There follows an edited version of Rabbi Botnick’s sermon at a special Shabbat service on 1 March to mark the end of our 85th anniversary year:

He started by referring to a meaningful message within the text of that week’s Parsha. The Torah reading had begun a nearly two-month-long narration looking at the description, building and accounting for the works that went into the Mishkan, the Tabernacle that wandered with the Israelites through the wilderness. David later brought it to Jerusalem and Solomon eventually built a more permanent structure, the Temple. The entire narrative had begun with God instructing Moses to tell the Israelites, ‘Make for me a holy space.’

We have all this description of these items, the materials that went into them, and all the various labours that were needed to make them. We spend literally weeks reading about this over and over again. Why? What’s so significant about the building of this Mishkan? Why do we spend more time focusing on this rather than on the story of the Exodus or on the story of giving the Torah and the Ten Commandments?

Rabbi Botnick spoke of Mordecai Kaplan, probably one of the most influential people in 20th-century Judaism, who had started out in the Orthodox world and founded the Young Israel movement of Orthodox synagogues in the USA. He then developed the concept of the Jewish Community Center, where a synagogue could be a gathering place for more than just prayer. It can be a place where you come together to have meals, learn, have wonderful events, and even work out – a place for Jew to live Jewishly with one another. He went on to found Reconstructionist Judaism, a relatively small denomination primarily in the United States, but with ideas that are pervasive throughout the Jewish world.

In his seminal text, ‘Judaism as a Civilization’, Kaplan tried to rid Judaism of its authoritative concept of a distant, abstract God and make it much more about people. He said that’s really what Judaism has always been about anyway – the people. Around the middle of his text, he shares his vision of this new idea of Judaism as a folk religion. He says that the significance of the traditional Jewish religion ‘does not derive from the cognitive element of its God idea but from the conduct in which that idea has found expression.’ This may not be the easiest concept to follow, but what he was saying, in essence, is that our faith is rooted not in the idea of God as such, but in the rites and customs that we’ve practised throughout history in acknowledgment of our God.

This is actually echoed by the continuation of that opening verse of the long Mishkan narrative: ‘Make for me a holy space, and I, God, will dwell amongst you.’ It’s by doing something, by actively building a space together, that God then becomes present in our lives. The holy space isn’t so much holy because it’s where God lives; it’s holy because God lives amongst the people. It’s the people working together, contributing their money, their precious items, their time, and their skills, as they did for the Mishkan, that make the space holy. God isn’t so much present in the Mishkan without us taking the steps to build that Mishkan and to practice our religious observances within it. It doesn’t matter at all what you think God is. What matters is that our individual ideas of God have led us to build a beautiful and open community together. God lives in this space because we make this space holy by coming together.

For 85 years, people, originally German Jewish refugees but now from all over the world and many different backgrounds, have come together to make this a truly holy space. This is a unique, special and precious community. Every synagogue talks about being a warm and inviting community, but most of them aren’t. We don’t say that anywhere in our literature or on the plaques outside, but we truly are. This is a special community, and it’s special because of the efforts of every single one of you, whether it is serving on the board as an honorary officer, sitting on a committee, helping run events, volunteering as a greeter or security, singing in the choir, playing the organ for us, or helping with the children. Each and every one of you has played a role in building this holy space, not just so you have a place to encounter the Divine, but so that others can benefit from that work as well. That is what makes this space so special. That is why we come together to congregate in this space – not so much because of God, but because of how we come together to experience something so much bigger than ourselves, which we might call the Divine. Whatever it is, it truly is special. It is a holy space, and it feels as if the Divine is dwelling amongst us because of each and every one of you.