Our parashah this week, Parashat VaEra, lands us smack in the middle of the story of the Exodus. And it begins with a failure. Of communication. Maybe of leadership. God makes a bold declaration to Moshe, restating God’s long-standing covenantal relationship with b’nei yisrael and God’s commitment to freeing the Israelites from their enslavement. God tells Moshe to relay these words to the people, which he does. And the people just couldn’t hear it. Their spirits had been crushed by the cruelty of their situation. They couldn’t imagine a relationship with God, much less a God who would save them and bring them close as a beloved people, and they rejected Moshe. 

It seems that Moshe didn’t quite know what he was walking into when he went to convey God’s message to the people. He didn’t understand what the people were feeling, what their lives were like. As a result, he couldn’t get his message across. He was preparing to guide them through a major transformation as a community, one that would alter their circumstances and their very identity as a people. In order to be successful here, Moshe needed to know his people’s minds and hearts.

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There are many applications of this principle of successful leadership, including in the realm of halakhah and community practice. We tend to think of Jewish legal decisions happening in the rarefied province of the Talmud and the teachings of our ancient Sages. A bunch of rabbis sitting in a room, poring over esoteric texts, making policy for the Jewish people without ever leaving the beit midrash. 

While there are certainly many discussions of Jewish law and practice that fit this description, there is a halakhic mandate that moves in exactly the opposite direction. In a number of places in the Talmud, a halakhic question is posed, and the rabbis asked don’t have a clear answer. Instead they say: פוק חזי (pok ḥazei) – go out and see what the people are doing. In other words, the answer to the specific question doesn’t lie in a clever parsing of text. It lies in knowing the minds and hearts of the community. In these cases, what the people are already doing becomes the halakhah.

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This past weekend, we were fortunate to host Rabbi Ari Saks as our guest teacher for Shabbat. Rabbi Saks has become known in the Jewish community for his focus on inclusion and celebration of interfaith families. He gained notoriety more recently for resigning from the Conservative Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly due to his practice of officiating weddings between one Jewish partner and one non-Jewish partner. 

His desire to create radically inclusive Jewish spaces and rituals has put him at odds with much of the movement that trained him. The Conservative Movement has both devoted significant energy to studying its approach to interfaith inclusion and taken meaningful steps toward becoming more broadly welcoming. However, for a good number of reasons, the movement hasn’t been willing to go as far as Rabbi Saks. 

Our community has also been studying and discussing our approach to interfaith inclusion for some time now. We also haven’t found ourselves entirely aligned with Rabbi Saks in this area – nor is that our goal. 

Our weekend with him wasn’t about drastically altering our practices. It was an exercise in pok ḥazei, an opportunity for us to look out at the world beyond the boundaries of our shul and see what’s going on out there and learn from it. 

Here’s what we saw: 

→ We are not alone in taking a careful look at our own practices and policies and examining how they do or do not fully reflect our values.

→ We are not alone in our sincere desire to support the entirety of our community and in our willingness to be honest about who makes up our community.

→ There are many different things communities can do to help interfaith families feel more accepted and welcomed. 

→ It’s not only the concrete things we do or the changes we make that matter here – our attitudes and motivations are a big part of the picture.

→ It serves us well to lead with love, empathy, and a desire to meet people where they are. Starting from that point, regardless of any policy changes that may or may not be on our agenda in the future, will put us on solid footing to talk about where we currently are with respect to interfaith inclusion and where we’d like to be.

→ We are eager to discuss this issue more – it impacts nearly every single one of us personally – and to bring our entire selves to the conversation.

I’m so grateful we had the opportunity to learn from Rabbi Saks and from each other over this past Shabbat. He has invited us to keep in touch; some of his writings and resources are available on our website, with more to come. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page.) 

And our conversation will continue. Having pok ḥazei-ed together, we have opened the door to deepening our learning and to creating a vision for Chevrei Tzedek’s present and future. I’m looking forward to doing this sacred work with all of you.

Shabbat shalom.