This sermon has been slightly edited from the original.

Thirty

This year PCS turns thirty.

In the system of gematria, where every number corresponds to a Hebrew letter, thirty is lamed — the tall letter that looks like a question mark, or a circuitous life journey.

Lamed begins lilmod, to learn. L’lamed, to teach. And lev — heart.

According to our congregational history (we have an eighty-page history — I’ll send it to you by email!), our very first full Shabbat was Parshat Shmini, in April 1997. Two of our founders, Steve Apkon and Arie Bucheister, then members of B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side, brought Rabbi Mark Sameth up from the city. He said:

“Having a community does not mean having to have everything in common. More important than the labels is the question of whether we are leading authentic, integrated, transformative Jewish lives.”

Rabbi Mark Sameth · PCS’s first full Shabbat, Parshat Shmini, April 1997

After that Shabbat, Malcolm Netburn z”l, our founding president, said: “We will never be the same.”

So thirty years later, on this day, the question this season first asked of Elijah the prophet singularly comes to us as a community:

Mah lanu po? What are we doing here? Here, at PCS?

Our founders gave us the answer before we had an ark, a Torah, or a rabbi: to live authentic, integrated, transformative Jewish lives.

This morning I want to talk about what it takes to live that way together — to weave a whole out of people who are not the same.

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A sanctuary where we bring the storm

A Mishkan is a dwelling place for the Divine — wide enough to hold people who are still searching, still disagreeing, still becoming whoever they’re going to be.

And it was never only a container. It is a reflection, a small world mirroring the great one.

A sanctuary is where those two ideas meet.

The Japanese word for a human being, ningen — 人間 — is written with two characters: 人, person, and 間, between. A human being is the space between us.

That is community. A space that holds people with both their shtick and their shine. We are held by one another, and we are held by something greater than us.

As Isaiah — my son, not the prophet — likes to say, “It’s not that deep.”

Except that it is.

Because imagine a world in which everyone was held, seen, listened to, and known — not only for their shtick, but for their shine.

That would be peace. And it starts here. This is where we practice.

Malcolm and I went back and forth about this. Is PCS simply a sanctuary from the storm?

Maybe. But I think it’s more than that — and I suspect Malcolm knew that and wanted me to figure it out on my own.

A Mishkan is a sanctuary where we bring the storm.

Because the storm is already here. Every human being is a world. Everything happening out there is, in some way, happening in here — in our bodies, our families, our relationships, this community. And when we transform what happens here, the world transforms.

That is why the High Priest, on this day, atoned first for himself, then for his household, then for the whole community of Israel — and, I would add, for the world.

He started here. So do we.

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The innermost room

This morning’s Torah reading opens acharei mot — “after the death” — reaching back to the events of Parshat Shmini, our very first Shabbat. And then it takes us somewhere we are never otherwise allowed to go: the Holy of Holies.

No windows. One piece of furniture: the Ark.

On top of it, a golden lid with two keruvim facing each other. That lid has a name — the kapporet, from the same root as Kippur. And God tells Moses: I will speak with you from between the keruvim.

From between. Ningen again.

One person goes in, one day a year. Which is now — each of us.

We take off our gold. We wear plain white linen. No jewels. No title.

And we do not go in alone. The Torah says:

Twelve stones. Twelve tribes. Twelve different names resting together over one heart. Lev — there’s our lamed.

So what is inside the Ark?

Luchot v’shivrei luchot munachim ba’aron. The whole tablets and the broken tablets rested there together.

Our rabbis read this as a teaching about us. Our brokenness — our mistakes, intentional and unintentional, even the egregious ones — rests in the holiest place, right beside what has since been made whole. Neither is higher in holiness than the other.

Take that in.

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The recipe

And what fills that room? Smoke.

Aaron enters in a cloud of incense, and the recipe is in Exodus: stacte, onycha, galbanum, and pure frankincense — “an equal part of each.”

Here is what the rabbis noticed. Galbanum — chelbenah — smelled foul. Acrid. Any perfumer would leave it out.

The Torah puts it in, in equal measure.

And the Talmud draws the conclusion: any fast that does not include the ones who have missed the mark is not a fast — because the galbanum is in the incense.

The work of inclusion is not a kindness we extend from the center to the edges.

It is in the recipe.

Before Kol Nidre we declared anu matirin l’hitpalel im ha’avaryanim, that we may pray with those who have transgressed. As Rabbi Ben spoke about last night, we are open and welcoming to transgressors — some of whom will remain silent. The galbanum is in the room.

That means including the most difficult parts of ourselves, too. It is not always pleasing. It is not always pleasant. We can hold our shtick without letting our shtick hold us.

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One, not the same

Now — we are a people of distinctions.

In Parshat Shmini, that first Shabbat of ours, the priests are charged l’havdil bein hakodesh uvein hachol — to distinguish between the holy and the common. We make Havdalah every Saturday night. Judaism does not flatten. Boundaries matter.

The twelve stones stay twelve. The two keruvim stay two.

So at-one-ment is not sameness. It is the moment when difference stops being a ranking.

A ranking demotes: this is worth more than that. And we forget that before Babel, the Torah says, the whole earth had one language — before tribes, before ethnicities, before peoplehood, we were one humanity. Underneath it all, we still are. One heart.

I am not you.
And I am not worth more than you.

Both are true. A sanctuary is where those two truths meet.

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Who is in this room

So who is in this room? I hope:

That is the list I hope for. Now the honest one.

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Kamtza and Bar Kamtza

Our rabbis tell a story about what happens when a room is not at one.

A man in Jerusalem gave a feast. He told his servant, “Invite my friend Kamtza.” The servant got it wrong and invited Bar Kamtza — the host’s enemy.

The host saw him sitting there. “You are my enemy. What are you doing here? Get out.”

Bar Kamtza said, “Since I’ve already come, let me stay. I’ll pay for what I eat and drink.”

No.

“I’ll pay for half the feast.”

No.

“I’ll pay for the whole feast.”

No. The host took him by the hand and threw him out.

The rabbis — which is to say, all of us — were sitting right there. And they said nothing.

Bar Kamtza said to himself: they saw it and stayed silent, so they must agree. He went to the Roman authorities and denounced them. A chain of careful, principled decisions followed.

And Jerusalem burned.

The Talmud’s verdict is one sentence: because of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, Jerusalem was destroyed.

It began with a mix-up. Bar Kamtza offered everything he had just to stay, and it was not enough. His revenge was out of all proportion. But the people who could have said “stop” stayed in their seats — because it wasn’t their party. Elsewhere, the rabbis name the cause of the destruction plainly: sinat chinam, baseless hatred.

This Rosh Hashanah we offered a thematic aliyah for people who want to deepen communication between generations. It drew one of the most energized responses of the holidays. And I keep thinking about Bar Kamtza — literally, the son of Kamtza — in the light of the growing divide between generations of the Jewish people.

Every community has a Bar Kamtza. Someone who arrived by mistake, or after years away. Someone who got a look or a whisper that said: you are not the one we meant to invite.

And every community has the rabbis in their seats. That is most of us, most of the time.

Silence teaches. A community’s real boundaries are set less by its rules than by what it lets pass in the room.

So here is the honest question:

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The siege

The story continues into the siege. Rome sends Vespasian.

Inside Jerusalem live three very wealthy men. One offers the city wheat and barley. Another, wine, salt, and oil. The third, wood. Together they could feed the city for twenty-one years.

Three gifts. None of them the whole meal. Grain without fire is raw. Fire without grain is nothing.

It is the incense again: unlike things, each one needed.

And the rabbis said: let us go out and make peace with Rome.

I think of Rabbi Ben and the people at Union Square after 9/11, which he shared about in his Rosh Hashanah sermon. Love, not hate! Peace, not war! Their voices mattered. Their values were spoken. And they were not heard.

In Jerusalem, the zealots would not let the rabbis be heard. They wanted to fight. And when the rabbis warned them they would fail, the zealots burned the storehouses of wheat and barley.

Famine followed.

They burned the common grain to win the argument.

Rashi describes the zealots as reikim — empty, reckless for war. Hear “empty” this way: nothing inside with room for anyone else’s name.

Aaron carries twelve names on his heart. The zealot has room for one.

One reading adds that the zealots drew much of their support from the poor, who resented the very wealthy. A city where the rich, the poor, the rabbis, and the zealots were not at one. The wealthy gave. The zealots burned. The rabbis were overruled.

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Being right

I am not above this.

On Shabbat Shuvah, at five o’clock in the morning, sitting in a Starbucks, I sent an email to half the board. The content is not important. What is important is that I was sure I was right. I was so right.

But I wasn’t listening to what was needed. Which was to take off for Shabbat, and not to send any emails.

And I think that is one of the great crises of our world. We are so right. We love being right. And we are right! And we are not listening. Look at what is happening in the world. Being right is not working.

Being right can be its own kind of shtick.

This is not about flattening our moral compass. But the question isn’t only Am I right? It is also:

Community is where we practice that — where we don’t foreclose a second conversation, and a third one after that.

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One line open

Back in the besieged city, there is one more detail.

The head of the zealots, Abba Sikra, was the son of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai’s sister. And Rabban Yochanan sent him a message: come to me in secret.

The leader of the peace camp still had a way to reach the leader of the zealots, because they were family. And he used it.

That conversation is how Rabban Yochanan got out of the city — and why Judaism outlived the Temple.

The same page that shows how a community burns itself down also shows what saves it: someone kept one line open to the person they disagreed with most.

Every generation has its zealots, on every side of every argument. And every generation needs someone who keeps the line open.

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Yavneh and the benches

And then the Temple fell. And with it, the Holy of Holies. No priest. No cloud of incense.

Where do you find at-one-ment when the room is gone?

Rabban Yochanan asked Rome for almost nothing: a town, a school, a handful of teachers. Yavneh.

Later, walking past the ruins, his student Rabbi Yehoshua cried out: woe to us — the place where Israel’s wrongs were atoned is destroyed. And Rabban Yochanan answered: my son, don’t grieve. We have another atonement, just as good: acts of loving-kindness. As the prophet says, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

What was built at Yavneh? A room where people disagreed — and stayed. The rabbis wrote down the losing opinion beside the winning one, so no one’s voice would vanish. Elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayim — these and these are the words of the living God.

But Yavneh had to learn inclusion, too.

Rabban Gamliel, the head of the academy, kept a guard at the door of the study hall. No student whose inside did not match their outside could enter. In other words: we will decide who is worthy to come in.

Then Rabban Gamliel was removed from leadership. Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya took his place. And the guard was taken away from the door.

The Talmud says benches had to be added to the study hall — four hundred, by one opinion; seven hundred, by another. The numbers are almost beside the point.

They opened the door, and the room got bigger. And Rabban Gamliel saw it and said: perhaps, God forbid, I withheld Torah from Israel.

That may be one of the most important things the Talmud teaches about inclusion. A community can sincerely believe it is protecting its standards when it is actually preventing people from belonging.

And inclusion is not only about making room for someone. When the door opened, more people came in — more voices, more questions, more Torah. We make room because we need what they bring. Inclusion doesn’t only enlarge the room. It enlarges what the community is capable of knowing and becoming.

You can encounter truth alone. You can encounter beauty alone. But you cannot practice community alone. And even truth changes when you discover it together; otherwise, your truth stays pretty small. Beauty expands when we share it. Goodness becomes something larger than a private virtue when it moves between us.

The tradition doesn’t preserve the story of the benches to shame Rabban Gamliel. It preserves it because communities must be able to correct themselves.

I know what it is to be on the outside. I was once outside without even knowing about the banquet, the study hall, the deep well of wisdom, joy and meaning available to me by living a vibrant Jewish life. I wasn’t only not invited — I didn’t know the invitation existed. And I was so alone.

This line is said at the beginning of the Torah service, and it is real to me. I am profoundly grateful for spiritual aliveness today.

I had an aha moment this summer reading Deuteronomy 8 on Fire Island. When you enter the land, give to others… you who were brought out of Egypt. Spiritual wealth is so much more than material wealth. If we are spiritual billionaires, millionaires, or even just middle class, we have won the spiritual lottery, and giving back is just as much an obligation as giving tzedakah is for a material billionaire. It’s not pushy or evangelistic to invite others to the banquet. Share the wealth. It’s just an invitation.

That memory is why I care so much about the benches. Someone is always sitting outside who doesn’t yet know there is a room.

We don’t have to wait for a Temple to fall to build Yavneh. We are building it here, now. We have each other, and we need each other.

So maybe there really are seven hundred more benches to add here.

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What at-one-ment is not

Let me say what at-one-ment is not.

It is not approval. Aaron confesses first, and the forgiveness of this day comes with confession and repair. Welcome is not agreement. Belonging is not the absence of accountability.

And it is not pressure. Some people cannot be at one with those who hurt them, and no one is asked to sit in a room where they are not safe.

Inclusion that ignores safety is not oneness.

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Shiluv

Hebrew gives us two words for this work.

Hakhlalah, הַכְלָלָה — inclusion — reminds us that the community cannot be whole if anyone is left out.

Shiluv, שִׁילּוּב, goes further. It means weaving together. From the same root comes shalav — a rung, a stage, things fitted together in sequence.

Shiluv is the galbanum woven, in equal measure, into the sacred recipe. Not a courtesy extended to the margins, but a thread in the fabric of the room.

On this day, our maps of Reality fall away and we are left with the territory. Every human ranking falls away, and we are called past tolerance — to weave a space. Our immigrant neighbors, for example, share the holy work. Every name is carried over the heart of the community.

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The work

That weaving is what Yavneh — our monthly gathering — is for. We meet in living rooms, around a Jewish text, led by our own members and not by rabbis, because the Jewish future belongs to the people. It is about a way of talking, and how we need each other now. It’s where we bring the hard questions: climate, AI, America, Israel, the verses we skip, the line in the news that made us flinch.

There are two rules. The text goes in the middle. And no one’s identity or motive goes on trial.

It is the lid of the Ark again: a text between us, two faces turned toward each other, and a voice arising from between.

Our four domains — Atzilut, Briyah, Yetzirah, and Assiyah: sacred life, learning, connection, and the work of keeping this place standing — are themselves an act of Yavneh, a structure for our next chapter together.

So, my charge:

Are you someone who will weave newcomers, old-timers, and everyone who hasn’t come yet into the fabric of this community? You belong in Yetzirah.

Are you someone who wants to study the whole of who we are — our vision, our purpose, our growing into our next stage? Briyah, learning, is your place.

And remember your homework from Rosh Hashanah: read The Enemy Looks Like Us. Remember the aliyah you came up for, and get into action. Do the next right thing, as Rabbi Ben taught. Two minutes a day of listening. Find a buddy.

Then add six practices for the year, one from each story we told today:

Carry one name. Like the breastplate. Pick someone you have written off and carry their name. You don’t have to forgive them or agree with them.

Notice the galbanum. When someone in this room grates on you, ask: what would be missing from the incense without them?

Speak from your seat. When someone is being pushed out of a conversation, a committee, or a Shabbat table, say something — even if you are not the host.

Keep one line open. Think of the person you’d least want to call. For Rabban Yochanan it was the head of the zealots.

Ask who never came. Not who left — who never came. And don’t wait for them to knock.

Bring a hard text. To Yavneh, to book group, to a board meeting. Pick the one that unsettles you most, put it in the middle of the table, and stay.

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Ne’ilah

Later today we reach Ne’ilah, the closing of the gates. Every year we picture the gate swinging shut.

This year, let us pray that we close it with no one left outside.

The Holy of Holies is gone. But at-one-ment survives wherever people keep a text in the middle of the table — and stay.

Thirty years ago, this community began with a question. Now PCS is Lamed, entering our thirtieth letter, the letter of learning.