Recent Sermons

Kol Nidre Sermon from B'nai Jacob on Vimeo.

On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about how communities such as our synagogue help to foster collective resilience. Tonight I want to address a second important dimension of the work of communities, that is, how communal organizations like churches and synagogues, PTA’s and Lions Clubs, are essential to the wellbeing of democracy.

Over the summer, I attended the screening of a new movie called, “Join or Die,” about social scientist Bob Putnam’s landmark work on the decades long decline of communal connections in America. The film’s title comes from a political cartoon created by Ben Franklin in 1754 urging the British colonies to join together to fight their shared enemy, at that time, the French. The saying, “Join or Die” has its rabbinic equivalent — hevruta or m’tuta, in the Talmud, meaning “give me friendship or give me death” — that is, a person will not thrive without friendship. One has only to glance at the news, to read about the epidemic of loneliness besetting our country and others, and understand how insidious loneliness is to our health. Recent studies confirm that a person’s risk of dying is cut in half by virtue of joining just one club. A person of any age, gender, or initial health status shows a 50% increased likelihood for survival if they have adequate social connections. In fact, loneliness is thought to be comparable to smoking, obesity and inactivity as a factor of morbidity. 

You only have to spend a few moments in our synagogue to realize the truth of this slogan. In fact, Join or Die could be our synagogue’s motto. We have so many congregants in their 80’s and 90’s driving themselves to shul, able to get on zoom and enjoy classes and services, living full and active lives. The fact that they are members of the synagogue is not at all incidental to their wellbeing — it is these very associations, often lifelong, that have sustained them, way out of proportion, I believe, to their peers. Join or Die indeed!

But it is not only the personal benefits of communal participation, significant though they are, that I want to address tonight; I want to talk about the larger importance of community to democracy. As Tocqueville famously observed when he visited the United States from France in the 1830’s: “Americans of all ages, conditions and all dispositions constantly unite together. … To hold fetes, found seminaries, build inns, construct churches, distribute books, dispatch missionaries .… They establish hospitals, prisons, schools by the same method. Finally, if they wish to highlight a truth or develop an opinion by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association.”¹ For Tocqueville, it was not simply that Americans were notorious joiners but that this uniquely American habit of forming associations was a critical pillar of democracy, enabling problems to be solved on a local level, engaging diverse citizens with one another, and providing a bulwark against democratic decay and despotism. John Dewey later observed, “Fraternity, liberty, and equality, isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions…Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborhood community. Only in local, face to face associations could members of a public participate in dialogues with their fellows and such dialogues are crucial to the formation and organization of the public.”²

Why, you might ask, is joining a bowling league or a synagogue good for democracy? You join a bowling league, presumably because you enjoy bowling, but in the league you meet people you wouldn’t otherwise have met. Over time you talk about issues that concern you — not who is running for president, but say, math education in your local school or the absence of sidewalks in your neighborhood. You might then decide together to join the PTA or a town committee on public safety. You might end up advocating for your cause, speaking about it, getting others involved, getting a petition signed, creating change. That is democracy in action. Associations enable members to express, debate, and give voice to issues of importance to them, so that they can both make demands of their government and protect themselves from abuses of its power. Within an association views are clarified and amplified, giving citizens a much more powerful voice than they would have individually.³

Associations like ours foster cooperation and public spiritedness, strengthening relationships and protecting against extremist groups that prey on isolated individuals. Often radicalized in online hate groups or on the dark web, isolated individuals⁴, particularly young men, are among the most dangerous threats to society and democracy in America today, accounting for 40-70% of mass shootings. Associations are schools of democracy: members learn critical skills such as giving presentations, running meetings, building consensus, bringing diverse voices to the table and valuing contributions from different perspectives or cultures. Civic associations are forums for deliberation on vital public issues and ultimately they inculcate habits of civic engagement. People who participate in clubs of any kind are far more likely to vote, take part in political campaigns, and discuss public issues. Members of associations learn civic virtues including trustworthiness and reciprocity.⁵

This summer I was privileged to attend a Boy Scout Court of Honor at our synagogue. Three young women became Eagle Scouts, the first three in our troop’s history. That’s a big deal! At the beginning of the ceremony, candles were lit and the Scout values were recited: A scout is trustworthy, helpful, friendly, courteous etc. What was amazing was to listen to these three girls speak and see the degree to which they embodied those values. They had, through their scouting experience, become poised, mature, capable, thoughtful, civic-minded leaders. Maybe they joined the Scouts because they thought camping would be fun; nothing wrong with that! But they came away as responsible, engaged citizens who understand that they can and do make a difference in the world they live in.

The bottom line is that without networks of civic engagement, politics fail. Citizenship becomes a spectator sport. I was surprised to learn that it was not until mid-century that political theorists began to assert that good citizenship simply required voting, as if one were choosing a brand at the supermarket. Before that, it was widely understood that democratic self-government required an active and engaged citizenry. Even more important, an engaged citizenry requires that we care about one another, but, if we don’t know each other, we stop caring. Your neighbor becomes, at best an abstraction, and worse, a source of competition for scarce resources. Without strong connections to each other, we become easy prey for demagogues who divide us, sowing fear of one another. The bottom line is that if we don’t care about each other, democracy fails. Or, to say it differently, “We are all in this together and we have obligations to one another. We’re not going to fix polarization, inequality, social isolation, or all the things that ail us, until, first of all, we start feeling we have an obligation to care for other people.”⁶

Putnam reached these conclusions through his research in Italy on regional governments in the 1970’s at a moment when the Italian government decided to give significantly more independent power to its regional governments. It was like an experiment in democracy at its inception and Putnam and his colleagues were eager to see what made one region thrive and another falter. It turned out that it was not, as they expected, wealth, education, ideology or social stability that made the difference. It was strong traditions of civic engagement— “voter turnout, Lions clubs, and soccer clubs —were the hallmarks of successful regions.”⁷ Every region, for instance, committed to building more preschools, but it was only in the regions where social networks were strong that preschools were actually built. “Where people know one another, interact with one another each week at choir practice or sports matches, and trust one another to behave honorably, they have a model and a moral foundation upon which to base further, cooperative enterprises.”⁸ Join or die indeed!

So, how are we doing? Are we still Tocqueville’s nation of joiners? I probably don’t even have to ask. You know the answer.. We all know that synagogue membership here and across the nation has declined. But we are not the only ones hurting. When Putnam studied associations in America from the 1980’s through 2000, he found that membership in PTA’s was down. In the Kiwanis, membership was down. The NAACP, down. The League of Women Voters down. Bowling Leagues, down. Americans are actually bowling in greater numbers. They are just doing it alone. Union membership — down. Religion across the board — down. And that’s not just a decline in faith. Religious organizations are responsible for half of our social capital, through both the groups churches and synagogues form and their manifold volunteer efforts. Putnam discovered that if you are a regular church or synagogue attendee, you are more likely to give to charity, religious or secular, to volunteer, to give to a homeless person or return change to a shopkeeper, to donate blood, to help a neighbor with their shopping, to help someone outside your family with homework, to spend time with a depressed person, to allow another driver to cut in front of you, to offer a seat on a bus to a stranger or to help someone find a job. Frequent worshipers are also more active citizens, disproportionately engaged in civic life from local elections to town meetings to demonstrations. Even attendance at private gatherings is way down. In 1975, people attended a picnic on average five times a year. In 1999 they went once. They also went to fewer dinner parties. And Putnam did his work in the 90’s in the US before

 the internet really took off, before social media, before the pandemic. Just imagine where we are today when people can do everything — shop, bank, hear a lecture, plan a trip — without ever leaving their homes or encountering another person. And as we know from what I said earlier, this isn’t just a matter of warm cuddles. Without civic infrastructure, there is more crime, our schools are worse, our society is more polarized, and democracy stops working. Imagine if over the last forty years, half the roads in the US suddenly vanished. It would be a disaster! That is what we are looking at when effectively half of our civic infrastructure has collapsed.

So being a member of this synagogue far from being irrelevant or just nice, is essential to our democracy. At shul, you meet people who are at different ages and stages of life than you are. You work together on common projects and you discover that you have a lot in common, even with people with whom you may not agree. You share interests that have nothing to do with national elections. You learn valuable skills running meetings, building consensus, seeing projects and programs to fruition. You are part of something larger than yourself and our collective voice is much greater than any one individual. When a few hundred people from our New Haven Jewish community joined a few hundred thousand Jews to march for Israel in Washington last year, it mattered. When I met with the governor along with other Jewish and Muslim leaders after the Tree of Life massacre, to demand security grants for our places of worship, it happened. 

As members of this synagogue community, we know and care for one another. When someone isn’t in shul, someone calls. When we hear that someone is sick or has suffered a loss, we check in on them or bring over a meal. When we were planning our daughter, Hallel’s bat mitzvah in Cleveland, she told me that she wanted to invite Henrich. Henrich was a Holocaust survivor in his late 80’s who spoke with a thick German accent. “Why do you want to invite Henrich?” I asked. And she answered without hesitation, “Because he is my friend.” A synagogue is a place where a 12-year old girl and an an 87-year old man can be friends.

Our synagogue is not an island. We are connected to other synagogues, other faith institutions and other nonprofits. One of the most inspiring experiences I had this past year was working on the iwage Peace Interfaith Day of Service. On August 4, hundreds of people from all walks of life gathered on the New Haven Green to participate in ten different service projects including cleaning up a Jewish cemetery, cleaning a stretch of the shoreline, building a home through Habitat for Humanity, packing blessing bags of necessities for homeless folks, and preparing and feeding them a meal. This year was my second year involved in the planning committee, and I got to know some folks I otherwise wouldn’t have. We end up partnering with them in other endeavors like the program we had at Trinity Church last winter or hosting the Jerusalem Peacebuilders for Shabbat. When one of the priests at Trinity asked me to participate in a service this summer, I answered, “Anything you need.” It is powerful to work with and meet others who are different than you, to find that we share common dreams, challenges, and goals, and to see what problems that may have been theoretical for you — like gun violence or homelessness — look like up close.

This web of connection really matters — not just because it makes you less lonely — and that’s a lot — but because it nurtures democracy. Building trusting relationships, trusting others, creates more trustworthy government. In an America where more and more people are going it alone, our synagogue is going the other direction, building caring community, building one of many nodes which sustain the civic networks that in turn sustain our nation.

As I read Putnam and watched his movie, and thought about this, I scrawled a verse from the Torah across my notepad: v’ahvta l’re’echa kmocha. Love your neighbor as yourself. These are words we will read tomorrow afternoon in the Torah reading. It strikes me that this is what Putnam is really saying. According to Rabbi Akiva, this is the klal gadol, the main point of Torah — if you got this, you got it. While there are many ways this verse is understood, I believe that at its core it is telling us that the primary goal of all the laws and all the rituals and all the commandments is to help us become more loving people. To love our neighbor means to do for them what we are convinced they ought to do for us. A non-exhaustive list might include sincerely loving them and respecting them, seeking their well-being, sharing in their sorrow, warmly welcoming them into your home, judging them favorably, gladly going to a little trouble for their sake, helping out in ways material and other, wanting for them what we want for ourselves, not less.⁹

Let me be clear here. Your neighbor is, sometimes, maybe often, annoying. The Torah doesn’t bother to tell us to love our spouses or our children. It expects that we will, just as it doesn’t have to tell us to eat regularly. But your neighbor is the guy with the lawn sign you disagree with, who doesn’t weed his yard, whose dogs bark loudly at all hours, the guy who revs his engine early in the morning. He’s the one you’re commanded to love and loving him means opening your heart to be a little more generous, a little more capacious, to recognize that despite your differences he’s not my enemy; he’s just a guy like me, working hard to take care of his family, raise his kids, pay his bills. 

What stands out for me in this central biblical text is that you can’t love your neighbor unless you know him. This commandment requires us to build social and civic connections, to get to know other people, people who by definition are different from us, and to learn to care about them. In other words, if Putnam were writing a religious text, this is where he would start. Democracy is anchored in the same soil as Torah — loving your neighbor and caring about him. We build a more just, peaceful, and good society on the basis of the love we nurture right here in this community.

We nurture community every day at B’nai Jacob, and we can do even better. We can, all of us, be more kind to one another, more respectful, more caring, more loving, not only to our friends at the shul, but to the people who, well, annoy us. At the end of the day, our synagogue will not stand or fall on the beauty of its building, the size of its membership, or its endowment. I know. Others will tell you that those are the most important things. And they are important. They’ll tell you, “She’s just a rabbi. What does she know about budgets or buildings?” But I know that the most important thing, the largest bank account we have, is our social capital, how we care for one another, how we stretch ourselves to do more, how we listen and even learn from those with whom we disagree, how we work together toward common goals, how we grow in love. 

Perhaps Yogi Berra said it best, “People won’t come to your funeral, if you don’t go to theirs.” I would like to close, though, with the words of novelist and writer Barbara Kingsolver in an essay called, *Saying Grace,* written after 9/11: “If we can agree on anything in difficult times, she writes, it must be that we have the resources to behave more generously than we do, and that we are brave enough to rise from the ashes of loss as better citizens of the world than we have ever been. We’ve inherited the grace of the Grand Canyon, the mystery of the Everglades, the fertility of the Iowa plain – we could crown this good with brotherhood. What a vast inheritance for our children that would be, if we were to become a nation humble before our rich birthright, whose graciousness makes us beloved.”¹⁰

Sources:

1. Alexis de Toqueville, *Democracy in America* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
2. John Dewey, *The Public and Its Problems* as cited in Robert D. Putnam, *Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community* (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
3. Robert D. Putnam, *Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community* (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
4. Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely,” *New York Times Magazine*, July 13, 2024.
5. Shai Held, *Judaism is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life* (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024).
6. Barbara Kingsolver, “Saying Grace,” in *Small Wonder* (New York: Harper Collins, 2002).