Hope, persist, make tomorrow better than today

By Rabbi Phil Cohen Departing Rabbi of Congregation Keneseth Israel

it out here. Riverside, California, to be precise, 60 or so miles southeast of LA.

Technically I am no longer part of the clergy team of the Lehigh Valley, having decamped from the region for the sunny world of Southern California, SoCo, as they call

One of the things I take for granted as I move to my next pulpit is that my job as rabbi will have an obvious continuity. I know well that synagogues and Jewish regions create their own cultures, and these produce significant differences. But beneath those differences lies the Jewish tradition of which we all are a part. Shabbat remains Shabbat, Yom Kippur the same, and so forth. As Jews, we belong to the same vast history of a people, a vast gathering of ideas and rituals — in other words, in the Lithuanian-born

American Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s felicitous term, a “civilization” through which we share so much.

Allow me to focus on one of these features: What is the meaning of our life as Jews? Well, one powerful element of that is our notion that history, and not just our history, is packed with meaning and bears within it an optimistic feel that belies our actual history. This optimism, usually couched in the term “messianism,” teaches us that history has purpose, that our lives have purpose, that living on this planet allows us to participate in the great adventure of perfecting it.

The messianic idea of the Jewish tradition forms the engine that empowers us to build, to create, to form families and communities. This idea also undergirds a critical element of the Jewish psyche: hope. No matter how bad things seem to be, the idea of the messiah teaches that we can, we ought to, persist, move on, and that through our existence, we can help bring about a tomorrow that’s better than today.

And so it will be for me out here in Southern California. Part of my job as a rabbi will always be to encourage people to look toward our future with optimism.

I much enjoyed my time in the Lehigh Valley. Helping to usher Congregation Keneseth Israel, my spiritual home for the year, into its new era was a pleasurable sacred task. In the deepest sense of the word, I learned a lot from the many meetings I had with you folks and wish you well as we move ahead to 5784. A bit early, I know, but still, shanah tovah u’m’tukah, a happy, healthy, sweet new year, a year that brings us one step closer to our history’s messianic conclusion.