Jewish Star Struck

As someone who grew up in the movement, I always get a little star-struck at Jewish conventions. So you can imagine what it was like to start my day studying with Lawrence Kushner and end my day meeting Peter Sagal of NPR’s comedy news quiz Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. I was fully prepared to act like a teenager at a rock concert (and I did, landing a front row seat, a photo, AND an autograph).

Sagal was hilarious, but clearly intimidated by being in a room full of rabbis. He mused about what the collective noun for rabbis might be. If there is a “school” of fish, or a “gaggle” of geese, what does one call this large gathering at the CCAR? A “certainty” of rabbis!

This morning, Rabbi Kushner led one “certainty” of rabbis in the study of a number of Hassidic texts about rabbinical leadership. He laid out the categories of gadlut—spiritual “bigness”—and katnut—spiritual “smallness.” When we find ourselves in a state of katnut, Kushner said, we should go home immediately, as we are not going to do anyone any good if we ourselves are not spiritually sound.

But spiritual gadlut is also something to be wary of. A text from R. Levi of Berditchev reminded us to remember that, whatever spiritual level we have achieved, there is always a higher level to attain. A tzaddik, we concluded, was not someone who had attained the highest level, but a person in a constant state of striving for a higher level who recognizes that he or she is not quite “there” yet.

It was easy to remember how far we have to go after this morning’s Shacharit service, where first-timers (like me) were offered an aliyah, right after an aliyah honoring those who have been in the rabbinate for 50 years. It was a moment of both gadlut and katnut. I felt gadlut at taking on such an important honor in such a beautiful service, and katnut in the presence of my distinguished colleagues.

I have to imagine that those standing beside me were asking the same question that I was: what will we learn over the next 50 years that will make us better rabbis? And, 50 years from now, what not-quite-attainable goal will we still be striving towards?