Rabbi Rick’s remarks on the occasion of his installation

as Rabbi of Temple Ami Shalom

September 9, 2005 

I want to offer my sincere thanks to all of you who are here to support me tonight.  There are several people whom I especially need to thank and honor.  First of all, Rabbi Jonathan Klein, thank you so much for taking time away from your busy schedule and family to present me to the congregation.  In the time that I have known you, I have felt a deep camaraderie, a shared sense of purpose in the rabbinate, and an admiration for your intellectual engagement with Torah, your enthusiasm, creativity, sensitivity, humor, and activist spirit.  I hope we can continue to grow together and learn from one another.  May your presence here tonight signify an auspicious beginning of a new year for us both.

I have so many other colleagues, friends, teachers, mentors, and students that I want to thank for the years of wisdom and insight they have provided me throughout my education and work.  While a small handful of you are physically present today, you are all here in spirit.

I want to thank this temple’s president, Lew Rader, for his selfless devotion to the welfare and success of this community.  Lew, I owe my entry into this congregation largely to your vision and tenacity to bring a full-time rabbi to the synagogue.  I’m so glad you followed up on that phone call I made to you, that you recognized what I had to share, and that we were able to make this work.  I also want to thank the Conservative Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association for allowing me to take this position.

But to return to Lew: Your unwavering support of me as I slowly introduce my style of leadership to the community has been a tremendous boon.  Your easy-going nature is deeply comforting, your davening on Shabbat mornings is robust and engaging, and your love of the Yankees definitely meets with my approval.  Thank you also to the rest of the Board of the synagogue.  I have enjoyed working with all of you, getting to know you, and facing the exciting challenges of restoring this congregation to a place of vitality and influence within the community.  I look forward to the ongoing success we will have in our shared efforts.  You have assembled a skilled, good-natured, and tirelessly committed staff to work with me in helping realize the dreams we all have for this community.  I believe I speak for all of us who are just beginning to know this institution — our new administrative assistant, Priscilla Baray, and our new caretakers, Alberto and Isabelle Romero, in thanking you, the Board, for your support and confidence in us.  I also want to thank our intrepid bookkeeper and religious school secretary, Sue Morris, whose years of service in our office have provided the rest of us with an invaluable hands-on education.  Thank you also to Sheila Zola who, for even longer, managed many crucial aspects of the office, and whose devotion I was able to witness in her final weeks of work here.

Thank you to my parents, Betsy and Michael Brody, for raising me with a love for the values of kindness, justice, honesty, critical thinking, awareness of the world around me, gratitude and appreciation, creativity, and personal growth and integrity.  Thank you, Mom and Dad, for sticking with the crazy notion that your good Jewish son was going to become a rabbi.  Thank you for your unconditional love and support.  I also want to thank my brother and sister, Jonathan and Rachel, my in-laws, Marian and Larry Kobrin, and my brother-in-law Josh for all making a wonderful extended family.

My greatest thanks must go to my immediate family, my life partner and daughter.  Rachel:  You are a rock in my life.  You are a ma’ayan mitgaber, an ever-flowing spring — of energetic enthusiasm, vision, love, intellectual rigor, and creativity.  Through your daily example, you inspire me to understand my own dreams, to expand them, and make them a reality.  You have helped me discover the things that really matter to me.  You fill me with love for you and the world, a feeling that anything is possible.  I feel so incredibly at home with you — to be with you is to know the powerful drama of living and also to know peace.  Thank you for remaining at my side, for encouraging me to pursue my real wish to be a congregational rabbi, and for never failing to lend a hand, an idea, a word of support, a suggestion, a challenge, or a hug.  And thank you for being you—for pursuing your own dreams and letting me support you in your achievements.  Through our partnership, we each become whole.  I love you.

Noa, I love the fact that your intuitive wisdom and abounding love does not require that I articulate in words how much you mean to me.  With you, love is simply known.

Finally, I want to offer my gratitude to the source of all creation, the source of love, the source of righteousness.  Thank You, God.  Thank You for inspiring within me the desire and ability to serve others and to serve my heritage; for calling me to a life of sharing Torah.  Each of us exists in this universe as an ambassador of Your will, a unique channel through which Your presence can become more manifest in the world.  I so greatly appreciate the tools You have given me—and the determination you have given me to cultivate and apply those tools—in order to help in that process of Divine manifestation.

And so I come to you, Temple Ami Shalom, to help us all increase God’s presence in our own community and in the world.  We do this together, as a community. While we all have unique gifts—some are more spiritual, some are more compassionate, some are more artistic (and there is great strength in that diversity of humanity!)—we, as Jews, share a primary tool.  Ours is a heritage of Torah—and by that I mean the collective wisdom, narratives, ethical precepts, ritual observances and various other cultural phenomena that define Judaism.  Torah literally means teaching or instruction.  It is God’s gift to us.  By embracing it, observing it, interpreting it, celebrating it, wrestling with it—making it a living document through our thoughts, prayers, relationships, and deeds—we return the Divine favor.  We offer to God what anyone who has ever given a gift truly wants—and this is the greatest gift possible—the complete, joyful, and honorable use of that original gift by its recipient for its ultimate purpose.  We utilize Torah to bring meaning and fulfillment into our lives, to structure our world around ideas and observances that make us whole.  The Hebrew word for whole or complete is shalem, which is where we get the word shalom, that abiding feeling of inner and outer completeness and security—peace. We establish that wholeness in community.  Private, mountain-top communion with God is nice, but we don’t live on the mountain-tops.  We live at the foot of the mountain, the site where we received Torah.  As the Psalmist says in Ps. 121, we lift our eyes up to the mountains, and recognize that our help comes from God.  We channel God’s help to us through the ongoing revelation of Torah.

Torah was given in community—to an entire nation, an am.  In tomorrow’s Haftarah for Parashat Shoftim, from Isaiah (Ch. 51, v. 16), God declares the intention to “say to Zion, ami atah (you are My people).”  God looks to us and calls us “My people,” ami.  Each of us, ideally, looks to the Jewish people and identifies with it, declaring it, “my people,” ami.  And when we work together, when we support one another in our pursuit of the ways of justice and peace, when we carry each other through our dark times and honor each other at our times of celebration, when we reach out to those in need, when we expand our minds and our spirit through prayer and study, then we become whole.  This is my vision for this community.  As a community, we can become shalem.  We can experience true peace, shalom.  We bring to life the vision that comes from the hybrid name of this unique congregation known as Ami Shalom.  We can assert “My people (Ami ) is peace (Shalom).”  Thus, a life of Torah becomes the means through which we express our love for God and allow for God’s power to be felt in the world.    This is my vision for this community. 

I believe we are already achieving this vision in my short time here.  We have engaged in ecstatic singing and praying, warm and comforting support for the sick and the mourning, stimulating and invigorating exploration of Torah.  I would be remiss not to mention the critical hour we are in as we continue to struggle with the terrible suffering we are witnessing in the Gulf Coast region as a result of natural disaster and human shortcomings.  Our congregation is responding to the need of the moment by focusing on a communal fund-raising campaign.  We will make a congregational donation to the Jewish Federation of Greater LA, which will make its way to the humanitarian relief so desperately needed in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.  As tragic as this situation is, it is yet another opportunity for us to gather at the foot of a mountain and see it not as threatening and ominous.  Rather, our shared communal effort—our compassion and our action—can bring God’s presence back into the picture, reminding us that God is the source of our strength and help.  I feel God’s presence here tonight, and am grateful to God and all of you.  I look forward to participating in many sacred occasions during my time here, occasions in which we come together and imbue our community with the holiness of God’s presence.