Yom Kippur address delivered by RS President Michael Hauptman on October 9, 2019.

In 1810, four men, who for 15 years had been part of an informal minyan, met in a house on Race Street to draft the bylaws and articles of worship for the nation’s first Ashkenazic congregation.  Included in their bylaws was a rule that members would be fined 25 cents each time they missed a Shabbat or holiday service.  By my calculations and adjusting for inflation, today that would bring in about $237,000 annually.  Sounds to me like an idea worth reconsidering.

One of those men, whose name may not be familiar to you, was Abraham Gumpert. You might want to make a point of remembering it. He was the first president of Rodeph Shalom.

We know a few things about Abraham Gumpert: he was born in 1766, he lived at 63 Race Street, he married a woman who was not Jewish – which led to the remarkably forward-thinking 1829 decision to welcome interfaith marriages at Rodeph Shalom — and they had two daughters, Rebekah and Sarah, who married brothers. It is entirely likely that he, as a younger man, crossed paths with the likes of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington as they went about their lives here in the new nation’s capital.

Abraham Gumpert died at the age of 83 in 1849 and is buried in the Mikvah Israel cemetery at 8^th & Spruce. He was the first of the 44 men and women who have led this congregation as president during the past 224 years.  Next month, we will be celebrating our presidents, living and deceased, learning about how they met the challenges of their time, how they were influenced by the events taking place in this city and in the nation, and how the work they did shaped the congregation.  We will learn about their legacies.  I invite you to honor their leadership by attending the tribute and celebration and participating as a patron if you can.  And if you are a descendant of one of our presidents, please let us know.

While we don’t know much about Abraham Gumpert’s life, we do know something about his legacy.  His legacy is us.

The enduring values and moral actions extolled in our newly minted vision statement find their historic origins in that house on Race Street. Those 1810 bylaws contained the notion that no member of the congregation would be excluded based on financial circumstances, encouraging them to pay what they could afford, a policy that we have continued to honor for over 200 years.  The generosity and kindness of that fiscal policy has made us the diverse, caring, and socially aware congregation that we are today. It has also created our increasingly chronic fiscal challenge whereby a majority of our members are not able to contribute at the Sustaining Level, which is the amount we need to meet our budget obligations.  Even the 10% of our members who contribute at the Investing Level, generously paying dues at a higher level than Sustaining, are unable to adequately make up the difference. This leaves us perpetually short of revenue, requiring us to rely on fundraising events, ever-increasing dues and ever-decreasing savings.

One way to provide a lasting solution to this unsustainable fiscal model, is to substantially increase our permanent fund – our endowment – that, through prudent investment, will be able to generate revenue of sufficient amount annually to close the gap in our budget, while the principal of the fund will remain in perpetuity. 

Your contribution can be designated for a named clergy chair or for a named space in our building. Donations to an endowment fund can be part of an estate plan, leaving a bequest in a will. Or, you can make a targeted gift as part of our “Bring Your Lamp” initiative that supports a personal philanthropic passion.

A healthy endowment confirms a belief in the future.  It ensures that Rodeph Shalom will always have the means to survive and to thrive.  I must assume that when Abraham Gumpert drafted those bylaws in 1810, he never imagined that his name would be spoken over two centuries later during the High Holy Day services of the historic congregation that he was founding. We must assume that two centuries from now the generations of congregants that follow us will have endured and flourished because of our foresight today.

Rabbi Maderer introduced me to a concept taught by the 20^th century Rabbi Joseph Soleveichik, that Jewish time is not linear.  Instead, we envision the future, learn from the past and take action in the present.  As we envision a fiscal plan that will secure our future; as we’ve learned that inclusion was a founding value of this congregation, born in Abraham Gumpert’s house in a distance past, and still defines us to this day; then let us act now to build a generous and durable endowment so that Rodeph Shalom, continuing to honor our extraordinary heritage, can enjoy with pride and gratitude our invaluable gift of lasting financial security.

That will be our legacy.

Shana Tovah.

Yom Kippur Address delivered by RS President Michael Hauptman on September 19, 2018. 

There’s a story in the Talmud about an old man planting a fruit tree by the side of the road.  A traveler walking by asks him how long it will be before that tree produces fruit. The old man says, “About seventy years”.  “Seventy years? Do you expect to be here in seventy years to enjoy that fruit?”  “No, but just as my ancestors planted fruit trees for me to enjoy, so I will plant for my children.”

His planned gift ensured that his memory would come alive every time someone enjoyed a piece of fruit from his tree.

Ninety years ago this week, the president of Rodeph Shalom, Charles Edwin Fox, stood on this spot, at this reader’s table, and watched as the Board of Trustees marched into their new sanctuary carrying the Torahs onto the bema and placed them in the ark.  As a string quartet and the organ played, the members of the congregation, sitting in your seats, marveled at the magnificent new space that their contributions had made possible. They could not know on that September evening in 1928 that in just over a year, the worst economic crisis in US history would profoundly change their lives and impact events around the world for the next two decades.

We tend to think of historical events that occur along an extended timeline as individual episodes experienced by completely different populations.  We don’t realize that it is often the same people experiencing these milestone events that may occur decades apart. Whereas some lives may have ended, and others may not yet have begun, there are those whose lifetimes connect them, like an intricate woven fabric of overlapping threads.

The children who participated in the lighting of our Eternal Light on that joyous evening in 1928, included the young men sent a dozen years later to fight in Europe and in the Pacific.  When they returned — and some did not —they were married in this room, under that light.  And as they began to raise their families, they moved out of the city, along with hundreds of other Jewish families, to places like Bala Cynwyd and Elkins Park where so many congregations were building modern new buildings and leaving their older urban synagogues behind. 

But we didn’t do that.  In addition to establishing a suburban presence to serve our young families, we, unlike every other Jewish congregation that once lined Broad Street, stayed here. Perhaps it was because the parents of those children who lit our Eternal Light for the first time were now in leadership positions in the congregation and remembered the joy and pride of that evening thirty years earlier, and remembered their children’s weddings on this bema, and the words that the Rabbi spoke at their parents’ funerals in this sanctuary, and the sorrowful sounds of the cello on Kol Nidre that reverberated only as it could in this irreplaceable room. And they could not abandon it.

For nearly fifty years, we maintained our two locations.  Generations of congregants worshiped and attended religious school at Suburban, coming into town for High Holy Days and special occasions so that their most cherished memories and their most profound experiences would be indelibly linked to this sacred space.

Even as the neighborhood around us began to feel less safe, and the sanctuary began to show its age, we still came.  The children who first attended the suburban center‘s religious school were now Trustees of the congregation.  Shifting demographics compelled them to make the painful decision to sell the suburban center that their grandparents had established and focus instead on restoring and expanding the awesome building that their great-grandparents had built and had sat in your seats at its dedication.

Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards, they shape us.”   So much of who we were and who we, as a congregation, have become is contained within the walls of this room.  It has been witness to thousands of Shabbats and b’nai mitzvah, hundreds of baby namings, weddings and funerals.  It was listening when we heard the news about the terrors of Kristallnacht, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel. It consoled us during the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of national leaders, the wars in the Middle East, and the events of 9/11.   In its 51st year, it witnessed our first Shabbat morning bat mitzvah and, in its 89^th year, the installation of our first woman senior Rabbi.

As we celebrate the 90^th anniversary of this sanctuary throughout the coming year, let us be generous in honoring the space that has been so generous with us.  Let us pay tribute to those who were here in this room as the Torahs were marched down the aisles, whose voices remain in these walls and whose contributions continued to support, maintain and restore this room long after their threads had ended. 

We can all plan a legacy gift for those congregants that come after us. We can’t know what events this room will bear witness to tomorrow, but we can plant the trees to bear fruit for our grandchildren, so that they will be able to hear our voices in these walls and marvel at the priceless gift we’ve left them.  

Happy Anniversary and Shana Tova.

Yom Kippur Address delivered by RS President Michael Hauptman on September 30, 2017.

Language has always been an interest of mine; how language evolves, where words come from and how language provides a window into a society or culture.  So, a book I read recently, Aphrodite and the Rabbis by Burton Visotzky, really satisfied my tendency to be a bit of a word nerd. The author documents how after the destruction of the Second Temple, Judaism reinvented itself as a religion based heavily on Greco-Roman civilization, adopting their stories, ritual and language to create a Jewish liturgy and culture that we still practice today.  In fact, Jews at that time were more likely to speak Greek than Hebrew.

In one of his more fascinating examples, Visotzky describes how the Passover Seder as we all know it, borrows liberally from the Greek symposia, cocktail parties where the Greek literati got together to tell stories and socialize.  A symposium, a Greek word meaning “to drink together” involved many glasses of wine and many of the familiar foods that you find on your Seder plate. Diners reclined on pillows and afterwards, there would be entertainment: api komias—Greek for to the comedians! – perhaps not much to do with hiding matzoh from children.

Greek and Roman references continue to permeate our modern culture through our art, music, architecture and language.  Take the word “philanthropy”, Greek for “love of people”. An interpretation of that sentiment is reflected in our Torah, Parsha Terumah , where God tells Moses to “accept gifts…from every person whose heart so moves him”,  confirming that giving is an emotional act that invokes a depth of feeling as an incentive to give. 

It is said that philanthropy provides an opportunity for a donor to fulfill their dreams and to live more Jewishly by giving to a cause they love.

There are congregants sitting among us today whose love of this community along with their passion for young children inspired them to fulfill their dream of creating a Jewish early learning center at Rodeph Shalom.  There are congregants here today whose love of this congregation and their interest in ensuring a Jewish education for our children compelled them to provide generous support for our religious school.  And there are congregational families here whose love of music and of the people of this synagogue has moved them to give us all a gift of music at Shabbat services every week.  

There’s a story I’d like to share that was told by Rabbi Alan Rabishaw of Temple Or Rishon in California. 

A wealthy nobleman, who lived in a small Jewish village, was getting on in years, and he wanted to create a lasting legacy for the people whom he loved so dearly. He decided that he would construct the most perfect synagogue as his special gift to the community. He hired the best architect in town who produced a magnificent design. The nobleman shared with everyone his dream that this place would reflect the very best that he had to give.  Finally, the new synagogue was completed. The doors were opened and the people flooded in. After looking around at the darkened new building, someone asked, “But, where are the lamps? Where will the light come from?”

The nobleman pointed to rows of elegant iron hooks that lined each wall of the synagogue.

Then he gave each family a lamp with a ring at its top. “You must bring these lamps when you come to the synagogue,” he told them. “Whenever you are not here, your part of the synagogue will be dark, but when you come, when you participate, and when you contribute, your contribution will illuminate our building.”

If you look closely, you will find hooks all over our building.  Is your connection to Reform Judaism through social justice?  We have hooks for that. How about food equality?  There’s a hook for that, too.  Is your passion Jewish art, historic preservation, caring community, lifelong learning?  We have hooks for every member of our congregation.

Bring your lamp.  Find your hook.  Light up this building with your presence, your participation, your passion and your philanthropy – your “love of people” of this congregation. Make Rodeph Shalom your philanthropic priority, and the light from our building will be a brilliant beacon for this city and the entire Jewish community.

As we read in Siddur Sim Shalom, “May the One who blessed our ancestors bless those who unite to establish synagogues for prayer, and those who enter them to pray, and those who give funds for heat and light, and wine for Kiddush, bread for the travelers, charity for the poor and all who devote themselves to the needs of the community and to all of Israel.”  Amen.