Erev Rosh Hashanah 5780 (2019)

Shana tovah.

A thought experiment: If sometime during the next year you come to Temple Sinai at 7:30am on an average Wednesday, plop yourself down on a comfy couch in the living room and proceed to watch everything that happens over the next 14-15 hours, here is what you will see:

--hundreds of beautiful souls, age 0 to well over 90, walking in and out --all shapes, all occupations, all skin tones, all genders, all political persuasions (TRUE!) --these beautiful souls are there for so many reasons! Some will learn how to share on the playground; some will plan a funeral for a beloved sister; some will finally get that third aliyah down pat; some will work hard – SO HARD -- to find connection and common ground over Israel; some will take their first step towards a Jewish life with Rabbi Regev. Finally, at 10:00pm or so, you’ll join the few remaining Board members who need to be nearly pushed out of the building while still discussing that last agenda item.

Temple Sinai is a vibrant, thriving community of human beings, and for the last two years I have had the enormous privilege of serving as its president, a job that I will genuinely miss when my term ends in November. I’m delighted once again to see all of your lovely faces, even against the midday sun of Paramount stage lights, and I am honored to share the bimah with this phenomenal team.

Yet again this year I must tell you how blessed we are to have Rabbi Jackie Mates-Muchin as our spiritual leader. So…. I debated whether to do this, but since she has now been with us for nearly 15 years and this is my last chance, we’re going to settle this matter once and for all tonight at the Paramount. Everybody repeat after me: MATES-MUCHIN.

Rabbi MATES-MUCHIN pours her entire being into her role as our Senior Rabbi. She cares deeply and thinks about each one of us. This is the very nature and strength of her rabbinate: she is focused with intensity on congregants -- on knowing them, understanding their needs, and helping them. In 25 years or so, when she retires, her legacy will not be a building or a chapel or even a prayerbook. Rather, it will be the thousands of people who led more meaningful, Jewish-centered lives because they were lucky, so very lucky, to call her their rabbi.

This year we will celebrate Cantor Keys’ 25th anniversary at Temple Sinai. She is beautiful inside and out. Her professionalism, her love of Judaism and her central role among American Reform cantors are daily gifts to us. Please stay tuned for special events we are planning to honor Cantor Keys this year.

Rabbi Regev is brilliant, funny, and a true mensch. He could easily have had multiple successful careers as a musician, an actor, a comedian and a scholar. I am so glad he picked rabbi. To watch him lead Torah study on Shabbat is to witness a master class in scripture, tradition, and history, and in making connections across all of these subjects. He is a blessed gift to all of us.

Ellen Lefkowitz is quite simply one of the best early childhood Jewish educators in the country. To watch her lead the David Pregerson Preschool with such care and quiet excellence is a thing of beauty. Ellen is nationally recognized for her work, and will present some of it at this the upcoming URJ Biennial in Chicago this December. We are incredibly lucky to call her our very own.

Over the summer we welcomed two new members to our Senior Staff: Executive Director Terrie Goren and Director of Education Stephanie Ben Simon. It took Terrie about 18 minutes to understand our finances, our office structure, our needs and where she should focus her time. She has been a true joy to work with, and we feel extremely lucky to have her. Stephanie and her husband Shay welcomed a beautiful baby boy at the end of August, and we look forward to working together when she returns later in the fall.

We have had another outstanding year at Temple Sinai, one marked by both healthy stability and healthy change. As of this past Friday, a total of 970 families have renewed their membership. This greatly exceeds last year’s number at this time in the Jewish year, and although I did not have time to check, I believe it is an all-time record. Since there are still many families who have not yet renewed, it’s not unreasonable to believe that by the beginning of 5781 – next year -- we will finally be a community of 1000 families, a milestone that has eluded us for several years now.

I’m also delighted to report that our financial health remains excellent. Although this marks the third year that we have held our baseline membership contribution amount steady, we have seen the average pledge from all member families go up meaningfully over that same time. It’s not hard to read two very hopeful messages into this fact: the first is that you all increasingly value your Temple Sinai membership, and the second is that we are getting more and more value out of each dollar that you contribute to us. I have no doubt that these trends will continue under Terrie’s very watchful financial eye.

This past year saw a landmark event in the history of Temple Sinai, the transfer of Home of Eternity Cemetery to Sinai Memorial Chapel’s Beit Olam of Contra Costa. The congregation overwhelmingly approved the transaction in April of this year, and we anticipate that the transfer will finally be complete sometime this coming week. This deal is the culmination of years of hopeful conversations, many long months of negotiations, and many more long months resolving some unexpected complications. There were union negotiations, property line confusion, land records from the late 1800s, elevators that needed fixing and streetlamps that needed posting and roads that needed paving.

Home of Eternity is a gem, the peaceful resting place of so many of our people and a beautiful reminder of Oakland’s Jewish past. Under Sinai Memorial’s loving care, it will undergo the capital improvements that it deserves, and blossom into the premiere East Bay Jewish cemetery of the future. Please continue to visit it and watch as this happens.

Of the many people who worked on this project over the last months and years, a few must be mentioned by name. Surprise, it’s the lawyers! To say that we had the legal Ivy League A-team working on this would be to grossly understate the case. Congregants Mike Baker, Seth Rosen and David Durham donated hundreds of hours of time to this project. They worked quietly and with a tremendous amount of humility. They were brilliant, they were creative, they were patient and they were persistent. The collective market value of their work on this was easily in the mid- to high- six figures, yet the cost to Temple Sinai was nothing. We are, as a community, and I am personally, enormously grateful to them for this gift that we will never forget. I also want to thank another Temple Sinai congregant, Bob Stein, who did a wonderful job representing the other side in this transaction, and also everyone from Sinai Memorial who worked so hard on this, including in particular Sam Salkin, Daniel Villa and Sharon Brusman. Last but certainly not least, huge thanks to our former cemetery directors Warner Oberndoerfer of blessed memory and Robin Reiner, to Rhonda Hartman and former cemetery employees Raymond Ulibarri and David Uribe, for their years of service to Home of Eternity.

At this synagogue we embrace and we live a Judaism that is new and old and real and alive and changing all the time. Some of you experience this first hand at services on the first Friday of each month, when we gather in the round in Albers Chapel – all ages – and lift our souls with music, ritual and dance. If you haven’t had the pleasure of this service yet, I highly recommend it to you.

To be fully honest, I struggled with what to say to you tonight beyond describing the health and vibrancy of our community, which is easy to do. There are competing impulses for this part of the President’s job. There’s an urge to say something meaningful that no one else has ever said before about the times we are living in and the ways we as a community can do better. “Talk about providing solace in troubling times!” “Talk about how to feel secure as Jews when warning signs are flashing”. “Give them a call to action!”

The better impulse, though, is simply to share two things that I know for sure are true based on my last two years as your President.

The first truth is that Temple Sinai is STRONG. It is strong because it has been TESTED and because we are DIFFERENT and we do not all think ALIKE. Rather, as E.M. Forster wrote so eloquently, we “only connect”.

Six years ago members of this synagogue disagreed sharply over an issue, rabbinic leadership, that regularly leaves communities broken in its wake. Some congregants felt one way on this issue, and they felt so very strongly. Ultimately they were disappointed by the outcome. Here are some things that happened during that time: feelings were hurt, conversations happened, people disagreed, more conversations happened.

Here are the things that did not happen: the congregation did NOT split, people did NOT stop supporting it with their money or their time, the people who were so sad and disappointed did NOT leave. Rather, many of them deepened their connection by becoming even more involved and by strengthening their ties to others in the community. One of those congregants, Jon Braslaw, will be Temple Sinai’s next President, which tells you everything you need to know about the health of Temple Sinai. This synagogue is a truly good place. Please find a new way to support it in this coming year with your hands, your mind and your treasure.

The second truth is that Reform Judaism is strong. It is strong in part because it is following trends of diversity and inclusion that were started at synagogues like ours. If there is a religion tailor made for America in 2019, it is this one. The Yale historian and Holocaust scholar Timothy Snyder wrote a book in 2017 that many of you probably read. In it he provided twenty lessons from the 20th century on fighting tyranny. Lesson two is this one:

Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. So choose [one] you care about and take its side.

Reform Judaism is an institution that we should protect and whose side we should take. Our religion teaches balance in all things, how to care for ourselves and others, how to work to make the world a better place every day. Its rituals are beautiful and serve both to comfort us and to goad us into action when we are complacent. It commands action over belief, does not require magical thinking and equally engages the sharp mind and the open and loving heart. It is truly a path to righteousness and to a good life and it is worthy of everything we can give to it. So please also find a new way to support the Reform movement this year. You might start by attending Biennial this December in Chicago with the senior staff, Board members, other congregants and me.

My endless thanks are due to so many. To my husband Tom Klein, who is m..a..y..b..e.. (although I didn’t fact check this) Temple Sinai’s first male candlelighting Presidential spouse. In any event he is in my eyes the most wonderful, and I have to start by thanking him for his loving support, his advice, and his good humor during the past two years. To my children Will and Julia, who have spent their entire lives in this wonderful place and who expressed to me so often their support and their pride and their interest in my work here. I am deeply grateful to the Temple Sinai Board and to each member of this year’s Executive Committee – Jon Braslaw, Liz Daoust, Sydney Firestone, Matti Fromson, Terrie Goren, Rabbi Mates-Muchin, Anne Schmitz and Joan Waranoff. And I’m particularly grateful to Jon, who is talented in so many ways and who is the ideal leader to take Temple Sinai into the next decade. Finally, thanks to all of you for your wisdom, your suggestions, your generosity, and your productive and constructive disagreement. I will miss this job and everything that came with it.

May each one of us enjoy a healthy and peaceful 5780, and may we continue to strengthen the ties among all of us.

Shana tovah!