:בְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר
".שמות יג ח) "וְהִגַּדְתָּ לְבִנְךָ בַּיוֹם הַהוּא לֵאמֹר, בַּעֲבוּר זֶה עָשָׂה יְיָ לִי בְּצֵאתִי מִמִּצְרָיִם)
In every generation, each individual should feel personally redeemed from Egypt, as it said: (Exodus 13:8) “You shall explain to your child on that day, it is because of what God did for me when God led me out of Egypt.”
(Passover Haggadah)
My heart skipped a beat every time I heard him say it, even though I knew it was coming. My grandfather changed the same line at every seder. He declared, “You shall explain to your child on that day, it is because of what God did for me when God led me out of Nazi Germany.” This was how he fulfilled the Haggadah’s instruction to see ourselves as if we went out of Egypt, by erasing the boundary between his story and the biblical story. The Exodus from Egypt was also his escape from Berlin in 1939, and Passover was a night for telling the stories of all of our liberations.
At seder in 1983, my grandparents announced that they had donated $3,000 to rescue a two-month-old Ethiopian Jewish baby named Elyas and resettle her in Israel. The story of the Exodus was so present for my grandparents that it compelled them to act. Every year since, my grandmother pauses the seder to recite Elyas’ name and retell her story. The Exodus is not just a story in the Haggadah; it is a story that we live. Telling this story has the power to change our lives and the world.
My grandfather was a professional Jewish educator with a gift for making Torah come alive. He inspired me to want to be a Torah teacher, too, which set me on the path to becoming a rabbi. His seders informed my model of leadership: we build community by sharing the stories of our lives. We search for meaning by connecting these stories to the story of our people. And when these narratives meet, we can transform our lives and the world for the better.
Building Communities through Sharing Sacred Stories
My grandfather’s seders were a masterclass in using story to build community, and they serve as a model for the kind of communities I hope to help build. I explored this approach as the Community Organizing Intern at my congregational placement last year. At one meeting of our synagogue’s social justice organizing team, we asked everyone around the table to share a story about what keeps them up at night. One person told a story about his struggles to find meaningful work. Another talked about her fears that her children would be bullied in school. Sharing these and other stories transformed the group. Hearing them invited us all into deep and holy relationships that reflect the relationship we seek with God. As we exchanged our stories, we strengthened the ties that connected us as one sacred community, we experienced the Divine, and we established a foundation from which our sacred work could begin.
Seeking Meaning by Connecting to the Stories of Our People
I want to be a rabbi who teaches Torah by listening to people’s stories and connecting them to the stories of our tradition. As a teacher, I want to help people find themselves in sacred text and Jewish tradition. It is through the interactions between our lives and our text that we can begin to explore our deepest questions about meaning and purpose.
I have witnessed the power of story in pastoral care. During my summer of Clinical and Pastoral Education (CPE) training as a hospital chaplain, I sat with a Jewish patient with advanced cancer. She was struggling with her diminished strength and her inability to work. I invited her to tell me her story, and she talked about the work of which she was most proud, about how she felt called in her life to serve others. Together, we composed a prayer about finding a new kind of strength and a new kind of purpose. We both cried as we recited it together, as the Jewish liturgy and our own words combined to create the possibility of a new story.
I have created powerful stories through ritual. Last summer, as I helped plan High Holy Day services as part of my rabbinic internship, I urged our clergy team to re-think Yom Kippur afternoon’s Avodah service. I asked whether the service in the machzor (High Holy Day prayer book) told a story that was resonating with our congregants. We all agreed that the answer was no, so we asked ourselves, “What is the story people need to hear at this moment on Yom Kippur?” We challenged ourselves to think creatively, pushing past the obvious or easy answers into new territory inspired by the themes of the liturgy. We created a ritual that enacted a story about the move from chol (the everyday) to kodesh (the sacred), and the avodah (holy work) it takes to get there. We used narrative, music, and meditation, along with selections from the machzor’s liturgy to guide the congregation on a journey from chol to kodesh. Afterwards, members of our community raved about the service, saying that it spoke to them. Nobody had ever raved about the Avodah service before. Through an intentional process, we discovered a new story within an ancient ritual, a story that resonated with the community.
Jewish text, ritual, and tradition have the power to help us find meaning when they resonate with the stories of our lives. I envision a partnership with congregants wherein together we search for meaning by listening for the echoes of our own stories in Jewish texts, and echoes of Jewish texts in our own stories.
An Invitation to Transformation
When our stories harmonize with the stories found in our Jewish texts and history, the sacred interaction produces transformation that compels us to live and act differently. Whether it is finding new meaning in a holiday or service, a new spiritual practice that gives us joy or serenity, or a new motivation to fight for justice in the world, our sacred stories have the power to change us. I believe in a Judaism that calls us to seek our purpose in the world. I believe in a Judaism that shakes us out of our complacency and inspires us to act. In the words of Finley Peter Dunne, we must strive to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
My Purpose
I want to be your partner in building transformative community. I want to hear the stories that motivate your lives. I want to plumb the depths of the text and the tradition together, in search of stories that surprise us, shake us, and set us in motion. By building connections between each other and with our texts, we seek sacred purpose, we change the world around us, and we fulfill the Haggadah’s holy commandment to see ourselves in the stories of our people.
