Rabbi Jeret's Column - August 2005

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August 2005

Dear Friends,

As I author this message, Arianna, Jacob, and I are in the midst of preparations for our impending move to Palos Verdes. While immersed in boxes, tape, and bubble-wrap, we feel an excitement beyond which words can express as we prepare to join all of you at Ner Tamid.

Over the course of the last several months, though we have not yet begun officially our journey together with you, we have had regular opportunities to visit Ner Tamid. Our enthusiasm has grown greater with each adventure from Tarzana to the South Bay. The beauty of our new surroundings and the warmth and spirit of the synagogue's membership, lay-leadership, and staff suggest a vast potential for the great good that we can all achieve together at Ner Tamid, both in celebration of a more personal and communal Jewish experience and in service of the Jewish people as a whole.

It is also the case that with each trip down to Ner Tamid, our familiarity with our new community has deepened. During this period I met with some of you simply to have the opportunity to get to know one another or to address pressing or timely matters. I enjoyed my initial Bar/Bat Mitzvah meetings with families and students and I was invited by one of our wonderful high school students to represent Jews and Judaism at a local public school. I also participated in a panel of the Dawn Unity Group. Arianna and I have each taken great pleasure in getting together with new friends and in attending Ner Tamid's outstanding "350th Anniversary of Jews in America" Concert. We were even blessed with the opportunity to celebrate with many of you our son Jacob's 2nd birthday on May 22nd at CNT's Annual Congregational Meeting.

Two of my most rewarding experiences during this intensive period of introduction have been my time spent with the synagogue's staff and that which I’ve shared with Ner Tamid’s lay-leadership. Ner Tamid is blessed with a cadre of clergy, professionals, and administrative and custodial staff who serve our community with great loyalty and commitment, in addition to achieving daily the level of excellence in their work to which the entire community has become accustomed. Ner Tamid’s lay-leadership has wwelcomed me and my family with great warmth and is wise and able to the indispensable role that it must serve in support of the important work that we will all engage in together as a community. As well, numerous individuals have taken time to answer my queries and share their insights and observations as I commence my spiritual leadership at Ner Tamid. In this regard, I want to extend my sincere and enduring gratitude to Sam Osofsky, Howard Blumberg, Bob Rothman, Eve Wechsberg, Cantor Radwine, Rabbi Danzig, and Rabbi Shulman, and to so many others, for their generosity of time and perspective.

All of these experiences, taken together with those which led me initially to accept your invitation to serve as Ner Tamid's spiritual leader, have revealed to me a synagogue in which participants treat one another with respect while caring lovingly one for the other. These are essential values for any healthy community and, at Ner Tamid, these values illustrate daily the essence of who we are as we strive to embrace and reflect the Jewish imperatives which nurture loving and healthy interpersonal relationships. Ner Tamid's previous spiritual leaders are to be commended and respected roundly for succeeding in leading our community toward a culture of compassion and respect. However, at the end of the day, no leader can lead people to places to which they would rather not travel. Ultimately, it is the Ner Tamid family as a whole who deserves highest accolades for assimilating, reflecting, and sustaining the teachings of its rabbis past. By consequence, ours is a community which understands with great clarity who we are.

Our future together awaits us. It will be born of study, of passionate Jewish engagement, of contemplation, and, most importantly, of the truths that will emerge from the deepening relationships that we will forge together over the years to come. No doubt, along the way, our synagogue will grow and change. This is inevitable. I am a different person and a different leader than the rabbis with whom you have been blessed in the past. New members join. Lay-leadership turns over. Most definitely, when healthy, we all grow and change over time and, of course, the circumstances in which we find ourselves change as well. The father of the field of Social Psychology, Kurt Lewin, taught that the only constant is change itself!

While both the inevitability and the oft-opportunity of change serve as a constant of life, one challenge presented by change is the responsibility to preserve that which mustn’t be forgone. Expressed in terms of our own community, it is precisely the essence of who we are that mustn't change; a loving, nurturing, embracing and diverse extended Jewish family, seeking continually and evermore so to create and sustain a figurative space worthy of a Divine Presence. As your spiritual leader, I pledge to you that I will do everything within my own power to ensure that we will indeed remain exactly such a community and that I will remind you and, at times, challenge you to do the same.

We will remain a community defined by the dignity and loving-kindness with which we treat one another and with which we address the world about us. We will remain a family in which each of us will aim always to provide for one another comfort, meaning, and fellowship in a Jewish context, knowing all the while with certainty in our hearts that each of these is available to us to the extent that we may want or need them to be so. We will protect, deepen, and broaden our expression of our core values even as we grow and change, over time, in response to the evolving needs and new challenges of today and tomorrow because who we are will always define how we must approach our understandings and responses to new realities. The direction in which we will head, my own vision for the future course of this community, will be grounded in the very values and virtues for which this community stands and which struck so deep a chord inside my own soul that I was unable to dismiss or deny my own inner-calling to serve as your spiritual leader.

And so, at the dawn of the Jewish future that we will build together, I will conclude this opening message with a story. Approximately one hundred years ago, my grandfather's grandfather, Rabbi Israel Lipkin (known later as Reb Yisroel Salanter, having been sent by his parents at the age of twelve to the Yeshiva of Salant for advanced study with the Sage of Salant), taught the following: "A rabbi with whom everyone agrees is not a rabbi; a rabbi with whom everyone disagrees is not a mensch (a decent person)!" Approximately one century later, this teaching, as others among my great-great-grandfather's teachings, has served to date as a guidepost for my own rabbinate and continues to do so. One century after my great-great-grandfather’s lesson was first taught, when I first had opportunity to visit Ner Tamid, I spent time with your previous rabbi, my colleague, and now evermore my friend, Rabbi Ron Shulman. Affixed to a wall in his study was a rendition of Reb Yisroel Salanter's lesson above. With change there is great opportunity, but only when the essence of who we are remains our constant.

May God bless us with the strength to sustain, to deepen, and to broaden who we are while granting us the courage necessary to become that which the future challenges and inspires us to become.

With every blessing for peace, wholeness, and all that is good, I am,

Your rabbi,

Rabbi Isaac Jeret