Dear Kol Rinah Family,
I hope everyone has enjoyed, or at least endured, the snow and cold of the past week. Come warm up your spirit tonight at 6pm in the chapel with our classic Shabbat Rinah, with Rabbi Shafrin, Karen Kern and me, as we sing some of our favorite Kabbalat Shabbat melodies. Candle lighting is at 4:24pm.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be teaching Torah Talk at 10:10am where we’ll look at a moment of Joseph’s rise to fortune in Egypt, and Rabbi Shafrin will be giving the sermon.
Mincha Saturday afternoon is at 3:25pm and Shabbat ends at 5:27pm.
Mazal tov to Tasha Kaminsky and Elad Gross, who will be married Saturday evening! And mazal tov to Tasha’s mother, our member Enid Perll!
Sunday will be Kol Rinah’s (rescheduled) Congregational Annual Meeting, at 2:30pm. Please come to vote for new board members, and to hear updates on so many important aspects of our congregation’s life and work.
As part of the annual meeting, we thank those board members whose terms of service are ending. I really want to thank Pat Cohen, Denise Field, Debbie Igielnik, Al Leving, Linda Mackler, Beth Rubin, Debbie Rubin and Lvav Spector for their incredible and dedicated service to our congregation. Each is an integral member of our community, and your leadership in all different ways has been so valuable. Thank you!
And Hanukkah begins Sunday night! Here’s a detailed explanation of a bunch of laws related to Hanukkah, if you’re interested in getting into the weeds a little!
It’s a relatively quiet time at Kol Rinah, but with people away, it can be hard to make minyan. If you have some extra time, please consider coming to minyan over the next two weeks, morning or evening. Your presence will really be appreciated.
My sermon from last Shabbat is below.
Wishing you a Shabbat shalom and a joyous and bright Hanukkah.
See you in shul,
Rabbi Noah Arnow
This has been a complicated, headspinning and tragic week in the life of the Jewish people. The combination of the President’s executive order, followed by the attack on Jersey City, and all the surrounding conversation of both of these, has been a lot to digest.
First let us make mention of Detective Joseph Seals, Moshe Deutsch, Mindel Ferencz, and Douglas Miguel Rodriguez. May their families be comforted, and their memories blessings.
It’s been hard, at least for me, to know how to make sense of and respond to the news of the week. It’s been hard for me to know how to feel. Should I feel more safe, or less safe? Do I feel more understood or misunderstood as a Jew now than before?
I want today to just briefly offer three questions I ask myself as I try to figure things out. First, anti-Semitism. There’s been much debate about whether certain speeches, actions, government actions, etc., are anti-Semitic. For me, the way I judge is how I experience it. If it feels anti-Semitic to me, than it’s anti-Semitic. For me. This is obviously not a sufficient legal standard, but it’s important for me that I check in with how I’m feeling and experiencing something that may be anti-Semitic.
Second, safety. Does an attack, a speech, an executive action, make me feel more safe or less safe? And at what cost? Whose free speech, or who else’s sense of safety, is being compromised so I can feel safer? Is the increased safety worth the cost?
Third, are the opinions around an issue, around any of these issues, being expressed with respect, or contempt? Disagreement, critique and even rebuke can be done with love, kindness and respect. In fact, if we want our disagreement, critique and rebuke to register, and perhaps be impactful and change people’s hearts and minds, we need to make sure we’re speaking in a way that can be heard, and that is not contemptuous.
We may not all identify the same things as anti-Semitic. We may not all be made to feel safe or unsafe by the same things. We may not agree about in which communications we see and feel contempt.
One way I think about our community is as a vessel, as a container, for holiness—for God, for Torah, for us. What do we want our shul—the spiritual vessel for who and what we are to be like?
I believe Kol Rinah needs to be an intensely and proudly Semitic—that is to say, Jewish—place—a place of that values Torah and Torah values.
I believe Kol Rinah needs to be a safe place, physically and emotionally. We may not all agree, but we need to feel safe disagreeing, and have a container—a sacred vessel of community and trust—that can hold us when we hurt, and hold us when disagree. And we must be conscious of the compromises—the costs—we incur to help us feel safer, and make sure those costs are worth it.
And for this to be a community that takes Torah and Torah values seriously, for this to be a community that is safe and can hold us when we hurt and when we disagree, it needs to be contempt-free zone. Contempt is poison, whether in a marriage or in a community. When we hear someone in our community speaking or writing or acting to or about someone else in way that feels to us contemptuous, speak up, speak out and let that person know that the way they are speaking is not acceptable. This is not about content, but about kindness.
And when someone in our community experiences contempt, we should rally around them—not to support their particular position, but to support their humanity, and their right to be spoken to with kindness.
We are the children of Israel—the children of the one who struggled with God and humans, and prevailed. We all wrestle with people, and with God. Will we prevail, each of us, and us together? Only if we wrestle, struggle, strive in ways that themselves holy.
Shabbat shalom.
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Phone: 314-727-1747