Henri Goettel
Overland Park, KS

Our Rabbis taught: A teacher accompanies his pupils until the outskirts of a city. Rabim yekarim, beloved teachers, tonight we are standing outside the gates of the city. With your guidance, what an extraordinary journey we have had.

What brought us together? My guess is that in this graduating class of 61 students, there were at least 62 different goals: to give ones-self the religious school education that one did not receive as a child; to become better able to share with one's spouse or teach one's grandchild. One of my classmates told me that his goal was to negate everything he'd been taught growing up Jewish; he's got a problem, because every time he asks a question, he becomes a better Jew and moves himself one step farther away from his goal.

My goal was to find community, although I certainly didn't know that's what I was looking for. I was raised in a classically Reform family in which weekly temple attendance, Sunday school, midweek Hebrew, Jewish summer camp, and the recognition of my mother and father as active community members were givens. When I began college, I was naively confident in the strength of my Judaism. Thirty-five years after my college graduation, I pulled up a chair in the JCC boardroom knowing no one at the table. I had married a non-Jew, I lived in Eastern Jackson County, Missouri--where I was certain you couldn't find a minyan if your life depended on it, let alone a good piece of kugel--and I was unaffiliated. In short, I had become your worst nightmare, the fully assimilated Jew.
Still I considered myself a Jew. I believed in God, one God. I understood that my purpose in life was to fully develop that part of God that was embodied in me, and by so doing, to make the world a better place. Like some of my classmates, I chose to come to the Melton table because I found myself at a time of transition in my life; for me it was retirement. Perhaps I'd make a few new friends, perhaps I'd find some new activities to occupy my time. Besides, it had been so many years since I'd studied for no other reason than the sheer love of learning. In September of 2003, I was barely aware of my hunger for community. My responsibility for community was totally beyond my comprehension.

Within a very few weeks, I began to feel at home in the Melton study community. Every week, dear teachers, you guided us into the big questions; and every week you dignified all of our denominational responses, answered all of our questions, and dismantled all of our brazen challenges (I can say that last piece, because I was the source of so many of them). I learned from my classmates too. As diverse as we were in age, in experience, and in practice, we were clearly more alike than different in places very deep within us. Every week I drove home brain-dead and ecstatic.

By the end of that first year, I understood that living Jewishly outside of community is like trying to sing four-part harmony by yourself. I discovered that I was still a Reform Jew. I was beginning to consider the possibilities of finding a congregational home. But before I became ready to make that commitment, Melton was to give me another indelible lesson in the meaning of community.

On June 21st, 2004, along with Rabbi Katz, two of my classmates, and nine Kansas City Melton graduates, I came home to Israel for the first time. Almost a year later, I am still groping for the right words to properly describe the experience of the Melton Israel Seminar. With the guidance of another beloved teacher, I slowly came to understand what it means to be a diaspora Jew in the twenty-first century. In Israel I learned what it means to study my history where it took place. What it feels like to be a part of the majority culture. What a joy it is to listen to music and poetry in the language my childhood remembers. The significance of sharing values with extended family that I've never even met, to be able have long, serious conversations with them about God and land and peace and the future. To seriously consider the implications of how alike we are in some ways, yet how totally different we are in others. To watch the city of Jerusalem come to a stop on Friday afternoon; to step outside on Shabbat morning and join the endless groups of people walking to synagogue. To treasure this moment in time and space…and then to have to leave, knowing that when I return, so much about this very special place may have changed.

I came home from the Israel Seminar determined to do three things: First, to practice Shabbat as I had experienced it in Jerusalem: a time for family, worship, study, and rest. Every week now the glow of the Shabbat candles reminds me that here in Kansas City, in Israel, and all over the world there are people experiencing just the same feelings that I am.

My second promise to myself was to resume the study of Hebrew, which I had stopped doing 40-some years ago. The Israel Seminar introduced me to Amichai, Bialik, Agnon. I wanted to be able to read them in the language they wrote in. So I have joined yet another community, hakita ivrit sheli, and have found another beloved teacher and still more friends.

Third and most important, I chose a congregational home. I followed six of my Melton Israel Seminar classmates there for weekly Torah and Talmud study, Shabbat worship, and the frequent joys and occasional sorrows of the Jewish life cycle. My choice gave me still two more beloved teachers, and a community that continues to expand and draw me in.I returned for the second year of Melton a very different Jew than I had been a year earlier. This year has been enriched for me, not only by my growing familiarity with Tanach and Talmud, by the beginnings of the ability to recognize roots and structures in Hebrew, by the indelible memories of the land and the people of Eretz Yisrael…but even more important, my second year has been enriched by my relationships with my community: my teachers, my classmates, my fellow congregants, my friends.

This last semester I've had the good fortune to extend my personal boundaries to include one more important segment, and that is the Melton graduate community. Worldwide there are more than 20,000 of us now, including more than 550 here in Kansas City. Working together, we have the opportunity to increase the number of graduate offerings for ourselves, to further strengthen the Melton program in our community, and to establish additional Melton sites in parts of the world where there are adult Jews eager to learn but without an infrastructure to support them. These goals are important to me; by now you can probably understand why.

Rabim yekarim, none of this would have happened without you, each of you, accompanying me as far as the outskirts of the city and encouraging me to knock on the gates. Within each setting I have found more of my community, and I understand more of my responsibility to them. Because the simple fact is…Had we been just a collection of individuals, each of us with a relationship to God but no responsibility to each other, little of what we have studied the last two years might even exist. Ezra the Scribe would have had no one to read to. Judah HaNasi would have had no reason to codify anything. Would there have been a Shulchan Aruch, would there be responsa? Had we not been a community, a people, would there be a State of Israel?

In the morning blessings, we are commanded to honor our parents; to perform g'milut chasadim, to tend to the needs of the stranger, the sick, and the bereaved; to celebrate with newlyweds; to bring peace to those who are at odds with each other. We can't do any of these things standing alone, no matter how much we want to honor God. Each of these obligations requires that we stand in community. V'talmud torah k'neged kulom, and the study of Torah leads to them all.

Sometimes, ancient words startle me with the clarity they possess to say what I am feeling. Tonight, I want to end with words from the kaddish d'rabbanan, the Sages' Kaddish. This is not a prayer for a dead teacher. This is a prayer for the conclusion of study, and it can only be spoken in community. This is the best way I know to say todah rabah, thank you to our beloved teachers. I think I can speak for us all: For Israel and her sages, for their pupils and all pupils of their pupils, and for all who occupy themselves with Torah, whether in this place or any other place, may God grant them and you abundant peace, and grace, and love, and mercy, and long life, and ample sustenance, and saving acts, all flowing from divine abundance in the worlds beyond. And let us all say amen.