Hi! This is Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and I'm excited to introduce you to Season 3 of Hashivenu: Jewish Teachings on Resilience. This season, we will focus on different ways to build community as a way to foster resilience. I want to begin with a story, which I'm sharing with permission. It's a story about redemption in the midst of a family tragedy. 

My younger brother Andy and his first wife Jessie moved to Portland, OR about 15 years ago. When they got there, they joined Havurah Shalom, the Reconstructionist congregation, and they became very involved, to the point that Jessie had joined the board and was slotted to become president. Life got in the way, as it sometimes does, and when Jessie was 38 weeks pregnant with their first child, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was, as you could imagine, very intense—Jessie ended up delivering their son Sam via C-section, and undergoing a double mastectomy and receiving radiation and chemotherapy all within a few short months. Jessie was a poster child for resilience and had an amazing attitude through it all. I flew out from the East Coast as often as I could while she was in treatment. On one visit, I arrived late Friday morning. My brother Andy was at work and it was at a point in her chemo treatments where Jessie felt well enough to pick me up at the airport with Sam in the car seat in the back. We went out to lunch; they went home to nap; I took the car to do a big shop and then came home and prepared Shabbat dinner. My brother left work a bit early to come home to see me and I heard him at the front door and went to greet him—it was a pretty emotional reunion. We love each other a lot and it was obviously an intense time.  Right at that moment, as we were hugging in the doorway, someone else approached the house. It was a young woman, she was carrying a bag of groceries, and we could see a challah poking out the top. She could tell she was interrupting something intimate, so she just handed the bag to my brother, said "Shabbat shalom from Havurah Shalom," and she left. And I'll never forget that my brother stared after her for a long minute and then turned to me and said, "I have no idea who that was."

I can't tell you how moved I was.I will always be incredibly grateful to Havurah Shalom for the myriad ways that community supported Andy and Jessie and Sam in that time and over the four years from her diagnosis to her ultimate death, which is still a huge loss. And they continue to support Andy and Sam and their family now. Sam just became bar mitzvah there and it was tremendously joyful to sing and dance and celebrate with so many of those same people; maybe that woman, I don't know. Andy never figured out who it was. My family's experience in this synagogue, and that story in particular, brings to life how community should function. For me, this story epitomizes community. It shows the way that individuals can voluntarily bind themselves together in relationship; the ways people reach out across difference and interests and generations, and at least some of the time subordinate their own desires to some larger vision and larger good.

Religious Jewish life is organized on the principle of minyan, a quorum. There are certain essential prayers, including the call to worship and the mourner's kaddish, and critical activities, like reading the Torah, that can only happen when there are at least ten people. (Historically, it's been ten adult men; in liberal Judaism, it's ten adults, without reference to gender.) For this to work, that means that people have to show up for each other—even if it's inconvenient, even if it's hard, even if they don't necessarily know each other.  In contemporary life, this principle of minyan, of a collective, of mutual obligation willingly offered, is deeply countercultural. The embrace of individualism that is a characteristic of modern society has been exponentially intensified by consumer practices and by social media, to the point that in the United Kingdom, they have appointed a minister for loneliness, and the former US surgeon general decries it as an epidemic. 

In this season of Hashivenu, we're going to talk to a lot of people who are thinking about and practicing how to create community. Many of them will be talking about synagogues, since that is a primary location of Jewish community, but this isn't a pitch for synagogues. It's a pitch for binding relationships, for mutual obligation, for connection, so we'll also be talking to folks building communities in spaces other than synagogues. I hope you'll listen with open hearts and will find insights and strategies to fill you up and nourish you on your own journeys.

This podcast has been an incredible delight for me to create, along with Sam Wachs, our editor and producer, and Rabbi Michael Fessler, who tends the website that supports it. I am so grateful to Sam and Michael, and I also want to thank Hila Ratzabi, the editor of Ritualwell.org, who regularly curates beautiful resources from Ritualwell to complement our discussion. We are all deeply moved that Hashivenu has resonated with so many of you as well. The episodes have been downloaded nearly 65,000 times and in my travels across North America, I am always excited when folks I encounter tell me how much they enjoy listening. I love these conversations, and I love when you write in. We try to respond to every inquiry. And this is probably a good time to encourage you to rate Hashivenu on whatever platform you are using to listen. The ratings really help to boost visibility and impact, so thanks in advance. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy!