Message From The Rabbi

Rabbi Spike Anderson

As you know, our Temple Emanu-El community continues to put tremendous effort into finding interfaith dialogue partners to promote understanding and create bridges.  Post October 7^th, this effort has become one of our top priorities, and today, over 200 TE congregants actively engage in this sacred work.

This past April, I was introduced to some of Atlanta’s Hindu lay-leaders at the AJC Interfaith Seder hosted at Temple Emanu-El.  They were kind enough to invite me to their Mandir (temple) in Lilburn, GA, and I have to tell you, I was totally blown away.

The grounds are stunning, but they pale in comparison to the actual physical building that is their sacred space.  It's huge, and all hand-carved out of marble that was imported to India from Italy, carved piece by piece by villages of artisans, and then shipped and put together by the congregation over the course of 2 years.

1.2 million volunteer man-hours went into this project.  Talk about buy-in!

But what impressed me most is that the entire base structure is made without any metal.  It is all engineered like a jigsaw puzzle.   Why no metal?  Because metal rusts, and stone will last for a thousand years.  When I spoke to my host, he was very specific that there are Hindu structures in India made the exact same way, still standing and in use, that were crafted more than a millennium ago.

The intent of this structure (in Lilburn, GA!) is to be standing 1,000 years from now.  Wow!

He asked if we have something similar in Judaism.  I had to think about it for a moment and answered him (in a typically Jewish fashion) with a ‘no…and yes.’   No, we Jews typically have not dedicated our time and energy to structures, monuments, or even temples.  For we are (and have always been) at some level, an itinerant people.  However, our civilization’s energy goes into building something else that lasts 1,000 years and beyond: we build ideas.  Ideas that are erected through our schools, with our holidays as the bricks and our rituals serving as mortar.  The great academies of old (Sura & Pumbedita) gave way to our yeshiva system, as well as the Jewish model for public education that predates America by eons.  We have always educated our boys (and girls) at extremely high levels (compared to other historical civilizations), and our value on education, along with the morals and ethics of Judaism, have allowed us to gather and progress wherever we might be in the world.

We can learn a lot from our Hindu neighboring community, on what it means to ‘belong’ to a religion, including the sacrifices that they gladly make to erect something beautiful and lasting… but I would not trade it for what we have in its stead.  Judaism itself is our temple in time, that can travel with us wherever we are… to cities and mountain tops…across oceans and continents…through our deeds, and into the depths of our deepest hearts.