High Holiday Reflection - What matters most?

Echoing Ben's post, I too have been taking the high holidays as a time to reflect on my life, my commitments, what matters most. At Rommemu in NYC, where I attended amazing Rosh Hashanah services, Rabbi David Ingber encouraged us to understand the Malchuyot (Kingship) section of the service not only in the traditional sense of affirming that God is king. Instead (or in addition), he asked us to think what we hoped would be king in our lives. What is royally, ultimately important? What really matters?

As an activist, Moishe House community builder, and rabbinical student, I often feel caught between the twin goals of building local relationships and Jewish community on the one hand, and working for broad based social justice on the other. This Rosh Hashanah, when thinking about what matters most and how I want to be in the world, I tried to think if there were any way to understand the work I'm doing, and that we are doing collectively at Moishe House Boston, that could articulate it as one thing - one thing that matters most.

I'm still working on it, but so far, what I came up with is that I want to be a weaver of chesed, lovingkindness/caring. I want to build loving connections with people in my community, so that everyone who comes to Moishe House knows they are an important part of our web of relationships. But I hope to experience and help others experience a sense of loving connection with people beyond our community, in Boston's low income neighborhoods like Dorchester and Roxbury, across the globe with kids working in sweatshops making our stuff, with Israelis and with Palestinians, with people whose opinions or methods we can't stand, with the earth. In feeling that loving connection, I want us to remember our responsibility for everyone in our holy web, and then work for justice less out of anger, more out of chesed, of caring.

As Dr. Martin Luther King said so wisely, "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. I cannot be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you cannot be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”