Shabbat Shuvah

September 29, 2006 – Tishrei 8, 5767

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman, Temple Beth El, Stamford, Connecticut

Synaplex is coming – in just 28 days!!!!!

Send your friends and relatives the gift of Jewish awareness -- a Shabbat-O-Gram each week, by signing them up at www.tbe.org. To be removed from this mailing list, sent e-mail request to office@tbe.org. If you have signed up and are not receiving our e-mails, check your spam filter to make sure that TBE is not being “spammed out.”

Please give generously to the Person to Person Food Drive

and our High Holy Day Appeal!

My best wishes to all for an easy fast.

May you be sealed for a good year:

“G’mar Hatima Tova”

Contents of the Shabbat O Gram:

(Click to scroll down)

Just the Facts (service schedule)

The (Occasionally) Ranting 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)

TBE Youth Programming

Joke for the Week

Quote for the Week

“Prayer does half, repentance does all.”

- Joshua b. Levi, Leviticus Rabbah

JUST THE FACTS

(The full Yom Kippur Schedule is at www.tbe.org)

L’hitra’ot to the 6^th and 7^th Graders going on their Shabbaton!

Hebrew School on Sunday will be for grades K-5 only.

Special Invitation for Teens:

To TBE teens

From Rabbi Hammerman

On Yom Kippur Day, during the Martyrology section of the service (which occurs a little after 1 PM usually, after all the children’s services are over),  I need your help to do something very special.  This part of the service recalls those Jews who have given their lives over the centuries.  If you are interested in participating in this very moving part of the service, please e-mail me at rabbi@tbe.org.  I will distribute the parts at the end of Kol Nidre services on Sunday night.  If you can’t be here Sunday night, let me know that you are interested and I’ll save something for you.  During services on Monday, I’ll indicate when the teen volunteers should come forward. 

Thanks in advance for your help.

Friday Evening

Candle lighting: 6:22 pm on Friday, September 29 - Havdalah is at 7:22 pm 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/

Kabbalat Shabbat: 6:30 PM –in the sanctuary

Tot Shabbat at TBE – 6:45 PM – in the CHAPEL

If you would like to host a future Tot Shabbat contact the Temple Office at 203-322-6901 or the following members:

Jeff Trell: 203-322-1531

Deb Goldberg: 203-323-3307

Stuart Nekritz: 203-322-0872

Shabbat Morning: 9:30 AM – We will continue our focus on themes of repentance and forgiveness, using Joseph Telushkin’s new book, “Jewish Ethics,” as a guide.

Children’s services: 10:30 AM – (jr. congregation service in the chapel, Tot Shabbat morning downstairs. 6^th and 7^th graders not on the Shabbaton are expected to be in the main sanctuary)

Torah Portion: Ha’azinu – Deuteronomy 32:1 - 32:52 Moses final song for the people of Israel

1: 32:1-6 (6 p'sukim)
2: 32:7-12 (6 p'sukim)
3: 32:13-18 (6 p'sukim)
4: 32:19-28 (10 p'sukim)
5: 32:29-39 (11 p'sukim)
6: 32:40-43 (4 p'sukim)
7: 32:44-52 (9 p'sukim)
maf: 32:48-52 (5 p'sukim)

Haftarah Hosea 14:2-10; Micah 7:18-20; Joel 2:15-27 – for Shabbat Shuvah

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. Also, try http://home.utah.edu/~rfs4/jkmfc.htm. 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

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!

A Guaranteed Minyan has been requested for Tues. Oct. 3.

Please sign up at the Rosner Minyan Maker at www.tbe.org (for those who have had problems, it’s been fixed).

The

(occasionally)

Ranting Rabbi

Full transcripts of the Rosh Hashanah sermons are now up on our website, www.tbe.org.

Audio files will be available in the near future.

From the First Day’s Sermon

“When work becomes 24/7 we lose something precious. It’s like having a musical score with no rests. Everything is about speed and efficiency. It’s all about fast and faster. In the 60 Minutes piece, workers spoke about being praised by their bosses for responding to e-mail at 2 in the morning. I must admit it’s something I’ve done. But please don’t praise me for it! We all want to see people going above and beyond in their work. And as a rabbi, I’ve always enjoyed the flexibility of being able to work at home and at all hours. But we need to listen to the message of the shofar – which today is the silent shofar.

There needs to be a time to turn it off.

Imagine - not blowing the shofar on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. It’s like having a wedding but leaving out the bride. It’s the Seder without Matzah, Hanukkah without the menorah, the playoffs without the Red Sox (OK I said it). It just doesn’t seem right.

We aren’t blowing the shofar today, because it is Shabbat. This happens often, about 28% of the time, though in no particular pattern. Technically, one could make a good argument for sounding it anyway – it used to be done in ancient Jerusalem. Two Psalms hint to us why the shofar is silent today: Psalm 81 states: “Tiku ba'chodesh shofar, ba'keseh l'yom chagainu,” “Blow the shofar on the day of the new moon” - literally, “on the day when the moon is covered.” When you rearrange the first Hebrew letters of those words, something Kabbalists love to do, it spells “B’Shabbat,” “on Shabbat.” So on Shabbat, the blowing is done in a covered, hidden way. And Psalm 89 states, “Ashrei ha’am yodei teruah,” “Happy is the nation that knows the shofar’s sound, they walk in the light of Your joyous presence.”

The happiness doesn’t come from hearing it or blowing it, but from knowing it. And knowing often is best achieved in silence. For Shabbat gives us something even more important than the shofar. More important than the strenuous multi-tasking work of Teshuvah, there is the need to step back and rest. Consider today as the pause between the notes. We heard the shofar all month, and we’ll hear it again tomorrow. But today is Yom Zichron Teruah. Today is the time to reflect. The time to inhale. The time to wait. To live life in the slow lane….

….So slow down. Have dinner with your family. In a June cover story, Time magazine cited studies showing that the more often families eat together, the less likely kids are to smoke, drink, do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables, learn big words and know which fork to use.

Judaism disdains fast food. Hey, even the most noteworthy fast food in our tradition, Matzah, baked in such haste, is eaten at the slowest meal of the year. This year I participated in a colloquium on Jewish eating, paid for, ironically, by McDonalds - as part of the multi million dollar response to a class action suit over misleading labeling and the furor caused by the film “Supersize Me.” What does it mean to eat Jewishly? It means to eat mindfully. It means to be conscious that what’s on your plate was once alive. It means to eat ethically. And it means to eat slowly.

Did you know that some sages of the Talmud felt that one who eats in a public marketplace, meaning one who eats on the run, cannot be a valid witness? They compared it to eating like a dog. The Talmud also states that one who eats slowly lives longer. How many of us make a special point of eating at least one meal a day with our families and having at least one of those meals each week be a slow meal, one that cannot be interrupted by the phone or the perils of the workplace?

Make it a slow meal – at least once a week. Hey, how about Friday night?

….We must act, and we must act fast: There is no margin for error. Each waking moment we all feel like we are behind a NASCAR wheel, continuously straddling the precipice separating life from death, constantly forced to make instant choices between too-hasty action and fatal inaction. Al Gore tells us that Greenland is melting and Roxbury Road will soon be waterfront property. Iranian calling cards are smashing into Nahariya, Safed, Haifa and Tiberias and soon they could have nuclear tips. Zero hour is fast approaching.

… Here’s my first response to Professor Hawking. We are all put on this earth for a tiny speck of a speck of an instant. We need to recognize how agonizingly brief is our allotment of years. But the recognition that our time is short is also our greatest gift - because it forces us to squeeze every ounce that we can from each moment and to gain from each instant a taste of eternity. We must live deliberately and act decisively. We NEED time to act. Because it IS time to act.

From the Second Day’s Sermon

If yesterday’s message was that it is “time to act,” today’s is that it is “time to ask.”

For centuries, traditional Jews have always relied on Rashi’s commentary to understand the text…. It is instructive to know that the normative Jewish way to read this story is to see Abraham as someone who doesn’t take this sitting down. In fact, the very next word, of the next verse is “Vayakam Avraham,” “Abraham stood up.” For Jews, Abraham could remain a hero, a viable patriarch only by standing up for his moral principles even if it meant grappling with God.

I’m sure that comes as news to no one. To be a Jew is to wrestle with God. I have often pointed out that the very meaning of the term Israel is “God wrestler” and indeed that is what Jacob did to prompt his receiving that name. We are all God wrestlers. For many of us, the first Jewish sentence we utter is a question – four of them, in fact, on Pesach. When a baby looks at his mother and says “mama,” he’s actually asking a Hebrew question! “What? How?” Before a Jew even learns to walk she’s already internalizing our inherent cultural need to challenge all convention – to question all assumptions – to scrutinize all orders – even if they come from God.

Stephen Hawking would appreciate that questioning approach. But how can simple skepticism help the world survive another century? Here’s the answer – my second response to Hawking: The ability to question brings out that which is most Godlike in each of us. And it is the empowerment of the individual conscience that will save humankind.

…It’s a scary world when nearly two thirds of us will willingly suspend our own judgment if a guy in a lab coat tells us to, but that’s what Milgrom’s landmark study showed. Nearly two thirds of us will believe authority more or less without question. Think about it, a group of a hundred; all good, moral people, with one dictator, a Hitler or Ahmadinejad, Pol Pot or Jim Jones. And 63 of them won’t raise a finger. That leaves the other 36 of us to be the skeptics, to answer the questions, to challenge what we are told and to stand up for what is right.

Thirty six is an important number in Jewish tradition, by the way. Double chai – and there is a legend that in each generation there are 36 righteous people, the lamed vav (for the Hebrew letters for 30 and 6), who will save the world. In the Talmud, the sage Abaye says that there need to be a minimum of 36 tzaddikim in each generation, but later folklore had it that there are only 36 and that they don’t realize that they are the ones who are saving the world. The person sitting next to you could be a Lamed Vavnik. Or maybe it’s you. Stephen Hawking needs a really strong class of Lamed Vav right now. If we all have done our jobs right, not a single Jew will fall into the category of the 63 – and all will be among the holy 36.

…If the battle cry of the 20^th century was “Power to the People,” the battle cry of the 21^st is “Power to the Person.” But that has been Judaism’s battle cry all along.

We are each supremely empowered individuals, each of us imbued with a godlike understanding of what is right and what wrong. That is the ultimate lesson of the Akeda, for Abraham and for us. Yes, we have entered the era of the supremely empowered individual. But that can save the world only inasmuch as we use that power to connect with others and to protect the rights of every human being. Which is where we will continue our journey on Yom Kippur.

Second Day Sermon:

When Does 36 +63 =100?

Some very attentive teens have approached me regarding some math I used during last week’s second day sermon. First and foremost, I’m so glad they were listening!

So here’s the source of the confusion (which I should have made more clear in my delivery). Based on the percentages taken from the landmark Milgrom study, in which 62.5% of the participants were shown to have, essentially, no moral backbone when given assurances by self-proclaimed “experts,” I imagined a theoretical country of 100 people. From within this population, there would be one outright dictator, a Hitler or Pol Pot, or a charismatic sociopath like a Jim Jones. 63 people would basically follow that person blindly. So 63 + 1 (the leader) = 64. How many would be left? The 36 righteous, the “lamed vav.”

Embedded in Lebanon

I received an extraordinary link from Jami Shapiro, who says “hi” from L.A. It is a first person account of an Israeli unit fighting in Lebanon. Itai Anghel, one of Israel's finest TV journalists is a senior correspondent in Channel 2's "Uvda" ("Fact") investigative news magazine, the Israeli equivalent to famous "60 Minutes.” Itai brings a unique point of view of the war in Lebanon, after being embedded with the fighting troops, and documenting one of the battles with a night vision camera. He is on tour in America this month. His report can be seen at http://switch248-01.castup.net/cunet/gm.asp?ClipMediaID=209947&ak=63628786

Patchworks is Going Kosher

For the past few years, around the holidays, I’ve been visiting the Patchworks Center, which provides Adult Day Services, located at the Rehab Center on Palmers Hill Rd. I had a great time there on Wednesday, blowing the shofar and discussing the New Year. Well, I wanted to get word out to our community that Patchworks is now owned by the Jewish Home for the Elderly in Fairfield and, in fact, it will be going completely kosher in November. If you know of anyone looking for the kind of services they provide, they are at 26 Palmers Hill Rd
Stamford, CT 06902 (203) 276-4993.

Here’s a little blurb from Eileen Walsh, coordinator of Patchworks:

Patchworks Adult Day Center recently became part of The Jewish Home of Fairfield County’s continuum of care. The Stamford adult day center is a medical model adult day center with a goal of providing medical and social services to allow seniors to remain in their home for a longer period of time. We are able to serve individual with a varying medical and cognitive needs.

We offer:

On site Registered Nurse

Full Recreation Program

Personal care assistance provided by Certified Nursing assistants

Kosher snacks and meal service

Social work and referral service.

Door to door handicapped assessable Transportation available

If someone you know one is in need of medical supervision or socialization please call:

203.363 1023

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

Please give generously to the 2006

HIGH HOLIDAY FOOD DRIVE!

September 22- October 2, 2006

Each year TBE members help to start the New Year off with a Mitzvah. You can join the team by bringing in food that will stock the pantry at PERSON to PERSON in Darien. Bags will once again be available for pick up at temple on ROSH HASHANAH. Please take one or more and fill it up with non-perishable, unopened and not expired food. Then, bring it back to temple by Yom Kippur. Your donation will then be delivered on Tuesday, October 3, 2006. Volunteers will be needed that day at PERSON TO PERSON to help unload, sort food and stock the shelves. To help, contact Cheryl Wolff (968-6361) or Cathy Satz (968-9191).

HABITAT FOR HUMANITY VOLUNTEERS NEEDED

Habitat for Humanity is recruiting volunteers to assist with the planning and building of 6 to 9 housing units on West Main Street in Stamford (near the Kentucky Fried Chicken). The actual timing of the building depends on site plan and other approvals, but the ceremonial ground breaking should take place in October 2006. Please contact bknebal@habitatcfc.org if you want to help in any way. Assistance is needed now in the formation stages, as well as later with the building. Bob Knebel, CEO, can tell you what jobs are available.

LOCKS OF LOVE HAIR DONATIONS CONTINUED

Any one wishing to donate 10 or more inches of hair to Locks of Love can contact Cathy or Cheryl for more information on how to donate and how to get your before and after photo on the TBE web sit

Cheryl Wolff

Cathy Satz

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
 

What’s So Bad About Gossip?

A Yom Kippur Primer

I think we all know instinctively how dangerous gossip can be, but as we approach Yom Kippur, during which we recite confessional prayers mentioning this sin again and again, it’s a good time to brush up on what Jewish law has to say. Here is an excellent summary, from Rabbi David Golinkin, the Masorti movement’s chief interpreter of Jewish law (halakha). It’s long and occasional