Dear Kol Rinah Family,
I hope everyone is staying warm and healthy as this week of wacky weather comes to a close.
Tonight we will come together for our First Fridays for Families. We’ll welcome Shabbat at 6:00 pm downstairs in the Mirowitz Auditorium with a lot of ruach, energetic singing, and special treats for our youngest members, led by Rabbi Arnow, Karen Kern and me. Candle lighting is at 5:12 pm.
Tomorrow morning, services will begin at 9:00 am in the lower auditorium. I’ll be leading Torah Talk at 10:10am in the Social Hall upstairs. Rabbi Arnow and I will also be doing a special teaching during services on the most important and deeply held Jewish traditions of prayer, and where we, as individuals and as a community, fit into that tradition.
Mincha this Shabbat will begin at 4:15 pm; Shabbat ends at 6:16 pm.
This Sunday at 5:30 pm we will be hosting a Tu Bishvat-themed Wine Tasting, with lots of delicious food to eat and drink to honor the bountiful celebration of a New Year for the Trees, which starts Sunday night. We will also have babysitting activities and pizza for kids to enjoy. You can find all the information and RSVP link here .
We are also co-sponsoring a program on Sunday with The Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion, our neighbors down the street, to show the documentary Rigged, which is all about voter suppression efforts around the country in the last decade. That program will begin at 5:00 pm and will be followed by several speakers explaining the film, what is currently happening on the ground in Missouri and nationwide, and what we, as voters who want our voices to be counted, can do about it. Please RSVP here .
Next Shabbat, February 14-15, we’ll welcome Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann, the founder and rabbi of a wonderful spiritual community called Mishkan Chicago, to Kol Rinah for Shabbat. Rabbi Arnow wrote in the Voice about her visit here. Sign up and more details are available here. It’s going to be an extraordinary weekend and very thought-provoking for us as we think about our goals and hopes for our prayer experiences here at Kol Rinah. Please join us for dinner Friday night, and for our full morning of programming Saturday morning.
Note that the Saturday morning service that week will begin at 9:30 am, will have some instruments (guitar and drum), and will not cover of all of the liturgy. We will have a complete, lay-led davening in the chapel beginning at 9:00 am.
And… the World Zionist Congress Elections have officially begun. EACH OF YOU can have a voice in the future of the Jewish State and help shape how funds are allocated, vision is set, and the leadership in Israel is formed. Here’s a little more information:
Vote in the World Zionist Congress Election - Beginning in January, you, along with millions of other American Jews, will have the opportunity to Vote for Your Voice in Israel. From January 21 through March 11, 2020, American Jews can vote online in the election for the 38th World Zionist Congress and impact the Jewish future in Israel and around the world. Click HERE to cast your vote!
A special note: I’ve voted already, as have 6 others in our community. It takes five minutes. It does cost $7.50 ($5 if you’re under 25). If you’ve already voted, email me, so I can keep a count of how many of our members have voted—let’s see how high we can get this number by March!
And now for a little Torah…
This week, we read in Parashat Beshallach about the final steps the Israelites take together to march from slavery in Egypt to freedom through the Sea of Reeds. It is an incredible mix of emotions, one of the most triumphant episodes in the entire Torah, so much so that it is easy to overlook the fact that it almost didn't happen.
When God came to Moses, and he went to the Israelite leaders to tell them they were going to be freed, they ignored him. When he went to Pharaoh after each and every one of the Ten Plagues, Pharaoh ultimately wound up keeping the people enslaved. Even as they were on the run, at the border of Egypts reach, they find themselves stuck between the power of Pharaoh's army and the crushing depths of the sea.
And so the people cried out and wailed, and God said to Moses (Exodus 14:15):
וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְי אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מַה־תִּצְעַ֖ק אֵלָ֑י דַּבֵּ֥ר אֶל־בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל וְיִסָּֽעוּ׃
Then the LORD said to Moses, “Why do you cry out to Me? Tell the Israelites to go forward.
Only when the people choose to move forward, to act to better their own lives, refusing to accept injustice and opression, and taking steps to make a better life for themselves and their people, can they move into freedom.
In March of 2015, author, professor, and historian Eric Foner published a piece in The Nation which talked about the fight for freedom that had played out in America's national landscape since its inception. Explaining how these themes echo into the modern age, Foner writes:
[T]he questions that preoccupied The Nation over the course of its history remain eerily relevant today. Will the onward march of capitalism produce a shared abundance—or a continued widening of the gap between the social classes? Will democratic self-government survive the assault of money and the transfer of economic decision-making to institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which lack any semblance of democratic legitimacy?
Will the growing racial and ethnic diversity of American society promote greater tolerance, or fragmentation and bitterness?
Will the ongoing revolution in the status of women, which propelled the idea of freedom into the most intimate realms of life, survive a powerful backlash? Can civil liberties co-exist with a “war on terror” that has no discernible ending point?
These are the questions that will shape the life of the nation, and The Nation, in the years to come. In the twenty-first century, the need for a positive, expansive, socially responsible understanding of freedom is as great as at any time in The Nation’s history.
His main argument throughout the article is that the answer to any of these questions could easily be either "Yes" or "No," and that the determining factor is our involvement. Freedom isn't free, or so the saying goes, and it is paid for by the civic involvement of all of us, the people of whom, by whom, and for whom this nation is supposed to work.
In the weeks and months ahead, we will each face many choices and continue to ponder what is best for us, our families, our community, and our nation. What we cannot do is sit on the sidelines. No matter what our thoughts are on a particular issue, policy, or leader, we have to be engaged in the process of political discourse in order to make our needs known and to keep freedom for all a value enshrined not only in our national vocabulary, but in our practical, civil policy.
Shabbat shalom and see you in shul,
Rabbi Scott Shafrin
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Phone: 314-727-1747