Cross-country Compassion

Newsletter February 10th, 2025 Together, we're #keepingitsacred...

Twenty-two years ago, I began the first year of my rabbinic journey. And that first year, I was brought into community with people for whom Judaism was a deeply inspiring and lived experience. People who felt that love and affinity for the Jewish story, Jewish texts and values, and Jewish rhythms of time, and wanted to create ways for Jewish life and the Jewish people to thrive. I met people from Arkansas and New York, New Jersey and Ohio, France and Israel. That year, I met someone who would become a dear friend who hailed from Indiana— Rachel Greengrass.

After our initial year in Jerusalem, Rachel and I both matriculated to the New York campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. There, along with our classmates, we would spend hours in the library together, gather for tefillah together, and various sanctuaries together, and we would socialize together— I remember birthday parties in SoHo, and fondue Shabbat dinners downtown. The night before we became rabbis, along with a handful of other friends and soon-to-be-colleagues, we went uptown to the Mikveh to spiritually prepare for taking on the sacred covenantal responsibility of becoming known as a rabbi among the Jewish people.  

In the 16+ years since our ordination, our paths took us to opposite sides of the country with me building my rabbinate in Southern California and her finding her path in Southern Florida. And, truth be told, we haven’t been in much contact throughout the years. Not deep contact. Not present contact. But when the fires devastated several pockets of the Los Angeles area and made national headlines, she immediately texted me to see how she could help. 

There’s a Jewish value based on the rabbinic teaching that says: “kol Yisrael arevim zen bazeh”/“all the people of Israel are responsible for one another” (Babylonian Talmud, Shevuot 39a)

Each of us are responsible for helping one another to maintain our dignity, to build one another up, to help one another when we are struggling. It is a universally held principle by people of deep faith— after all Dr. Martin Luther King preached that we are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” The theology for people of faith is that we are connected, and so when there is need for one, it is morally incumbent upon others to help.

As a rabbi and a Jewish person trying to live my values, I am used to showing up and being there for people. I try to say “hineini” here I am ready to respond to you — to take in what you uniquely need, and to respond well in ways that hears where you are, humanizes you, affirms you, supports you, and sets you up for empowerment and success moving forward. In whatever ways that needs to happen. Pastoral care training has given us the tools to become a non-anxious presence for our people. To, without fear, walk with our people on journeys through life. And I try to show up this way— as a sacred witness to what’s happening. But I also try to help with physical support or spiritual support, always responding to the needs of the person in front of me. 

But, when my friend, Rabbi Rachel Greengrass extended this kind of sacred care to me and our community, on her own behalf and on behalf of her community, Temple Beth Am of Miami, from nearly 3,000 miles away, it hit differently. We identified that there were a lot of resources flooding in — in the form of clothing donations and shelters immediately housing people displaced. But that our community members needed to find time and space to gather around the table for community. 

In turn, she offered, on behalf of her community, to sponsor two Shabbat dinners for our people. So that after services we could process what was happening, together. Not in a formal or stiff way— but in an organic and authentic way. This past Shabbat we did just that. 

It is so beautiful to affirm a culture of care even as we personally or communally experience this disaster. Feeling the love of community, Jewish community, so far away, reminds us that how we are doing and what happens to us from here matters to others in communities elsewhere. 

All of this has taught me something about the kind of amplified sacred witnessing that can be experienced because it is offered community to community. This is perhaps why many cities with large Jewish populations have developed “twinning” relationships with those in cities in Israel. This is why our Keeping It Sacred community’s development of deep relationships with other entrepreneurial Jewish communities have been so meaningful, and why our partnerships with other communities trying to build spaces where all people thrive have been so rewarding. All Israel is responsible for the well being of one another. All people are responsible for the well being one another. 

The world is small, after all. And we make it so. So, THANK YOU to Rabbi Rachel Greengrass and Temple Beth Am in Miami, Florida for extending support and love and compassion by sustaining our bodies with food and our spirits with community who cares. We are grateful.

Together, we’re #keepingitsacred…

Rabbi Heather Miller,

Founder, Keeping It Sacred

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The above is an excerpt from a Keeping It Sacred newsletter. If you want to read the entire newsletter or any from our archives, please head over to: keepingitsacred.com/news 

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