2022 Response to Berry Street Essay: The Reverend Sam Teitel

Berry Street Essay Response #3
Rev. Sam Teitel, Minister
Church of the River
Memphis, TN

Hello my friends, my name is Rev. Sam Teitel, and I am the minister serving The Church of the River, our Unitarian Universalist congregation in the beautiful city of Memphis, Tennessee. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be here today as a respondent to this lecture and I am grateful to my beloved friend and colleague, the Rev. Mykal Slack, for the invitation. So, inspired by Rev. Mykal’s words about slowing down to honor where we have come from, I will begin by saying that I am thinking now of my mother, The Rev. Mary Harrington, who was our colleague in Unitarian Universalist ministry, and who brought me to my first Berry Street Essay twenty-two years ago. And I am thinking of my father, Dr. Marty Teitel, who taught me to understand and celebrate the thousands of generations of Jewish people from whom I am descended on his side and who inspired the imagery in my words here today.

When I was reading Rev. Mykal’s prophetic words about the challenges being faced by the Unitarian Universalist community, I was reminded of a passage from the Talmud – Bava Batra 3B, if you’re playing along at home. And in this Talmudic passage, the rabbis are discussing: Under what circumstances can you demolish a temple? Generally speaking, the rule is that you cannot tear down a temple unless a new temple has already been built to replace it. But there is an exception to this rule, which is that if the current temple has cracks in its walls, then it must be torn down immediately. If the sacred space, the sacred structure that a community has built to love and shelter their deepest, most spiritual selves, if that structure has holes in the walls that are letting in rain and snow and heat so that all members of the community are not equally protected by the existing structure, then this structure is not able to do its sacred work and it cannot be allowed to continue to stand.

Something that Rev. Mykal made clear and that many leaders in our movement have been expressing since the very beginning of our movement, is that many of the temples that we have built, many of the norms and models that we have normalized as Unitarian Universalists, are cracked and have always been cracked. They are cracked with white supremacy culture. They are cracked with heteronormativity. They are cracked with patriarchy and ableism and antisemitism and Islamophobia and WITH many, MANY other forms of oppression. And that means they need to be taken down and rebuilt.

My theory about why the Talmud says that the rule about when to demolish a temple does not apply in the case of a temple with cracked walls is because otherwise, the new temple would never get built. Because the people who weren’t affected by the cracks, the people who were still perfectly comfortable in the temple as it was, would say, This is fine, there’s no need to tear it down. They would be like the man who Rev. Mykal described who was unwilling to embrace the eight principle because of his own racist and ignorant preconceived notions. Or maybe they would say, OK, you go build something new and then when you’ve done all the work, then maybe we’ll consider leaving this structure that has allowed harm to befall you. This is why it is the work of all of us, including people like me, who are protected by structures built on white supremacy and heteronormativity and many other forms of oppression. It is all of our responsibility to reimagine what the structures of our faith movement should look like. I’m going to just reiterate Rev Mykal’s words, because we cannot possibly hear them enough times. Rev. Mykal writes, It is a problem that we, on purpose or inadvertently, suggest that the only UUism people can know is one that can be found in congregations where harm is being done to people on the margins. All of us need to take those words to heart.

Now I want to talk just a little bit, in the remainder of my time with you, about the story of Rav Ashi. The Talmud tells a story about a rabbi named Rav Ashi, who saw that his temple had cracks in its walls, and he immediately tore the Temple down. But then Rav Ashi did an amazing thing. He took his bed out of his house and moved it to the site where the new Temple was being built. Now, at first glance this seems like yet another story about a religious leader over functioning and taking the entire burden of breaking down and rebuilding an oppressive structure all on themself. And Rav Ashi did arrange it So that he would not be able to rest comfortably until the new structure had been built. But what he also did, is he drew the community’s attention to his own need to restore himself. He didn’t just stay up all night every night building the new temple, he slept. He slept in his bed in front of everybody. He communicated to everyone around him that his own restoration was sacred and non-negotiable and that their work on building the new sacred structure must continue even when he could not be present. As religious leaders, we must immerse ourselves in the work of dismantling and rebuilding oppressive structures, but we also must make it very clear that this work is not only ours to do. It is the work of every Unitarian Universalist to do their part in constructing a Unitarian Universalism that can shelter and comfort and accept every single seeker that is drawn to our faith.