Relevant to Whom?
The highest praise a rabbi hears is that her or his sermons and classes are always relevant, by which the generous congregant means that the topics always pertain to the lives of the people in the synagogue and are not arcane or archaic in content. But another way to translate that praise is to hear it as saying that the rabbi didn’t stretch the congregant’s sense of what pertains to modern living. If “relevant” means, “something the congregant already has an interest in,” then a rabbi who restricts teaching to those areas simply prevents the congregant from a broader interest i