Divre Harav

Divre Harav/Words from the Rabbi – Summer, 2010

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One of my projects for the past couple of months has been working with a web designer on our new Ahavas Israel web site.  By the time you read this it should have replaced the web site that Paula Bojsen created for us about five years ago.  Paula created a state of the art web site which over the years has been a valuable virtual front door to the congregation.  It is fascinating to me how quickly time goes by in the internet world.  Five years is a generation.  A five year old web site looks dated, but more importantly, the technology that was used to create and maintain had become obsolete.  We undertook the redesign project in order to ensure that our web site functions not only as an attractive and informational brochure for potential members, but also as a communications tool for our congregational family.

While researching web sites of other synagogues, I found many, belonging to both large and small congregations, that contained broken links and out-of-date information.  As a virtual front door to the congregations, they reflected badly on the organization.  We are grateful to Rachel Lutwick-Deaner for keeping our website updated for the last few years.

One of the interesting things about building a web site is that it is a great equalizer among congregations.  A 2000 family synagogue might have a large building and staff along with an eight figure budget and a multi-million dollar endowment, and might offer a greater variety of programming than a small congregation, but you can put their web site and ours side by side, and the differences shrink.  A large congregation is just as likely to have a difficult to navigate, out of date, web site as a small congregation.

I also found organizations with web sites that gave no sense of the personality of the congregation.  Many Federation and Chabad web sites, which take most of their content from a national organization suffer from this.  Such generic sites may have useful information, but the personality and uniqueness of the local organization is buried underneath the identity of the national parent organization.  In the world of news, we know that national and international news can be found any number of places; local news sources, however, are much more limited in number.  A web site of a congregation should stress the local, not the national.  Our web site reflects the fact that Ahavas Israel exists to provide local community and connections.

Our new web site can be found at the same address, AhavasIsraelGR.org.  Please visit it and let me know what you think.  Let me know what else you’d like to see, and let me know if the organization and layout is intuitive and usable.

Stuck in a Rut? Pesah Tells You to Get Unstuck!

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Divre Harav, Words from the Rabbi – Bulletin article, March, 2010

I am grateful to the leadership of Congregation Ahavas Israel for giving me a three month Sabbatical.  The time away from active rabbinic work was renewing and refreshing, but it is very good to be back at the synagogue.

While away, I visited with a number of pastors to learn about the creation of a sermon from a fresh angle.  Within Protestant churches, the sermon is the focus of the service much the same way that the Torah reading is the focal point of a traditional Jewish Shabbat morning service.  We devote about 1/3 of the service time to the Torah reading, and about 1/2 of our time on Shabbat morning is devoted to the Torah service, adding in the Haftarah and the sermon.  In the churches I visited, the pastors devoted an equivalent amount of time within their service to the sermon.  Because their sermon functions as the main vehicle for hearing sacred Scripture, they tend to be longer and more carefully structured than most synagogue sermons.  They also tend to use Biblical verses to appeal to the emotional and moral sense of the congregation, often teaching a specific belief or theological approach to God, while most synagogue sermons tend to appeal to the intellect and teach a specific Jewish practice or behavior.

I don’t believe that one style is inherently better than the other.  What I learned from the project is that it is easy to get into a rut, preaching and teaching in the same style and appealing to the same part of the brain week after week, just because it is familiar and comfortable.  The work I did as a graduate coach in a Dale Carnegie program reinforced the same message — that most of us are stuck in a rut, doing the same things over and over again, repeating the same habits and the same mistakes, because we are afraid of trying something new.

This is a good lesson to be reminded of in conjunction with the celebration of Pesah.  The Hebrew word for Egypt is Mitzrayim, a word that connotes narrow places  (probably taking its name from the fact that the fertile part of Egypt is a narrow strip of land on either side of the Nile).  In a metaphorical sense, when we are stuck in Mitzrayim, we are living our lives in a constricted place. We are stuck inside a narrow box.  Pesah is the time to look at the narrow box in which we are living, look at those behaviors which keep us stuck in a rut, and free ourselves.