Sacred Empty Space
Yom Kippur 5785/2024
As most of you know, I will retire on July 1st from my role as senior rabbi. Like many of you, I have some questions. Some are logistical, like “where will I put myself?” I have taken over my son Ari’s bedroom and turned it into a home office. Will that be my default place to sit, read, and write? Or will it be important for me to have a place out of the house, perhaps the reading nook in our new CBB Library? As I have said already many times, I plan to do a lot of hiking, and traveling, and take classes in art and music, and so on. But on a typical day, when I just want to sit and read, what will be my place? That is an important logistical question.
Another question is more existential. What will be my purpose? The last time I asked that question without knowing the answer I was twenty years old, 47 years ago. I was a junior in college and feeling bewildered, struggling to choose a career path. I was home in Rochester NY for Thanksgiving and I went to consult my rabbi. We went to lunch and I asked him what Judaism says about our purpose on earth. Emerging from that conversation, I had decided that my purpose in this world was to become a teacher of Judaism. For the past 47 years, that purpose has been my north star. I have had other important and meaningful responsibilities, like being a husband to Marian and father to Rachel and Ari, and son to my mother and father. But my primary identity, my work, and my purpose on this earth has been to teach Judaism. Now what?
That question is both terrifying and exhilarating. I feel an empty space opening at the center of my life. An empty space that is alive with possibility, and with uncertainty. Like a sudden silence in the middle of a conversation. For a Jew, empty space is bound up with the sacred.
The Kabbalists, the Jewish mystics, spoke of the Halal hapanui, the evacuated space which God opened up as the beginning of creation. Shabbat is an empty space, a time of rest and reflection, of doing nothing, just being, at the heart of our week. The ancient Tabernacle, the dwelling place of the Divine Presence, was an elaborate structure built around an empty space at the center. The empty space was the whole point. In giving the instructions for the Tabernacle to Moses, God says about that empty space: “I will meet you there, and I will speak with you [in that empty space,] above the ark, between the two keruvim.”
When we study together and allow ourselves to ask a question to which we truly do not know the answer, that question creates an empty space for God to enter. I feel an empty space opening at the center of my life. Let me share a few ways I experience that.
For forty-five years, whenever I have entered into Jewish prayer, I have found myself thinking “what is the meaning of this prayer? How could I translate this prayer into language that my congregation can embrace?” There have been many times that I felt the presence of God while praying, and often, very often, those moments led immediately to the question “how can I share this with my students?” Soon that question will no longer be at the forefront of my mind. What will it feel like to pray without the rabbi in my head taking notes, and planning the next lesson? An empty space is opening in my life.
Here’s another example. I try to go hiking every week on my day off, on one of the front country trails like Cold Spring Trail, or Rattlesnake Canyon, or Romero Canyon or San Ysidro, or if I have more time, down into Blue Canyon or in the back country of the San Raphael Wilderness. Those hours alone, with the wildflowers and the lizards, the rocks and the cool streams have been healing and inspiring for me. But it never takes long for the rabbi in my head to pipe up with, “Could we get the 8th and 9th graders out here? Would that be a good place to gather to tell a story? Hey, could we make learning the Santa Barbara wildflowers part of the Netivot curriculum?” Bringing together Judaism and wilderness has been a major theme for the last twelve years of my life. Now I wonder: what could it be like to go out into the wilderness without the rabbi in my head? An empty space is opening in my life.
And here is one more important example. For the past eight years, I have spent many hours almost every day thinking about the Building Dreams project. Thinking about how to redesign and make the most of our CBB building. About how we can use our outdoor spaces. About what Shabbat might look like once we come back to campus. Thinking about our education program and how our building can be a place for experiential learning for our kids and adults of all ages. And thinking about how to tell the story, how to describe the vision to all of you. Guiding and pushing forward the project to make our Temple new again and ready for the next hundred years has been, in some ways, the culmination of my rabbinic career. Very soon, I will have NOTHING to say about what happens in the building. I had BETTER have nothing to say. Because if I do express an opinion, I will quickly go down in CBB history as the Rabbi Emeritus from hell.
For the past twenty years, my days have been filled with passionate, creative, immensely productive thinking, speaking and doing, with many of you here today. Together we have been building a house of living Judaism. That has been and will continue to be CBB’s mission. But for me, as Rabbi Emeritus, a difficult but sacred silence is coming. An empty space is opening at the center of my life.
I know that it will be difficult. After more than forty years, the rabbi in my head is not going to just stop talking. I will be resorting to meditation, to prayer, and probably to psychotherapy to help me manage that voice. Not to shut the rabbi in my head down completely, but to manage him. To help him grow quiet. I want and need the empty space that is opening in the center of my life.
I don’t want to shut the rabbi in my head down completely. I cannot imagine taking off my life’s purpose like an old coat and hanging it up in the closet forever. My retirement contract says that I will become Rabbi Emeritus. I am thinking hard about what that means.
I have been thinking about role models, both in my own life and in history, of community leaders who have relinquished their leadership and moved into a next phase. Most are not very helpful. Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzsk, who was one of the most brilliant and creative Hasidic teachers of the 19th century, spent the last twenty years of his life in almost complete isolation, emerging from his room only rarely, to scream at his students, “You are all liars!” He is not my role model.
Moses, at the end of his life, was 120 years old, one of the three men of his generation still alive. And he was still not ready to retire. He begged God to allow him to continue to live and to lead until God finally said “Moses, stop! I don’t want to hear any more of this!”
The closest I have to a role model for retirement is my own father. He was for many years Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education at the University of Rochester Medical School. My father was a beloved physician and teacher and led the school through an important period in the school’s history. In retirement he gave up his big beautiful office in the center of the medical school and moved to a small office down a quiet corridor. He wrote two books about his mentors. He continued to read electrocardiograms, because his experienced eye still caught things that the computer missed. The thing he enjoyed most was a class that he was invited to teach every year, to the first-year medical students. He taught the students how to conduct an intake interview with a new patient. It was a class in bedside manner. Even in retirement, my dad never stopped being a doctor, and he never stopped teaching. That’s my role model.
After this year, like my dad when he retired, I will no longer be a leader and builder of this institution. That is the vast empty space which is opening up. But I will continue to be a teacher of Judaism. Sharing the Torah that has become so much of who I am. Telling stories to the kids. Teaching adult ed. That would be enough.
The other day, I was walking around the construction site of our Building Dreams project with our old friend Tom who was visiting from out of town. Tom just retired from his job as a home builder. As we walked through admiring the new structures taking shape, the new concrete that has been poured and the stunning steel structure of the new shade canopy, Tom commented to me “just think Steve, you are leaving this legacy for the next hundred years or so.” And then he added, “of course, eventually someone is going to tear it down.”
Thank you, Tom. I mean it. That is true. The building is going to be beautiful and will provide a magnificent home for our communal life for many decades to come. And a time will come when a future generation will tear it down and build a new synagogue. Or our building will become a house for all peoples and all religions. Or...who can see that far? Nobody. But Tom is correct. Nothing lasts forever. That truth helps me relax.
Every morning when I stand in my backyard and pray, I thank God. For each of my family members, for my health, for our miraculous planet earth and for my job, which has given me so many years of work with purpose. I cannot imagine any work that would have been more meaningful.
I am beginning to get some sense of what comes next, after July 1st. A new chapter of my life, in which I can pray without taking notes. And can hike in the canyons without planning the next outdoor education lesson. And can come to our new building and just enjoy it, sitting with friends out among the trees, under the mountains, and chatting or singing or quietly sitting. Without judging and worrying about whether we are doing the right thing with our space. I can imagine the voice of the rabbi in my head growing quieter and quieter.
I can feel a sacred empty space opening in the center of my life.
Gmar chatimah tova.
May we all be sealed in the Book of Life for a year of blessing, a year of good health, a year of love and a year of peace.