Return Again:
Endings and Beginnings

Rabbi Michael L. Feshbach
Temple Shalom
Chevy Chase, MD

There are two words written on the bottom of the final page of every masechet (tractate) of the Talmud.  The words are in Aramaic, but they mean, roughly: "return to you."  "We're not done with you."  "God is not done with us."  "We haven't gotten everything there is out of this yet." "We will return."

Everyone knows the joy of going over something familiar, and finding a fresh insight in it, something you had never thought of before.  Everyone knows the power -- sometimes joyous, sometimes poignant -- of coming back to a once familiar place, and seeing it through new eyes, or in a new way.

Al echad kama v'kama... how much the more so for me this summer...

I think the only thing that made the end of my stay at the Shalom Hartman Institute for the summer, and my family's departure from Jerusalem yesterday bearable... was those two Aramaic words, with their ancient promise... "We will return to this place."  Literally, for us, in just two weeks with the Temple trip.  But also, for me, to the learning, and the learners, of this summer... which will continue, winter and summer, for the next three years.

How can I describe the Hartman Institution, and this program, without sounding like I have, to use what I have always found a puzzling phrase, "drunk the Kool-Aide?"  What made this so special, I believe, was the content, the context and the colleagues.

The content.  What we learned was simply the highest quality educational experience of my career -- on the most urgent and pressing questions of our time.  A small sample: Moshe Halbertal, one of the co-authors of the code of ethics for the Israeli military, teaching us not only his theory of the Rambam (Maimonides), but also reviewing with us -- and having us study it as if it were an ancient text, with careful parsing of each word -- that very code of ethics itself.  Rani Jaeger, founder of a new Tel Aviv based spiritual community which draws hundreds of secular Israelis to servies on a beach with drums and guitars every Friday night -- speaking on the new Israeli spirituality, and the deep, almost unconscious Jewish content lurking behind the cultural and everyday experiences of life in the Jewish state.  (Not just obvious things, like the fact that reading a map with street names in any Israeli city introduces you to the entire world of Jewish and Israeli history in ways which are hard to describe -- he didn't even mention this aspect of life here, but it is hard for an American to miss.  Street names that ask questions, like 29 November Street, or a street pronounced by Israelis as Avraham Linkolin -- which is actually Abraham Lincoln street, but Hebrew can't quite handle an unpronounced consonant.)  Discussions and panels and peer study on questions such as the meaning of Judaism after the Jewish state.  Or questioning who defines "the good."  Or asking what is an ethical approach to the use of power based on Jewish sources?  Or dealing with the complex and existentially central question of the meaning of peoplehood in a world of individuality, autonomy and choice. 

And Rambam.  Rambam, Rambam, Rambam!  I don't think I fully realized the degree, before I came to Hartman  (fully locution, that... people talk about "doing Hartman" the way they do about "doing Chautauqua," and the pluralistic approach to Jewish life and sources is referred to as the "Hartman Torah"), the degree to which Rabbi David Hartman, his son Rabbi Donniel Hartman, and many of the scholars assembled here... focus on the work of Moshe Maimonides -- nor was I prepared for an in-depth introduction to the Rambam as a classical philosopher, political thinker, social strategist, community organizer, legal theorist, God-seeker, intellectual rationalist, scientist and mystic!  (All this in one man!  Yes, and this, by the way, is why there is a saying "from Moses to Moses [Maimonides], there was never anyone like Moses.") 

For a quarter of the content alone, a tenth of it even, dayyeinu!  It would have been enough!

But then the context.
To study these things here, in Jerusaelm... steps from where the events we study took place, and in the light of the world we live in... wow!  Questions of Jewish sovereignty are no longer theoretical.  For two thousand years we wrote about what we thought God wanted of us and what we should expect of each other, with absolutely no realistic opportunity to implement our vision, our values, to test our ideals against the anvil of everyday life.  And now?  Now we are called into reality, to see where we stand, and what we are made of not just in powerlessness, but power.  There are Jewish discussions that are only words in the air, even in an open society such as the United States, but which here... here those words are life and death decisions with real world implications, every day, and for everyone.  Here the cab drivers run the Knesset in their own minds, and the postal delivery routes take in this dream-like, sun-drenched intoxicating mixture of yesterday, today and tomorrow just in the course of their daily rounds.  To study about Jewish ethics and the use of power and who determines what is good in a place where these things matter... for that, too, dayyeinu.

But the most valuable piece... the teachers... and my fellow learners.  The colleagues who are travelling this path with me.  To study together with colleagues from all streams of Judaism... that alone gives a wider vision of Jewish life and possiblity than I had before coming, or have had in quite some time.  Too many Boards of Rabbis are so divided that communities (such as ours, in Washington D.C.), have two such organizations -- one Orthodox, and the other everyone else.  What a mechayah (wonderful experience) to study together, to come together (although the Orthodox colleagues who come here have their own interesting sets of issues with the... very pluralistic approach... of the originally Orthodox founders of this place, and they have to be open enough to deal with or at least live with the issues this raises for them).  But this... 

We have members of our congregation travelling next month to New Orleans, in a continuing and ongoing effort to rebuild parts of the city.  The first thing I thought of after just a short period of my cohort being together?  Oh, these congregants have to contact this colleague of mine who is there, when they get to New Orleans.  Never mind that he heads a community it would not even have dawned on me to think of, just a few weeks ago.

If any of my colleagues, those in my "cohort" of fellow learners read these words... thank you, for the gift of your presence, and your company on this journey.  May we continue to learn from each other, and share the energy and enthusiasm we find here with those we teach and pray with back in our own "everyday" worlds.

Content, context and colleagues.  Hadaran!  We're not done with each other yet.
Just as, after so many years in exile: we shall come back to this place.  We will return.