Shabbat Shalom ~ Vaetchanan 2025

Shalom WJC Family,

While I was away last month, I thought a lot about the concept of community. As I mentioned last week, I believe community is a place people can gather who don’t necessarily agree on many important things, but who find being together more valuable than drawing lines between them. So ‘community,’ where people learn to live together despite differences, is not the same as ‘tribe,’ where people gather based on commonalities. In order to make community work, there must be communication – a striving for understanding (not convincing) that enables mutual respect and growth. It is an idea I learned from my Jewish education.

For one year after college I attended the Conservative Yeshiva at the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center. Studying at Yeshiva I discovered hevruta style learning. Your hevruta is your study partner, the person you pour over text with – often cryptic, ancient texts open to varied interpretation. Your hevruta is the person set up to disagree with you over the text. They are your textual codiscoverer, but also your textual adversary. And that Talmudic sparring partner gets the extraordinary title of hevruta, which comes from the word haver, translated variously as friend or neighbor or member of the community. Your haver is the one with whom you can disagree, not the one who agrees with you all the time.

As we make efforts to weave and maintain our strong communal fabric at WJC, I am constantly thinking about these ideas. How can we build a sacred space open for people who may have deeply different opinions and ideas? Where people of different backgrounds and perspectives can come together and learn, and worship, and grow together? Here we are not striving for intellectual or even spiritual sameness; we are striving for sacred togetherness with all its beauty, complications, challenges, and rewards. Maintaining that sacred, open space takes constant effort and is at the heart of many of our services, programs, and events.

This Shabbat will be a bit of a celebration of hevruta at WJC. When I arrived at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) for Rabbinical School, I made a new hevruta, Rabbi Joshua Ben-Gideon. Rabbi Ben-Gideon and I have been learning regularly together, sometimes sparring, always challenging and growing, for over 27 years. On Sunday his daughter Vered will marry third-year Rabbinical School student at JTS, Micah Simons. At Saturday morning services in our chapel they will celebrate their auf ruf and I, who blew shofar at her baby naming, will have the privilege of giving them a blessing at the Torah. What an extraordinary honor and celebration of hevruta, community, and the Jewish people. I hope you will be in shul Saturday to share the moment, and to enjoy as Micah delivers the Dvar Torah.

I also hope you saw the announcement last week that Dr. Mijal Bitton will be the keynote speaker at our Pre-High Holiday, Selichot program and service on Saturday night September 13th. Among other roles, Dr. Bitton is a fellow at the Hartman Institute, one of the great hevruta learning institutions in the Jewish world right now. The event begins at 8:30pm with a dessert reception followed by the presentation by Dr. Bitton. The keynote will be followed by an extraordinary musical and uplifting service presented by the cantors and rabbis of the four participating synagogues. The registration link is now live. Sign up here!

As always, we will also have beautiful services on Friday night and Saturday evening.

See you in shul,

RJA