Kidoshim 2022

This past week one of our older congregants, Michael Gelfand, passed away.  He and his wife Edith are long time members of our shul, generous supporters, and are among those, over the years, who have worked very hard as leaders to make Kesher Israel the welcoming, bustling, thoughtful, community that it is.  Michael was buried in Israel and I have been in awe of how deep and wide the ties between members, alumni and friends of Kesher are.   

The cemetery chapel in Israel was filled with former members of Kesher and the funeral itself in Israel was arranged by a former Kesher member.  Though much of the family was unable to go, their extended Kesher family was there every step of the way, making arrangements, saying psalms, and indeed shoveling dirt for the burial itself.   

This past Sunday during shiva there was a zoom visit of Kesher members and alumni, over 40 people from many different generations and eras of the shul from around the world gathered to pay a virtual shiva call together.   Later that day I was at the shiva in person in Florida and the discussion turned to the funeral and the virtual Kesher shiva call.  People marveled at the way in which those who have attended our shul, even at different times, knew the Gelfands and felt part of a big Kesher family.  

This week’s parsha, Kidoshim, is filled with a mix of commandments, some between us and God, such as not engaging in sorcery and waiting three years before eating the fruit of a newly planted tree, and some commandments between us and others, such as having only true weights and measures and standing before the elderly.   The array of commandments  between us and God and between us and our fellow people are interwoven together, one after another.  The Torah does this to teach us that religion is not just, as is commonly thought, between us and God, just as importantly according to the Torah, are those between us and others.   The Torah puts them all together as if to show that there is no difference between them.   They all form one seamless whole, to keep one and not the other is to miss the point of Judaism, and its way of life entirely.  

This engagement in living on both levels at the same time, the interpersonal/communal and the religious/spiritual, is a wondrous gift which cultivates a very unique culture.   We are bound to each other in community and through obligations, but there is an element of the transcendent, the holy, interwoven within our communal and interpersonal life.  So too our religious life is not just between us and God, the community and our interpersonal relationships are part and parcel of our interactions with God and of our spiritual life.   

Pehas this is part of the secret sauce which helps make a committed Shul community so interconnected and so strong such that these relationships last so long and spread so wide.   Our connections with each other and as a community also have spiritual power and our spiritual life is also communal.  This synergy makes shul communities like Kesher Israel so very powerful and if we cultivate them correctly, with warmth and open arms, they will last us a lifetime, and indeed many generations.