blogs/brentspodek

When I was younger, I so much wanted to escape what I thought the Jewish world I was born into - it felt loud and abrasive, acquisitive and insecure.

It's almost as if I was born feeling too Jewish.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, I escaped the Coney Island of my mind not by fleeing Judaism, but by going much deeper in. I went to Israel, I learned Hebrew, I went to yeshiva and found a different Judaism.

This Judaism I found - of Torah, of meaning and connection, of spiritual nourishment - was as far from Jackie Mason as the Dali Lama is from Lululemon pants. If Judaism was about real connections - with people, with the past, with the Divine - then I could never be too Jewish.

At BHA, we try to live a Judaism of connection and spiritual nourishment, a Judaism that flows from the hassidic teaching: ?? ??? ??? ??? ????? ????? - every person has a letter of the Torah, a bit of Divine Truth that they, and perhaps they alone, can understand. We are defined by what truth we can uncover and what connections we can build on that truth.

Open to the Sky is a project that grows out of that teaching. It's a project that is about inviting everyone to come together and share what bit of Divine truth we can, even - particularly - if we would never call it that. The truth of Torah is much bigger than any book can hold, even the Torah.

This past Sunday, we wrapped up Open to the Sky with Simchas Torah - the rejoicing in the Torah, in its biggest and broadest form. BHA marched loud and proud from the Open to the Sky Sukkah on Main Street to our synagogue on Verplanck Avenue. Thanks to Josh Rutner, we were led by an amazing klezmer band and we waved our lulavs all the way back home to BHA, where we sang and danced and completed reading the Torah and then of course, immediately began again.

When I was 15 years old, I would have laughed out loud at the idea that one day, I would be marching in and even leading a Jewish parade.

But I couldn't have been happier to part of this parade. This was a celebration of the Torah we read on the parchment of a hand-written scroll and the Torah we live in a life of connection and meaning. It was a celebration of a Judaism very much informed by the past and very much lived in the present.

This was a parade celebrating the Judaism of our community, of Beacon Hebrew Alliance.