Category: Featured

Judaism is all about the sacred time. To be sure, space matters too, but time – now that’s really important. Minutes, days, weeks – all of it matters tremendously – just take a look at the Jewish calendar, its’ beautiful, complicated precision. Just look at how carefully we monitor time – on March 6 Shabbat begins at 5:34 pm and ends on March 7 no earlier than 6:19pm… Does it really matter? Why do we obsess over such seemingly trivial details as minutes of an hour? Does it really matter if our Yom Kippur fast lasts full 25 hours, and do we really need to wait for the three stars to appear at the end? I’d like to suggest that we pay so much attention to those precise minutes not because they matter quite so much, but because they allow us to pay attention to an extremely important moment: that of transition. At the beginning of Shabbat, it is the lighting of candles that allows us to usher Shabbat in, creating an invisible divide between the long week we just had and a very special space in time we call Shabbat, the time of rest, of renewal, of family and friends, a Jewish space in our often very non-Jewish week… Havdalah allows us to mark the transition ‘back’ into the world of daily routine. Every time we mark the arrival of a festival with kiddush we mark that transition from the ordinary to the sanctified – and then back again. Both transitions are special, both are sacred! As I write these words, Temple Emanuel embarks on one of the most ambitious projects in over 50 years of our existence, the biggest such effort in over twenty years: to bring the entire TE community under one roof. We called this project OneCampus. The addition to our sanctuary building will contain 4 classrooms, a library/meeting room and some office space. It will enable us to bring to life our vision of TE members of all ages entering through the same doors to engage in learning, celebrating Shabbat and Festivals, working to make this world a better place through the acts of Tikkun Olam and enjoying all the wonderful things TE has to offer -all under one roof! And so I come back to marking the transitions. On Tuesday, March 10 at 11 am we will hold a ground breaking ceremony, allowing us to mark this moment in time, this moment in the history of our congregation, when we will officially begin to construct this new part of our campus. We will do so with the words of shehecheyanu, thanking God for sustaining our community for over 50 years, and allowing us to reach this very special moment. There will be many more opportunities for us to celebrate this wonderful new stage in our synagogue’s life. There are still plenty of opportunities to get involved in this wonderful project and to support it with your talents, and to donate money to help make it happen. But for now, let us just take this moment in, cherish it, and let the words ring in our ears: ‘Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech haOlam, shehecheyanu ve’kiymanu ve’higianu la’zman hazeh’. Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the Universe, who has sustained us, and kept us alive and allowed us to get to this very special moment.

Music stirs our souls in a way that words often cannot, activating emotions within us that we did not know existed… Music is such a strong presence in Temple Emanuel worship style that it is almost unimaginable without it! Yet music in worship (especially instrumental music) has a complicated history in Judaism. Following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE the rabbis placed a ban on the use of music in general, and especially in worship, as a sign of mourning. It is not hard to imagine that having witnessed the devastation, the last thing they wanted to do is sing…

From the very beginning, the Reform Movement insisted on bringing the music back to worship, back to the synagogue, back to Shabbat. Music and joy were always part of Judaism and now they were making a comeback! Synagogues installed pipe organs and commissioned talented and popular composers of the time to write music settings for service in the synagogue, giving us the profoundly inspiring music of Lewandowski, Bloch, Sulzer and many others. The music they wrote for the services was spiritual and uplifting. It was also very modern and reflective of the 19^th century popular music styles.

As the popular music styles changed in the second half of the 20^th century, a new kind of music entered the world of the synagogue worship. The pipe organs were joined (and often replaced) by guitars and electric pianos. Temple Emanuel, founded in 1962, is a true ‘child’ of that era – from the very beginning, our services were accompanied by guitar music, with the entire congregation singing along, rather than relying on a powerful pipe organ and a professional cantor or choir to provide music for the worship experience. In fact, it is probably safe to argue that music has been one of the main defining features of the new congregation, as well as many others that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s around the country.

The music of Debbie Friedman had defined that generation – and after some four decades it continues to touch the souls of so many Jews all around the world. But it’s not only her music and her talent that has completely transformed the music in the synagogue – Debbie, along with Jeff Klepper and a few others, had ignited the spark of creativity in generations of young Jews. She inspired them, she nurtured them, she challenged them – and they have completely transformed Jewish worship and Jewish music. Every year since Debbie’s untimely passing in 2011 we gather for a Debbie Friedman memorial concert around her yahrzeit. We sing and we play and we honor her legacy. This year please join me and the TE band as we honor Debbie’s legacy with our annual concert as part of the “Taste of Honey”, a community-wide celebration of Jewish learning at the JCC on January 31^st at 7pm. I can think of no better way to honor her legacy than to share our gift of music with the wider community.