"You can't preach to a community you don't know"

       “You can’t preach to a community you don’t know.”  This was said by a preacher who was helping install a rabbi at our temple.  He knew our new rabbi well.  He was the senior rabbi at the temple our new rabbi had just served at for six years.
 
       Preacher went on that the door must always be kept ajar and she, our new rabbi, already knew this; he’d observed her for those years.

       What is it the community supplies that allows a teacher to teach, a preacher to preach?  Doesn’t the teacher know something more than the community, and therefore they need him or her?  That would seem to be so; yet the teacher, knowing something more, still must know what's not known at the beginning of preaching:  the community itself.

(Concluded tomorrow)