacred of days. Yom Kippur is sacred time that we share with one another as Jews, even the most secular among us. You may recall that our family friend Stan joined us here at Am Haskalah last year for Yom Kippur, and he shared that being an atheist, he had not been to Yom Kippur services for 45 years. And yet, he always knew that it was Yom Kippur and fasted on that day. Because of the centrality of this holiday for our people, Sandy Koufax became a Jewish hero in 1965 by refusing to pitch in the first game of the World Series because it was on Yom Kippur. Even the organization of Jewish radicals and atheists who threw a Grand Yom Kippur Ball in New York City in the 1880’s on Kol Nidrei night, complete with music, dancing, and buffet, were clear that it was Yom Kippur and were expressing their deep connection to the day by mocking the ritual.

We are all in agreement about the sacredness of Jewish time. In his beautiful series of essays entitled The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel argues that Judaism is a “religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” He asks, “What was the first holy object in the history of the world? Was it a mountain? Was it an altar?” No, the first thing declared holy, or kadosh, in the Torah, is the 7th day, the Shabbat. In the beginning of the Torah, after the extensive description of everything that is created—the heavens and the earth, the dry land and the stars, the plants and the animals, it is the 7th day that is declared holy—time and not space.

Am Haskalah, coming upon our 30th anniversary next year, is a congregation that is true to this pattern I have described—we gather regularly to mark the passage of sacred time; and yet, Am Haskalah has been ambivalent about becoming rooted in a particular location. As I have learned from long-time members, Am Haskalah has had many homes--the Finkelsteins’ basement, the old Agudas Achim downtown, the basement of St Timothy’s Lutheran Church, the Muhlenberg Hillel, and now for the past 5 years, the JCC. When our primary space has not been available for various services over the years, Am Haskalah has also met in college auditoriums, restaurants, and hotels. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, we have been a wandering congregation.

As I mentioned, the Torah ends with the Israelites not yet in the promised land; and yet, they are just about there, and the Bible does indeed continue with the accounts of entering the land and setting down roots. In recent months, it has become more and more clear to me that it is time for Am Haskalah to enter a new phase—to find a home that will help us to sanctify and deepen our relationship to sacred time, a home that is warm and welcoming, where our ark can take off its wheels and rest in one place for awhile, and where our ner tamid, our eternal light, can burn continuously. I imagine a home where we can hang a beautiful yahrzeit plaque to remember members and loved ones who are no longer with us, a home where our members can gather during the day or in the evenings for study and socializing and social justice work, a home where our teens can hang out and where our religious school students can hang their art work, a home with a Jewish lending library and resource center, a home with a kitchen that enables us to prepare and share home-cooked meals.

The JCC has been a wonderful space for us to meet this past 5 years—through renting space here, we have become more integrated into the larger Jewish community, and this has been a warm and welcoming space within which to celebrate holidays and life cycle events (without having to set up chairs ourselves). However, we are now at a crossroads where the JCC no longer meets many of our needs. The JCC is often not available when we need space, and we find ourselves meeting in several different locations-- back at St Tim’s for board meetings, at member’s homes or offices for committee meetings, at the First Presbyterian Church for our monthly potluck dinners. I am currently in need of an office, and we also need more classrooms for our religious school.

It is time for us to explore finding a new home, a home that will ground us so that we can put more energy into working towards our vision as a community. There are a few different models for thinking about a new home. We may decide to rent, buy, or build a space that is exclusively ours, which meets all of our needs except for our largest services, or we may find another religious community or organization with which to share a building. Figuring out how to go about working towards a new home will be a process for all of us to engage in this coming year. What is clear is that this is the time to begin to put down roots as a congregation—our congregation is thriving, our religious school is growing, we play an important role in the fabric of the Lehigh Valley Jewish community. We are a warm, loving congregation that celebrates Judaism, that fully welcomes interfaith families, that honors difference, and that promotes healing and transformation, and it is time for us to have a home that more fully supports this work.

There is a verse in the book of Lamentations, a book written following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, which reads: (Lamentation 4:1), “The hallowed stones are poured out at the head of every street.” A midrash interprets this verse to mean: When the Temple was destroyed, the Holy One scattered its stones over all the world, and every place where a stone fell, a House of Prayer was built. It is for this reason that a House of Prayer is called a little sanctuary, because it has a little of the Temple, a stone of the Temple, which is sunk into every house of prayer (p.176-7, Agnon)

I believe that there is a stone from the Temple buried somewhere here in the Lehigh Valley, waiting for Am Haskalah to establish a synagogue upon its site. I invite you to join me in searching for that stone.