Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins’ Farewell Celebration Speech – Sunday 21 June 2026

THANK YOU TO ALL YOU WONDERFUL PEOPLE HERE IN PERSON AND LIVESTREAM, TO RABBI NINIO FOR LEADING THIS EVENT, TO KATE SHKURKO WHO HAS GATHERED A WONDERFUL TEAM WHO HAVE GIVEN ME, US, THIS DAY, AND ESPECIALLY TO THE FOLLOWING: JENNIFER PRIESTLY FOR THE HOSPITALITY YOU WILL SOON EXPERIENCE PROVIDED BY NORA’S KITCHEN; OLIVER DAVIES, WHO HAS CREATED THIS ROOM AND ALL THE LIGHT AND SOUND AND SO MUCH MUCH MORE; AND OUR EXTRAORDINARY CREATIVE DIRECTOR MELBA PROESTOS, FOR HER VISION AND HER EXTRAORDINARY EYE TO DETAIL LOVINGLY EXPRESSED BY HER TEAM IN YOUR EXPERIENCE HERE TOGETHER TODAY. THANK YOU.

As I step down from active service after 37 years as rabbi of this Emanuel Synagogue, I want to express three things to you the best I can in these few minutes – my gratitude, my calling and my love.

I am grateful for so much, first and foremost for existing, and in this place in time. If my great-grandparents on both sides of my family had not left Eastern Europe during the pogroms of the late 1880s I most likely would not exist at all. I am grateful they came to Chicago, and raised my grandparents, who on both sides moved after marriage to Los Angeles, proud Jews committed to family and the “goldene medina” of their immigrant parents.

I was blessed to be born in a time of relative peace and prosperity, not touched by the ravages of war, personally never experiencing antisemitism, given the best public education, raised in a family steeped in humanitarian ethics, my parents teaching me and my two sisters to be as colour blind as possible, working against racism and inequality with the best of progressive motivations. As they aged, my mom and dad remained consistent in their commitment to those values, role models for me. But no one in my family had any spiritual inclination. I was the odd one out there, and so it was odd that I, who had never prayed in my life, was given the opportunity to give the benediction to our high school graduating class of just over 1,000 students in 1973; an excerpt from the blessing I offered gives insight into the values with which I was raised. I began, “Dear Lord” and in part continued: “We have different backgrounds, ways of life, and outlooks for the future. But if our future is to hold promise, it must be a future of harmony and peace. If each of us will make the qualities of compassion, understanding, honesty and selflessness part of our lives rather than mere rhetoric, our goal can be reached.”

I want to share with you my calling to become a rabbi, as my personal journey is deeply steeped in that family history. I, for as long as I can recall, sensed – well the best I can call it is – presence. Something intangible, a mystery, a life force that permeates all yet is somehow just beyond. For that I had no language, just openness and a curiosity to explore. Eventually, those explorations took me, after a bit of a meandering journey, to learn more about my Judaism when I was in my mid-20s. I was surprised to find how strongly the ancestral traditions spoke to me, providing me a foundation and framework for the ethics by which I had been raised. For example, the Torah’s insistence that each and every human is of equal worth and that there should be one standard of justice for citizen and stranger alike. And the prophetic call to “beat swords into ploughshares” or the rabbinic dictum that “the world rests on three things – on truth, on justice and on peace.”

But more so in Judaism I found an expression of my inner sense of existence and the manifestation of life itself, a language for addressing the divine and the sublime. The name of God which in Hebrew is pronounced as Adonai is spelled with four letters, YHVH, meaning all that was, all that is, all that will be. And Judaism’s central teaching known as the Shema declares that that is what is God –something infinite, beyond all time and space, yet mysteriously ever-present.

The verses of the Shema ask us to take a leap of faith – to act with love, with all our heart (in our emotional realm), with all our soul (our mindful realm) and all our might (in our doing realm of words and deeds). Since our faith teaches us that God is all and God is one, we are called to live as if this is so. That everything is deeply interconnected. This means to practice love toward all our fellow humans, and as well all other sentient creatures and this delicate earth that nurtures us. The tradition teaches that each time we recite the Shema, we take upon ourselves “the yoke of the kingdom of God”. Not that Judaism actually believes that God is a King, rather that the metaphor expresses the vast, majestic mystery of creation, one that provides a sense of awe for the starry heavens above us and a calling to the moral law within. Poetry, prayer and song all help open our hearts to become, as Moses says, “hearts of wisdom.” And so, my yearning turned to learning, learning to be a rabbi and a spiritual community leader.

I am grateful that 37 years ago Heinz Gerstl, the synagogue’s president, and Rabbi Brian Fox came to my seminary, interviewed me and invited me here for my first – and it turns out my final – pulpit. I arrived with my progressive values and my first wife Bobette, who accompanied me on this journey and bequeathed me a beautiful family. I have always considered progressive Judaism not to be a separatist form of Judaism, but rather a lens by which some Jews choose to read and interpret the ancestral teachings of Judaism. I said in part at my induction speech in August 1989: “We no longer wish to ask difficult questions that may have painful or ambiguous answers. In an age of doubt, people crave certainty – but certainty cannot tolerate dissent or difference of opinion – certainty must be imposed on others.” I continued:

“The strength of progressive Judaism has been its openness to question more than an insistence on certainty in addition to its response to the prophetic voice, the challenge to heal and transform the world – not just our little corner of the Jewish world, but the entire world under the sovereignty of God. The synagogue must be the community centre for Talmud Torah – the teaching of the moral conscience found in our sources that leads to the development and fulfilment of a progressive program. …We must have the courage to risk, to reach out to the other – both our fellow Jew and our fellow human being.”

I am grateful to you, my fellow human beings, this embracing and welcoming congregation, in that you allowed me to pursue that path over the years. We asked difficult questions, welcomed women into engagement and leadership, extended our social justice work, walking with First Nations people, supporting refugees, indigent and the vulnerable. We championed marriage equality, worked in multicultural communities and basically created more open doors for people to walk through to express their religious orientation, from the traditional to the creative.

I am grateful for the friends I have met of the First Nations and other faiths and cultures, and look forward to deepening those relationships. I am grateful for those who mentored me and looked after my well-being. I am grateful to the lay leaders of this congregation with whom I have worked, the dozens of beautiful people in the office who have supported me, and my inspirational and ever-patient and supportive colleagues who have enabled all this to unfold. I am grateful for my family in Los Angeles who pull me there like a magnet and for my beautiful loving companion Caz – a true partner who nurtures, guides and challenges me – and for our family that anchors me here.

I have been very blessed. Blessed with health and home and education. Blessed with peace, freedom, security and dignity. Blessed with family, blessed with love. Blessed with and by each of you. For all this I am deeply grateful. But now is the time for me to share these blessings more widely in this beautiful country and watch how my fabulous colleague of 28 years, my guide and counsel, Rabbi Ninio with her team work with her first president Ian Rathmell to continue to nurture this extraordinary Emanuel Synagogue and every human being who contributes to this spiritual community. In the footsteps of my parents, as I have aged, I have maintained my values and I pray as Emanuel Synagogue ages soon into its second century, it will continue to embrace the values of diversity, equality and inclusion we have come to cherish.

I close with one of my favourite passages from Scripture which finds its way into our daily prayers – “Barukh Kavod Adonai Mimkomo”. Blessed is the presence of God in its place. Its place is in each and every one of you who have made this journey all so worthwhile, all so meaningful and all so filled with faith and love.

And so, I share this song of love and faith with you; by written by Nick Cave, performed by Ilan Kidron on vocals and guitar, Simon Tedeschi AM on piano and Jonathan Zwarts. Such is my love for you.

THERE IS A KINGDOM, BY NICK CAVE:

Just like a bird that sings up the sun
In a dawn so very dark
Such is my faith for you
Such is my faith
And all the world’s darkness can’t swallow up
A single spark
Such is my love for you
Such is my love

There is a kingdom
There is a king
And he lives without
And he lives within

There is a kingdom
There is a king
And he lives without
And he lives within

The starry heavens above me
The moral law within
So the world appears
So the world appears
This day so sweet
It will never come again
So the world appears
Through this mist of tears

There is a kingdom
There is a king
And he lives without
And he lives within

There is a kingdom
There is a king
And he lives without
And he lives within

The starry heavens above me
The moral law within
So the world appears
Through this mist of tears

There is a kingdom
There is a king
And he lives without
And he lives within

There is a kingdom
There is a king
There is a king
And he is everything