June 10, 2006 –Sivan 14, 5766

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman, Temple Beth El, Stamford, Connecticut

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Contents of the Shabbat O Gram:

(Click to scroll down)

Just the Facts (service schedule)

The Rabid Rabbi

Mitzvah/Tzedakkah Opportunities

Ask the Rabbi

Spiritual Journey on the Web

Required Reading and Action Items (links to key articles on Israel and Jewish life)

Announcements (goings on in and around TBE)

Joke for the Week

Quote for the Week

“With respect to America's global war on terror, the assassination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Thursday is even more significant than the assassination of Osama bin Laden would be. Zarqawi is the terrorist responsible for the greatest number of casualties in recent years, and therefore, his liquidation has operational significance. Bin Laden's liquidation would have only moral significance.”

-Yossi Melman (Ha’aretz)

JUST THE FACTS

Friday Evening

Candle lighting: 8:07pm on Friday, 09 June 2006,- Havdalah is at 9:11pm on Saturday evening. For candle lighting times, other Jewish calendar information, and to download a Jewish calendar to your PDA, click on http://www.hebcal.com/. To see the festivals of other faiths as well, go to http://www.interfaithcalendar.org/

7^th grade Shabbat dinner - 5:45 PM

7^th graders will take class photos before the service (it won’t be dark yet) so families are invited to bring cameras.

Kabbalat Shabbat: 7:30 PM – in the sanctuary – Aliyah service for the 7^th grade (Hay class). Mazal tov to them!!!

For those who can’t get enough of Tot Shabbat, Nurit conducts Tot Shabbat Morning at 10:30 am every Saturday morning. All are welcome to attend.

Shabbat Morning: 9:30 AM – Mazal tov to Samantha Karp who will become Bat Mitzvah this Shabbat morning.

Children’s services: 10:30

Torah Portion: Naso Numbers 4:21 - 7:89

1: 5:11-15
2: 5:16-26
3: 5:27-6:4
4: 6:5-8
5: 6:9-15
6: 6:16-21
7: 6:22-27
maf: 6:22-27

Haftarah Judges 13:2 - 13:25

See a weekly commentary from the UJC Rabbinic Cabinet, at www.ujc.org/mekorchaim. Read the Masorti commentary at http://www.masorti.org/mason/torah/index.asp. University of Judaism, JTS commentary is at: http://learn.jtsa.edu/topics/parashah/. USCJ Torah Sparks can be found at http://uscj.org/item20_467.html. UAHC Shabbat Table Talk discussions are at http://uahc.org/torah/exodus.shtml. Other divrei Torah via the Torahnet home page: http://uahcweb.org/torahnet/. Test your Parasha I.Q.: http://www.ou.org/jewishiq/parsha/default.htm. CLAL’s Torah commentary archive: http://click.topica.com/maaaiRtaaRvQhbV2AtLb/. World Zionist Organization Education page, including Nehama Liebowitz archives of parsha commentaries: http://www.moreshet.net/web/index.asp?f=1 For a more Kabbalistic/Zionist/Orthodox perspective from Rav Kook, first Chief Rabbi of Israel, go to http://www.geocities.com/m_yericho/ravkook/index.html. For some probing questions and meditations on key verses of the portion, with a liberal kabbalistic bent, go to http://www.jewishealing.com/learning.html or, for Kabbalistic commentaries from the Zohar itself, go to http://www.kabbalah.com/k/index.php/p=zohar/weekly/intro. To see the weekly commentary from Hillel, geared to college students and others, go to http://www.hillel.org/hillel/NewHille.nsf/FCB8259CA861AE57852567D30043BA26/DF7D129F15B3DF0885256AB80058E9C3?OpenDocument. For a Jewish Renewal and feminist approach go to http://rabbishefagold.hypermart.net/Torah1.html . For a comprehensive Orthodox viewpoint from the Israeli rabbi, Yaakov Fogelman, go to the Torah Outreach Program at http://israelvisit.co.il/top/previous.shtml. Guided meditations for each portion by Judith Abrams at http://www.maqom.com/kavannah.pdf

For online Parsha quizzes from Pardes in Israel, go to http://www.pardes.org.il/online_learning/parsha_quizzes/ Torah for Kids: http://www.torah4kids.net/ Weekly Lesson of Popular Israeli Rabbi Mordechai Elon: http://www.elon.org/archives/archives.htm - and his parsha sheets: http://www.mibereshit.org/special/download_eng_pdf.htm From Bar Ilan University: http://www.biu.ac.il/JH/Parasha/eng/; http://www.torahproductions.com/weekly_article.jsp

Monday Morning –Guaranteed Minyan Request – please sign up at www.tbe.org

Rosner Minyan Maker

THE ENTIRE HEBREW BIBLE (AS WELL AS OTHER JEWISH SOURCES) CAN BE FOUND WITH SIDE-BY-SIDE TRANSLATION AT

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/

Morning Minyan: Weekdays at 7:30, Sundays at 9:30 AM

TO ENSURE A “GUARANTEED MINYAN” FOR THE DAY OF YOUR YAHRZEIT – GO TO THE ROSNER MINYAN MAKER AT WWW.TBE.ORG AND ALSO CONTACT ME AT RABBI@TBE.ORG.

We’ve had several people coming lately who are saying kaddish following recent deaths in the family. We want to make sure we have a minyan each day. Your presence any morning is greatly appreciated!

(Some of you might recall some of the letters from camp that I read last Rosh Hashanah. Here’s my column from last week’s “Jewish Week”)

Letters From Camp

http://www.thejewishweek.com/top/editletcontent.php3?artid=5083

In just a few weeks, one of the most important annual rituals of the Jewish calendar will take place: an entire generation will be shipped off to summer camp. In a flash, they’ll all be gone, banished to a world of enormous mosquitoes, clammy bunk beds and off-key renditions of Kumbaya.

Why do Jews, especially, shell out thousands of dollars to subject our kids to this?

I was rummaging through some old stuff recently and came across postcards I sent home from my first summer at overnight camp, when I was 10. It made me appreciate just how well-adjusted my own children are.

“Dear Folks,

I went to the infirmary today. I didn’t feel good. I’m taking pills and I can’t go swimming. Everyone is reading my comics. Not only does my throat hurt, but I’m getting dizzy spells. Please send safety pins. Love, Josh.”

“Dear Folks,

“I’m still coughing a lot. I’m homesick. I’m crying a lot. I don’t feel good. I don’t sleep so good. I’m not eating good. I’m taking pills. I wish you could send a bagel. I’m learning to speak fast Hebrew. Love, Josh.”

“Dear Folks,

I REALLY am sad now. I need more food because I haven’t had anything to eat. My swimming teacher is making me jump into the water but I don’t want to. I’m scared of putting my clothes into the laundry because I’ll lose them and they’ll come back different colors. Send ear plugs.”

What’s funny is that I actually loved camp—even that first year—because I discovered there what children have been discovering about summer camp for decades, and what Jews have known for millennia: When you leave home, you can reinvent yourself. As Eric Simonoff writes in his recent book about the American summer camp experience, “Sleepaway,” camp was the place, “where I knew I wouldn’t be that weird, bookish kid who always had his hand up in class—where, instead, I would be the popular kid, the lifelong camper who knew all the counselors, all the camp songs.”

Ever since the Garden of Eden, abrupt displacement has been a prerequisite for growth. Dorothy, Toto, Ulysses and the Psalmist would agree.

Thousands of years ago, the Jewish exiles from Jerusalem sat by the rivers of Babylon and wept for the home that was no more. They wrote a letter from camp that came to be better known as Psalm 137. Ancient Babylon, with its hanging gardens and spectacular ziggurats, was a metropolitan marvel.

But for the Jews, brought there after the destruction of the first temple in 586 BCE, this was their first Exile. King Nebuchadnezzar’s Army Corps of Engineers had constructed a massive network of canals and aqueducts feeding from the Euphrates. These were the “Rivers of Babylon,” where the Jews sat and wept for Zion. This system of canals, ironically, proved the city’s undoing when the army of the Persian King Cyrus was able to conquer Babylon 50 years later by wading through the waist-deep waters of the drained rivers.

The Psalmist probably knew that when Psalm 137 was written; for this Psalm takes the Jews on a journey from Exile to restoration, from powerlessness to the promise of return. It begins by those rivers, where the tormentors forced the Jews to sing songs of their home; but singing those songs was just what they needed. For in doing so, they learned how to sing the songs of God on alien soil. They set up entirely new institutions so that they would not forget Jerusalem; they called them synagogues. They set up Hebrew schools. They wrote down from memory all the stories and laws that had sustained them back home, all those things they took for granted all those centuries. They painted verbal pictures of what life was like back there in Jerusalem, so their children would not forget.

They collected all these stories and laws into a single scroll, which they called the Torah. And these people came to be known by an entirely new name. They were called Jews.

All this happened by the rivers of Babylon. In the face of utter homelessness, they faced Jerusalem and held it up above their greatest joy. Disregarding their sorry lot and defying their tormentors, they forged a new destiny. Psalm 137 marks the moment when the home team learned how to win on the road.

It is a triumph we have repeated time and time again, and through the experience of homelessness, Judaism has become a stronger and more dynamic faith. The Torah was a product of exile, so was the Babylonian Talmud and later, the Kabbalah. It’s been like this from the very start, from Abraham and Sarah, who were known as Ivri’im, Hebrews, from the word meaning “to cross over.” They crossed over those same rivers, leaving behind the very Mesopotamian soil where their descendants would later weep, choosing homelessness in order to found a new faith.

When Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua bemoaned the uselessness of the Diaspora in an American Jewish Committee forum last month, creating a major stir, he was forgetting the centrality of portability and displacement to the Jewish psyche. The Torah, whether given at Mount Sinai or redacted in Babylonia, did not originate back in Zion. It originated, rather, out of the yearning for Home. The Torah, essentially, is God’s letter from camp.

We send our kids in droves to Jewish camps where they’ll weep by bodies of water with names like Gitchee Gumee, but in essence, they’ll be sitting by the Euphrates, reenacting Psalm 137. And even when they sing Kumbaya, they’ll be able to intuit the Hebrew translation of that title, “Arise, God, and come forth.”

"Like a multi-screen theater,

Synaplex™ offers a variety of Shabbat experiences

for our diverse Jewish community."

-- starsynagogue.org

COMING THIS FALL!!

“Shabbat Re-imagined”

Save the date for our Grand Opening:

Oct 27-28

Come to an informational meeting this Tues., June 13 at 7:30

to see how you can become a part of the excitement!!!

And save the following dates as well…

SYNAPLEX at TBE 5767

Friday and Sat., October 27-28 GRAND OPENING Synaplex Shabbat (including Shabbat Unplugged on Friday night)

Friday, December 8 - Synaplex Shabbat (theme of diversity)

Friday and Sat. January 19 – MLK weekend -Synaplex Shabbat/Shabbat Unplugged – social action theme

Sat. February 10 - Synaplex Shabbat – Havdalah Unplugged

Friday March 9 - Synaplex Shabbat, Shabbat Unplugged,

Shabbat, April 7 -Synaplex Shabbat

Friday and Sat. May 4 and 5 - Synaplex Shabbat/Shabbat Across America, Scholar in residence

Shabbat, June 23 - Synaplex Shabbat, adult b’not mitzvah

For more information, go to www.starsynagogue.org

If you are interested in participating in our steering committee or would like an info packet, contact me at rabbi@tbe.org

http://www.forward.com/articles/7784

Mitzvah/Tzedakkah Opportunties

 
Beth El Cares
Cathy Satz (968-9191; csscounsel@yahoo.com)
Cheryl Wolff (968-6361; cwolff@optonline.net)
BETH EL CARES co-chairs
 
 
HELP ME HELP OTHERS WITHIN OUR COMMUNITY WHO NEED OUR ASSISTANCE BY DONATING TO PERSON TO PERSON.
 
Person to Person located in Darien, Connecticut is an organization that collects new or worn items
such as clothing for babies, kids and adults.
They are looking for donations for only Spring and Summer items.
Needy families in emergency situations will go to Person to Person for assistance.
Person to Person services the Stamford, Norwalk and Darien areas.
 
You may donate clothing, food (canned items) and only brand new unopened toys.
 
We will be bringing a large donation of items on the first of every month.
Please help me with any donations that you would like to make.
I would greatly appreciate it.
I am hoping you can help me with this for my Mitzvah Project
because it is important for us to help others who may need it.
 
This is how you can help:
Please bring your donation to my house, 116 Wedgemere Road,
or e-mail coopbry@aol.com to make arrangements for us to pick it up.
We will do this during June, July and August.
 
Thank you so much for helping the needy. Eric Cooper 968-9591
 

BABYSITTER AVAILABLE

My name is Shira Burstein. I’m twenty one years old, and will be a Senior at Clark University this fall. I’m majoring in Psychology, and have worked with children for a few years now. I babysat at school, have worked with children as a counselor at a sleep away camp as well life guarded. I have my own car, and am available on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays during the week, as well as the weekend. You can reach me any time on my cell phone: (203) 979- 5112

The Annulli family will be staying at an ulpan in Netanya for a few weeks this summer

and would like someone to house and dog sit from July 22 through August 24 or 25.

Please call Richard or Melanie at

203-569-7562 or email mrdrannulli2@yahoo.com.

Is Shakira an anti-Semite?

The answer is, not to my knowledge, but the real question should be: Are public figures fair game for inflammatory gossip? To that the answer is an emphatic “no.”

Last Sunday, a rumor came flying through our Hebrew School that the music star Shakira said that she would “rather sing in front of 1000 pigs than 1 Jew.” Students prepared protest flyers and circulated them, proposing a boycott of her music. Had she actually said that terrible thing, a boycott would definitely be in order (and I’m sure she would feel great pain from such a move by Temple Beth El!). I always encourage our students to become socially aware and to act when they see injustice occurring.

The problem is that, while, hips may not lie, somewhere in this real and cyber universe, whoever started that rumor did. When some of our students approached me with a “Boycott Shakira” flyer, I suggested that they check out the rumor before spreading it. One very responsibly young lady, who has asked to remain anonymous, followed that advice and did the appropriate research. Sure enough, not only is the story unsubstantiated – it’s dead wrong. That student knows how proud I am of her going the extra mile in search of the truth. Here are two important links: http://www.adl.org/rumors/shakira.asp and http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blshakira.htm

Here’s what the Urban Legends site said:

Comments:  Here we are asked to believe not only that a fast-rising pop star appearing on TV to promote her new CD uttered an outrageous slur against an entire people, but that the network aired it intact, without reservation or comment.

Poppycock. It's an obvious, slanderous hoax. For the benefit of those who lack the common sense to recognize it as such, I contacted an MTV spokesman who told me without equivocation that the story is false. This incident never happened.

Though her nationality is Colombian, Shakira's father was a Lebanese immigrant and her name is Arabic (meaning "woman full of grace") — a fact the author of this hoax clearly found ripe for exploitation in a climate of heightened tension between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. But there is no record of Shakira making anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli remarks prior to this, nor any evidence that she has ever held such views.

As the student’s mom always says, quoting the Hebrew word for “silence,” “Check it or Sheket”!

The Awareness Cycle of Shabbat Morning:

Explorations with Rabbi Goldie Milgram

http://www.rebgoldie.com/daven.htm

If prayer services strike you as meaningless collections of Hebrew words and archaic English translations . . . or if you've wondered whether there is a deep structure to the service that might serve your spiritual needs, try the following map. One day it was revealed to me, making my relationship to services before the map similar to what practicing medicine must have felt like before x-rays revealed the human structure.

The Awareness Cycle of Shabbat Morning: A Map of the Psycho-Spiritual Stages of the Prayer Service by Rabbi Goldie Milgram
One:	Awaking to a new Day	Modah Ani
Two:	Gratitude for your body	Asher Yatzar
Three:	Immersing in words of Torah (engaging your mind)	La-asoke
Three:	Awareness of your pure soul	Elohai Neshama
Four:	This morning's blessings	Birkot HaShakhar
Five:	Raising energy/Cultivating feelings	Psalms
Six:	Awareness of Divine Presence	Barkhu
Seven:	Giving and Receiving Love	Shema & Her Blessings
Eight:	Liberation from our Concern with History	G'ulah
Nine:	Expressing the Prayer of Your Heart	Amidah
Ten:	Receiving Guidance and Healing	Kriyat HaTorah
Eleven:	Committing to Engaged Living	Aleynu
Twelve: