D'var Torah

I hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving, ate your fill, and enjoyed the company of family or friends. What was your Thanksgiving celebration like? Did it remind you of what you are grateful for? Did you share any meaningful moments with the people around you? Perhaps, in the context of a week filled with tragic events around the country and world, it provided space to get in touch with those connections, with each other, and with our sense of purpose — or even “spirituality.”

Thanksgiving is a unique holiday because of its American universality and its focus on food and gathering. It is also unique, for many of us, due to the absence of religious content. This doesn’t mean that we aren’t having spiritual moments like the ones I mentioned above. It does mean, though, that whatever experiences we have are not usually labeled as “spiritual.”

In the Torah portion this week, Jacob leaves home and begins his life’s journey. He spends a night in the desert, using a stone as a pillow. During the night, Jacob has a moment of transformation, and who wouldn’t in his situation? He is in a time of crisis, as he flees the threat of his brother’s anger over the stealing of the birthright, and strikes out for the first time on his own. He lies on the desert rock through the night, a memory that I will never forget from my own times in Israel, staring up at a sky full of bright stars. Jacob awakens in the morning with a new feeling of meaning and purpose in his life.  

At our best, our lives are full of moments like these, though some of them may feel deeper than others.  Perhaps the difference between Jacob’s experience and many of ours is not only its depth, but also the significance he attaches to it.  Jacob exclaims aloud, “Surely, God is in this place and I did not know it!” He understands his experience as an encounter with God.

Judaism seeks to provide us with many pathways to the divine. It encourages us to broaden our concept of what spirituality is and how we talk about it.  Some call it God, and some call it our connection with something beyond us. For some, it’s about our relationship with each other and with community. Maybe the secular but meaningful Thanksgiving holiday, combined with the example of Jacob finding deep meaning in his experience of nature, can lead us to look harder for a sense of spirituality in our lives – not just in prayer, but whenever we experience something profound, whether a deep encounter with another person, a feeling of wonder, appreciation, or meaning, or a sense of being connected to something beyond the world that we see and touch.  Our religious lives, and the life of our congregation, can be made fuller if we welcome those experiences, and share them with each other – not just at yoga class, not up in the mountains, but here, at Temple Rodef Shalom.  

Wishing you a Shabbat of rest, rejuvenation, and fulfillment,
Rabbi Jeffrey Saxe