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Leap of faith: making room
An expansive Jewish community is one in which we can crowd together and still make space
I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about elbows. Actual elbows. The ones you become conscious of when there are too many people in too small a space. Someone bumps you, you bump somebody else, and almost without noticing everyone begins trying to make themselves fractionally smaller.
At five foot tall, I do not have much smaller to go. There is a reason I am almost always in heels! Perhaps that is why I love the rabbinic description of the Temple in Jerusalem where people “stood crowded, but when they bowed there was space”.
The rabbis do not imagine a community in which nobody gets in anybody else’s way. It is crowded. There are bodies and opinions and, presumably, elbows everywhere. And yet somehow there is room. That image has kept coming back to me alongside Psalm 118: “From the narrow place I called to God; God answered me with expansiveness.”
There has been a lot of narrowness this year. Public debate has become more polarised, but so too have some of our conversations within Jewish life. Words become badges of belonging. Disagreement can quickly become a question of whose side you are on, and sometimes whether you are really one of us at all.
When that happens, people adjust themselves before they enter the room. We edit and we soften, we decide which parts of ourselves are safest to leave outside.
I have never been especially good at making myself smaller. Physically, there is not much scope and temperamentally, even less. I am naturally an optimist, but mine is an optimism with sharp elbows. I believe deeply in what Jewish community can be, while knowing that communities can close ranks and institutions can get things wrong.
We talk, rightly, about being visibly Jewish in the outside world. But there is another kind of visibility which can be just as demanding: allowing ourselves to be fully seen by one another, including the bits that do not fit somebody else’s idea of what a Jew should believe, look like, say or be.
For me, that is why the Hebrew word merchav is so beautiful. It is not niceness, and it is not agreement; it is room. Room for contradiction and argument and room for Jews who are inconvenient to one another.
A genuinely expansive Jewish community is not one without elbows. It is one in which we can stand crowded together and still make space; where somebody else taking up room does not mean there is less room for me; where we can argue without constantly redrawing the boundaries of belonging.
As 5787 begins, I am less interested in asking whether the coming year will be easier than the last. Instead, the question I care about is whether we can become more spacious within it. Merchav is not a miracle we should wait for – it is something we have to make for one another. Elbows, heels and all!
Rabbi Charley Baginsky is Co-Lead, The Movement for Progressive Judaism
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