SERMON

KOL NIDREI

12 OCTOBER 2005 - 9 TISHRI 5766

"PATSY'S BAR"

 

Last week I tried to raise a question in my Rosh Hashanah sermons about what we need to do and what we can do to transform ourselves, our community, and our world into the place we believe it should and can be. This week I want to answer that question.  

In order to do this, I want to restate what I think are the problems and pitfalls that would prevent us from achieving our noble goal. But once that is done, we can move ahead with creating a strategy for getting where we want to go from where we are.  

For a very long time I was not sure that synagogues were still willing or even able to provide the things that previous generations had come to believe they could or should expect from them. Without waxing too nostalgic, I think you can still hear the older generations of Jews talking about all the different things that their congregations provided for them over the years. There were worship services, of course, and life cycle ceremonies, study opportunities and social events. There were community service programs, Israel-related events and programs, religious school and Hebrew school classes. But most of all, synagogues like this one were the central focus of the Jew's life. But no more.  

Today there are so many options and opportunities for involvement in things that it's often hard to know where to turn first. If you are a loner, then you have hundreds of television cable channels to watch, or endless hours in front of your computer where you can learn things, play games, be in instantaneous touch with numberless people whom you would never talk to face to face B if that was the body part you were interested in B and you would be able to fill up every free minute of your day and then some, and never have to encounter another real person.  

If you are more socially oriented, there are social groups, arts groups, political groups, educational groups, environmental groups, service groups, sporting groups, business groups, and thousands of other organizations and institutions, all of which make your involvement easy and fun, entertaining and educational, exciting and fulfilling. And a great many of them are worth every minute of the time, money, and energy that you put into them. There is no dearth of ways to spend your time.

One other consideration about synagogues: in my parents' generation and before, except for the avowed Jewish Communists who wouldn't be caught dead in a synagogue, it was simply assumed that you would belong to your local synagogue, even if you didn't go there very often. It was part of the universal consciousness of Jews that the synagogue was the central Jewish community institution. Even as far back as Talmudic times it was considered essential for the community to have a Torah and a synagogue before almost anything else. But those were days when Jews weren't able to take advantage of, or have access to, all the things that we now take for granted, things which are more exciting than today's synagogue life, and which draw us there, rather than here.  

Also, in former times, when most women were systematically excluded from the workplace, one place where they were omnipresent was in the synagogue, where they did far more work than most of the men. Sisterhoods were vitally important parts of synagogue life and, as far as that goes, this synagogue still maintains that tradition, even though the vast majority of women here are now working outside the home and so have far less time available to donate to either the Sisterhood in particular or the Temple in general than their predecessors had. And this reality, too, has had a significant impact on us.  

One other factor, too, has to be included in this mix. To put it simply and straightforwardly, we are pricing ourselves out of the market. Since Temple membership is entirely voluntary and shelter, food, clothing and healthcare are not, and since costs in every sphere continue to rise, it does not take rocket science to figure out that, unless someone perceives membership in the Temple to be as vitally important as the other categories, there is a very good chance that the Temple will fall by the wayside, not because it has been rejected for any specific reason, but because there is only so much money to go around, and one must provide for the practical essentials. At one time, the Temple would have been considered one of those practical essentials. But no more.  

What to do? Should we take the easy way out and simply consign the Temple to the dustbin of history, admitting that it no longer meets our needs, that it is an anachronism that cannot keep up with the demands of contemporary society? That is certainly one way to go, and considering that the affiliation rate of Jews with synagogues in the Bay Area is barely 15%, that is apparently the way that a very great number of our co-religionists have chosen to go.  

Or should we look around us at other synagogues or other non-Jewish houses of worship, to see if they have anything to offer or suggest about better ways to go. If we were to go that route, I would suggest looking at two congregations in the area, one in San Francisco and one in Alameda . If you look at Temple Emanu-El , unequivocally the largest synagogue in the entire Bay Area and one of the largest on the West Coast, you will see an institution that has redefined by learn what its members want and need rather than telling them what it wants them to think they want and need. Every week they produce massive mailings that they send to their more than 2,000 member families offering learning programs, worship experiences, social outlets, social service opportunities B so many, in fact, that it is practically impossible to keep track of all of them. And their membership keeps growing like weeds. This is not an accident, but it is extremely impressive.

The other congregation is just across the sidewalk. Bay Farm Community Church could not be farther from us in theology, demography, and outlook. But they have built up a membership here in the last few years that has provided them with enough funds to build that huge new structure that they call a worship center and which will be dedicated next month. They have so many programs going on that it would make your head spin. And yes, they have a much larger potential member base on which to draw than we do. But one of the major differences between us and them is that they are going out and drawing on them.  

Please don't get me wrong. I think we have a strong, good, and practical Board here at Temple Israel , and I salute them for bringing order out of chaos after years of good intentions with relatively little to show for it. But we need much, much more than this Board can do on its own. The commitment of a baker's dozen of dedicated Jews on a Board and a few committee chairs in addition is not enough to sustain the life of a synagogue.  

And that lack is where I want to focus tonight. But first, a digression.  

As you may know, I am originally from Ohio , a state that considers itself to be part of the Midwest . I was born, raised and educated there in the age of "Leave it to Beaver." It was a time of close community, of pride in America , of growing prosperity and, perhaps most of all, a time of relative peace.  

Slightly farther west, in the real Midwest , and especially in rural parts of that section of the country, the bedrock values that people refer to as Midwestern values are still very much in vogue. Perhaps they are not as sophisticated as the folks on the coasts claim to be, but by and large, crime rates in the rural Midwest are still lower, families seem to hang together longer and better, and excitement can often be measured against the standard of going to the county fair.  

I go back to the Midwest every August, and every time I go, I get a real sense of those bedrock healthy values. I go to recharge my batteries, to get some kind of reassurance that some things are better left unchanged. Let me give you an example of what I mean, based on something that happened a little less than two months ago.  

One of the things I do on my summer vacation in the North Woods is to go to a sort of magical place created about twenty years ago by a fellow named Warren Nelson. Warren was a folk-singing, bluegrassy kind of guy from southern Minnesota who made wonderful music with a group called the Lost Nation String Band. All talented musicians, they all moved to northern Wisconsin and, after some careful thought and planning, invented what came to be called Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua, a venue that produces very high quality entertainment six nights a week in an 800-seat blue and yellow canvas tent from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend. It is indescribably wonderful. But I digress from my digression.  

Warren has continued to write songs and shows, some of them so successful that he and his crew at the Big Top have had works commissioned by both the states of Wisconsin and Minnesota . He produces a weekly radio show and, during the summer months, produces new and old shows at the tent as well as bringing world-famous talent to this little place, to which thousands of people flock from all over the country for some of the best entertainment you can find anywhere.

Warren Nelson's specialty is writing about local things, places and people. He writes musical histories that are accompanied by actual photographs from the times, people and places that the musicals describe. One such place, one that I had never heard of until this August, was the inspiration for my sermon tonight. I found it a little ironic that on the one night of the year that Jews all over the world begin a one-day fast, refraining from food and drink and other pleasures of the flesh, I should be talking about a place as opposite from that as it is possible to be. But this is what blew me away, folks. It was Warren Nelson's song, called Patsy's Bar, that rang the bell for me, that made me sit up and take notice, that sort of pulled dozens of random thoughts together, and made me realize that on this Yom Kippur I needed to talk about something even more important than atonement, forgiveness, and repentance. I want to talk about Patsy's Bar.  

You see, Patsy's Bar is a little bar in Washburn , Wisconsin that might not seem out of the ordinary to the folks who live around there. But to me it has come to symbolize what I think is so obviously lacking in our own lives that it deserves to be taken out of its anonymity and put into the spotlight as a terrific example of what our lives could and should be like.  

In his song about Patsy's Bar, Warren sings about all the locals who come to the bar, most of them every day. And I'm sure that none of them gives the bar a second thought. It's just where they go, even if they don't drink. Warren mentions them each and all by name, because by doing so he indicates that every patron of the bar counts, that each one is important in his or her own right, and that they are all worth mentioning and remembering, whatever their idiosyncrasies, their special traits or talents, or even their unremarkable sameness.  

What Warren doesn't say, but what every patron of the bar knows instinctively, is that Patsy's Bar is the one place in town where everybody goes most often. If they can't find somebody for some reason, they always go there to check first to see if anybody has seen them. If someone needs help building a new barn, or even getting out of a snow drift, they all find out about it at Patsy's, and they come together for a barn raising to help their neighbor, or they find a way to extricate their neighbor from the drift, and the folks definitely count on their help and support to do a job that would be miserably difficult to do alone. If someone in the area is sick, they find out about that at Patsy's, too, and they rally around the sick person or their family to help in whatever way they can. Patsy's Bar, in short, is the community center par excellence where people know one another, care about and support one another, and where they share the same Midwestern values that are transmitted from generation to generation more by deed than by word, but which are unmistakable and solid throughout the community.  

The refrain in Warren =s song about Patsy's Bar goes like this: "Do we even know who and where we are? We are human seekers, peekin' through the glass down at Patsy's Bar. Do we even know who and where we are? We are strangers, friends, neighbors to the end down at Patsy's Bar."

With all due respect to Jewish theology, history, prayer, study and the rest of it, I don't think I have ever heard anything that resonated so clearly and loudly with me than the simple words of this refrain. "We are human seekers...." What are we seeking? We are seeking the sense of community that we have clearly lost and that, in many cases, we don't even realize that we have lost. And "We are strangers, friends, neighbors to the end, down at Patsy's Bar." Because we have forgotten, or possibly never even known, what it means to be part of a close-knit community that shares its values together, we may not understand what is involved in being an intimately involved member of such a community. It means being able to be counted on in an emergency. It means caring enough about the survival of the community and its values an institutions that you spend a lot of time not only doing those things that build the community, but also reaching out to those people who ought to be part of the community, but who either don't know about it, don't care about it, or don't understand how important that sense of community can be to them.  

Yet we are often strangers in our own community, or at least we often feel that way. But in reality we are often friends and, with a little transformation or reorientation, we could grow those friendships, we could realize that we have friends or are friends in ways we haven't realized. And when all the shouting is done, we will realize that we are neighbors to the end, landsman, and more closely connected that we have ever imagined.  

In this case, the community I am talking about is Temple Israel . Even if we don't remember a time when life revolved around just one or two community institutions, you don't have to be sociologists to see how detached and distant we have become from one another. The institutions that used to be the glue that held the community together have lost much of their adhesive quality, except perhaps in the African-American and immigrant communities. And that loss is life-threatening, maybe not physically, but definitely spiritually.  

Synagogues like ours need to be places that demonstrate, teach, and exemplify the kinds of values we want people to see and emulate. They also need to speak to the needs of people who get all the wrong messages about values in every other sphere of their lives. Instead of learning from advertising on television, radio, in the print media and on the Internet that being sexy, lustful, and promiscuous is the way to find true happiness, maybe we could remind people that being accountable, loyal, honest, and compassionate is the way not only to find happiness, but to spread it around.  

Instead of seeing that accumulating wealth is the best, if not the only way, to be happy or successful, maybe we could remind people that sharing what we have with those who have less is a way to make society better, more peaceful, and more just and fair. Maybe if we could somehow help people understand that accumulating things doesn't amount to much (a lesson that tsunami, hurricane, and earthquake survivors learn every time they live through one of these disasters), and that improving who you are instead of what you own, is much more likely to be of use to you B and everyone else B in the long run than your accumulated possessions, we would at the same time help them understand that, whether they like it or admit it or not, they are part of a community - of many communities probably - and that the members of those communities often count on them to share not only the good times, but the bad times as well.