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It’s always interesting to see what various synagogues do years like this one, when Shabbat and Halloween fall in such close proximity.  We can be certain that some synagogues are doing nothing, which is understandable.  The two days could not be more different.  Shabbat is unabashedly Jewish while Halloween, with its probable pagan roots, has become a secular holiday celebrated around the world.  Shabbat is a doorway through which we might experience rest and peace.  Halloween, though it also involves doors – knocking on them most specifically – relies on scares and surprises.  Both use light to pierce the darkness, so maybe there are some similarities after all!

At any rate, some rabbis capitalize on the confluence of the two by telling their congregants a Jewish tale of the supernatural or a version of “The Golem of Prague” at services.  Still other synagogues include Halloween treats in their Oneg Shabbat.  I would apologize for our not being among them, but tonight following our service for Breast Cancer Awareness, let’s just say the Oneg won’t disappoint!

All this effort and creativity is wonderful.  That said, we just may have missed the possibility that the scariest element of all this Shabbat doesn’t lie outside Torah.  It lies within it.

In the opening verses of Lech Lecha, Abram as he is then known receives the Divine call to get up and go forth to a land where he has never been and knows nothing about.  God promises to make a great nation of him and his descendants, and his legacy one of great blessing.  But the fact remains that in this moment, he has no idea what this new life of his will be like, or what is going to happen next.  Few things are more frightening than that.  For any one of us it’s these shifts – whether they are stark and dramatic, or subtle and less visible… years in the making or thrust in our paths without warning…positive and exciting or the last thing we ever wanted… these contemporary Lech Lecha moments have the power to scare us more than any fright mask or ghoulish costume ever could.  They happen every day, not just one day out of the year.  And they are real.

Abraham’s ability to heed God’s call and to go forth is remembered as one of his single greatest acts.  Within it lies the beginning of our peoplehood.  He remains for us a model of bravery and moxie.  He reminds us too that as frightening as the unknown is, there is also potential for blessing there.  Those moments of being called to become more than we have been are also real.

A member of a past congregation I served put it this way in the first D’var Torah she ever gave – a Lech Lecha experience for her:

“Be brave in small ways.  Take chances.  Make mistakes.  We who are made in God’s image are gloriously inventive, and that’s what makes us marvelous.  It’s amazing how we can enlarge our world, see what we’ve never seen, experience ourselves more deeply when we bravely ‘go forth.’  As John Shedd once said, “Ships are safe inside the harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.”

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Gutterman