Shabbat Sermon: Holy Flying Fish with Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

I have a friend who is a therapist. She tells the story that once, she had someone in her office who was really struggling. As he shared story after story of misfortune and sorrow, she found herself thinking, “oy, he really needs a therapist.” Then, the patient paused and asked her for her wisdom. “Oh no,” she thought, “I am that therapist.”

I’ve never felt this story more deeply. This week, I looked at the sermon schedule and thought, “oh no…I am supposed to be the rabbi.” How do you speak to this moment? Everyone is feeling this week so differently. For some people, this was an incredible week of miracles, and for some people, this week plunged them into despair and anxiety. What do you say to that? What do you say to this space where we are all processing it so differently?

I want to tell you a story today. It’s one of my favorite stories of all time and I hope you love it just as much. It’s about two rabbis. Now these two rabbis could not have been more different. Rav Baruch of Medzhybizh was a very distinguished rabbi. He believed every prayer should be said with decorum, proper pronunciation and annunciation; that prayer services should be thoughtful, reflective, quiet, studious, and proper affairs. When he davened, he would come into the sanctuary, and he would sit down with a straight back, and he would pray reverently and quietly, as would his students. They would do every prayer, with every word, until the end.

The other rabbi, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, was charismatic and emotional. He didn’t believe in doing things because you should do them one particular way, he believed in following his heart wherever it led him. He sang loudly sometimes, and quietly others; he believed you should move in a service, and you should dance– if you felt it, you should just get up and move and dance around the room. He believed in singing prayers loudly that he felt and maybe skipping some other words. He was all about the emotional experience of the prayer. By the way, when he came into a sanctuary he didn’t sit in one spot. He would start over here, move over there, he would dance over there, he would clap, he would sing– it was a lot of motion and movement all the time.

Now, Rabbi Yitzchak of Berditchev had one dream, and that is he wanted to share a Shabbat with Rav Baruch of Medzhybizh. So he sent him a message and said, “Hi, I’d really love to have Shabbos with you.” And Rav Baruch writes back, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. It’s just not going to work. There’s no universe in which you come to my shul, my house…It’s just not going to be pretty, no thank you, let’s get together another time but not for Shabbos.”

But Rabbi Yitzchak was not to be deterred.