Erev Rosh Hashanah 5783
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
Imperfection is good. It means we aren’t finished.
After one of those early-in-our-relationship Friday night dinners with the lovely people who would years later become my in-laws, on our way home as we were sharing news of our respective week, I remember joking to Jonni: “Does your mum create leaks in the house because she enjoys spending time with Liam the builder? There’s always something that needs fixing and he’s always there.” It was a few years later that we became home-owners ourselves and I have spent the last 14 years being reminded of my naïve comment, as I learnt the lesson that comes with the privilege of owning your own home: there is always something that’s gone wrong, that needs fixing or is needing to be replaced or repaired and not nearly enough “Liams” in the world these days who can turn their hands to fixing anything.
What these last six months have taught me is whatever the snagging list you might have after a home renovation, whatever you might feel always needs fixing at home, it’s not a patch on building a whole new synagogue. So, while you sit here wondering when art will go up on the walls, assessing the quality of the sound or if you’ve noticed one or two bits still on the snagging list, I want to assure you that these imperfections are inherently Jewish.
In the Talmud, Bava Batra 60b restricts the finishings we use for internal walls. Maimonides comments on this teaching stating that, “When the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the rabbis of the generation established that we should not build a building decorated like the residences of the Kings. Rather, when plastering the walls with clay and lime, one should leave a space of one ama by one ama without lime.”
Maimonides draws out two potential aspects of the build to bear in mind. Firstly, an implication that our walls should not look as lavish as royalty, using luxurious or over-priced materials. Secondly the mitzvah of leaving a section of the wall, un-plastered, unpainted, unfinished (Penine Halakha, Ha’am veha-Arets, p 186, according to the Beit Yosef Sh. A. 560).
Though the majority halachic ruling is a lenient one and it is not common practice to limit the type of decoration a private Jewish house can have, there is a practice that when building a home, one should leave a square of wall unfinished, unpainted. The size of this uncoated wall is a square of roughly 1.5 ft by 1.5 ft (an ama by an ama).
We are instructed to feel like it is incomplete, commanded for every building project to still have room to work on, to be improved. The Talmudic discussion is rooted in creating a connection and an ongoing source of remembrance for the destruction of the Temple. Yet I think it could have a much more powerful message for us today and a far stronger significance to how we live our lives as diaspora Jews.
Once something is deemed to be finished, we can sit back and stop working on it. Once something is finished, it is as good as it gets. Once something is finished, it is left in that state, at which point we take its very existence for granted. It simply is as it is.
Poet Eve Grubin, in her piece “Unfinished”, writes: “Who needs finality when unfinishing creates a longing for what has not yet happened?” i
It’s that longing for what has not happened yet which keeps us moving forward.
Erev Rosh Hashanah 2020 we sat behind our zoom screens the night before our drive-in services. Erev Rosh Hashanah 2021 we sat outside in the stands watching the sun set as we davened.
Erev Rosh Hashanah 2022 we sit, so many of us, with others watching remotely, we sit happily in our new home, so thrilled by the extraordinary communal success it signals. What an achievement. What a journey and what a sign that the community is forward thinking and ready to embrace a wonderful future. Yet learning from the naïve newly-wed who was moving into her forever home 14 years ago and thinking she was moving into a finished product, tonight I am sitting comfortably with its still (for the moment) blank walls, its temperamental building management system and its characterful leaks and quirks because I’m definitely not ready to say it’s finished. We are not finished. FRS is not a finished product. Our building is not finished because we are not there yet. We are not ready to say we have arrived, because we need the community inside the building to match the potential of its big, impressive walls.
So, when in prayer your eyes look heavenward and you see the super-environmentally exposed ceiling, I invite you to ask, when will the building be finished?
It’s going to take more than builders going through the snagging list. The building will be complete when it is filled with a living Judaism which is relevant, vibrant and being passed on to generations who will also hold it meaningfully. The building will be finished when the sound of learning and cultural events is reverberating off its walls, when people are popping in any day of the week to enjoy the rich and varied offerings and those who can’t be here in person feel equally engaged in community life via the technology which allows them to feel totally connected with those in the room. The building will be finished when people feel completely welcome, at home and among friends and not judged for any aspect of their identity. The building will be finished when we can acknowledge that we are living at the time of a climate crisis and yet managing to tread so lightly that we can take pride in leading the way to reverse the negative impact our lives are having on the planet. When will the building be finished? When we feel the connection of community tying us together, giving us the ability to support each other through life and to look out to the world around us and be the neighbours, the citizens, the people we can take pride in being. Only then should we paint the final square foot, the one ama by one ama, and then feel that we can step back from the canvas and say we are done, we have truly created the spiritual and communal home we are proud of.
We’ve come so far from little hall purchased on Fallow Court Ave which gave this community its first home. We have come even further from the pandemic work-arounds and the makeshift temporary home of Reubens House and yet there is still plenty of the journey still to walk together. It’s an extraordinary new building that we begin this new year in, our fabulous new home.
But let us not think it’s finished as we continue to journey together always checking at the back to make sure everyone is walking with us and only then can we say we have arrived, the building is finished because we are where we want to be.
We build physically, metaphorically, and spiritually for the coming of a better time. Articulated for us by the words of the Aleinu.
iEve Grubin, “Unfinished,” from The House of Our First Loving. Copyright @2016 by Eve Grubin.
