Dear Kol Rinah Family,
I hope you had a wonderful and meaningful Thanksgiving this past week. This Shabbat will be full of festive community gathering and simcha.
Tonight is our First Fridays for Families, featuring lively singing for our members of all ages beginning downstairs in the Mirowitz Auditorium at 6:00 pm. We welcome all families and members to come join us for a fun and energetic Shabbat! Candle lighting tonight will be at 4:22pm.
Tomorrow morning, we will be celebrating the bat mitzvah of Yael Sabin. We are excited to celebrate with Yael and her extended family on this marvelous simcha! We want to wish a mazal tov to Andrew and MaryAnne Smyly Sabin and Alana and Mike Minoff, as well as our members and Yael's grandparents, Bruce and Ellen Sabin, on Yael becoming a bat mitzvah!
Services for Shabbat morning will begin at 9:00 am upstairs in the sanctuary. We will also have Tot Shabbat for our youngest members starting at 10:45 am DOWNSTAIRS in the Mirowitz Auditorium.
Mincha on Shabbat afternoon will be at 3:20 pm, and Shabbat ends at 5:25 pm.
As always, our entire community appreciates those of you who make a special effort to come to minyan, whether it is a regular part of your routine or every once in a while. We need your support, and ask that you commit even an evening or a morning here or there to help make sure that we keep our daily spiritual community vibrant and connected, that we can aid those in mourning who need to say kaddish, and that we can extend our Jewish community into our everyday lives. Please consider joining us for minyan anyday in the next few weeks.
And now for a little Torah…
Every human being has dreams. When we speak of dreams, we are often talking both about the visions we have while asleep and the ideals we set forth for ourselves, our families, our community, and the world while we are awake. A dream can be both a vision (an imaginary journey in the mind) as well as a goal (a path we lay out for ourselves in the real world).
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, an Orthodox rabbi living in New York, once wrote, “The fact of the matter is that a person can dream when he’s asleep and can dream when he’s awake. But only the dreams that one dreams when [they are] awake can become transformed into the visions which change reality.”
In this week's Parashah, Vayeitzei, Jacob has his famous dream of the ladder ascending to heaven, with angels traveling up and down. His reaction upon waking, which has become equally famous, was "God was in this place and I did not know it." I think this speaks to Rabbi Riskin's distiction between the imaginings of our unconscious and the visions we work to make real in our world. The work of our hands becomes holy work when we envision a better reality for our world and then work to make it so. It is by using our time and efforts to improve the world around us that we can look around, see the good we do, and realize that what we are doing in fulfilling these dreams is sacred work. By pursuing a vision of a more just and ethical world, we uncover the Godliness in ourselves, our work, our dreams, and our world.
Here at Kol Rinah, we have long made it our goal to be a part of the work of creating a more just society. We have also formally began the process of creating a social action committee, and to forming plans for our synagogue as a whole to become actively involved in fighting for the needs of our community and our world. If you would like to learn more, please contact me or Benj Singer
(benjamin.d.singer@gmail.com).
May we all work to uncover the sacred depth of meaning in each moment as we work together to pursue the dreams of a more equitable world.
Shabbat shalom, and see you in shul!
All the best,
Rabbi Shafrin
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