A Pre-Sabbatical Message from Rabbi Greyber, January 2018

January 2018 / Sh’vat 5778

A Pre-Sabbatical Message from Rabbi Greyber

Chevre,

Next Tuesday, January 30th, I will begin a three-month sabbatical which extends through April 30th, 2018.  As that date approaches, I wanted to offer some thoughts on where we’ve been and where we’re heading.

A Sabbatical

As my sabbatical approaches, I feel many things.  I feel gratitude to our community and our leadership and our staff for this opportunity to renew and recharge.  I feel excitement at some of the goals I’ve set for myself: to complete an Olympic distance triathlon with Team-in-Training while raising money to fight leukemia; to visit family, to teach, to read, to write, to travel.  I feel anxiety, not only because the community I love is in the midst of so much change, but also because I care about each of you.  As much as I want and need this time away, I feel incredibly honored and blessed to be a part of your lives through joy and sorrow, and I worry that I may miss being there for one of you in a time of need.  I ask your forgiveness in advance if that happens.

Accessibility

Given the many congregational transitions currently underway, Beth El’s leadership and I have agreed that I will be more “in touch” during this period than is typical during rabbinic sabbaticals.  When I am in town, I will be available in case of a congregational death, and I am planning to be “on the bimah” on February 10th and March 10th.  I will periodically (every week or two) check and make brief replies to emails, primarily to Beth El’s leadership and staff.  Otherwise, my away reply will read:

I’m on sabbatical and not checking this email account until April 30th.
 

In case of a life cycle emergency

Please contact the head of Beth El’s Chevra Kaddisha, David Klapper, on his cell phone at 919-270-1621.

For Pastoral Issues

If you would like to meet with Rabbi Jerry Fox, you can call Sheri Hoffman in our office at (919) 682-1238 (preferred) or email her at sheri@betheldurham.org to set up an appointment with him.

Scheduling

If you need to try to schedule something involving me after my sabbatical, you can contact Sheri (see above).  She can look in my calendar and give you a preliminary answer as to whether a certain date and time might be or is not available and, if it is, she can tentatively schedule it “to be confirmed” when I return in May.

Jewish Learning / Divrei Torah

In addition to making pastoral calls, Rabbi Fox will also teach monthly Lunch & Learn, weekly classes after Wednesday morning minyan and steward our community through the Purim and Passover holidays.  On Shabbat mornings, Beth El is filled with an incredible array of rabbis and scholars who have volunteered to give divrei torah.  The lineup includes: Professors Marc Brettler, Eric Meyers, Jack Sasson, Rabbis Frank Fischer, Jerry Fox, and Michael Giser, and Beth El EC members Debbie Goldstein and Rachel Galanter.

Shabbat at Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church (TAPC)

As you know, during my sabbatical, Shabbat services will continue to be held at TAPC, a community that has shown us extraordinary hospitality.  They greeted us on the street as we walked with the Torahs toward the church, welcomed us to their Fellowship Hall with a mezuzah, and have gone out of their way to help us feel at home.  Last Shabbat was a great beginning as our voices filled the chapel with a ruach filled Kabbalat Shabbat, we enjoyed a tasty community Shabbat dinner, and enjoyed learning throughout Shabbat with our scholar-in-residence, Professor Benjamin Sommer.  Rabbi Sager settled into a new room for Mishnah study, our b’nei mitzvah students found places to study and then sat together in the front left section of seats, kids wandered the spacious halls and, by the time the day was over, everyone seemed to feel very much at home.

One of the things that makes our community so special is…questions!  So, naturally, some questions came up about turning on lights and how we’ll get into the building.  You can read below what the questions were and what our practice will be during our stay at TAPC.

L’hitra’ot / See you again soon!

Beth El has an amazing staff.  Thank you to Nancy Luberoff, who has jumped into her role with calm and competence and leadership, and in whom I have tremendous confidence to keep things humming in the next three months.  Thank you to Elisabeth, Sheri, Averyl, Sandy & Jim, Rachel, Lamont and Yoni for endless hours of love and devotion.  Ours is an amazing community.  Welcoming.  Diverse.  Committed to one another, to Israel and the Jewish people, to the world.  We are strong, gifted with so many people of so many talents.  I look forward to this time away, and I look forward to an exciting and important future together.  Until May…

L’hitra’ot / להתראות / See you again soon!

Rabbi Daniel Greyber

 

 

Question: Can we turn lights on and off at TAPC? Background: It has been Beth El’s practice not to turn lights on and off on Shabbat in our public spaces.  This is a practice we’ve maintained – and will continue to maintain – in our new building.  Some Conservative and all Orthodox authorities consider use of lights to be forbidden by Jewish law.  Maintaining our public Shabbat space so that Jews who do not use lights on Shabbat can feel comfortable in our sacred space demonstrates a commitment to pluralism and a sense of ahavat yisrael (love for our fellow Jews).  One could argue Jewishly that we should adjust lights on Shabbat too because lessening our use of electricity fulfills the Jewish imperative of shemirat ha’aretz, preserving God’s world.  Ethical choices involve weighing multiple values.  For one day a week, I think it is a good thing for us to make a small compromise so that our public Shabbat space is as welcoming as possible to Orthodox and some Conservative Jews. However, TAPC’s normal practice is to turn lights off in public space when not in use.  So, as we settled into the space on Shabbat at TAPC and found some rooms dark, the question arose: should we ask TAPC to leave their lights on for us during Shabbat?  Or may and should we turn them on and off ourselves? Answer: While TAPC has been extremely hospitable and would likely say yes to such a request (they’ve bent over backward to accommodate us in myriad ways), I believe that, for our year at TAPC, such an accommodation is not something we need to ask for.  Why not?  In 2012, the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS) passed a detailed (79 page!) teshuva (legal responsum) on “The Use of Electrical and Electronic Devices on Shabbat.”  You can click to read or you can look on page 59 for a chart with a summary of rulings.  What you’ll find is that using electric lights is considered mutar (permitted).  During this year when our Orthodox Kehillah has chosen to spend Shabbat in a separate space – back in the Freedman Center – and during which we are using the TAPC space and their practice is to conserve energy by turning lights off when not in use, I think it’s appropriate for us to lean on the permission of this teshuva and permit switching lights on and off. If the door is locked, can we ring the doorbell? The same holds for the use of electronic key fobs and the doorbell system that the church uses for entry and exit (they qualify as a Type 2 key card in the teshuva), and their use can also be permitted during our year in the TAPC space.   Final Thought: Ahad HaAm once wrote, “More than Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.”  While such small questions may feel insignificant, I have found that, when the weighing of each of those small questions is added together, the process produces something larger than the sum of its parts; it produces what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called, “a sanctuary in time” that has kept the Jews as much as we’ve kept it.