“Where do you belong? Where do you belong?” That song has been stuck in my head for lo these many months. The musical Mean Girls follows Cady, a teenager raised in Africa by zoologist parents, as she enters public high school in Illinois and discovers that the social ecosystem is surprisingly similar to the savannah, complete with predators and prey.
The song comes in Act One, as Cady is led on her first day of school through that most terrifying of watering holes: the high school cafeteria. As her two new friends pass by the tables pointing out the athletes and the mathletes, the dance team and the junkies, they warn her to choose her lunch table very carefully:
Where do you belong? Where do you belong?
Where do you belong? Where do you belong?
You’ll be judged on sight and made to fit.
So find a clique and stick with it.
Say, where do you belong?
Where do you belong?
This may seem like a question about high school, but it’s not. It’s one of the deepest questions we human beings ever ask.
We ask it when we’re children, hoping someone will pick us for their team in gym class. We ask it as adolescents, when we want more than anything to be added to the group chat or to the party. We ask it as adults, when we move to a new town and don’t yet know our neighbors or which golf club to join. We keep asking it: as our children grow up and suddenly the friendships that revolved around carpools and soccer games begin to dissolve. Where do we belong, we wonder, when we retire? When we lose a spouse, a sibling, the friends who knew you when you were young?
Belonging is something we keep searching for, over and over and over again, our whole lives. It isn’t a one-and-done thing. The word itself denotes something deeply human: we yearn to belong, we be longing, we long to belong a long, long time. Over and over and over again.
Where do I belong?
I have been thinking a lot about that question.
It started a few years ago. A new member showed up in my office. Her family had just joined Oheb. The kids were at Zeman, Oheb’s religious school, and they were really trying to make friends here. But somehow, it wasn’t happening. They came to First Friday, Oheb’s early dinner and Kabbalat Shabbat for families, once or twice—and sat at their own table. “It’s great that so many people have these longstanding relationships here,” she said. “I want that, too. But it seems like everyone else has their friends already.”
Fast forward to a few months ago. A longtime member showed up in my office. Someone who’s been here for decades. He told me that he looks around at, say, Simchat Torah or First Friday and feels like he doesn’t know half the room. “It’s great that so many new families have joined these past few years,” he said, “but now—well, it seems like everyone else has friends and I just feel left out.”
How is it, I’ve been wondering, that these two people could be looking at each other and both feeling like they are the ones left out of some inner circle?
And there is another reason the question has been on my mind. I think we are especially thirsty for belonging right now because so many of our old answers to the question “Where do I belong?” are shifting.
For many American Jews, this has been a profoundly disorienting few years. We thought we understood the deal. We were Jews and Americans. Proudly both. Many of us were politically progressive or liberal or card-carrying Democratic voters. Or maybe we voted Republican, but either way, we understood that we belonged, because we shared an approach to certain values: concern for the vulnerable, opposition to bigotry, commitment to pluralism, women’s rights, civil rights, human dignity.
But then October 7 happened. And in the years since, some of us have found ourselves standing in the cafeteria wondering where to sit.
People with whom we thought we shared a moral language suddenly seemed to be speaking in tongues we didn’t recognize. Groups we had marched with were no longer interested in marching with us. People who knew exactly what to say when another minority was threatened were suddenly silent when Jews—the world’s tiniest religious minority of all!—were under attack.
Harder yet is what’s going on within the Jewish community itself. Sometimes we look at other Jews and wonder how we belong to the same tribe. Because we don’t agree about Israel, or Gaza, or Iran. Or the Israeli government. Or the American government. Or how to handle antisemitism. Or what safety requires. Or what justice demands.
Even within the Jewish community, the question nags at us: Where do you belong?
So this is not just a synagogue problem, or, God forbid, an Oheb problem. It is a Jewish problem. And it is a Jewish problem because it is a human problem.
Long gone are the days when we lived on the same block as our cousins, in a three-generation house with our grandparents. Telephones became texts became posts on social media sent to entire groups at once. The average American moves 11 times in their life and has 13 jobs over the course of a career. And that is all before we had to grapple with AI, which pushes us to reconsider our jobs, our brains, our relationships, and what it means to be human.
No wonder we wonder where we belong.
Abraham Maslow famously put belonging right there in his hierarchy of human needs. First come our most basic physical needs, then our need for safety. But right there up next: the need for love and belonging. Before esteem, before achievement, before self-actualization, we need friendship, intimacy, family, connection.
We need a sense of belonging.
So how do we get it?
Rabbi Julia Appel, a faculty member at Clal, teaches that belonging is built in stages: Named, Noticed, Known. We need people to know our names. We need people to notice us. Eventually, we need to be known beyond the small talk.
But it was her fourth stage that stopped me.
Needed.
Needed!
Maybe we have it all backwards. Because we tend to imagine belonging as something other people do for us. Will they invite me? Will they come over and talk to me? Will anyone save me a seat? Will somebody notice if I’m not there? Will someone want me?
But what if the deepest sense of belonging doesn’t come from somebody making room for me? What if it comes when I make room for you? What if instead of spending our lives asking: Where do I belong? we began asking: Who will belong because I was here?
There is an ancient Jewish teaching I have been thinking about differently because of this. Pirkei Avot says: 
— k’neh l’cha chaver. Acquire yourself a friend.
What a strange verb. Not find a friend. Not wait until somebody notices you. Not keep checking your phone and wondering why nobody invited you. Acquire yourself a friend. Invest. Risk. Show up. Do something.
You want to belong? Learn somebody’s name. And then remember it the second time—which is terribly hard and I’m terrible at it, but I really, really try.
Notice who isn’t there. Make the call. See somebody standing alone? Walk over. There’s an empty chair next to you? Move over. Somebody new walks into the room? Don’t wait for the Membership Committee. You are the Membership Committee. Say: Sit here. Say: Come with me. Say: I was hoping I’d see you. Say: I need your help.
Because this is the other half of it. Don’t just make yourself useful. Let yourself need somebody. Ask for the ride. Text for the recipe. Ask the teenager to show you how to do the thing on your phone. Ask somebody what they think. Ask somebody for help.
Because – get this – research shows that we consistently underestimate how happy it makes other people to help us.
Jennifer Wallace discusses this in her book Mattering. When we refuse to ask for help because we’re afraid of being a burden, she says, we may actually be depriving someone else of an opportunity to feel useful, valued, connected. Letting another person help us can reinforce their sense that they matter.
Think about that.
You need a ride—and you think you are imposing. You ask for the ride—and the person driving gets to know: I matter to you.
Wallace tells the story of Daniel, who every Tuesday and Friday calls his dad. He asks how to fix the leaky faucet. How to handle something difficult at work. How to cook a steak. Daniel could Google all of it. That’s not the point. His father is retired. He has struggled to find his place in the world. And Daniel can hear it: When he asks the question, when his father has something to teach him, when his son needs what he knows, the energy comes back into his father’s voice. Because he is needed. He matters. He belongs.
The fact that we need each other is not a weakness. It is a gift.
And maybe that is what the rabbis meant when they taught: 
— Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. All Israel are arevim for one another.
We usually translate it, “All Jews are responsible for one another.” But an arev is a guarantor. Your obligation becomes my obligation. Your trouble becomes, in some small way, my trouble. Your need makes a claim on me. And mine makes a claim on you.
We are bound up with one another.
That is belonging. Not everybody knows my name. Not everybody agrees with me. Not everybody invited me to dinner. But I need these people. And these people need me.
That is the gift I want us to give one another in 5787.
Over the past several years, nearly one hundred new families have become part of this congregation. That is extraordinary. But membership is not belonging. Membership can be entered in a database. Membership can be quantified in dues and dollars and headcounts.
Belonging can’t. You can pay dues and not belong. You can come twice a year and belong profoundly. You can have been here for thirty years and suddenly feel like the place is changing around you. You can have joined three months ago and already know: These are my people.
So the question isn’t how many people belong to Oheb Shalom. The question is: How many people belong more deeply in this world because you are here?
Because you noticed them. Because you called. Because you moved over. Because you asked them to help. Because you gave them something to do. Because you looked at another human being and said, in one way or another: I need you.
Do you know what power you have?
You can do that. You.
You can walk into a room and change somebody’s experience of that room. You can see the person nobody else seems to see. You can call the person who has quietly stopped showing up. You can sit next to the person who came alone. You can ask the retired person what they know. You can ask the teenager for help. You can ask the new person to bring something. You can ask the person who has been here for fifty years to bring something.
You can look at somebody who has begun to wonder whether they matter and give them the answer: Yes. Yes, you matter. Yes, I noticed you. Yes, there is something here that only you can give. Yes, this place is different because you are part of it. Yes, you belong.
That is why this belongs on Rosh Hashanah. Because we come here every year asking, How can I be better? How can I live differently? How can I change the world?
And sometimes changing the world sounds so enormous. This isn’t enormous. Notice one person. Make one call. Move over one seat. Ask for one favor. Let one human being know that their presence makes a difference in your life. And you have changed their world. And if enough of us change one another’s worlds— we change the world.
So yes, this is about Oheb. But it is not just about Oheb. Take it to work. Take it to your block. Take it to school. Take it to the dinner table. Take it to the person in your family who has begun to wonder whether anybody still needs them. Take it to the person who just moved here. Take it to the person who lost the person they always sat beside. Take it to the person whose politics make you crazy. Take it to the person standing at the edge of the room pretending to look at their phone because they don’t know whom to talk to.
Go get them. Bring them in. Give them something to give. And then—this matters—let them give it to you.
Because belonging is not something some magical community bestows upon us once we’ve been here long enough or attended enough programs or finally gotten invited to the right dinner.
We make belonging. We make it for one another. And every time you help another person know that they matter, every time you help another person feel needed, every time you help another person belong— something happens to you, too.
You belong more.
So at the beginning of this sermon, I stood up here alone and sang a question: Where do you belong? But I don’t want to end this sermon alone. Because I think I finally know the answer. The answer isn’t: I belong. The answer is: We belong.
And the most important word in that sentence may not be belong. It is we.
We—who have been here forever and who just got here. We—who agree and disagree. We—who are Jewish and other things, too. We—who sometimes feel utterly at home and who sometimes walk into a room and think: Where is my table? We—who still yearn for the home we left three houses ago and who cannot imagine living anyplace but here. We—who help. We—who need help. We—who make the call. We—who answer the call. We—who move over. We—who say: Sit here. I see you. I need you. You matter. You belong.
That is community. That is belonging. Not something somebody gives us. Something we give each other.
So stand up, if you’re able. Look around this room. Really look. These are your people. And somewhere in this room is somebody who needs what you have to give. And somewhere in this room is somebody who has something you need. Don’t leave it here today. Find them. Need them. Let them need you. Help them belong. And let them help you belong.
At the beginning I sang alone. I don’t want to end that way. Because this year, 5787, I don’t want us just to sing the words. I want us to live them.
Not: I belong. We belong.
L’shanah tovah tikateivu v’tichateimu.
May this year be sweet.
May we notice one another.
May we need one another.
May we make room for one another.
And may we know, deep in our kishkes:
We belong together.
Click here to watch Rabbi Treu’s full sermon on Rosh Hashanah Day 1.