Rabbi Yair D. Robinson
Va’etchanan/9 Av 2026
7/24/26
If you’ve spent enough time around me you will have been bored, possibly to tears, over my laments over social media and the internet, but every now and again it reveals something useful and even wonderful. This week I read about a fascinating art exhibit taking place in Venice Italy. It involves an inflatable synagogue, based on the wooden synagogues of Easter Europe, primarily, floating above the Venice Lagoon. The artist, Anna Kamyshan, grew up and lived in Ukraine until the war, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, only learned of her Jewish heritage at age 11. The exhibit, called “Nabatele”, was originally supposed to be a video exhibition for the Venice Biennale. It is a bold statement for two reasons. First, for centuries Jews in Venice were not allowed to have synagogues of their own, but had to hide their worship in repurposed buildings: the back of a shop or warehouse, or in a living room in a home. Now, having an obvious synagogue building, Jewish star and all, floating above Venice is to make a profound statement of pride. And yet, the synagogue in question is not rooted in any space, it floats, impermanent, above the city, with no land of its own.
It’s worth looking at online, and there’s a chance that once the exhibit closes, it will come to North America. And this Shabbat, only a day after the observance of Tisha B’Av, the 9th of Av commemorating the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, and the end of Jewish sovereignty for nearly 2000 years, I can’t help but think about what this exhibit is saying and what it means to be Jewish in this moment. Of course, we as Jews have had our coping mechanism for this balloon-like state of being: sometimes we have done all we could to root ourselves in our new land, as we’ve done perhaps more successfully than anywhere else here in America, and sometimes we have embraced our sense of floating, building permanent structures of the soul rather than bricks-and-mortar, ‘palaces in time’ as Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote. And, in the nearly 80 years since the State of Israel came into being, we have, as a people, taken comfort from the idea that we at least belong somewhere.
At least, we thought so. The last three years have taken their toll on us as a people, haven’t they? It is perhaps telling that it is the granddaughter of holocaust survivors who herself had to escape warfare is the one who was able to capture our emotionally unsettled state at this time. It serves as a reminder to the non-Jewish world that we exist and have a right to exist, in peace, and a reminder to us that we have work to do: to reaffirm our relationships with our community, to assert our right to safety and presence; that we are not a metaphor, but people. And, it raises important questions about this moment. The temptation is to rehash various political arguments about our own elected officials, about the elections in Israel and the policies of its current government, and the like. And there is a time and a place for that very important discussion. Today, however, I would propose a different possibility: that we must hold a middle place between the urge to be fully grounded in space, and to detach fully and float off into our palaces in time. The holidays, our sacred texts, our worship and music cannot merely be aesthetic choices that give us a feeling of Yiddishkeit, but expect nothing of us in terms of the social weal and our work in the world. Likewise, our activism, our commitment to improving the world must be rooted in a sense that we are working lashem shamayim, for the sake of heaven, and that we act l’taken olam b’malchut Shaddai; to repair the world yes, but in order to bring about God’s sovereignty over it.
This past week our social action chair, Mallory Deardorff-Dawson and I travelled down to Washington DC to meet with Representative McBride and introduce her to our Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. Likewise, we took meetings with the staffs of Senators Coons and Blunt Rochester. Not to promote some abstract idea of how we should achieve our country, but to assert and affirm our Jewish values, including our right to existential safety, mooring the message of our sacred text to the realities of today. It was an opportunity for relationship-building, and one that I believe was successful. At least I hope so. And it is a reminder that, when the news of the world makes us feel ever more untethered, that there is action we can take, and when we feel lost in details of our work and no longer have a sense of vision, our Torah can shake us out of our doldrums. There are 48 days to Rosh Hashanah. May we use these days to reconnect, reaffirm, and recommit to the Torah and the action it calls us to take on. Amen.