| Dear {{first_name}},
In just a few weeks we will be gathering to celebrate the High Holidays. Once again this year, we will be running hybrid services with some in person and some on Zoom. I am grateful that whether in person or online we will be together as one community. The Jewish people have been celebrating the new year for thousands of years. In the ancient days, Rosh Hashana relied heavily on the Temple observances. It used to be there would need to be testimony as to when the new moon was spotted and thus they would determine when Rosh Hashana would precisely begin. This is in large part the reason for the two-day Rosh Hashana festival rather than one. In the Temple, Rosh Hashana was mainly about sacrifices and communal worship centered around the sounding of the shofar. With the final destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, all of this ceased immediately. Our ancestors were left with hard choices as to what to do next. I suppose an option at that time was to just give up and move on. Fortunately, our ancestors chose a different road. They chose to breathe new life into Jewish observance. They created synagogues, bolstered Jewish home observances, and created new roles for Jewish communal leaders. The Judaism of today would be unrecognizable to the Jews of 69 CE. But the truth is, Judaism of today would be unrecognizable to the Jews of 1000 CE or 1492 CE as well. This is in large part because Judaism has naturally evolved over time.
As a religion that has accentuated the value of change for so long, one would expect Jews to be good at change. But the reality is very different. Change is hard. We don’t like change; it makes us nervous. We are creatures of habit, we become comfortable in the way we do things and thus we prefer the familiar and comfortable. At the same time, change is necessary. The ability of humanity to adapt has landed us at the top of the food chain. The ability of Judaism to adapt has kept us in the newspaper rather than in history books. I don’t believe in change for the sake of change. And I don’t believe in “doing things the way we always have because it’s how we’ve always done it”. All changes made in religion must be for a reason that is noble and sacred and with purpose.
This week marks a change for our community. We have maintained our services as they are for quite some time. They are comfortable… They are pleasant… For years, a segment of our population has asked the simple question: why. They want to know why women cannot participate in the same ways that men do. They want to know why our services are the same as they always have been. These are noble questions. Traditionally, women did not participate in public ritual. While there are numerous examples, historically speaking, of women practicing their Judaism publicly, the overall consensus is that, for the most part, it just wasn’t done. This is an undeniable fact. What it is also undeniable is that again, we cannot say with authority that every Jewish community observed that way. There are also minority opinions from the Talmud and through the codes of Jewish law that each assert much greater female involvement then became commonplace in the more traditional Jewish communities. One of the most famous is taken from the Talmud in Eruvin 96a where it says, “Michal, the daughter of Saul, put on tefillin and the sages did not protest.” In a commentary to this statement by the sons-in-law’s and grandsons of the famous commentator Rashi, called the Tosafot, they assert that they had seen women wearing tefillin in their own times. We deduce from the statement that the women who were wearing the tefillin would have been the daughters and/or granddaughters of Rashi.
Now, even if none of this was true, we would still be left living in a world today that looks strikingly different from the world out of which this all grew. In the world today, women hold equal positions to men in all fields. This is uncontestable and undeniable. For many women, they do not struggle with the dichotomy of being 100% equal to men in the secular world and being unequal in the religious one. And yet for other women, and men, they do struggle. They question the authenticity and rationale for this compartmentalized style of living. Nobody can assert one way of seeing this is right and the other is wrong. It should be our goal to seek a world in which these two viewpoints can live side-by-side.
As we conclude the Jewish year 5781, here at OVS, we are going to have our first ever Shabbat morning service with women participating in a more equal way to their male counterparts. We remain committed to all of our members. It is for this reason that whenever we have a service with more female participation, we will offer a second concurrent service, the same as the services we’ve held here for over 100 years.
I recognize that change is hard and I recognize that some feel this is not the right thing to do. At the same time, I do believe in my heart that we stand on firm Jewish legal footing in making this move forward. If it weren’t for change, Rosh Hashana would not be a holiday today because there would be no Temple in which to offer sacrifices. If it were not for change, Judaism would not be a religion today because all of our journeys throughout the world would have destroyed us had we not slowly evolved over the centuries. It is our prayer that this change will be for the good of our Keilah, our families and our people.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Hearshen
Semon Akbashev
President |
