Presidential Address
Joshua Karsh, JRC Board President
Erev Rosh Hashanah, 5770
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura … That’s Italian, and those are the first words of The Divine Comedy, the great epic poem by Dante, the great Italian poet of the Middle Ages. If they seem like a strange way to start remarks before a room full of Jews on Rosh Hashana, even if we are praying in a church, well, I hope to persuade you otherwise.
You see, there is one scene at the beginning of Dante’s Divine Comedy that has been utzing me. I’ve also been utzed by Heschel and Hillel and Rabbi Tarfon ― and the immortal Satchell Paige, too ― and I’ll get to each of them, but we’re going to start with Dante.
If you recall, The Divine Comedy is Dante’s allegorical account of a tourist trip through thru hell, purgatory and paradise and of his encounters along the way ― Dante is himself the tourist ― both with sinners and saints.
The scene that has been haunting me comes at the beginning of the poem, as Dante is about to enter hell. He is standing in the vestibule of hell, which is for me one of the sublimest creations of his imagination. The vestibule is not filled with sinners or saints. Instead, it is filled with the hollow and cowardly souls of men and women, who, according to Dante, sat on the sidelines of every great issue and controversy of their day. Among them Dante also throws in the “neutral” angels, in other words, the ones who lined up on neither side when Lucifer rebelled against God.
Dante has nothing but scorn and contempt for these souls and angels who were good for nothing during their lifetimes except standing idly by, and what I want to share with you tonight is the punishment he invents for them.
You see, Dante imagines these souls and angels spending all their time now in the vestibule running behind a blank banner. The banner carries no message and it signifies no cause. But they chase that messageless banner, and they will chase it perpetually, because behind them are swarms of hornets and wasps waiting to sting them if they stop. This is the sting of their death. It is the expiation that Dante makes them pay for their numb and indifferent lives.
It’s a gruesome scene (and I’ve spared you some of the gruesomeness), and as Rosh Hashana has been approaching this year, I have been gripped by this scene ― and I have been asking myself, a little bit frightened, whether I have had the courage of my convictions this past year and whether I am doing enough to make my life about something bigger than myself.
For focusing the mind on these questions, Dante’s vestibule is as vivid and striking as any image I know. There are other mediums for the same message. There is the part of Hillel’s maxim that says, “if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” And somewhat along the same long lines, there is also Rabbi Tarfon’s adage in Pirkei Avot: “We may not complete the task, but neither are we free to desist from it.”
I’ve been preoccupied with these particular thoughts this particular year substantially because of the deaths of two men. Josh Cytrynbaum and Harold Richman both passed away this summer, and their deaths have been a kind of shofar call to me ―because comparing my life to theirs has been so humbling.
Josh Cytrynbaum ― or Joe, which is what many of his friends called him ― was the son of JRC’s Executive Director, Bryna Cytrynbaum. He died this summer very suddenly and much too early, while still in his 30’s. He worked at Manley High School in Chicago, for the UMOJA Student Development Corporation, and in the Social Work Program at Northeastern, keeping challenged students in school and bringing buoyancy to their lives. His impact in the world was “louder than a bomb,” which is also the name of the poetry team he coached. “Louder than a Bomb.”
Nearly eight hundred people came to JRC for his funeral. I suspect I can speak for many of us who were there in saying how awe-inspiring that gathering was ― to witness the turnout, certainly, but more profoundly to witness the sense of Josh that so many speakers at the funeral so vividly conveyed, as a man who was the moral center of their world, who was a master teacher and who believed in them and, by believing in them, dignified them … and empowered them … and changed their lives.
The second death with a big impact on my family this summer was the death of Harold Richman. Harold was the founding director of Chapin Hall Center for Children, a Dean of the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, and a mentor to my wife Carolyn ― and to numerous others. Harold had a near prophetic ability to see what was wrong in the world and to imagine the way things might be. He also had the even rarer talent to transform his vision into practice. He dedicated much of his life to child-welfare issues, and he leaves behind durable institutions that he created and that benefit vulnerable children across the globe.
Harold also set a shining example for those of us who are parents with young children. Here’s a goal to strive for if you have young children. After Harold’s sons were grown up, had married and had their own children, his daughters-in-law gave Harold a gift. They gave Harold a picture book with wonderful photographs of his sons parenting their own children. They gave him the book to thank him for having taught his sons how to be such terrific fathers.
Harold Richman and Josh Cytrynbaum lived lives that Dante would have celebrated, engaged lives animated by a belief that conscience and conviction are muscles and that they should be exercised strenuously. They are also people who dared, in the words of the baseball great Satchell Paige, “to work like they didn’t need the money, love like they’d never been hurt, and dance like nobody was watching.”
Many of us come to JRC in some part animated by these same beliefs. We come and stay here because of a commitment to living engaged lives, because this is a congregation where even activities as seemingly material and non-spiritual as putting up a new synagogue building become opportunities for spiritual audacity, opportunities for changing, in some fashion, our relationship to the world.
This yearning for meaning, and for finding it both through ritual and social action, is an important distinguishing feature of JRC. But this is a synagogue. Social action supplements worship and ritual rather than the other way around ― because no religion or religious community that depends solely on social action for its validation can survive for very long.
So I hope you know about the varieties of spiritual experience that you can find here at JRC, from traditional services, to Shabbat morning Torah study with Rabbi Rosen, to torah yoga, to a new program, “FEST” (F, E, S, T ― Families Enjoying Shabbat Together).
I also want to encourage you to look at the adult education programming for this year, including the adult Kallah on Jewish Film, classes on Sholem Aleichem and on Tales of the Talmud, and our scholar-in-residence program this year with poet and storyteller Howard Schwartz. Brochures giving dates and details for all of this programming are in the lobby. Please pick them up.
My theme tonight, though, is that prayer, on the one hand, and social action on the other, are intimately related. That is what Abraham Joshua Heschel so often preached.
In March of 1965, before the first seder, Heschel and at least two members of this congregation, Nina Raskin and Helen Widen, marched from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. King. Reflecting on that experience later, Heschel said, ""For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer … Our march,” he said, “was worship. I felt my legs were praying.""
“Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive.” That is something else that Heschel said. I understand him to have meant that in a world of sometimes cruel injustices and savage inequalities, praying meaningfully intrinsically means positing the possibility of a better world. At JRC, it also means being mindful of the precept b’tzelem Elohim, that all of us are made in God’s image and that, because of our shared humanity, spirituality and redemption point both inward and outward.
JRC provides lots of opportunities for redemptive, outwardly focused activities, if you choose to participate. We try to make it easy to emulate Josh Cytrynbaum and Harold Richman rather than the denizens of Dante’s vestibule.
Every Thursday night, JRC members staff the night soup kitchen at the First United Methodist Church in Evanston. Once a month, JRC members, in partnership with Connections for the Homeless, entertain children whose moms are enrolled in the Connection for the Homeless Transitional Housing Support Group. While the moms meet at JRC, we share a pizza dinner and playtime with their kids. JRC also participates with the Interfaith Refugee and Immigration Ministries, helping to settle immigrants and refugees in the Chicago area.
And every Yom Kippur, bringing cans of food for the poor is as much a part of our minhag here as reciting the haftarah reading for Yom Kippur, a reading in which Isaiah exhorts us to feed the hungry.
I think there is a misperception sometimes that tikun olam at JRC is all about AIDS in Africa and far away causes. But the projects I’ve just been talking about are all local, Chicago-based efforts. And they’re great efforts. We should shep some naches from the tikun olam in which this congregation engages. But not too much. We’re good, but we’re not unrivaled or unsurpassed.
So tonight, right here, we’re going to try, in a small way, to make a difference. Maimonides famously described a ladder of justice with eight rungs. He reserved the eighth rung, at the top of the ladder, for what he deemed the highest form of aid and assistance: helping someone else find work.
Tonight, we are going to try to climb that ladder. Almost fifteen million Americans are experiencing the nightmare of unemployment as we gather here tonight. We’ve lost almost 10 million jobs in this country since December 2007. There are people in this room tonight who are out of work. And there are more people out of work in this room right now than there were last year. Many are out of work for the first time in their lives, and they lost well paying jobs. These truths should be acknowledged, and they should not be spoken in hushed tones.
If you are looking for work, or you know someone who is, the Jewish Vocational Service offers excellent services ― support and networking groups and programs, individual career counseling and job strategy coaching. A JVS group meets at the Skokie Public Library every third Monday of the month at 9:30 in the morning, including this coming Monday. For more information, or if you have questions about your own search, you can call Maxine Topper. Maxine is a JRC member and the manager at the Skokie office of JVS. You can reach her at 847 568 5155. Or you can visit the JVS website at www.jvschicago.org. JVS also has a new job listing website. www.parnossahworkschicago.org. The site is free to employers, and it is open to all jobseekers.
Now, here’s what we’re going to do right here tonight. Most jobs are found through networking. And networks are simply people helping people. We have a room full of people here tonight. We are the network we have been waiting for.
There are two boxes in the lobby, marked JVS, for Jewish Vocational Service. Please consider volunteering to be a networking contact for JVS by putting your name and contact information on a piece of paper and putting the piece of paper in the box. The box will be there tonight and tomorrow. There is a slot in the top of the box. The box is empty right now. By the end of tomorrow, I hope it will be full.
I hope it will be full of slips of paper filled out by people in this room, volunteering to give advice to, or provide an informational interview for, or networking leads for JVS clients who are searching for jobs. I’m not asking you to provide jobs or make job offers. But if you can be a resource for others looking for work in your industry, it would be a mitzvah.
And if you or your family struggled with economic difficulties this past year, may you be blessed with opportunities and renewed sustenance in the coming year. Keyn Yehi Ratzon.
Before I conclude, I want to acknowledge some of the people who make JRC the special place that it is.
I want to thank Dianne Sperling and Pat Lane for their work putting together this service, and tomorrow and next week’s services. And Mike Nolan, Dennis O’Keefe and Jonathan Markowitz for schlepping us between the JRC building and this location.
I want to thank our Executive Director, Bryna Cytrynbaum. Our Educators, Terri Berhnson and Bonnie Silverman. Our religious school and preschool teachers. I want to thank Dinah April London, our Membership and Programming Director; Jill Persin, our Assistant Executive Director; Bonnie Stern and Robyn Hurtig, our administrative assistants; Tuly Faden, our bookkeeper; Eva Eisenstein our librarian; our Rabbi, Brant Rosen; our Cantor, Howard Friedland; and Vadim Shmukler and Ira Narod, our custodial staff and utility infielders. When you see Vadim, congratulate him on the birth of his first grandchild.
On behalf of the JRC board, I want to say thank you to every member of the JRC staff. And to each of them, and to each of you, Shana Tova u Metuka. Shana Tova Tikateivu.