Breaking Ground

Pericles said it for us: The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is a brave heart.

Two months after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, small acts take on a magnified historic context, and large acts are dwarfed by human peril. Freedom and courage seem exceedingly dear, and both are measurable in personal sacrifices and acts of public largesse.

And so it was impossible to take a spade of dirt from a garden-variety synagogue groundbreaking last Sunday and not think in grand, if not grandiose, terms about the role of our American Jewish community in dangerous times. Perhaps it always takes guts to act for the future — to believe in a future — acknowledging that a threat is always rising beyond the next hill.

The Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue site on the bluffs along Pacific Coast Highway might not precisely remind anyone of ancient Athens. Still, given the current backdrop of our besieged democracy, and the threatening finger that Osama bin Laden has pointed at the Jewish people as the symbol of the American spirit, it did seem as if at any moment Pericles — the Rudy Giuliani of the Peloponnesian War — would appear.

"The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it." He could have said that last weekend, just as he had in his famous funeral oration 2,500 years ago. And then he’d take his shovel and cut the dirt.

It’s so weird how history’s contours get played out.

In the synagogue’s beginning, 21 years ago, bravery was an insular thing. Emily Lodmer, a Malibu mother who was tired of shlepping down the highway to take her children to Hebrew school, stood in front of the Passover display at the local market and looked for people buying matzah whom she could ask to help her start a new synagogue. Malibu was known for its Keep Christ in Christmas essay contest, and its crèche near the civic center marking the December holiday season. The synagogue’s first families, led by Lodmer’s husband, Sheldon, met in living rooms and gardens, emerged to rent public space — largely for membership drives.

Some 10 years later, bravery was public confidence. Thanks to the extraordinary networking synergy of two well-connected members, Red Lachman and Hal Ross, the synagogue received a parcel of prime land — free and clear. Even unencumbered, the acreage seemed like a big risk, to leave the tiny space rented from the local elementary school and declare that Jews in a small seaside town without a decent deli really were here to stay.

The risk was as spiritual as it was financial, demanding self-disclosure: inevitably, an Agam menorah, sponsored by Chabad, sits right next to the crèche to mark the holiday season.

If you are lucky enough to serve on a synagogue board or building committee you have a rather refined sense of how freedom and bravery stand on a precipice wherever a Jewish community is built.

In Malibu, as elsewhere, the question of when and how to build a permanent structure has caused the usual amount of second-guessing and frightened thinking. There are always large numbers of people who think working out of a storefront is good enough; who think that the proposed building plan is too big and too ostentatious, and who worry that taking out a loan will put their children in hock.

As Manny Foster, an expert in the funding of synagogue building campaigns, told me, every synagogue blueprint starts out way too big. And every shul opens its doors way too small.

One day, the doubts are gone. On a rain-splattered Sunday morning, comes time to break ground.

It will take both freedom and courage to stay the course in the months ahead. Writing in The New York Times Sunday Magazine last week, Jonathan Rosen says that since Sept. 11, he has woken up to the anti-Semitism of his father, a Holocaust survivor. We are all waking up. Fear is coming up over the hill.

How much more important it suddenly has become for us to define our courage in terms of our freedom. Joining with our community — in prayer, in politics and in ecumenical partnership with other Americans of both secular and religious belief — has never been more crucial.

As Pericles praised his fellow Athenians, so too is there pride and obligation for us American Jews: We do not "neglect public affairs when attending to private business…. We consider a person who takes no interest in the [community] not as harmless, but as useless."

It’s time to cut the dirt.