This May Be the Last Time

When I first started going to Shabbat services, I liked the sermons. I liked the contemporary and progressive Jewish music. And I loved the community. I have since told people that if this had been a badminton club, I probably would have learned to play badminton.

I have visited enough churches in my day to know the difference between people who really want to welcome you, people who are doing it because their pastor told them to as part of a church growth strategy, and congregations where members believe welcoming visitors is the ushers’ job and not theirs.

I did not know anyone when I began attending. Yet people invited me to sit with them. More than once, someone noticed that I was sitting alone during the service and came up to me afterward. They said that the next time I came, I was welcome to sit with them and their family.

There were smaller gestures, too. Someone shaking my hand in a way that communicated more than hello. Catching someone’s eye across the sanctuary and receiving a smile of recognition. A nod. An acknowledgment. The simple affirmation that someone was glad to see me.

One evening, I arrived early for Shabbat. Not knowing where people sat—and worried that I might accidentally take someone’s seat—I chose a place in the back row against the wall.

While I waited for the service to begin, I was looking at my phone, probably reading messages or answering them. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman walking straight toward me.

I knew I was in trouble.

Here I was, working on the Sabbath, in the Temple of all places. I braced myself for what was coming.

She reached me and, to my surprise, instead of correcting me, invited me to come sit with her and her friends.

People would sometimes ask whether I was a member. Not because they were trying to hint that I didn’t belong, but almost as though I were a member and they were embarrassed or apologetic that they didn’t know me. Usually they would explain that they did not attend regularly, or that the congregation had grown so large that it had become difficult to know everyone.

That made me wonder. Being Black, I usually did not look like anyone else in the room. The default assumption could easily have been that I was not a member. But it happened often enough that I began to think: perhaps I could be a member.

Eventually, I became one.

There is a difference between being welcomed into a place and discovering that you belong there. The first can happen in an evening. The second happens slowly.

During the service, I continually look for friends and familiar faces. If they happen to see me, they smile, nod, or in some other way let me know that they see me too. Perhaps that is why, when we come to the part of the service where we can pray from the siddur or offer the prayers of our own hearts, my prayer so often becomes a prayer of thanksgiving for the people I have just been looking for.

I thank God for this community.

There are many other reasons to thank God for the TBE community. This is just one.

There are those who are critical of Jews who come to Temple only during the High Holidays. But I think differently. I am just glad you made it back.

There is something about the High Holidays themselves that makes return seem especially appropriate. Again and again, the biblical story is one of God calling people to return and celebrating when they do. Jewish history also remembers generations when people lived far from Jerusalem and could not simply walk into the Temple every week. For many, going up to Jerusalem was an extraordinary pilgrimage rather than an ordinary weekly experience. What mattered was that they came.

So when someone appears at Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur whom I have not seen for months, I am glad to see them. I like to see that you are still alive and doing well. In an age of antisemitism and hatred, anything could have happened.

And then comes Unetaneh Tokef:

Who will live and who will die;
who will reach the fullness of their days and who will not.

I am glad you made it back.

Those words remind me of a song we sing in the Black church around Communion:

This may be the last time we sing together.
This may be the last time.
I don’t know.

The song repeats the thought, sometimes changing the verb. This may be the last time we pray together, worship together, or get together.

You and I are here together right now, but that might not be true the next time.

I have come to hear those words as words of gratitude. This gathering is not guaranteed. This group of people will never exist in precisely this form again. Someone may move. Someone may become ill. Someone may die. Circumstances will change.

This may be the last time. I don’t know.

Perhaps I feel this so strongly because of where I come from. “This May Be the Last Time” is a Black song, born from a people who had good reason to know that gatherings could not be taken for granted. Black families knew separation. Black churches knew funerals. Black communities knew what it meant for someone who had been present one Sunday simply not to be there the next.

But the longer I have spent within Jewish community, the more the song has begun to sound Jewish to me as well.

Jewish history contains too many places where people gathered for prayer without knowing how many more gatherings they would be permitted. Communities flourished and disappeared. Families were expelled. Synagogues were destroyed. People said goodbye without knowing it was goodbye. Across centuries and continents, there really were occasions when Jews gathered to pray and sing together for the last time. They did not know.

That history does not make Shabbat a sorrowful occasion for me. It does the opposite. It makes the community more precious.

When I walk into the sanctuary now and recognize a face across the room, I am grateful. When somebody smiles, I am grateful. When someone who rarely attends appears for the High Holidays, I am grateful. When I hear voices around me singing prayers that Jews have sung for generations, I am grateful.

And during the prayers of the heart, I find myself returning again to the simplest prayer I know:

Thank you, God, for these people.

Thank you that we are here.

Thank you that we are together.

The Black church taught me something that Jewish history has taught me to hear even more deeply:

This may be the last time we sing together.

This may be the last time.

I don’t know.

So while we are together, give thanks.