September 2020 Clergy Column

How do we create a sacred place for individual and communal teshuvah (“return” or “repentance”) online?

This is the challenging question that confronts our community as we stand on the verge of our annual, and always remarkable, multi-week opportunity for covenant renewal, solidarity and personal growth. The High Holy Day period that begins with S’lichot (Saturday evening, September 12) invites us to engage, through the process of teshuvah, in reformulation: to take the components of our identities and to realign them, to renew ourselves and to begin again.

This year, however, our time-tested High Holy Day liturgical practices that provide pathways for introspection, for reflecting on our deeds and how we missed the mark, and for examinations of our relationships with others and with God, are once again being tested. The word “liturgy” means “public rite.” Our liturgies for the High Holy Days comprise a meaningful interplay between the individual and the community. We confess our individual sins in a public space; each of us asks for forgiveness from God, communally; we are to listen to the sounds of the shofar in public, together. And yet, as we know, our present circumstances prevent us from gathering together, in person, in one place. By necessity, we are reformulating Beth Am’s minhagei hamaqom (lit. “customs or traditions of the place”) for the High Holy Days, and I invite you to take part in this communal endeavor.

During the past six months, in ways large and small, we have all engaged in acts of reformulation of our own literal and figurative “places” in the world, and the patterns and customs through which we interact with others. We have discovered, improvised, often through trial and error, new ways to work, to learn and to connect with friends and families. We’ve developed a range of approaches to contending with the isolation and stress of the pandemic. Limitations spur creativity: by necessity we each have become adept reformulators of our individual lives. The skills we have developed this year will serve us well as we gather as a community, online, for a High Holy Day season unlike any before.

Accordingly, the clergy and staff have been working hard to reformulate our High Holy Day services and programs for our virtual gatherings. The name of our machzor for the High Holy Days, a machzor for which Rabbi Janet Marder, Beth Am’s Rabbi Emerita, served as a lead editor, is Mishkan HaNefesh. The word mishkan refers to the sanctuary that, in the narratives of the Book of Exodus, the Israelites utilized as a flexible and portable worship space while journeying through the wilderness. The word nefesh means “soul” or “person.” One way to translate the name of our machzor is “Sanctuary of the Soul.” In the introduction to Mishkan Hanefesh, the editors share their hope “that this machzor will be a ‘meeting place’ for the inner life of each individual, the warm embrace of community, and the sacred traditions of the Jewish people.”

It is with this same hope and intentions that Beth Am’s Program Team and lay leaders are creating our online mishkan. This will be a new experience for us all. No doubt we will encounter some glitches. When we do, we’ll all take a collective breath and remind ourselves to be patient. No doubt it will feel odd, at first, to engage with our High Holy Day traditions in a virtual space, but we’ll get used to it. After all, we have become adept at gathering together, and sharing with one another, online. And I promise that what we will create together will be something new and exciting. Together, we will create a sacred space without walls, a sanctuary defined by our faces and our committed participation, and like our sanctuary on Arastradero Road, a place of warmth, risk and reward.

My clergy colleagues and I look forward to meeting you there.

With wishes for a good and sweet New Year.

L'shalom,

Rabbi Jeremy Morrison