Walking Distance

We walked to shul last Shabbat. Five minutes, most of it along the park. That is the whole commute now — out the door, past the park, there.

For most of my Jewish life, Shabbat morning started with a decision about a car. Now it starts with shoes.

We went Friday night last week, which was the first time Cooper was alone in the new place. He survived it. Tomorrow we are going Saturday morning instead, and I suspect we will end up doing both most weeks.

That is most of what this week held, honestly. We are still settling in.

The rabbi gave us a tour the first time we came. Reform, with Conservative practice mixed through it, and a sukkah up beside the parking lot. Everyone was kind to us in the specific way of people who have decided in advance to be kind to whoever walks in.

We also had to send our IDs to the executive director before we came. There was a police officer inside the door. He knows everyone there and he questioned us anyway — pre-approved, on a list, questioned.

None of that is unusual. It is roughly what it takes to walk into a shul now.

Something else about that building. The names on the wall inside do not belong to one congregation. They belong to four, folded into each other over the years until what was left was this one — which carries pieces of all their names in its own. And after the holidays another congregation is folding in too. The details are still being worked out.

A shul whose name is a record of other shuls.

Tomorrow is Shmini Atzeret. Seven days of Sukkot end, and the Torah adds one more:

בַּיּוֹם֙ הַשְּׁמִינִ֔י עֲצֶ֖רֶת תִּהְיֶ֣ה לָכֶ֑ם כׇּל־מְלֶ֥אכֶת עֲבֹדָ֖ה לֹ֥א תַעֲשֽׂוּ׃

On the eighth day you shall hold a solemn gathering; you shall not work at your occupations.

— Bamidbar 29:35

Atzeret. JPS footnotes that word: precise meaning uncertain. The root means to hold back, to stop, to detain. A day named for stopping, and nobody is entirely sure what we are being stopped for.

The midrash has an answer. Across the seven days of Sukkot the offerings count down — thirteen bulls, then twelve, then eleven — seventy in all, which the Talmud reads as one for each of the seventy nations of the world. A week of the Temple working on behalf of everybody. Then the eighth day comes and the number is one.

Sukkah 55b puts words in God’s mouth for it: kashah alai preidatchem — your leaving is hard for me. Stay one more day. Make it a small meal, just us.

A week facing outward, and then a day that asks you to stay close and keep it small. Four congregations’ names on a wall and a fifth on the way. I did not go looking for the rhyme.

I keep thinking about it this year because of what tomorrow also is.

The seventh of October, 2023, was 22 Tishrei 5784. It was Shmini Atzeret. Tomorrow is 22 Tishrei 5787 — the third yahrzeit on the Hebrew calendar, the calendar the day actually happened on, falling on the day itself.

So tomorrow morning we say Yizkor. And then, because it is Shmini Atzeret, we say Geshem, the prayer that turns the year’s weather over and asks for rain. Memory and rain, in the same service, in the same hour.

I am holding both and not trying to resolve them. The yom tov is real. The anniversary is real. Neither is a frame for the other.

What I have mostly been thinking about is how much healing this community needs, on more levels than I can count. Not one wound. Many, in different directions, and some of them we gave each other.

Which brings me back to the walk.

Tomorrow’s haftarah is the end of Solomon’s dedication of the Temple — the largest building project in the nation’s history, finished, the whole people assembled. It closes like this:

בַּיּ֤וֹם הַשְּׁמִינִי֙ שִׁלַּ֣ח אֶת־הָעָ֔ם וַֽיְבָרְכ֖וּ אֶת־הַמֶּ֑לֶךְ וַיֵּלְכ֣וּ לְאׇהֳלֵיהֶ֗ם שְׂמֵחִים֙ וְט֣וֹבֵי לֵ֔ב

On the eighth day he let the people go. They bade the king good-bye and went to their homes, joyful and glad of heart.

— I Melachim 8:66

On the eighth day he sent them home. Not deeper into the Temple — home. To their own tents, on their own feet, glad.

That is the shape of it. The grand assembly is not where it lands. It lands when people walk back to their houses carrying something.

Healing on the scale this community needs will not arrive as an announcement. It will be a lot of people walking five minutes to a building where somebody knows their name, past the officer who knows them, week after week, for years. Four congregations becoming one and then one more.

Something of mine moved house this week too — a piece of work I built on my own went under a bigger roof, with other names beside mine. More on that another time. It was the right move, and it felt like exactly what this day is about: stop running the thing outward, and come sit at the smaller table.

On Wednesday, three years to the day on the other calendar, AIC is taking people across that ground. David Sussman is guiding a live virtual tour of the Nova festival site, 9:00 AM Eastern. It is recorded, so register even if you cannot make the hour.

Seventy bulls, and then one. The whole world, and then your own house.

Tomorrow we will walk to shul again, past the park. We will say Yizkor for people we never met and for a day that broke this holiday open three years ago. We will ask for rain. And then we will walk home.

Shabbat shalom. Chag sameach.

— Uriel ben Avraham