Dear Kol Rinah Family,
We have a lot of wonderful things to celebrate this week, so let's dive right in. I want to wish another hearty mazal tov to Yael Sabin on her bat mitzvah this past week, as well as to her whole family: 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 this wonderful simcha!
Tonight is our Kol HaNefesh service, a Contemplative, A Capella Kabbalat Shabbat experience led by Rabbi Noah Arnow and Karen Kern. We will begin together in the chapel tonight at 6:00 pm. Candle lighting tonight will be at 4:22 pm.
Tomorrow morning, we will be celebrating the aufruf (pre-marriage blessings) of Tasha Kaminsky and Elad Gross. We are excited to celebrate with Tasha and Elad and all of their family and friends this Shabbat in advance of their upcoming wedding!
Services for Shabbat morning will begin at 9:00 am downstairs in the Mirowitz Auditorium. I will be leading Torah Talk at about 10:10 am in the Social Hall. We will also have Rhythm 'n' Ruach in the Sara Myers Community Room and MifgaShabbat in the Chapel, both starting at 10:45 am.
We will also be treated to two special learning opportunities. Our community ShinShinit, Shaked Birenboim, will be teaching the community following the Torah service. Following serivces and kiddush, our own Verein Education Committee will be presenting several perspectives on Good and Evil and Ethics, which will focus on Jewish views of our ethical obligations and the limitations of our own free will, and will be taking place in the Sara Myers Community Room.
Mincha on Shabbat afternoon will be at 3:25 pm, and Shabbat ends at 5:26 pm.
This Sunday, December 15, at 3:30 pm, our entire community is strongly encouraged to attend the annual Congregational Meeting. We will be discussing the state of our community, our exciting plans for the future, and answering questions from all of our members. Please come to celebrate our successes in this past year, to get excited about the many incredible things we have planned for the year ahead, and to make your voice heard throughout our community.
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…
This past week was, sadly, full of acts of violence that injured innocent people and ended lives too soon. Two of these incidents even happened in schools not to far from where I grew up in Wisconsin.
But one of the most frightening incidents was the shooting on Tuesday where three innocent people and one police officer tragically lost their lives at a kosher market in Jersey City. Many others were injured in what is being considered by authorities as an act of domestic terror and another intentional targetting of Jewish people and Jewish spaces. Though these actions were swiftly condemned by numerous organizations, including the American Jewish World Service , our local Jewish Federation , and The Rabbinical Assembly , it is a shocking and devastating horror to have our community so violently torn apart.
While to the outsider it may seem like just another store, the kosher market has always been a staple of Jewish live, one of a handful of shops that became a sanctuary and a gathering place for Jewish communal life. My great-grandfather, Oscar Malon, owned what was at one point the main Jewish bookstore and Judaica shop in Milwaukee. It wasn't just a place for Jewish people to get the supplies they wanted and needed for thier lives, but a place to gather, to see friends, and to form community. It was a pillar around which formed much of Jewish life in the city, and still today, when I meet people who knew my great-grandparents, they hold those memories of the Jewish bookstore as sacred.
It is tragic to have our sacred spaces marred by violence. Hate has no place in our society, especially in those corners of safety and communal warmth that we hold most dear. As I think over this latest tragedy, which sadly falls in the same week we will be marking the seventh anniversary of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, another once-safe haven of learning and community now host to tragic memories and shattered lives, I can hardly contain my sadness, my anger, my righteous fury that somehow our nation has still not learned the crucial lessons taught to us in our most sacred texts:
Shulchan Aruch, Choshen Mishpat 427:8
And for every stumbling block that is a danger to someone’s life, there is a positive commandment to remove it and to destroy it from among us and to take good caution; as it says: “You shall guard your lives,” (Deuteronomy 4:9). And if you don’t remove the stumbling block that brings danger, you have neglected a positive mitzvah.
I only hope that we can remove the sumbling blocks of hate and violence, of easy access to guns and of the tragic inaction of our leaders to do their most basic duty of keeping all of us safe. I hope that this Shabbat can be one of peace and love and healing for us, for our bothers and sisters in Jersey City, and for all people.
Shabbat Shalom and see you in shul,
Rabbi Shafrin
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