We are blessed with a community that is vibrant and diverse.  Many Shuls would be overjoyed to have the liveliness that hundreds of young professionals bring to a community, the wisdom of dozens of accomplished thinkers and politicians, and the commitment that many vatikin, those who have been members of the community for decades, bring.   Kesher Israel represents a great synergy and a place of enormous potential as a model of Modern Orthodoxy.  But the elements that are so integral to community, are hard to maintain in the age of COVID.

Perhaps, the community is not just friends and a place to daven and socialize, but an entity larger and more vibrant than the sum of its parts.   A web that is made up of each of us, but transcends us.  A cultural, spiritual, and social mesh which has a unique identity, the ability to instill feelings of welcoming, belonging, and spiritual inspiration upon those who are touched by it, and the potential to impact the society at large, and the world, beyond our ability to do so as individuals.

How do we preserve this web so that it can continue to function in a healthy, creative and passionate way, during this time of semi-suspended animation?  A time when the opposite of community surrounds us, when we all are engulfed by a wariness of being together and of coming too close?

Many of us have friends with whom we are communicating virtually or meeting at a social distance.  But community is more.  It is a synergistic web which is larger and more widely impactful than all our individual friendships.  Reaching out to our friends is wonderful and vital, but to maintain the invisible interwoven filagree of community which supports, which inspires, and which helps us to make sense of the world around, requires more than our regular social interactions.  It  requires us to reach beyond our intuitive everyday circles, toward something larger.

There is now no central gathering place where we can feel the power of community coursing- elbow to elbow at kiddush.  The hotel ballrooms where we strengthened the communal links as hundreds of us ate shabbat meals together are closed.  The frenzied, inebriated, holy joy of Simchat Torah hakafot, and the deep feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood they engendered, for this year, will likely be nil.  So, what can we do to retain communal integration, and to reinforce the strands of the web of community, so it can continue to embrace us all?   I would love to hear your ideas, but here are some starters.

•  Call someone in the Kesher community who you don’t know well.  Someone you met twice in Shul,   someone you only know a little bit, or someone who is new to D.C., but you have not met. (About 30 new people, singles and families, moved into the Kesher community this month, call me or the hospitality committee, and we will be happy to give you names!).  This maintains the web.

• Volunteer.  Get together with some people from the Kesher community and volunteer to pack bags of food at a food pantry.  This helps the community to impact the larger world.

• Practice an extra act of chesed, kindness.   Are you baking challah?  Look on the Kesher membership list to find someone who is not the obvious person you would bring one to, not your everyday friend.    Text them and drop one off for them with a Shabbat Shalom note.

• Mail a note on paper to a fellow Kesherite from a different age group.  This will shock and endear!

• Give a donation in someone’s honor to the Shul or another cause, “just because we miss seeing you in Shul.”

• Order boxed shabbat meals and invite people for a picnic with social distance.

With God’s help we will find ways to maintain the majical web of community which transcends us all, and when we return to normal functioning, be pleased with the strong community which is there to rewelcome and encompass us.