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You
may be asking yourselves how is this afternoon different from all other
afternoons. Or, in more secular terms, what are we doing here when we
could be watching the Ravens battle the Bengals or hiking along the
Stoney Run? The answer of course is that we are here to celebrate the
birthday of this birthplace, the Bolton Street Synagogue in the heart of
historic Roland Park. We Jews and Christians belong to traditions that
think extravagantly: we hear strange voices from heaven, we see burning
bushes, and we move through parting seas. But the miraculous can take
more pedestrian forms in our own backyards, and the eruption of the
sacred on the former grounds of a Baltimore Gas and Electric substation
certainly represents a power surge beyond any normal person’s
calculations. So it was a harmonic convergence just shy of biblical
proportions in which all of you participated: Rabbi Mona Decker, the
leadership of the Bolton Street Synagogue named and unnamed here today,
the visionaries who funded this dream, the architects who gave a nomadic
hope beautiful lines and a solid definition, the engineers and builders
who anchored the idea to the ground, the larger community who has the
good sense to welcome this development as nothing less than a gift from
on high. Congratulations to all of you! May the songs of our hearts and
minds that overflow in this holy place now and in the days to come be
ever pleasing to the God Who sustains each and every one of us.
This
event which will soon spill into a more festive celebration prompts me
to think about beginnings, stretching all the way back to the very
beginning…when God created humankind. There is an incisive observation
tucked into the Tratate Sanhedrin of the Mishnah, which for my fellow
goyim refers to a compilation of rabbinic teachings, indeed the first
strata of the Oral Tradition. The sages are engaged in a searching legal
discussion about the seriousness of taking a life when the comment is
made that we all share the same point of origin. You see, if we trace
our genealogical roots, we eventually discover that we are all the
offspring of Adam and Eve. We all come from the same primordial couple.
We share a common beginning. The Sages comment that this ancestral
convergence is “for the sake of peace among people, so that someone
could not say, “My father is greater than your father, or my mother is
superior to yours.” It is this foundational insight about human
equality, first delineated and applied by the Prophets, that is the
basis of our American democracy—and this awareness constitutes one of
the most glorious bequests to western civilization. We are to be sure
different from one another, but none of us can claim to be of greater
significance in the eyes of God. Therefore Kings and Queens, priests and
prophets, government officials and military officers are all bound by
the same rules of justice.
It
is an elemental revelation which nonetheless sits precariously on the
edges of our consciousness. Allow me to illustrate. How many of you have
ever had parents? Raise your hands. (Most everyone raises an arm.)
Well, this is just as I suspected. How many of you have ever had
siblings? (A smaller but still significant number lifts a hand.)
Ok. Now we are getting somewhere. How many of you at one time or
another believed that either you were your parents’ favorite….or
that one of your siblings was your parents’ favorite? (Almost every
person with a sibling once again puts a hand in the air.)
Anyone
with kids knows that it is extremely difficult to dole out your
attention in equal measure to all your children at the same time, and
the first parents, our distant ancestors Adam and Eve, discovered the
consequences of favoritism. You remember, they made a big fuss about
their firstborn Cain, and their second son Abel was something of an
afterthought. The name says it all. “Hevel” means a “breath,” a
“vapor,” “emptiness” in Hebrew. Attention got dished out in
unequal proportions. A sibling rivalry was born, which if the truth be
told was only compounded when God flipped things around, lavished his
attention on Abel and disregarded Cain. We all know the fallout.
Jealousy took hold of Cain, and his obsession with being front and
center, gaining the status of number one, his frustration and anger, or
perhaps his failure to learn from his brother’s success, all these
unruly passions took possession of him. Cain escorted his brother Abel
into the field and murdered him.
Now
you can dress up the story in lots of ways, but the fact remains that
our history involves a pattern of re-enactments, a dreadful series of
fratricidal revivals. We Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been created
in the image of God, equal as carriers of the divine imprint, but we
have scrambled to be the king of the mountain and seize the title of
God’s favorite. We have followed faithfully in the footsteps of Cain
and Abel. And we are still struggling to break the code of hate and to
disarm the deadly rivalry.
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One
of the most celebrated Argentine authors, Jorge Luis Borges, offers an
entrancing escape from the impasse. In a fanciful flight of the
imagination, he envisions an encounter between Cain and Abel many years
after the crime…when both of them have become old and worn.
“They were walking in the desert and knew each other from a distance,
for both men were very tall. The brothers sat on the ground, made a
fire, and ate. For a while, they were untalkative, the way tired men can
be after a long day’s work. In the sky, some still unnamed star
appeared. By the firelight, Cain made out the mark of the stone on
Abel’s forehead, dropped the food he was about to put into his mouth,
and asked to be forgiven for his crime.
“I
no longer remember--did you kill me or was it I who killed you?” Abel
answered. “Here we are together again, just as we used to be.”
“Now
I know for sure you’ve forgiven me,” said Cain, “because to forget
is to have forgiven. I’ll try my best to forget, too.”
“Yes,”
said Abel, speaking slowly, “you’re right. As long as there’s
remorse, there’s guilt.”
The
problem, it seems, is that we remember when things go wrong. We remember
when bad things happen to good people. We bear the scars, and the wounds
never disappear. Perhaps, Borges suggests, global peace in our day
requires less memory. Perhaps the resentment and bitterness that pits
Protestants against Catholics in Ireland, Serbs against Croats in
Bosnia, Israelis against Palestinians will fester until and unless we
all develop an aptitude for forgetfulness. Perhaps the solution to the
hostilities depend upon our capacity to let go of the past, to allow our
memories to sink into oblivion.
For
those of us who wonder where we placed our glasses and puzzle over the
question how our car ended up on the third level of the Towson Commons
parking lot when we know for certain that we dropped anchor on the
second level, the appeal to amnesia as the answer to our global
discontents has an almost irresistible power. Imagine the psychological
benefits. Our failure to remember where or when or which of the kids
crashed the car, our confusion over the facts… this kind of mental
slippage is for the good…it is simply our own little way of
contributing to world peace.
Yet,
here is the rub. We Jews and Christians belong to traditions that insist
that redemption depends our ability to recover and honor the past. The
call to remember is an imperative that lies at the heart of the Torah. Zakar,
the act of remembering is the movement of heart and mind and spirit that
our scriptures and our traditions insist makes the future possible. No
not amnesia, but a hearty and honest and self-critical memory is the
Jewish way, and I might add it is the Christian and Muslim way as well.
What we need to learn is how to remember without magnifying our
grievances and intensifying our resentments! Memory that heals! Memory
that repairs!
And so
we come back to reason that we are celebrating today. This shul carries
the memories of a people on a sacred journey to heal the wounds and
repair the ruptures of the world. We celebrate the establishment of this
“synagogue,” Greek for gathering place…because it is the
particular vision of this community to remember not in isolation from
each other, but together. We celebrate because we need one another in
all our diversity to comprehend the possibilities and the demands of
living with all the glories and all the problems of our differences.
Those of us who make our home in historic Roland Park on the privileged
edges of Baltimore in the State of Maryland in these here United States
need this synagogue more than the people of Bolton Street Synagogue know
and more than the neighborhood realizes. We celebrate the grounding of
this sacred dream as a Beit Midrash, a house of study, where we can
learn where we come from and where we want to go, a house of study where
we discover that we are each created in the image of God and that we can
break the patterns of Cain and Abel. The hospitality that you provide
will help us to face our limits and to expand our possibilities. The
welcome that you extend to the community at large will expand our
horizons and extend the reach of the divine. We are grateful to have you
here, all of you!
The
Reverend Christopher M. Leighton is the Executive
Director of The Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies
http://www.icjs.org |
Baltimore, MD 21210 
