Category: Rabbi’s page

Elul (אלול) is the name of the month in our Jewish calendar that immediately precedes the Jewish New Year and High Holy Days. The month of Elul is one that fulfills the promise of drawing closer, awakening our inner lives through the call of the shofar, and preparing ourselves for the joy and renewal of the holiday season.

A recently published companion to Mishkan T’filah provides us with additional liturgical and poetic sources, allowing us to deepen our sense of approaching High Holy Days. We also begin to blow the shofar in the month of Elul, the sound piercing our souls and reminding us to engage in the process of introspection and preparation.

In an average year, the month of Elul tends to fall on August, with only a tail of it landing in September — and so it often gets ‘lost’ in the end of the summer routines, the beginning of the new school year and all that goes with it. This year, the High Holy Days fall in October, so we get a chance to experience the month of Elul in its fullest.

Before we arrive at Rosh Hashanah, we get to pause and consider our lives, engage in the practice of cheshbon hanefesh, accounting of the soul. Before we come together for the full liturgical experience of the holiest days of our year, we get to slowly prepare. The culmination of the month of Elul is the Selichot service on the last Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah, when we begin to recite the penitence prayers and chant the haunting melodies that are so familiar to us from the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy.

Four New Haven area Reform synagogues come together for Selichot services, taking turns in hosting the gatherings. This year, on Saturday September 28^th at 7pm we will gather at Temple Beth David in Cheshire. We will say goodbye to Shabbat with a brief Havdalah ceremony, and we will get a chance to hear from Judge Douglas Lavine, the co-chair of the Connecticut Hate Crimes Advisory Council (of which I am a member), who will speak about Restorative Justice and Forgiveness, an incredibly fitting topic for the night of Selichot. The evening will conclude with a special service, led by all of the rabbis and cantors and choirs from all of our synagogues, a very special annual gathering that will allow us to prepare for the holy days ahead.

This year the ‘late’ start for the High Holy Days offers us a gift: experiencing the month of Elul in its fullness. Come and enjoy Friday night Shabbat service, join Saturday morning Torah study and get ready for the Days of Awe together!

When members of our community and our loved ones fall ill, we add their names to the Misheberach list that we read before reciting the prayer for healing, inviting us all to hold the community members in our prayers, alongside our own loved ones and friends. We often use the traditional formula of using someone’s Hebrew name to preserve the anonymity of the person, and at other times we use the full name, thus sharing the news of illness with wider TE community, reminding people to reach out and call/visit a friend. (Please note, according to our tradition you should ALWAYS check with the person you want to pray for whether they are comfortable with their name recited in public or added to the list read out in the synagogue)!

The prayer for healing is traditionally recited during the Torah service. In addition, a slightly different version of the prayer for healing is part of a weekday Amidah, which is not recited on Shabbat as part of our liturgy, when the 13 ‘middle’ blessings/petitions are replaced with one special blessing for Shabbat.

The words of Debbie Friedman’s Misheberach have become a staple of our Shabbat services, as it did in numerous communities all around the world – the powerful music, the inspiring words, combined with an opportunity to offer a communal prayer for healing have become an essential part of our Shabbat services. TE’s spiral-bound prayerbook Seder T’filot Emanuel has included the text of this prayer at the end of a Friday night Amidah, and it continues to be one of the most powerful elements of the service for so many of us. New words and new melodies continue to be written, and we often add the new prayers for healing to our services – but the presence of the prayer for healing in all our Shabbat and Festival services remains a constant.

Over the years our Misheberach list became surprisingly long. And while there is definitely a long accepted tradition of appointing an emissary to pray for one’s health if you can’t make it to the synagogue, our current minhag, or custom, that evolved at TE has led to the breakdown of the original intent of the prayer for healing: to be offered in person with intentionality.

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Landes, in My People’s Prayerbook, remarks:

“The Mi Sheberakh is not a magical incantation. It obligates the [pray-er] to give tzedakah and to pray personally on behalf of the person for whom the prayer is given. It summons us all to recognize our own utter powerlessness in the face of illness.”

The TE Ritual Committee discussed this at length at a recent meeting and agreed to modify our current practice. If you are thinking of a loved one, a family member or a friend, and would like to pray for their health – please come to Shabbat service, in person or online, and please think of them as you add their name – publicly or privately, to our communal prayer for healing. If you hear of someone’s acute illness and want to add their name (and you can’t get there yourself), please call/email the office, and the name will be added to our list, which will continue to be read every Shabbat. When the person gets better, please remember to let us know so we can remove their name from the list – we love hearing good news! After the name has been on the list for about a month, the list will ‘reset.’ Please note, the names of all TE members struggling with illness will remain on the list without any time limit.

I invite you to use the opportunity of the Misheberach prayer in our services to think of and to pray for healing for your loved ones. May all who are in need of healing be blessed with the love, care and support they need.

Around this time of year the classic song from Israeli rock icon Arik Einstein ‘Uf Gozal’ begins to pop up everywhere I look. It acknowledges the difficult feelings for parents watching their kids grow up, mature and leave the nest. We have been the so-called ‘empty nesters’ for two years now, and I think the reality is yet to fully set in, even as we watch our kids spread their wings with pride, joy and yes, a little sadness.

This year’s crop of high school graduates has grown up at TE right in front of our eyes – I have so many cute pictures from their childhood to prove it! Many have remained active in our school as teenagers: Katie and Sarah Harper, Ava Shanbrom, Maya Katsovich, Sophia Rivkin and Beyla Ridky have had an outsized influence on the life of TE over the years, and most of them are pretty used to the extended TE family treating them as if they were our own children. They have sung in the children’s choir, and then years later they taught the children’s choir for the next generation of kids. They were our students and then became our colleagues, helping teach, tutor and inspire our current religious school students. They have written and performed Purim spiels and sat on TE boards and ran Chanukkah basket fundraisers… If I attempt to list all their achievements, this column would never fit into the allotted space! Over the next few weeks, we will get to celebrate them and their achievements, to hug them and to wish them well as they take that important leap and go off to college – I hope you all mark May 17^th in your calendars and come to Shabbat service to do just that. But first, I wanted to invite you to a special ceremony on May 5^th – and to share with you a description of two Eagle Scout projects completed this year for the benefit of Temple Emanuel.

For her Eagle Scout project, Katie Harper chose to help her community here at Temple Emanuel by building an additional four benches for the outdoor sanctuary. “I decided to expand the outdoor sanctuary because it has become a special space for me and many other members. It was a lot of fun assembling the benches, and I am pleased that the outdoor sanctuary will now be widely more accessible during services. As the weather starts becoming warmer, I cannot wait to use the benches in the upcoming weeks.”

Sarah Harper, as part of her BSA Eagle Scout Project, led a group of volunteers in restoring over 80 damaged spiral-bound prayer books at Temple Emanuel. The entire restoration process involved many steps and was completed over the course of four months.

“In Jewish tradition, any document or ritual object with God’s name on it must be buried in a special grave called a ‘genizah.’ It is the proper way to dispose of these holy objects with the utmost respect and consideration. As part of my Eagle Scout project, I have arranged for a geniza to be created on TE property, and we have collected over 15 boxes of beyond-repair prayer books and additional items from the community. I have been an active member of Temple Emanuel for over 18 years and these prayer books were the first to incite my love for attending services, studying Hebrew, and learning the different tefilot. I am extremely delighted for the newly bound prayer books to get used again and for the beyond-repair items to get appropriately laid to rest. I hope everyone in the community will be able to witness and take part in this sacred occasion along with me.”

The genizah ceremony will be held on Sunday, May 5th at 9:30 a.m. All TE families and members are invited to attend to learn about the ritual of disposing of sacred texts and objects, as well as to assist with burying the items.

“The individual may pray in prose or even in wordless silence; a congregation must sing or disband.” Israel Abrahams, Poetry and Religion (1920)

Music has always been a part of Judaism. From the Levites who sang the Psalms and played instruments on the steps leading to the Temple in Jerusalem, to the ancient system of cantillation, a special way to chant the Torah; from the melodic way of studying and memorizing rabbinic texts of Mishnah and Talmud to the Hassidic niggunim, often simple melodies that were credited with being as powerful as the most well-composed prayers. There are numerous Hassidic sayings about the significance of melody, as the Zohar (foundational work of Jewish mystical thought) puts it, in “opening those heavenly gates that are firmly shut except to song and tears…”

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’s 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, 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 was sing… Another complication was the prohibition against playing musical instruments on Shabbat – not because the act itself is a violation of Shabbat (it was permitted in the Temple in Jerusalem), but out of much more technical considerations (to prevent the carrying of the instrument, its tuning or repair, if needed, all of which were considered violations of Shabbat). Even the shofar blowing on Rosh Hashanah was suspended if it fell on Shabbat!

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 services 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 19th-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.

For more than a decade now the TE band has been a part of a further experiment with music at TE services – and what an incredible experience this has been! Under Laurel Shader’s wonderful leadership up to 22 TE members of different ages, from middle school to retirees, have played together on various occasions, giving a new meaning to ‘musical Shabbat’ at Temple Emanuel!

As we continue to bring music to our worship, with the full TE band and with small groups of musicians, with a solo guitar and even a cappella – allowing the music to nurture our souls and lift our prayers straight to heaven – I am delighted to remind you that we have an amazing musical program coming up on November 4^th! A world-renowned singer and composer, Elana Arian, is coming to Temple Emanuel! We know and love Elana’s music; it has enriched our worship at TE over the last few years, and we look forward to welcoming Elana as our Shir Magic performer this year! Shir Magic is the Annual TE Concert in loving memory of Rabbi Jerry Brieger z”l

You can get your tickets in advance right here. Please spread the word, and I look forward to enjoying this special musical evening together. The TE band will of course make an appearance, and you can hear it next at Shabbat Chanukkah on December 8^th!

P.S. Play an instrument? Want to join the band? Speak to Laurel Shader or Rabbi Farbman!

Oops, Help, Thanks & Wow!

At one point or another, all of us have said these short words. Often, multiple times a day! As you read this column shortly before the start of High Holy Days, you are most likely concentrating on the ‘oops’ part – that is the nature of ‘accounting of our soul’, or cheshbon hanefesh. This time of year we are encouraged to take stock of our lives and our actions, acknowledge our failings and seek ways to perform teshuvah, ‘return’ to the vision of ourselves that we aspire to be… And while this time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and this process of teshuvah is extremely important, I am always mindful of the fact that we should pay even more attention to our actions between Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah!

So how do we do this? How do we elevate our daily and weekly experiences to allow for such thoughtful action? One of the traditional answers to this question is to rely on the structure of services and both individual and communal prayer. Our prayerbook, also known as the Siddur, is a sacred and essential tool that guides the individual and communal worship practices. This meticulously crafted compilation of prayers, blessings, and liturgical texts serves as a gateway for expressing gratitude, seeking guidance, and fostering a deep spiritual connection with each other and with the divine.

Temple Emanuel has its own prayerbook, Seder Tefilot Emanuel. This wonderful and warm book has inspired generations of TE members – and continues to do so! It began as a loose-leaf collection of prayers in the early TE years, then became a ‘Yellow Prayerbook’ and eventually took shape that we know and love over 20 years ago. It has survived two reprints and has served our community as a truly magnificent tool. In addition, after a few years of exploration and discovery, we have adopted the Reform Prayerbook ‘Mishkan Tefilah’, to be used alongside ‘Seder Tefilot Emanuel’. Although quite different in design and content, these two wonderful books help shape the worship at Temple Emanuel. In 2018 we adopted the recently published Mishkan HaNefesh as our High Holy Days machzor, and it has enriched our experience of the High Holy Days in a profound way.

This fall we will once again get together to explore the Jewish Liturgy. In this enriching journey, we will delve into the profound world of Jewish prayer and explore the intricate tapestry of rituals, texts, and melodies that have woven the fabric of Jewish worship for centuries. From the heartfelt expressions of gratitude to the introspective moments of self-reflection, Jewish liturgy offers a remarkable insight into the spiritual essence of the Jewish people. Join us as we uncover the history, significance, and deep connections that make up the mosaic of Jewish liturgical traditions. Whether you are a curious learner or seeking to deepen your understanding, this course promises to illuminate the beauty and meaning embedded in every word, every note, and every gesture of Jewish prayer.

The new course begins on October 8^th and will run on Sundays at 11 am. Advance registration is required, please follow this link to sign up!

It’s been over a year of the war in Ukraine when we boarded our flight to Spain to support Ukrainian refugees in Europe as part of the JFNA’s Global Volunteer Hub Initiative. It was a third such trip for Rabbi and a first for Olga.

A year is a long time. In April 2022 (Rabbi’s first trip to Poland) people were utterly disoriented by the physical and emotional ordeal they have just survived. The war was real and devastating, the people were hurting and shaken, there was shock, disbelief, and a hope that the war will be over and they were going home soon. In August 2022 the immediate pain and shock felt more distant, and people were facing the reality that their lives were not going to be the same again, and they had to make some choices and long-term decisions. They needed help, reassurance, and support as they were trying to figure out their next steps. They needed someone to take care of their kids while they were navigating bureaucracies and looking for work. They needed to hear from those who went through the immigrant experience themselves that they will be OK someday. In April 2023 the reality is different once again. People are learning Spanish and are starting to have basic daily interactions in supermarkets and corner stores with more confidence. Kids are navigating school, people have moved on from temporary housing (Red Cross hotels and shelters) into rented accommodations. Many are securing jobs and continue to find ways to keep in touch with friends they made during the worst of it, supporting each other still. As the basic needs of their lives are beginning to slowly fall into place, their need for community, support and camaraderie becomes more focused – the early childhood center, the women’s Club, the Spanish lessons, the hiking group, the teen art project continue to be life savers. There’s a sense of ‘new normal’, where the same person simultaneously invited us to visit her again in her new home in Spain AND in her beloved Odessa, Ukraine (someday soon, we all hope)!

We brought with us iPads for the preschool program, matzo ball mix and chocolate covered matzah (a huge hit!), Passover snacks and a PJ library book in Ukrainian, your generosity and our desire to help. It was all put to such great use every step of the way. We shopped and cooked and hosted a Passover Seder, we taught and shared, we played with kids and read stories with adults, we took people on walks and trips and picnics. We sang and prayed and laughed and cried together. There was a lot of hugging. We talked about the pain that people carry, we talked about freedom and hopes for the future.  We listened – A LOT. The importance of speaking the same language is the key and cannot be overstated! We gave a lot. It was not enough – it can never be enough. 

As we return home we try to process our experiences and take account of what we are coming back with. We bring with us the stories and names and faces. We bring a sense of devastation and of hope. We bring lessons of resilience and optimism. Most of all we are returning filled with gratitude to TE for recognizing this urge we have to try and play a small role in making this world a little friendlier for people whose lives have been turned upside down. We couldn’t have done any of this without your love and support – THANK YOU!