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By Rabbi Carl M. Perkins

Public Needs
Parashat Pekudei (Shabbat Shekalim)
March 8 , 2008

This practice continued far beyond the days of the Tabernacle; far beyond the days of King Yehoash. It says in the Mishnah, (Shekalim 1:1), written a good thousand years later, that on the first of Adar, we proclaim the half-shekel obligation, and on the fifteenth day of the month, which is the day after Purim, exactly two weeks later, we “mitaknim et ha-derachim, v’et ha-rechovot, v’et mikvaot ha-mayim”—“we repair the roads, and the public squares, and the public bath houses,” AND, the text continues, “v-osin kol tsorchei ha-rabim,”—“we attend to all necessary public needs.”

In other words, the month of Adar, the month just before the new year, is the month for doing all of those repairs we’ve been accumulating over the winter. We’ve got to fix the potholes, we have to patch up the roofs on the public buildings, we have to get ourselves and our communities ready to usher in the new year and celebrate the great holiday of Pesach in style. And in order to do that, we have to collect funds. Thus, the reminder that each Israelite should contribute a half-shekel.

Now, as any fundraiser will tell you, this is not the most efficient or effective way to raise a lot of money. It would make more sense to try to get a few wealthy individuals in a particular community to give a lot of money, and for the less well-off to contribute smaller amounts. Well, when it comes to certain fundraising efforts, that technique is employed. But not here. Here, we find an insistence that each and every Israelite of age should contribute the same minimal amount, the same half-shekel.

Why? Why is this so important?

The answer is fairly simple. Yes, the community needs funds. But the community has a more subtle need as well. Each and every one of us depends on the roads. We depend on the public square. We depend on the public buildings. Unless each of us contributes to them, even minimally, we won’t feel we have a stake in them. We won’t care for them. We won’t protect them. And so, even though this method might not raise as much money as other methods, we employ this as a way of getting everyone in the community on board, as it were.

Clearly, when it comes to the mitzvah of the half-shekel, developing a collective communal consciousness is as important a goal as raising the funds.

I worry about community in America today. Yesterday, I spoke at a local retirement village. At the end of my talk, everyone sang “America, the Beautiful” together. Afterward, one of the residents came over and lamented to me that her own grandchildren don’t know that song, probably because, in her words, “they don’t have the assemblies that we used to have, where we’d sit around and sing those songs.”

America is a very individualistic country. Each of us is in it for ourselves. There’s very little willingness to offer something up, even a token, for the collective. Sure, we pay taxes. But we try to get away with paying as little as possible. Sure, some of us get involved in local or regional politics, trying to assure that our towns and communities remain safe and clean and desirable—but most Americans choose a community based on a variety of factors, many of them economic, and we don’t hesitate to leave if other opportunities present themselves elsewhere. Some of us feel patriotic enough to enlist in the armed forces, or to encourage our children to enlist. But not all of us. Not by far. And so, even though our nation may be engaged in an armed conflict, as it is today, stretching out over years and years, the actual service may end up being done by a few highly committed men and women, rather than a representative group. This hardly contributes to group cohesion. About the only thing we might do as Americans to express our sense of belonging here is to sing the national anthem before a football or baseball game.

I worry about the sense of community among Jews as well. Our people has survived for thousands of years. Why this is, is a great mystery, but surely one of the reasons is that we’ve felt not only a sense of common history, and a common destiny, but also a commonality in the present, and we’ve expressed that feeling in concrete ways, by taking care of one another in times of need, by reaching out, by housing and clothing and feeding the indigent, by welcoming the stranger, by extending ourselves. This doesn’t take a lot of money, but it does require a willingness to feel ourselves a part of the community, and therefore responsible for others in the community.

When I heard about that awful attack at Mercaz HaRav yesterday, one of my first thoughts was a question: How many in our community will experience this as a loss? How many, instead, will be indifferent, not out of malice, but simply because what happens in a yeshiva in Israel is simply off of our radar screen? Last week, we read a poem by Rachel, whose last line spoke of the “silent tear” the poetess shed in response to the “affliction” she witnessed, the affliction of her Land and of her people. How many of us shed such “silent tears” when we hear of such tragedies taking place in Israel? I wonder sometimes.

Let’s focus our attention closer to home. What about our own community, our own congregation, which is, after all, a microcosm of the Jewish people? Do we feel, and do we express, our sense of community? How well?

We might ask, “How well do we welcome the stranger?”, which is an important question.

We might also ask, “How well do we welcome those who are already part of our community, who shouldn’t be strangers at all?” Our congregation has taken a number of constructive steps over the past few years to try to be as warm and welcoming to newcomers as we can be. And these efforts have borne fruit. But we still have far to go, not only in welcoming newcomers, but in supporting those of us who’ve been around for awhile.

There are members of our congregation who are contending with illness. Others have recently lost their jobs. Still others are going through divorce or other traumatic experiences. A true community is one where each of us feels responsible for one another—and expresses that. Now, that’s not an invitation to be nosy, or to gossip—as tempting as either of these might be—and certainly not an invitation to violate another person’s right to privacy. It is, instead, an invitation for each of us to ask ourselves: What can I do? What can I do to help? How can I exemplify what it means to be a Jew in this community?

You know, New England is a wonderful place to live. But some say it can also be a chilly place, a formal place, a place where, out of deference to one’s zone of privacy, people will not only refrain from prying, but will refrain from trying to reach out. What I’m suggesting is that we need to put into place and maintain the means for us as a community to serve the needs of every one of us in the community. We need to strengthen our Kehillah, and our Kesher and our Keruv and our Hesed Committees, all of which are, in one form or another, devoted to this goal. And we need, each one of us, to see ourselves as ambassadors for the congregation, representative exemplars of hospitality and compassion. And there’s no better time to reflect on this than on Shabbat Shekalim.

Yes, there are potholes in our parking lot that I’m sure will demand fixing. Yes, I’m sure that, after this rough winter of snow storm after snow storm, our roof will need to be repaired. I’m sure that dozens of ceiling tiles have been damaged by water and will need to be replaced. And, yes, each and every member of the congregation should contribute to those expenses, because the entire congregation depends on a sound building.

But there are other kinds of potholes; there are other burdens that individual members of our congregation face. Let’s remember that during the month of Adar we are to attend to “kol tsorchei ha-rabim,” “all necessary public needs.” Our strength as a congregation depends as much on the sense of congregational cohesion as it does on the soundness of our physical structure. Let this be a reminder to each of us to work together to achieve each and every tikkun, each and every repair, that we can within our community. Shabbat Shekalim Shalom—may each of us, as a result of that, be privileged to enjoy a peaceful and supportive Shabbat Shekalim.

Shabbat shalom!