I Give Myself Away
Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback and Cantor Emma Lutz
June 16, 2023 | 27 Sivan, 5783
Watch this week’s video and all Shabbat sermons HERE.
Following the retirement of a friend of the congregation, Bishop Kenneth Ulmer, Rabbi Yoshi couldn’t get enough of a song he heard during the bishop’s retirement service. As he took his sabbatical, Rabbi Yoshi had listened to one song so much that, walking the streets of Manhattan, he found that his music app had sent him into a gospel playlist. That’s where he heard a setting of William McDowell’s “I Give Myself Away,” a setting which was sung by Cantor Emma to set up Rabbi Yoshi’s Shabbat teaching on Friday night.
While there was nothing overtly Jewish about the song (it is, in fact, on a gospel album), the lyrics aren’t overtly Christian, either. Rabbi Yoshi thought, would it be like to see yourself as being useful to God, as the lyrics suggest? While that notion of God using people to enact some grand plan may be an uncomfortable one (and seemingly not a Jewish one), the core message resonates with Jewish tradition.
Jewish clergy, after all, are called klei kodesh, “instruments of holiness,” a term we use for Wise School students when they, too, lead their peers in prayer. We all, in fact, are tools to be used by God to make the world a better place.
While the V’ahavta (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) speaks of loving God, a few chapters later in Deuteronomy 10, we are commanded to love and to serve with all our hearts and souls, and all our might. Divine service is, in fact, an integral part of our tradition, as is the giving of oneself in service of something greater.
