Thirty-six years—which is to say, double “Chai” or two Jewish lifetimes ago—I received my rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew Union College. On that occasion, my father, Rabbi Arnold Fink, had the honor of addressing the congregation of teachers, classmates, friends and family. He acknowledged the holiness of the hour, then reminded us that every rabbi’s authority is a gift bestowed by the community that they serve. He opened with a verse from that morning’s Torah portion, Beha’alotchah:
Bring the Levites forward before the Holy One, and let the children of Israel lay their hands upon the Levites. . .
Commenting on this passage, Dad noted:
The people ordain! Your communities will teach you about God, and their lives will be Torah. You will celebrate with them in their joys and bring them comfort in their sorrows, for they will give you access to themselves that they will extend to no one else, in the highest and lowest moments of life. They will shape you and you will become different because of those whose lives touch yours.
As I reflect upon three decades as your rabbi, my father’s words feel prophetic. Over the course of our journey together, we have shared so many sacred occasions. We have danced at weddings, kvelled at baby namings and b’nai mitzvah, rejoiced at birthdays, graduations, and anniversaries. We have also mourned heartbreaking losses—deaths and divorces, debilitating illnesses, unemployment, infertility—and endured countless ordinary setbacks and indignities. We’ve marched for justice at MLK Day, partied for LGBTQ equality at Pride, demonstrated for democracy and human rights. We have fed the hungry, housed the homeless, rallied for refugees and welcomed new Americans. We’ve also davened from an evolving array of prayerbooks, Reform and Conservative, in this historic sanctuary that we moved from its original home on State Street—and in local parks, on Payette Lake at our annual retreat in McCall, and in the Owyhee and Sawtooth wilderness for desert seders and teen backpacking trips.
Over the past thirty years we have more than doubled in size, growing together with the Treasure Valley through boom and bust, prosperity and pandemic, tragedy and triumph and everything in between. We’ve lived through times of war and peace, for Israel and America, and supported one another in this alarming season of skyrocketing antisemitism. In a stridently polarized world, we strive, always, to embody inclusive, caring and compassionate community, to truly listen to one another in ways that both respect our differences and celebrate our shared commitment to our tradition’s highest calling: to uphold the ultimate dignity of humanity and all Creation.
My friends, working in partnership with this holy congregation has been one of my life’s greatest privileges. As Psalm 119 teaches: Mi kol m’lamdai hiskalti—From all of my teachers, I have gleaned wisdom. Just as my father foretold, I have learned—and continue to learn—from my entire community. I have had the honor of serving with an evolving and deeply gifted staff and countless extraordinary volunteers—each and every one of you has essentially shaped the rabbi and the person that I have become.
I do not take this distinction for granted. I know, all too well, from troubling conversations with colleagues, that this is not always the nature of the rabbi-congregational relationship. I’ve heard many trying tales of intractable conflict and chronic ill-will from peers who lament, “It’s dark out there!” But that has never been my experience and such accounts only remind me just how incredibly lucky I’ve been. While we have experienced a few disappointments and disagreements along the way, as even the best long-term partnerships inevitably bring, I can honestly note that I’ve never doubted that our contract was anything but a true brit, a sacred covenant grounded in mutual respect, love, and light. Every morning, I can unequivocally affirm the beautiful line embedded in the Shacharit service:
Ashreynu, mah tov chelkeynu, mah na’im goraleynu
How blessed I am, how good my portion, how fortunate my fate!
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Beloved CABI members and friends, as I have been privileged to both grieve and celebrate with you in your lives’ defining passages, so, too, have you stood with me and my family over the course of our own. You were with us through a divorce and a second marriage, my father’s too early death, a pregnancy, and the coming of age of all my children. You accompanied us even when the roads we chose did not necessarily follow custom or convention. You walked with me as we found our way, bountifully extending your love and support. When I came here in 1994, you were my congregation. Over the ensuing years, you became my community. Thank you.
As for my family, having grown up the son of a rabbi myself, I know a bit about the challenges of being part of a rabbinic household. I recognize that while I freely chose the public pressures of this path, for Janet and Tanya and Rosa and Rachel and Jonah, it was part of the package that came with having me as their partner and father. Yet over the years, they have each, in their own way, worn this inheritance with unsurpassed grace. For their unerring support, unconditional love, boundless patience, creativity, compassion, and wisdom, I am grateful beyond measure.
In this moment, I recall a beautiful passage from Rabbi Harold Kushner’s reflection on the life of Moses. He writes:
In the grace after meals in the Jewish tradition, we ask God to bless us, “as You blessed our forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with a brachah shleimah, a full and complete blessing.” But the Bible tells us of how their lives were marked by fertility problems, quarrels with neighbors, conflicts between husbands and wives, between parents and children. What sort of blessings were these? I can only understand the phrase “a full and complete blessing” to mean the experience of life in its fullness, taking everything that life has to offer, the bitter and the sweet, the honey and the bee stings, love and loss, joy and despair, hope and rejection. The blessing of completeness means a full life, not an easy life, a life that strikes the black keys and the white keys on the keyboard so that every emotional tone is sounded.
That is exactly the kind of blessing that you have all given to me over the past thirty years.
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Now we enter a season of change. The coming months offer what I faithfully believe will be a time of fruitful transition, as I settle into retirement and CABI’s journey continues with Rabbi Appel as interim and then, God willing, with a gifted settled rabbi. Those passages will certainly pose their challenges, as almost no significant transformations come with utter ease. We will be in a place that our tradition—including this week’s Torah portion and the biblical book that contains it—refers to as bamidar, in the wilderness. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s description of that geographical and metaphorical locale offers both instruction and a kind of hard-won consolation, as he writes in Honey from the Rock:
Wilderness is not just a desert through which we wandered for forty years. It is a way of being. A place that demands being open to the flow of life around you. A place that demands being honest with yourself without regard to the cost in personal anxiety. A place that demands being present with all of yourself. In the wilderness your possessions cannot surround you. Your preconceptions cannot protect you. Your logic cannot promise you the future. You are left alone each day with an immediacy that astonishes, chastens, and exults. You see the world as if for the first time.
With this in mind, I ask your forbearance as I conclude with just one piece of soon-to-be rabbi emeritus advice by way of a classic Jewish story:
There was once a community whose longtime rabbi was nearing retirement. The congregation loved this rabbi, who had served them well for much of her adult life. They were accustomed to her ways, comfortable with her style, and content under her leadership. So it was with a heavy heart that they took on the task of finding her successor.
But the decision, at least initially, proved surprisingly simple: they decided that upon the rabbi’s stepping down, they would hire her daughter. This, they were convinced, was the perfect solution, providing the continuity that they so desired.
Well, as planned, the rabbi retired and her daughter assumed her position at the synagogue. But it wasn’t long before some of the congregants started to notice that the new rabbi’s manner was quite distinctive from her mother’s. She followed some divergent customs and took a very different approach to problem-solving. This confused the congregants, so the board of directors decided they needed to clarify matters. They scheduled a talk with the young rabbi.
When the time arrived, they invited the rabbi into the conference room and got straight to the point: “Why,” they asked her, “do you do things so very differently from your mother?”
To which the young rabbi calmly replied: “I do exactly as my mother does. She always blazed her own path as this congregation’s rabbi, refusing to imitate anyone else. I follow that same course.”
My friends, in that spirit, the single kernel of counsel that I urge you to consider—the lone request I make tonight—is that while honoring our community’s core values, you also remain open to the new visions, pathways, and proceses that my successors will undoubtedly bring to the table. For while we do not know for certain what forms Jewish community will take in the years to come, and we possess no assurances of what will bring success, of this we can be sure: doing the same old thing, year after year, is a surefire guarantee of failure. As my rebbe Bob Dylan noted long ago, he not busy being born is busy dying. And so I end with the time-honored words that Moses offered to Joshua as he passed the mantle of leadership to the next generation:
Chazak v’amatz—go forward, with boldness, strength, and good courage.
Keep busy being born.
Ken y’hi ratzon
