This weekend we celebrate 25 years of Beth Torah. Anniversaries mean renewal. On the first night of Passover Jews renew the exodus; we free ourselves once again from our personal slavery.  On our birthdays we renew our commitments to our core values: at least I do.  What might this anniversary of Beth Torah mean?
In the last 25 years communication has changed more than at any time since the invention of the printing press. I don't know that anyone can currently appreciate precisely where we are headed while the revolution continues.  I only know that Jewish core values: God's unity, gemilut hasadim (acts of loving-kindness), all humans being created in God's image, and love your neighbor as yourself will remain the same. But the methods of communicating them will change dramatically.
My 20 month old granddaughter uses an iPad. She will compare all activities with the games on her iPad.  What will we offer her that will be nearly as entertaining and involve her so completely that she seeks out the Jewish community?
This I know: in an age in which allegiances to old social groupings are totally fluid, in which people change religions for convenience, in which many people are not interested in spending 10,000 hours to learn Jewish core texts: Hebrew, Aramaic, siddur (prayer book) Tanakh (Bible), midrash, Talmud, Bible commentators like Rashi, it's going to be very difficult to transmit the depth of spiritual understanding contained in Judaism. It's not an easy religion.  It's a way of life, and it does not compete well with instantaneous cultures (think Monday night football games, the Super Bowl, even high production synagogue High Holy Day worship live-streamed.)
What will become of the Jewish community?  It will depend, it seems to me, on our voluntary allegiances to one another, on our reaching out to help those in our congregation who are in need, and are willing to give back.  The core of the synagogue, the synagogue community, will need to exemplify what community can mean in a world of anonymity.
You see: that's the enemy, and that's the plague for which Judaism is the antidote:  Anonymity.  The religious community that recognizes, validates and reaches out to help individuals in their difficult times in life: that is the community that will survive.  That is what I hope Beth Torah is, and what it will develop increasingly in the future.
In this vision of community there is continuity.  We did not stay in touch with our members by tweeting, by email, or by website and Facebook. But we started out as a community of people excited to rely upon one another.  The intimacy among members, the spirit and energy that enlivened all of us, that can be renewed in each generation.
We pass the baton to a new generation, conversant in the tools of the new world.  Moses did the same when the people entered Canaan. So it is in every generation.  Now is the time for renewal; and watching a new leadership grasp the mantle of leadership to cross the Jordan to a renewed Promised Land.

I am taking the unusual step of posting the outline of my sermon tonight in advance.
Here goes:

Torah Writing Project Launch Shabbat

October 4, 2013

Rabbi Mark H. Levin, DHL

 I don’t know exactly what Sinai was. 

·      Orthodox Jews contend it was a one-time event in history:  God revealed the Torah to Moses.

·      I believe Sinai is a metaphor for a process:

o   When the people of Israel, the Jewish people, focus on God for divine purposes, we tend to discern God’s will for us in history.

o   The result of that we call commandments, mitzvot.

o   In other words:  commandments are the action results of the interaction between God and the Jewish people.

One of the books we received as a result of Sinai, the encounter between the Jewish people and God, is the Book of Deuteronomy.

·      Since the second century rabbis have agreed that there are 613 of the these action statements, these mitzvot, in the Torah

·      The very last one in order, from the 31^st chapter of the fifth book of the Torah, is this:  once every 7 years, you have to read this book out loud where all of the people are assembled to hear.

In other words:  these encounters with God, and their results, are special to us: they are holy or sacred.  It’s not that they constitute our obligation. They are our responsibility. But that’s like you have a responsibility to your  birthday, or the day someone special died; or to pursue a challenge you relish in your life.

·      Mitzvot are embedded in, originate from, the Jewish people’s encounter with the sacred.

·      Let’s take Shabbat:  the Jewish people were the first to realize that if we are to bring the sacred into our lives, we must have certain techniques and devote time to it.

o   So on Shabbat we pray, study, rest and enjoy sacred pleasures:  all of them gifts from God to raise our material bodies to a higher, more spiritual level.

o   Embedded in each mitzvah, each commandment, lies a spiritual spark that we can harvest with the right motivation and intention. 

·      Our ancestors knew this, and that’s the answer to the question of why or how we are here today:  we’re here because they used this commandments, these embodiments of the experience of the holy, to bring holy actions into the world and into their lives.

o   So, as we are discovering today, it’s important what you eat, because that’s what you become physical.

o   Similarly, what you take in spiritually is important, because that’s what you become spiritually.

§  If you live among truth sayers all of the time, you live in a world of trust

§  If you live among liars all of the time: you live with constant doubt and trepidation.

§  Your spiritual values determine much of your life.

§  They result from our encounters with the holy.

So what did we Jews do?

o   We took those encounters with God, and we strung them together in a story, and we put that story of the spiritual encounters with God in a book that we call the Torah.

o   It’s not only our spiritual history:  when we unpack those embodiments of spiritual encounter in our lives: when we ask how God wants us to live in this world: how to encounter others, how to determine what we eat, whether to be cruel in order to gain politically or in prestige, then we again bring that holiness of the encounter with God embedded in the mitzvah into existence again in our own lives.

o   When we tell the story of the exodus at the Passover seder, we can really experience our emergence from slavery, but then we can also live as the Torah commands: with the lessons of slavery as part of our experience, even though we, ourselves, we never actually physically slaves.

So this book of Torah, containing our narrative history with its embodied mitzvot, the sparks of our encounters with God, can bring holiness into our lives because each experience records that encounter with holiness.

o   And so we call the book sacred.

o   And when we write those words, when we observe the final, the last commandment in the Torah: we are doing what our ancestors did thousands of years ago:  encountering the divine in our lives.

o   We must pause when we write in Torah, and make a particular story, or a mitzvah, something embodying holiness for us, a part of our personal lives.

o   As a result, we find a small portion of God enters our lives.

o   It’s not possible to take all of God into our lives.

o   We must encounter God where we find God.

o   But then we pause, consider, and make the experience part of the body and soul that is us.  We become Torah.

We cannot be at Sinai, but we can BE Sinai.

o   When we inscribe Torah

o   When we find the divine spark at the center of a mitzvah, we bring the Jewish people’s past encounter with God into the present and make it part of our own lives.

o   We stand at the foot of Sinai; we write Torah with Moses; we discover the eternality of God, and ongoing revelation of God’s mitzvot to the Jewish people.

When one of my daughters was 2 years old we dreaded taking her places because of the following incident.  Visiting friends in Boston, we stopped and strolled the Hancock Tower area downtown. Having rented a 2-door car, we stored the baby-stroller in the trunk and the kid in the child seat in the rear, having to push forward the front seat to manipulate her body into the back while placing her gently in the baby seat. You get the idea.  There's considerable twisting of the body required, which, being in our mid-thirties didn't phase us at all.
Until, the universally adored, model beautiful, blond child inexplicably determined she wasn't going anywhere.  She preferred her current location, regardless of the plans of the majority. On the grass lawn surrounding the Hancock Insurance Tower the little darling commenced to scream bloody murder, globular tears cascading down her seemingly innocent cheeks, while holding her 3-foot body so rigidly straight she could have been suspended plank-like between the backs of two metal folding chairs.
Around this time there had been several nationally publicized kidnappings of toddlers, and people were on the lookout for marauders snatching cute, Gerber-Baby children.  Consider my dilemma: attempt to cram said screaming child headfirst through the driver's side of a two door car, door ajar to hinge squeaking lengths, pushing the driver's seat forward with my extended butt while attempting to force her rigor mortis like body into a bent position, or remonstrate with a two year old.  I caved.  Sitting on the grass, ignoring the stares of passers-by, a grown man attempted futilely to rationally argue with this two-year old terrorist that she needed to stop screaming and obey daddy, all the while hearing in my ear a fantasy cop vociferously arguing, "If you're her father why is she so blond?"
And you ask why I am recounting this?  It is because the T-Party has decided to shut down the United States government in their self-absorbed, anti-democratic, economically destructive attempt to portray their fury at the Affordable Care Act, and the story somehow just came back to me.

I have always worried about my intellectual acumen. But I figure I couldn't sound dumber than Ted Cruz, and he gets lots of press.  And isn't that the goal?  I couldn't be a bigger liar than ....  Well, I'll leave that out.  But you get the idea.  Clearly facts no longer matter, and I figure the time must be ripe for me to express my opinions: the grapes of truth have ripened on the vine of self-adulation.  So I am ready for prime-time.  After all, who better to engage in truthiness than one who occupies a pulpit!
Standing on the brink of retirement as I do, seems to me I should get a running start on wasting time, mine and others'. I don't know that I can ever achieve the demagogue status Cruz aspires to.  I figure it's not just inborn talent. It must require practice.  So if I'm going to expand my influence beyond 1, I'd better start honing my skills.  I'm getting out my whetting stone and sharpening my obfuscations. Now there's a mixed metaphor; but that's exactly what I mean! No one any longer cares about clarity of thought or language use.  So the world is finally ready for me.
So here it goes: my launch.  Criticize away, who cares. As long as you read what I write.  I'll stand 21 hours on the floor of the Senate reciting inanities if the press will just cover every exhalation. As for impact: Let us not forget that sage Ecclesiastes' opening gambit, "Nothing matters anyway," or something close to that; I forget precisely; but you get the idea.