February 15, 2025
Author(s): Rabbi Michelle Robinson,
Parshat Yitro
Meeting Our Moment
February 15, 2025 – 17 Shevat 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Has this ever happened to you? One frigid morning, I grab my warmest jacket. I reach down to zip the zipper and it won’t budge. I pull. I push. I take it apart. I put it back. I pull again. I’m late. I’m from California – I need this coat to zip.
Now there are probably more rational things to have done, but I do not do them. I pull with all my strength – words that I make it a practice not to say bubbling up in my mind – until I have whipped myself into a quiet frenzy. The coat is broken. The world is broken. It’s all too much.
From broken zipper to broken world in 60 seconds flat.
As the feeling moved from my kishkes to my head and calm descended, I thought of the many members who have shared how close to the surface that feeling of overwhelm is for so many right now in this moment of shifting ground. Our assumptions of what is usual or expected, in everything from the political to the tech to the economic to the global – whether you think those changes are good or not good – have been so rapidly changing that one could be forgiven for experiencing some whiplash. How do we meet this moment?
Where my coat was concerned, in order to get unstuck, I had to start with what wasn’t working and try something new.
It just so happens that last week, in preparation for our Contemporary Shabbat this morning, I went down to the Temple Emanuel archives searching for the first Contemporary Service booklet. What I found there surprised me.
The year was 1970. Rabbi Samuel Chiel had been here just two short years. In rabbi years, that is brand new. But he and the lay committee who joined him created a non-traditional service so powerful and so beloved that every second day of Rosh HaShanah, in the nearly 55 years since, it remains our most robustly attended service.
The sweetness of the service? All of us who were blessed to know Rabbi Chiel could have predicted that. But the edge? Not the first thing most of us would think of. Yet, flipping through the pages from prayer to poem to song reveals a masterpiece of courage and conviction – on two levels.
First: As Mrs. Chiel so beautifully puts it, Rabbi Chiel lived k’din u’k’d’aat, holding precious the traditions and laws of our people. And in his time, as today, there were many for whom tradition done “just so” was critically important. The service he compiled, a pamphlet much more than a machzor, with a mere nod to matbeah tefillah, must have been controversial to traditionalists at the time.
It was musical – Lou Siagel, the beloved music director at the time, is listed here as an officiant. It had translations and transliterations. It had art and hand-lettered lyrics to a relatively new folk song at the time, “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav,” which, contrary to the thousands of years of street cred attained by the traditional Machzor, had been released just three years earlier. This was anything but traditional.
And yet, in 1968 and 1969, Rabbi Chiel had looked out at the pews in the second service on the second day of Rosh HaShanah. He saw something he was not capable of ignoring – empty seats. What could he do to bring people in? The most perfect service, he taught us, is not always the one with every halachic box checked off, but one that reaches and teaches, one that lifts and moves us to join in.
By dreaming outside the box, with a service that invited people to access traditional observance in new ways, to sing and to think deeply about the “what” and “why” of the day, Rabbi Chiel brought second day of Rosh HaShanah back to Temple Emanuel.
What is feeling blocked and broken for you right now? What energy can you bring to renew?
Secondly, immediately right off the bat in the service he compiled, in his introduction to the service booklet, Rabbi Chiel wrote, “The readings and prayers address themselves to the relevant problems of our day.” He wasn’t kidding
Peppered throughout the service are anti-war poems and prayers, including the fiery words of the 1963 song, “The Universal Soldier”: “And he knows he shouldn’t kill…and he knows he always will… He is the one who must decide who will live and who is to die.”
That echo of the Unetaneh Tokef is later matched by the final paragraph of the prayer and partnered with a “New Unetaneh Tokef” reading, which imagines, “Who shall be shattered by the earthquake of social change, and who shall be plagued by the pressures of conformity?”
The ongoing question for Rabbi Chiel in his day, and for us in ours, is: “Should the shul be a sanctuary from the world – as in, “Don’t talk about the troubles of the world, that ruins my Shabbes peace.” Or should the sanctuary be, as in the old adage, a space that “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable”?
Rabbi Chiel had a clear answer: Option B. Get inspired here in shul to make a difference in the world. Do not be indifferent. When things seem hard, even insurmountable, when we feel so small, the sanctuary is the place we come together to remind us again: Do not give up. From start to finish, the Contemporary Service Rabbi Chiel chose to bring to our community is focused on that mission.
Now, Rabbi Chiel spoke softly, he drew you in, he cared deeply. Most of his sermons speak beautifully to the personal challenges and trials we all, at some point, must endure, offering steady guidance and reassurance. But one particular Rosh HaShanah, he spoke with a prophet’s outrage against what was an exceedingly political issue of his time. He delivered his fiery sermon in the first service.
Afterwards, during the break between services, Haskell Shapiro, of blessed memory, stopped him. “Rabbi,” Haskell said, “What’s your plan for the second service? I don’t think you should deliver that sermon again – it made people uncomfortable.” To which Rabbi Chiel replied, “That is why I need to deliver the sermon again.”
There is a time for sanctuary from and there is time for sanctuary for. At Temple Emanuel, Rabbi Chiel mostly did the former, his golden voice and gentle grace bringing people together. But he definitely did the latter, courageously and sparingly, when appropriate.
When you emerge from this place, what will you use what you have learned here for?
Yet somehow whenever Rabbi Chiel spoke out, it was also suffused with menschlichkeit, humility, empathy, and aspiration. The same reading that included such a sharp challenge to “quarrel with the world” also includes: “Let it be out of love, not envy, let it be in order to correct, and to improve, not just for the sake of tearing down.”
Rabbi Chiel practiced this too. Now, I may have heard the only two stories of anyone ever disliking a sermon he delivered. There was a time a gentleman disagreed with what Rabbi Chiel had to say so much that he walked out in the middle of his sermon. Now those were the days when the ushers used to tie off a rope to hold people at the back from entering during the rabbi’s sermon, so to walk out required no small amount of effort. It did not go unnoticed – by those there that day or by Rabbi Chiel.
The next day, Rabbi Chiel called the man up. “Can I come see you?” he asked? They set a time. At the appointed hour, the rabbi arrived to a chilly reception. But they sat and talked. Finally, Rabbi Chiel said, “It’s all right for you to walk out if you disagree with me, but let’s be more than just our disagreement.”
“Let’s be more than just our disagreement” is a masterful recipe for real relationships – a recipe we need more now than ever. After talking for quite some time, the two men did not come any closer to agreement. But as Rabbi Chiel rose to get his coat, the gentlemen who had been so furious rushed in to hug him. He continued to disagree with Rabbi Chiel but loved him even more.
That is gadlus – the kind of greatness we need for our time. Disagree with me, even passionately, but let’s still be friends, let’s still be family. We are in this together.
Rabbi Chiel met his moment. And he taught us how we can too. First be open to changing our approach. Second do not shrink from speaking out. And third, when we do, be disciples of Aaron, even as we disagree, drawing together.
On this first Contemporary Shabbat, as we recall 55 years of disruptive inspiration Rabbi Chiel gave us so long ago, the world has changed. We face different heartbreaks. Different disagreements. But the legacy of Rabbi Chiel lives on.
Let us meet our moment as he met his: with courage and conviction, paired with an empathy for others that enables us to never – no matter how things change – give up hope that, in meeting our world as it is, we can, together, summon the resilience to gently, wisely, move to a higher place.
Shabbat Shalom.