Park Avenue Synagogue

Thank you for listening to Park Avenue Podcasts, a place to be to catch the music, sermons, and select programs of Park Avenue Synagogue.

If you like what you are hearing or want to learn more about the community, please check out our website at www.pasyn.org. See you in Shul!

Shabbat Shalom.

So 60 years ago, on the morning of April 18th, 1966, a fire broke out at the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary at 122nd Street and Broadway.

You are listening to Park Avenue Podcast, and this is Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove.

While it's always better to hear it live, this is a place to be to catch the music, sermons, and select programs of Park Avenue Synagogue.

If you like what you are hearing or want to learn more about the community, please check out our website at www.pasyn.org.

Enjoy our latest installment.

You want to fight anti-Semitism, strengthen democracy, see leadership in office that reflects your principles and politics? Then stop pointing out what everyone else is doing wrong and start taking responsibility for what is yours to do.

You want a more vibrant Jewish future here at Park Avenue Synagogue on campus or in whatever corner you call home? Then be an example.

Learn, lead, show up, invite people to your Shabbat table.

What force other than your well-rehearsed excuses is stopping you? You want Judaism to speak more forcefully to questions of justice, climate change, and tikkun olam? Then make it speak through your choices, your commitments, your deeds.

It suggests something gentler, and I think more honest, that the altar and the vineyard can come first, that hope can be an action taken before it is fully a feeling, and that reinforcing a foundation someone else helped lay is itself a form of love that continues.

This October, I mark 30 years since I stood under a chuppah at Park Avenue Synagogue with my beloved, three years since I stood beside her grave, and nearly two years since beginning this new chapter at JTS, an institution she knew and whose values she lived every day.

Like Noah, I don't have a tidy word for it all, but I know what I am doing next.

I'm planting.

Today, I'd love to tell you about a newer initiative, an interfaith park cleanup.

Brick will be joining our neighbors from Park Avenue Synagogue, Saint Ignatius Loyola, and other houses of worship for a fall cleanup at the park.

Last year, my husband Parker and I joined the very first one, and we had the time of our lives.

Side by side with people from different faith communities, we raked leaves, cleared walkways, and left Carl Schurz Park looking beautiful.

I was not entirely sure what to expect.

In retrospect, and I hope the experience becomes a Park Avenue Synagogue teen tradition, I understand more clearly what the journey was asking of us.

We face the darkest chapter of our people's history, fulfilling the command never to forget, and committed ourselves to another obligation, to choose life.

The scar is part of us.

Shabbat shalom.

Shana tovah.

With the sanctuary cornerstone set in May of 1926 and the opening dedication in March of 1927, this year marks 100 years of Park Avenue Synagogue's sanctuary, an anniversary significant not only for what was said at the dedication, but also, in hindsight, what was absent.

Built in the Moorish tradition with Gothic touches evocative of the great synagogues of Europe, hailed in the press as artistic and brilliantly ornate, our sanctuary was constructed for the then astronomical sum of $1 million.

You are listening to Park Avenue Podcasts, and this is Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove.

While it's always better to hear it live, this is a place to be to catch the music, sermons, and select programs of Park Avenue Synagogue.

If you like what you are hearing or want to learn more about the community, please check out our website at www.pasyn.org.

Enjoy our latest installment.

And let us say, amen.

Amen.

Thank you for listening to Park Avenue Podcast, a place to be to catch the music, sermons, and select programs of Park Avenue Synagogue.

If you like what you are hearing or want to learn more about the community, please check out our website at www.pasyn.org. See you in Shul!

Um, there was this great quote from Rabbi Cosgrove.

He's the rabbi at Park Avenue Synagogue, which I think is a fairly leftish synagogue.

Um, he said, "Grateful as I am for the steps outlined, to construct a plan to address New York Jewish insecurity without addressing anti-Zionism is like writing a report on lung cancer without mentioning smoking."

Yeah.