Dear Friends,

My heart is filled with a mix of emotions as I write to you for the first time as your rabbi—awe and trepidation at the sacred responsibility of serving as your rabbi, eagerness to get to work and help build up and strengthen this community, and more than anything, joy (simcha) that I have been given this opportunity to do what I have long dreamed of doing, leading a beautiful, inspiring Jewish community, and to do so in a place that is already dear to my heart.

And yet, my sense of joy is not unqualified. This has been a difficult week for our community. On Wednesday afternoon we buried Jessica (Yafa Beyla) Plaut’s son, Francis David Plaut, who died tragically at the age of 28. On Thursday, Julie Hern lost her brother David Ben Avraham Aricha in Israel. (Please scroll down for shiva information for both families.) After sitting and speaking with Yafa and with Julie this week, I am mulling over what it means to celebrate the simcha of coming to Sacramento to serve as your rabbi while members of our community are sitting shiva.

As it turns out, this week’s Parsha has a lot to say about how we should celebrate. Different forms of the Hebrew root Sameach, meaning joy or celebration, appear exactly seven times in the course of Parshat Re’eh (repeating a word multiple times in a short passage is one of the Torah’s ways of drawing our attention to a concept—the biblical equivalent of writing in all caps). The word is used in a surprisingly consistent way throughout the parsha: always appearing in the context of an instruction for us to rejoice either lifnei Hashem (before God) or Lashem (for God). Simcha then is associated with consciousness of the divine.

Interestingly, the expression of joy evolves over the course of the parsha, the first time it appears (Dev. 12:7) we are simply instructed to rejoice “you and your households.” The next three times it appears (Ibid v. 12, 18 and Ch. 14:26-27) in addition to the household, the verse instructs us to celebrate together with the Levite who was landless, and thus likely to be economically disadvantaged and in need of material support. The last three times it appears in our parsha (Ibid 16:11, 14-15), the list of those who are included in the celebration expands yet again to include not only the household (complete with children and servants) and the Levite, but also the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. These three groups, like the Levite, are likely to be economically disadvantaged, but they are also groups we might expect to not be experiencing joy at all—people who are experiencing a personal loss or exclusion of some kind.

Perhaps the Torah is teaching us that there are three levels of Simcha. At the lowest level, we share it with our intimates and loved ones. The next level is to include people experiencing material need (the Levite) as part of our celebration. At the highest level of simcha, we find a way to celebrate that can include even those who are experiencing the opposite of joy. Interestingly, if we take our parsha as our guide, though the emotion of joy can be experienced alone, true simcha is always shared with others.

We live in a world, where letza`areinu (to our sorrow), many people experience lack and want, and almost all of us at one time or another experience profound loss. We also, thank God, live in a world that is full of causes for celebration. Let us strive never to let our private simcha make us blind or unable to help those who are in need, whether of material support or spiritual support.

May we merit to celebrate many semachot (joyous occasions) together.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Garth Silberstein