June 6, 2025
As a Jewish leader, I spend time immersed in Jewish life, Jewish history, and the profound lessons of Torah. I also spend time listening and speaking with many of you, along with learning from other Jewish leaders. I have spent much time immersed in what the future of Jewish life will look like.
October 7th changed Jewish life in the 21st century. After twenty months of war, we are filled with deep questions about what it means to be in a perpetual state of war. We know that antisemitism is rising, and we know that participation in Jewish life around the United States, including in Columbus and at Beth Tikvah, have surged since the war. We are looking for community, we are looking to be heard.
My own questions have centered on our own community and what we can become. I have thought about:
- How can we enrich our Jewish identity?
- What are our values?
- How do those values play out both within and beyond the walls of our synagogue?
- What is our connection to Israel and the Jewish People?
- How can we live out our Zionism?
- In a world in which we feel deep loneliness resulting from antisemitism, what can we do to make the world a better place?
Over the course of these next several weeks, I want to begin to share with you my responses to these questions. During my February sabbatical I spent time in study and reflection and crafted what I would call a “living and fluid vision” for the future of Jewish life and how Beth Tikvah can immerse in that vision. For the first six weeks, I would like to reflect on the Jewish values that can be the fuel that fills the engine of Jewish life. Subsequent to a conversation on values, I would like us to think about how we apply those values to our lives and our community.
We begin with B’tzelem Elohim to be made in the image of God.
In the beginning of God’s creating the world, the Torah teaches us that we, human beings, are created in God’s image. With this distinction of the highest esteem, it serves as a calling to us to see others with a divine spark of creating. The value is repeated several chapters later when God creates the world anew; starting with Noah and his children. Even as God realized the depravity of humankind prior to the flood, God began the world again with the same value. The failure of human beings to behave in the aspirational manner reflecting the divine spark within all humankind was not enough for God to eschew this value in the reboot. To underscore this point, God makes a covenant with Noah and his descendants – a promise about the future built on care and respect for one another. The Rabbis of the Talmud enumerated this covenant as they established the Noahide laws. In tractate Sanhedrin (56a) the Rabbis begin to envision what such a covenant might look like. To live this covenant is to recognize this universal vision for all humanity: The children of Noah were commanded with seven commandments: [to establish] laws, and [to prohibit] cursing God, idolatry, ensuring sacredness in our relationships, bloodshed, robbery, and caring for animals and all God’s creation.
The rabbis in Tractate Sanhedrin also wonder why Adam and Eve were created alone. They conclude that it was for the purpose of maintaining peace among people so that one person cannot say to another, my ancestor was better than your ancestor. This text in Sanhedrin is a foundation for a Jewish pursuit of equity between people. So much of the world is built on false notions of superiority of gender, race, status, or class. The rabbis teach us that this cannot be true because we all derive from Adam and Eve, the first human beings. We want to be seen in this light and we also must see recognize the divine spark in others.
As we enter this Shabbat and we continue through Pride month, I ask all of us to consider what this value comes to teach us? How can we live by it? And how can we remember it when we interact with others?
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rick Kellner