November 17-24, 2006
– Heshvan 20-27 5767
Happy
Thanksgiving and Safe Travels to All
As you sit down with your families at
the table, pause for a moment to remember how fortunate we are, to be thankful
for every moment that we are alive, for the capacity to love and to share. Say a spontaneous prayer and try to give
it a Jewish context - the formula for a blessing would be perfect. Just begin as we would with any
blessing, “Baruch ata Adonai, Elohaynu Melech ha-olam” and then
add, in English “we are so thankful for ___.”
Tradition instructs us to try to
utter 100 blessings every day, whether spontaneous or not. Some can be found in the grace after
meals (see Birkat
Ha-mazon explained in Wikipedia and in the Jewish
Virtual Library) If you would
like to add some or all of that beautiful prayer to your Thanksgiving meal, it
can be downloaded at Birkat
Hamazon [pdf]
Join your fellow community members and volunteer on Super Sunday,
(UJF's community phone-a-thon)
on December 3, 2006.
What do you have in common
with people from all these countries?
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They are among the thousands
who have visited our website over the past two weeks. Yes, EVEN the
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.”
Tapestry 2006
Click here to
learn more and to sign up for Tapestry,
a
night of adult Jewish Education on November 18, 2006 – THIS WEEKEND! Cantor Littman and Education Director,
Eran Vaisben will be participating, representing TBE, while I have the distinct
pleasure of officiating at the wedding of TBE’s own David Miller to Susan
Nebenzahl (and Mazal Tov also to David’s parents, Andy and Toby Miller!)
BTW
– Adult Ed at TBE is having a banner year. We had over 30 people at last Saturday
night’s Israeli Movie Night showing of “The Syrian Bride,”
and around 300 at this week’s Hoffman lecture. You can still join our Sunday classes
and partake in our Synaplex seminars; plus we’ve got two excellent
scholars-in-residence coming this winter.
Save the date for the next Israeli Movie Night, Dec. 9.
Contents
of the Shabbat O Gram:
(Click
to scroll down)
Just
the Facts (service schedule)
The Beth El Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary
(new)
The (Occasionally) Ranting Rabbi
Mitzvah/Tzedakkah Opportunities
Required Reading and Action Items (links
to key articles on Israel and Jewish life)
Announcements (goings on in and around
TBE)
Quote for the Week
“It’s 1938 and
Friday Evening
Candle
lighting: 4:17 pm pm on Friday, 17
November 2006; 4:12 PM next Friday, the 24th. For candle lighting times, Havdalah
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/
Shabbat Evening
service: 6:30 PM (both weeks)– in the chapel
Tot Shabbat: 6:45 (this Friday only) – in
the lobby.
No Tot Shabbat next Friday night
Shabbat
Morning: 9:30 AM– on Shabbat, we celebrate the Bar Mitzvah of Zachary
Krowitz. Mazal tov to Zac and to
his parents Scott and Liz!
Children’s services: 10:30 AM – (jr.
congregation service in the chapel, Tot Shabbat morning downstairs. 6th
and 7th graders are expected to be in the main sanctuary) – on
Thanksgiving weekend, only Nurit’s service will be held. Older children are most welcome in the
main service.
Our Torah
Reading for Shabbat Morning
Parashat Chayei Sara
פרשת חיי שרה
Genesis 23:1 - 25:18 – The Abraham
Saga Continues…Sarah dies, Isaac needs a wife…
1: 24:10-14
2: 24:15-20
3: 24:21-26
4: 24:27-33
5: 24:34-41
6: 24:42-49
7: 24:50-52
maf: 24:50-52
Haftarah I Kings 1:1 - 1:31
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://www.jtsa.edu/community/parashah/.
USCJ Torah
THE ENTIRE
HEBREW BIBLE (AS WELL AS OTHER JEWISH SOURCES) CAN BE FOUND WITH SIDE-BY-SIDE
TRANSLATION AT
Morning Minyan: Weekdays at 7:30, Sundays at
9:30 AM
ON THURSDAY AND FRIDAY
OF THANKSGIVING WEEK, MINYAN WILL BE AT THE SPECIAL
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!
Please sign up at the Rosner Minyan Maker at www.tbe.org
The Beth El Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary
Ilana
Springer’s Commentary on last week’s portion: VaYera
H
A
T
E.
These are four letters that I have never
been allowed to string together and use in my household. As a young child I did not really
understand why I could not use the word, not even when I was describing my feelings
towards spinach. As I have grown
up, and now as I accept the responsibilities of being a Bat Mitzvah, it has
become much clearer to me why my parents insisted that we not use that
term. You see millions of people
have died through out history, and are still dying today, as the result of that
word. With that in mind I decided
to focus my mitzvah project on the elimination of hatred locally and hopefully
more broadly.
As you have seen today I have chosen to
serve as the first Youth Advocate for the No Hate But Harmony program affiliated
with my dance school. Through my
support of this program I have come to realize that bullying is a terrible act
of hate that can cause all kinds of harm.
I believe that it is something that must be prevented. I hear about acts of hatred too often
and want to stop it.
Hate is something that has always bothered
me. When I was six I went with my brother to Rabbi Hammerman’s office
because we were very upset about a Pokemon trading card that contained
something that looked very similar to a swastika. Paul and I wanted to stand up
to this, and were seeking the rabbi’s guidance*. It turns out that it was not a swastika,
but rather backwards and as a result has a whole different meaning to the
Japanese, who created Pokemon. This lesson about standing up to hatred in a
funny way became a lesson to us on accepting the differences of others.
Speaking of funny, in the torah portion I
read from this morning Isaac is born.
Isaac’s name in Hebrew means laughter. While Isaac is still a boy,
his brother Ishmael is sent away from his family because he was making fun of
Isaac. Actually, that is just Rashi’s view. The torah itself said that
Ishmael was Metzachek. That just means that he was playing or having fun but
since the word Metzachek is a play on Isaacs name, which is Yitzchak, Rashi and
other commentators assumed that he was making fun of Isaac.
It is true that hatred, and its harmful
consequences, very often begin with mockery or making fun of people. Think of
all the ethnic jokes that people laugh at. Look at the examples that No Hate
But Harmony has provided us this morning.
We all do it, and don’t realize how dangerous it really is. The
holocaust began with cartoons and caricatures making fun of Jews.
It’s important to note, that sometimes
in order to address hatred; the two parties have to be separated. With Ishmael
and Isaac, that was the case. G-d doesn’t take sides, and as a result, he
continued to care for Ishmael and enabled him to become the father of the Arab
people. While I was studying this portion I looked in the Koran, the muslins
holiest book. I was fascinated to discover that in the Koran Ishmael is the
favored child over Isaac and was the one whom Abraham was told to sacrifice.
Anyway, the animosity between Ishmael and
Isaac continues to this day between Arabs and Israelis. So in this case, the
timeout between Ishmael and Isaac has lasted for hundreds of generations. I
hope someday there will be peace.
The No Hate But Harmony dancers this
morning depicted a scene entitled I Am Who I Am. They made it very clear to all of us
that we need to be proud of who we are, and tolerant of any of our G-d given
differences. As I become a Bat Mitzvah
I would suggest that we all follow this advice.
*(for background, see my article, Pokemon's
"Swastika" and the Right to Cultural Privacy)
The
(occasionally)
The General
Assembly
For those of us unable to attend this week’s General
Assembly of the U.J.C. in
One chilling highlight was the opening plenary
keynote speech by
existential struggle against
Islamist government of
"It’s 1938, and
preparation for slaughter," Netanyahu said. Iranian
President Mahmoud "Ahmedinijad takes his cue from Hitler, and no one
cares.
Every week he talks about erasing
he is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state."
See: Video: Netanyahu in the
GA
See highlights of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's dramatic address on video, or
read his
speech.
The Most
“Ageless” Storah Ever Told
If you liked
Storahtelling, you’ll LOVE Storahtelling’s new weekly blog about
the Torah portion Find it at http://storahtelling.blogspot.com/.
I received a question
from a congregant last week about the particular word used to describe
God’s remembering Sarah by
giving her a child – Pakad –
can mean both “remember” and “visit,” but that a lesser
used definition of the term would give that visit a more, shall we say,
intimate purpose. So, the
questioner asked, does that mean that Isaac could have been the result of some
Jewish form of Immaculate Conception?
I replied that I’ve yet to see such an interpretation among the
traditional commentators, and that the text clearly leads us to believe that
Abraham is the real father. But
there was also a miracle here, of sorts, in the fact that a woman of
Sarah’s age could give birth, and so you will find commentaries explaining
that God did “visit” Sarah to help her to give birth. Whether God could be seen here as a
midwife or fertility specialist is a matter of conjecture. But Isaac’s father? Not in the Jewish sources.
Here is what
Amichai Lau-Levi (“Lauviticus”) had to say about last week’s
portion. Lau-Levi has a completely
different take on the miracles of Sarah’s aging process, an
interpretation that will resonate with us no matter how old we happen to be:
This week, Lauviticus is celebrating a private birth of a lovely little girl, auspiciously
echoed in the weekly Torah episode in which a much anticipated little boy is
born.
Also, this week, a visit to that intimate
domain which is most often referred to in the Scriptures as
‘Procreation’, otherwise known as ‘sex’. There’s
lots of that this week – including wife swapping and what will one day be
known as Sodomy, but our focus is senior citizen orgasms. There is a moment in
this week’s tale, VaYera, when Sarah, at 90, hears the Divine promise of
motherhood, and laughs to herself, at herself, a mythic laughter foretelling
the name of her son. But at this moment in the story Isaac is not even a
twinkle in her eye. it’s all about her, and her body. She laughs and then
asks a mysterious question, recorded in Genesis, Chapter 18, verse 12:
"Now that I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I still have
pleasure?"
The word here translated as pleasure is the Hebrew ‘Edna’. Derived
from ‘
‘Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment?’ This is JPS. The
King James Bible, and most other English versions use the word
‘Pleasure’, while the Orthodox Stone Edition of the Artscroll Torah
uses, for some odd reason, the expression ‘good skin’.
Commentaries go to town on this verse. The 11th century interpreter Rashi
writes: ‘She looks at her uterus and at her breast, wondering, will this
still work?’ The Pseudo Jonathan translates this verse: ‘And Sarah
derided in her heart, saying, Now that I am old, is it possible to return to
the days of my youth, for me to have conception, and Abraham old?’
What’s striking here is that Sarah responds not to the promise of
fertility, which one would think would be uppermost in her mind---all those
barren years, and finally the promise of a child of her own---but to the
prospect of pleasure, enjoyment, and sexual excitement: A return to the Garden
of Eden. Is she talking about the bliss of orgasm?
God not only makes Sarah fruitful again; God makes her juicy. The laugh of the
crone, tinged with irony and a sense of the divine ridiculous, rings also with
the joy of remembered ecstasies, maidenhood and maidenhead, a sensual and
sexual fulfillment which, for the moment, overshadows even the dream of
motherhood.
Often in religious poetry---see the Song of Songs---sexual imagery may be a
code for spiritual pleasure, carnal knowing a metaphor for divine bliss.
‘And so Sarah laughed, privately: ‘post menopause, with an old man
for a husband - am I it enjoy
There are many ways to re enter the Garden of Eden. Beyond the obvious orgasmic
option that sex has to offer, in whatever context and age – what is YOUR
personal way to enter this state of mind and heart?
Mazal Tov and Shabbat Shalom
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 FROM DAVID KATZ FOOD DRIVE MITZVAH PROJECT Donate Food to Help the Hungry
All donations will be taken to the local food bank.I will personally shelve the food so the more donations you give, the harder I will work!Boxes will be located in the Hebrew school lobby and at my Bar Mitzvah on 12/2/06.Thank you.David Katz Christmas Eve Dinner/Toiletry CollectionVolunteers are needed to donate food items and serve food at St. Luke’s and Pacific House Homeless Shelters on Christmas Eve 12/24 at 6pm. If you wish to participate in this amazing Mitzvah, please call Cheryl Wolff 968-6361 or email cwolff@optonline.net. This has always been an amazing event. Respond early if you wish to serve, since the event fills up fast.The third grade Hebrew School give to the guests at the Christmas Eve dinners. Start saving thosesamples and watch for details in December telling you where to drop offthe items. 
American Red Cross
Connecticut
Please Donate Blood for Patients Among Us
Like Alex
November 19
JCC
11-3:45