Dear Kol Rinah Family,
This week is full of so many exciting things!
Tonight, we’ll welcome Shabbat with our some new favorite Shabbat tunes in our Shir Chadash service. Join Karen Kern and me tonight at 6:00 pm in the chapel. Candle lighting is at 6:43 pm. (Next week will be Kol HaNefesh: A Contemplative, A Cappella Experience with Rabbi Karen Kern and Rabbi Arnow).
Tomorrow morning, we will be celebrating the bat mitzvah of Grace Cooperstein! Services will be UPSTAIRS in the sanctuary starting at 9:00 am. We will not be having Torah Talk to ensure that everyone is able to be a part of this wonderful simcha (festive occasion). Mazal tov to Dave, Alisa, Grace and their entire family!
Saturday afternoon, Mincha will begin at 5:40 pm in the chapel, followed by Seudah Shelishit and Ma'ariv.
Following Havdallah at 7:39 pm, we will have some light refreshments and begin a program of learning for Selichot at 8:00 pm, which we have titled "Rebuke and Repentance." The mitzvah of rebuke (tochecha), a kind of feedback from one person to another, is an essential part of sustaining healthy relationships, with ourselves, with people with whom we are close, and with our leaders. Together we will learn a little bit about why this practice of tochecha is an essential part of Jewish communal and spiritual life, and how exactly we can do this for ourselves and others as we prepare to start a New Year together.
The learning will be followed by a Selichot service starting at 9:00 pm. For those of us who may be unfamiliar with Selichot, it is a service of penitential prayers, readings, and supplications designed to set the mood for the upcoming Days of Awe and get us into a mindset to reflect on the ways we may have missed the mark individually or as a community this past year and how we can start the year 5780 on the right foot. I look forward to learning with and from you all!
Speaking of the Days of Awe (a.k.a "The High Holidays," a.k.a Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and their attendant festivities) they are little more than one week away! We have some amazing experiences for community members and friends of all ages and backgrounds, from services to singing to learning opportunities of all types. If you have not yet signed your children up for babysitting, and you would like to, PLEASE contact our Youth & Family Programming Coordinator, Melissa Bellows: melissa@kolrinahstl.org . I am particularly excited about all of the brilliant teachers who will be leading sessions each and every day of the High Holidays. Please take a look all of the amazing things going on throughout the Days of Awe on our website:
https://www.kolrinahstl.org/high-holiday-forms
Also, if you have not already ordered a lulav and etrog for Sukkot, you can still do so by calling Nancy in the office (314-727-1747) or by filling out the form online before this coming Monday (ignore the August due date):
https://www.kolrinahstl.org/form/lulav--etrog-order-form-5780.html
Finally, we are always looking for ways to help those in our community and beyond to get the things they need. Recently, the Harvey Kornblum Jewish Food Pantry (HKJFP) has reached out to us to let us know that they are able to provide specially-packaged meals for the holidays for anyone who might need them. They can bring the food to Kol Rinah so that people can pick it up with confidentiality and privacy, or make arrangements for an alternate location if that would be more helpful.
Their goal is to increase the number of Jewish families benefiting from the food resources that are available. The point of contact for making arrangements is Judy Berkowitz, the HKJFP Director, who can be reached at 314-513-1673 or at jberkowitz@jfcs-stl.org .
And now for a little Torah…
In Parashat Ki Tavo, we find one of the most famous sectionsrecounted in all of the Torah:
"My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt and lived there, few in number, and there became a great nation, powerful and numerous. But the Egyptians ill-treated us and made us suffer, subjecting us to harsh labour. Then we cried out to the Lord, the God of our ancestors, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders." (Devarim 26:5-8)
Each year, we read this story during our recounting of the Exodus from Egypt during our Pesach seders. How odd that we should read it now as well, when we are, quite literally, as far from Pesach in the year as we could be!
But perhaps this is actually the perfect time to recall this narrative and, by extension, the holiday of Pesach. The story of Pesach, summarized in such wonderful brevity above, is actually the story of how the Jewish People first became, well, a people. A nation. Something more than just a group of families living near each other. When we left Egypt, and moved toward Sinai, we were living behind a life of degradation and single-minded focus on survival toward a future of interdependence, community, stability, and a shared spiritual paths with many branches, spokes, twists and turns.
Even more than this, however, the story of Pesach is the story of our gaining a sense of awe and wonder, of looking up from the work of our hands to see the miracles of our world. How many times this year were we too busy, to engrossed, to distracted to pay attention to something wonderful, beautiful, or joyful? What did we miss by only focusing on the task at hand, without raising ourselves up to walk with others through the wilderness journeys of our lives?
Just as we left Egypt during Pesach, Rosh HaShanah and the beginning of the Jewish New Year of 5780 call on us to also exit our own narrowly-focused spaces and to take a broader perspective of who we are, who we might be, and who we ought to be in the year ahead.
This Shabbat, these coming days, I encourage you all to look carefully at the ways in which you feel painfully constrained. I hope that you can find some ways to look up, to appreciate the little miracles and the big ones alike, and that you can enter this year with joy and gladness.
Shabbat shalom and see you in shul,
Rabbi Scott Shafrin
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