We have been studying community for three weeks now. Rosh Hashanah is only a week away. Our next guest blogger is Rabbi Neil Kominsky. Neil was my rabbi in my “home congregation” at Temple Emanuel of the Merrimack Valley, through much of rabbinical school. He was my ordaining rabbi. He remains a good friend and a study partner. His words are always wise. His advice welcome and practical.

By my best reckoning, I have participated in Shabbat services in some communal setting on most Sabbaths for past sixty years or so. I’ll grant you that about forty years of that could be attributed to my professional responsibilities as a congregational and campus rabbi. The fact of the matter is, though, that my personal need to participate in group worship was part of what led me to the rabbinate in the first place, and what has kept me attending with great regularity in retirement.

Why do I do this?  I could simply answer that it is a mitzvah, a Divine commandment, to which I respond, but my theology really does not assume that God demands that I be there.   It is I who need to be there, addressing God in the company of other Jews who have come to join in worship together. What is that about?

Jewish worship is, fundamentally, a communal activity. It is not that one cannot pray alone—I often do—but that the dynamic of a community joined in prayer together is greater than the sum of its parts. Whatever each of us brings through the door with us, whatever kind of day or week we’ve had, in shared worship we become part of a larger whole, a community. There have been times when I have shown up largely out of habit, not feeling particularly worshipful, but, almost always, once the service gets going, I find myself lifted and borne along by the music, the shared words, the sheer presence of fellow worshippers sharing a common desire to worship God in community.

It is significant to me that nearly all our prayers, even when we say them alone, address God as Eloheynu, Our God. Only in a very few instances does the singular Elohai, My God, occur. The message is that even when we pray alone, we are part of a larger community that the words of our prayers acknowledge.

This is about more, however, than what makes meaningful worship. It is about the significance of being deeply committed together. The Ten Commandments are addressed to the individual: You (singular) shall have no other Gods before Me, and so on. The words following the Shema are addressed in the singular: You (singular) shall love the Lord your God…. But the Torah also commands us to be holy, and when it does so, it does it in the plural: You (plural) shall be holy, as I your God am holy.

Few, if any, of us are comfortable thinking about how we, individually, can become holy. It seems like an exercise in chutzpah to even think in such terms. As a community, however, we can aspire to holiness if what we do collectively contributes to making a holier, indeed a wholer (the original root meaning of shalom) world. When we work together to see that hungry people are fed, homeless people are housed, we are creating holiness. When we work to make our society and our world a more just place for the poor and powerless, we are creating holiness. When we deepen our understanding of Jewish tradition and find ways to pass what we know and have learned on to another generation, we are creating holiness. When we exert our utmost effort to recognize the Divine Image in every human being we encounter, we are creating holiness. When we comfort the grief-stricken, visit the sick, befriend the isolated within our community, we are creating holiness. And, yes, when we join our mouths and our hearts and our souls in worship, we are creating holiness.

We know that congregations often bear Hebrew names—Beth this or B’nai that. When the full name of the congregation is spelled out in Hebrew, though, it is often prefixed with the Hebrew letters Kof”Kof. This stands for Kehillah Kedoshah—Holy Congregation, which is precisely what our Jewish tradition understands by the banding together of a group of individual Jews, whether few or many, to meet each others’ needs and to join in community for a higher purpose.

Working together, we can fulfill God’s commandment; we can create holiness. That is what community is for.

Rabbi Neil Kominsky