Rethinking Obligation

I love tallitot. I love wearing them, I love collecting them. I love the diversity of colors, sizes, images, patterns. I love the memories and the people they conjure up: shopping with my roommate in Jerusalem for a new tallit, receiving a tallit from my parents for my rabbinic ordination, being wrapped with my spouse in a tallit under our wedding chuppah. 

As a rabbi, I may wear a tallit more often than some people in our Jewish community, but perhaps you too can picture the many moments when a tallit makes a special appearance in Jewish ritual: we often wrap families in a tallit for a baby naming here on the bimah, wedding couples might stand under a canopy made from a tallit, and we invite our Confirmation students to stand under an extra big tallit to receive a blessing from the clergy. I love hearing the stories behind the tallitot people choose to wear or keep or remember. 

You may not know this, but before every BE Mitzvah service here at PTBE, a family gathers with their student in the meditation room behind our ark, and we look at the tallit they are about to wear for the first time. We remind them that a tallit carries so much symbolism within its folds. The tzitzit, the fringes on the edges, symbolize the commandments, the mitzvot. They attest to Jewish expectations and responsibility. We wrap the weight of the commandments around us, draping our bodies in obligation. And simultaneously, we receive an embrace from Jewish tradition, a welcoming into the greater possibilities that lie ahead. This is a joyous moment, this moment of wearing a tallit and saying, I am ready to lead, I am ready to grow, I am ready to commit to adult Jewish responsibilities and possibilities.

 Traditionally we only wear tallit in the morning – Kol Nidrei is the one night of the year when it’s customary to wear tallit. As we enter Yom Kippur and imagine being our best selves in the year ahead, we physically demonstrate the importance of this night, by wrapping ourselves in this ancient symbol of commitment to Jewish obligation. And so as we gather here tonight, I invite us all to think about what obligation means.

In her work The Obligated Self, scholar Mara Benjamin writes that “to be a Jew, according to the classical textual tradition, is to be obligated [...] obligation has been a ‘fundamental word’ that structures Jewish thought and behavior for centuries.” The Rabbis of the Talmud called this “the yoke of the commandments,” seeing Jewish obligation as a heavy weight, and the French medieval commentator Rashi added, “the commandments were not given to Israel to fulfill them for their enjoyment, but were given to be a yoke around their necks.”

But what does Jewish obligation mean for us here today? Perhaps you feel compelled by the Torah’s commandments, articulated through centuries of Jewish law and interpretation. But perhaps you don’t. Maybe the image of the yoke of the commandments stirs up indifference, or even discomfort - do we really want our Jewish obligations to feel burdensome? We may prefer a Judaism that is joyful and enriching, not onerous and weighty. And we follow two hundred years in which Reform Judaism sought to dismantle religious obligations, especially the ones that weren’t morally compelling. As a result, many of us are heirs to a tradition where the Jewish yoke of the commandments was cast off, not to be missed.

But on this Yom Kippur, I want to think seriously about what obligation has to offer us. There’s a classic Jewish joke about two friends, Goldberg and Schwartz, who both attend synagogue services regularly, sitting together in the same seats each week. Goldberg has a deep connection to God and prayer, while Schwartz feels no obligation to or meaning in these traditional Jewish rituals. So why does Schwartz go to synagogue every week? He explains, “Goldberg goes to synagogue to talk to God, I go to synagogue to talk to Goldberg.”

This joke goes to the heart of obligation. Goldberg is compelled by the traditional call to the mitzvot and to God, and he shows up for his obligations. Schwartz is equally compelled, but by another obligation - to his friendship, to his community - and he too shows up for this obligation. One of our teens, Becca Rosenberg, was stuffing High Holiday envelopes earlier this month with her mom, Jessica, when she said, “I know this matters to my mom. It means a lot to her to help get people together.” And so Becca obligated herself, and she showed up, and many of you are wearing name badges that she handmade.

Mitzvah literally means commandment in Hebrew. But in Aramaic, the language of the Talmud and the Kaddish prayer, the equivalent word tzavta means ‘connection’ or ‘link.’ And I believe this definition reflects our community more accurately. I don’t conceive of a God who obligates me, and I don’t want to see my Jewish responsibilities as a weighty yoke upon my neck. But I do feel obligation - obligation through connection, obligation to you, obligation to each other. I feel commanded through my connections.

In the spirit of Yom Kippur confessions, here’s mine: In the Goldberg-Schwartz joke - I’m the Schwartz. Praying doesn’t come naturally or easily to me. I have sat in High Holiday services, turning the pages of the heavy machzor and wondered how to connect to these even heavier prayers, which avowed theologies I didn’t believe in and confessed transgressions I hadn’t committed. I didn’t know how to access these words and ideas - on Yom Kippur, and on every other day.

But I found my way in, and, like Schwartz, it was through obligation to others. When I studied Hebrew at Middlebury Language School many summers ago, a classmate of mine lost a relative, and asked for the support of the school community in her mourning. There was no organized daily prayer experience and my classmate wanted to say the Mourner’s Kaddish every day. Saying Kaddish is a ritual action that demands communal obligation, because we traditionally say it in a minyan of at least 10 pray-ers. This took coordination, communication, and commitment.

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein explains that a commandment is “an obligation that we perform even if we don’t feel like it.” I volunteered for the minyan, even though I really didn’t feel like it. I felt awkward and exposed, standing on the grass in full view of the passersby, part of a small group facing east each evening. But I went for my classmate, wanting her to have the ritual she needed. And I came to feel needed, wanted, and useful. I came to relish our daily moment together, this group that drew together in support. We built a community, and our obligation to each other compelled us to show up each day of that hot, sticky, Vermont summer. Our classmate felt the call to a Jewish ritual that required a minyan, and we felt the obligation of connection to one another. 

I know many of you have also felt this obligation to show up when needed in community. Whether you have joined the Tuesday morning minyan to say the Mourner’s Kaddish, come to make sandwiches with SSH, volunteered to help with the Purim carnival, or sat with a friend when they were ill, you felt a call that obligated you towards something greater. And I want to thank you, and to say this work is deeply Jewish, and is the stuff that community is made of. Because community doesn’t just happen; we have to show up and be active in order to create community together.

Jewish philosophers from Maimonides to Franz Rosenzweig have thought about interdependence and communal responsibility as central to our Jewish lives. I am no philosopher, but I did watch the entirety of the TV show The Good Place…twice. Its characters navigate ethics, morality, and the possibility of becoming better people. The narrative is in part inspired by the work of T. M. Scanlon, whose book What We Owe to Each Other guides the characters of The Good Place on their journey. The show’s creator, Michael Schur, shares that this title “stuck in my head and was a quietly, to me, radical idea, because it starts with this presupposition, which is: We owe things to each other. It’s not, ‘Do we owe things to each other?” It’s ‘this is what we owe to each other.’”

Our Torah reading tomorrow says something similar. It begins, “You stand this day, all of you, in the presence of your God [...] to enter into the covenant of the Eternal your God [...] and not with you alone do I make this covenant and this oath, but with each one who stands here among us this day in the presence of the Eternal our God, and with each one who is not here among us this day.” The covenant is not about individuals, but the community, obligated together. In a society that often celebrates the individual, writer Sarah Hurtwitz reminds us just “how countercultural Judaism is - its insistence on hard things, on obligations we didn’t choose, on our communal ties rather than just our individual needs.”

But this obligation towards one another need not feel burdensome, like a heavy yoke upon our necks. Instead, my teacher Rabbi Dalia Marx explains that “by participating in communal life, an individual takes on responsibility, but paradoxically the burden is also lightened, for we see that there are others who join with us.” 

At a recent leadership training, our congregant Michael Adler described his picture of our community at its best as the tableau we made last Simchat Torah, the day when we complete and begin again the reading of the Torah. He described us standing in the PTBE sukkah, the entire Torah unwrapped and held up by dozens of congregants of all ages. Without our sense of obligation to each other - without showing up, participating, creating a community - we could not have done it.

And through obligation, we build relationships. Activist Mia Birdsong teaches that “asking for and providing support is another way we build intimacy. It allows us to know each other more deeply. It allows us to be seen by each other.” Our gatherings are statements of obligation: When we read our Mi Shebeirach list on Friday nights, we share the names of our loved ones who are in need of healing, and we entrust each other with that information and with supporting us. Our Caring Committee commits to making meals for our community following illness or surgery.

And this summer, we launched the pilot for PTBE Circles, where small groups of congregants commit to showing up to build relationships over shared interests or experiences. We ask each Circle to create a brit, a covenant of their own, which states their commitments to each other, the obligation they are undertaking as a community. By joining together in an intentional Jewish community, we create bonds of obligation that make us more deeply connected. 

And we receive so much when we obligate ourselves. Birdsong notes that “our best self gets a positive feeling from supporting others. It’s a feeling that is not about the gratitude we receive or the points we earn, but an alignment with love and care that fills us.”

Many of you have shared with me that it means so much to be asked to help, to be given a role or responsibility, because being needed gives us purpose. When you make a meal for a fellow community member, or show up for Tuesday minyan, or serve as a Shabbat or holiday volunteer greeter, you not only take responsibility for helping to create our community, but you benefit too. As our member Sherry Lipson says, “the more I give of myself, the more I get for myself. The connection to others is vital for me and my well-being.”

I said earlier that I’ve struggled a lot with prayer, especially on Yom Kippur. Maybe you have too. But I have come to see how obligation runs through our holiday liturgy as well. When we add inserts into the High Holiday Amidah, the central standing prayer, we ask zochreinu l’chayim, remember us for life. Us, not me. We could so easily ask just for ourselves, but we call out in plural, and we call out for each other. 

When we say the Vidui, the High Holiday confession, we speak in the plural: Al cheit shechatanu: for these sins that we have committed. Ashamnu. We betray. Bagadnu. We steal. Gazalnu. We scorn. As individuals, we haven’t committed every one of these transgressions, but when we say them together, we take responsibility for each other. The communal liturgy and shared experience of Yom Kippur, of standing together in covenant and confession, connects us in a chain of interdependent lives back to Sinai.

On this night of Kol Nidrei, I invite you to understand obligation not as a yoke, and not only as a commandment from on high, but as the force that binds us together as a community in happy times and hard times, for learning and for prayer and for justice and for each other. And in our obligation to one another we find ourselves lighter, more joyful, less alone - knowing we are bound to each other through a sense of commandedness. 

One of my favorite parts of BE Mitzvah celebrations, weddings, baby namings, conversions, and other moments of community celebration and recognition is when we offer Birkat Kohanim, the Priestly Blessing. Each of these milestones is one of obligation - becoming a Jewish adult, committing to the interconnection of marriage, being welcomed into the Jewish community with all of its possibilities and expectations. And it is no coincidence that this is often a moment when a tallit, that symbol of Jewish obligation and Jewish embrace, is wrapped around the people receiving the blessing.

And so I’ll invite you at this time to literally connect with each other through the embrace of tallit. If you are wearing a tallit, please form a close circle with some folks who are not, and if everyone consents, wrap them in the extension of your own tallit. Or create a metaphorical tallit of arms and shoulders holding each other up by joining with those near you. And as you do, we offer each other the words of our most ancient blessing:

יְבָרֶכְךָ יְהוָה וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ׃

יָאֵר יְהוָה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ וִיחֻנֶּךָּ׃

יִשָּׂא יְהוָה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם׃

Please repeat after me: May God bless you and keep you. May God’s face shine down upon you and be gracious to you. May you feel the divine presence within you always, and may you know peace.

And may we each feel - and continue to create - those threads of connection and covenant, the tallit of responsibility and embrace, this joyous and sacred obligation that binds us together. Amen.

Works cited:
Artson, Bradley. God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology. (Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2016).
Benjamin, Mara. The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought. (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2018).
Birdsong, Mia. How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2020).
Birdsong, Mia. “Q&A With Mia Birdsong.” Accessed from: https://familystoryproject.org/qa-with-mia-birdsong-author-of-how-we-show-up-reclaiming-family-friendship-and-community/ 
Hurwitz, Sarah. Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life--in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There). (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2019).
Goldstein, Elyse. “Heeding the Call to Commandment - and to Obligation.” Accessed from: https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/torah-commentary/heeding-call-commandment-and-obligation 
Marx, Dalia. “The Bayit and the K’neset.” Mishkan Hanefesh: Machzor for the Days of Awe (Yom Kippur). (New York: CCAR Press, 2015).
Schur, Michael as quoted by Dylan Matthews. “How The Good Place taught moral philosophy to its characters — and its creators.” Vox, Jan 30, 2020. Accessed from: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/26/20874217/the-good-place-series-finale-season-4-moral-philosophy 
Deuteronomy 29:9, 29:11, 29:13-14.
Mishnah Berachot 2:2. 
Rashi commentary on B. Rosh Hashanah 28a.

1. Benjamin, Mara. The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought. (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2018), 3.

2. Mishnah Berachot 2:2. Rashi commentary on B. Rosh Hashanah 28a.

3. Artson, Bradley. God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology. (Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2016), 98

4. Goldstein, Elyse. “Heeding the Call to Commandment - and to Obligation.” March 2016. ReformJudaism.org. Accessed from: https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/torah-commentary/heeding-call-commandment-and-obligation

5. Schur, Michael quoted by Dylan Matthews. “How The Good Place taught moral philosophy to its characters — and its creators.” Vox, Jan 30, 2020. Accessed from: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/26/20874217/the-good-place-series-finale-season-4-moral-philosophy

6. Deuteronomy 29:9, 29:11, 29:13-14. JPS translation from Sefaria.

7. Hurwitz, Sarah. Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life--in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There). (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2019), 253.

8. Marx, Dalia. “The Bayit and the K’neset.” Mishkan Hanefesh: Machzor for the Days of Awe (Yom Kippur). (New York: CCAR Press, 2015), xviii.

9. Birdsong, Mia. “Q&A With Mia Birdsong.” Accessed from: https://familystoryproject.org/qa-with-mia-birdsong-author-of-how-we-show-up-reclaiming-family-friendship-and-community/

10. Birdsong, Mia. How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2020), 16.