February 8, 2008 – 2 Adar
1, 5768
Thank you to the Katz family for sponsoring this
week’s Shabbat Announcements and Shabbat-O-Gram
in honor of Emily’s reading from the Torah this Shabbat
morning.
Special
Occasion? Sponsor a Shabbat Bulletin, (sent every
Friday morning via e-mail),
the Shabbat
Announcements (Distributed each Shabbat at the
& the
Shabbat-O-Gram. Sponsor all three publications for only
$72
All sponsors will be
acknowledged at the beginning of each of these announcements
and also
listed in our Bi-monthly Bulletin. Call Mindy in the office at 322-6901
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.”
Prior Shabbat-O-Grams are archived at http://www.tbe.org/sog/index.php.
Contents
of the Shabbat O Gram:
(Click
to scroll down)
The (Occasionally) Ranting Rabbi
Mitzvah/Tzedakkah
Opportunities
The
Beth El Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary
Required Reading and Action Items (links
to key articles on Israel and Jewish life)
Quote for the Week
“When Adar arrives, we increase our joy."
(Talmud Ta'anit 29a)
The gematria of word 'in joy’ [Heb. b'simchah] is the same as that of 'year' [Heb. shanah]This means that the joy that a person is inspired to have at this time will be a sourcefrom which he can draw upon himself joy for the whole year. And so it should be God’s will.
(Rebbe Avraham Yehoshua Heschel of Apt.)
Happiness is…
“And Mordecai went forth from the presence of the
king in royal apparel of blue and white, and with a great crown of gold, and
with a rob of fine linen and purple; and the city of Shushan
shouted and was glad. The Jews had light and gladness, and joy and honor.”
Book of Esther 8:15-16
"The Constitution only gives
people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself."
-Ben Franklin
"The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up."
-Mark Twain
"I have no money, no
resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man
alive."
-Henry Miller
"Most people would rather be
certain they're miserable, than risk being happy."
-Robert Anthony
"Be happy while you're
living, for you're a long time dead."
-Scottish Proverb
“Who is happy? The one who is content with
what she has.”
- Talmud, Pirke
Avot
Candle lighting: 4:53 pm on Friday, February
8, 2008. For 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/. The United Synagogue has updated its candlelighting information. To learn more, click here.
THE FULL SERVICE SCHEDULE NOW APPEARS ON THE
SEPARATE TBE ANNOUNCEMENTS E-MAIL
Shabbat Services:
6:30 Dinner for 4th grade families
7:30 Friday night in the sanctuary, (NOTE
SPECIAL TIME), led by our 4th graders
Shabbat morning @ 9:30, Children’s services at
10:30
Morning Minyan:
7:30 Weekdays, 9:30 Sundays
WE’VE BEEN HAVING
DIFFICULTY OF LATE ACHIEVING A MINYAN EACH DAY.
PEOPLE WHO ARE SAYING KADDISH NEED YOUR HELP! PLEASE COME TO MINYAN!
TO ENSURE A “GUARANTEED MINYAN” FOR THE DAY OF
YOUR YAHRZEIT – GO TO THE ROSNER MINYAN MAKER AT WWW.TBE.ORG
AND THEN NOTIFY OUR OFFICE.
Now you can become more comfortable with the prayers of our
morning service by heading to…
http://www.tbe.org/site/sog/minyanmastery.htm
Reminder of our “No
School No Shul” policy: On days when Stamford
Torah Reading For
Shabbat Morning
Torah Portion:
Terumah
The construction of the Sanctuary
Torah
Portion: Exodus 25:1 - 27:19
1:
25:1-5
2: 25:6-9
3: 25:10-16
4: 25:17-22
5: 25:23-30
6: 25:31-33
7: 25:34-40
maf: 27:17-19
Haftarah: I Kings 5:26 - 6:13
- myjewishlearning.com
- Torah
from JTS
- JTS Podcasts
- American Jewish University
- Academy for Jewish Religion
The Anne Frank Rule
by Joshua Hammerman
Spcial To The Jewish Week
http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c55_a3834/Editorial__Opinion/Opinion.html
In Shalom Auslander’s angry, narcissistic, yet shockingly brilliant
memoir “Foreskin’s Lament,” he describes the horrible way his parents inflicted
guilt as “going Holocaust” on him, as in “Do you know how many Jews died at the
hands of the Nazis so you can keep kosher?” The Holocaust itself becomes a
character in the narrative: “Mr. Holocaust,” he calls it, the bearer of eternal
Jewish trauma. Auslander is numbed by the naked bodies in the
newsreel footage he watches at school assemblies. He struggles with the
horror even as he trivializes it, out-Rothing even
Philip Roth in his cynical detachment.
Similarly, in the
documentary “Kike Like Me,” recently broadcast on the
Sundance channel, Jamie Kastner takes us on a
sophomoric, self-indulgent road trip through the Jewish world, culminating with
a visit to
As we marked the 63rd
anniversary of
This process is inevitable
and for the most part beneficial. When we lose a loved one, the grief
eventually gives way to “normalcy” — but not normalcy as it was before the
person died. Instead, a new equilibrium forms, an
altered worldview, in which the story of that departed relative becomes one
with our own, imbuing our lives with added meaning.
The Holocaust is hardly
typical, but it is noteworthy that prior tragedies in Jewish history eventually
yielded rich new fruit. Seven decades after the destruction of the
Historians will argue the
fine points here, but what is irrefutable is that the Holocaust is becoming in
some manner normalized, especially among Jews born long after the liberation. I
sympathize greatly with the survivors forced to swallow the shocking fruits of
this new normalcy. One shudders at how they must respond to Auslander’s insolent prose or David Deutch’s
humor, as quoted in Heeb Magazine, including “jokes”
like “So I guess you don’t think the Holocaust is funny. But I gotta tell you, it killed them back in
And we thought that the
greatest danger to the memory of the Holocaust came from the anti-Semitic
deniers! I ask the survivors to have patience, somehow, and to recognize that
out of this rudeness will emerge, eventually, renewal.
On the other hand, while
this generational seismic shift is taking place, it is clear that boundaries are needed to protect the martyrs from the shockmeisters. Just as the ancient rabbis believed in
building a “fence around the Torah” to safeguard the commandments, so must we
build a “fence around
In my house, we have the
Anne Frank Rule.
One night during a recent
school vacation, my family was engaged in a stimulating round of “Apples to
Apples” — that popular game where a rotating judge picks a descriptive card
(like “refreshing,” or “feh!”)
and other contestants select cards that they hope the judge will consider the
best possible match (like “Passover” and “Alan Dershowitz”).
Naturally, we were playing the Jewish version.
I’ve found this game to be
a very helpful tool in navigating through the complex choices of Jewish
identity. Echoing the randomness of such choices, “Apples” effortlessly
shuttles us from lox to Leviticus and from Moses to Jackie Mason; from the sublime to the ridiculous.
This reflects the same
randomness experienced by Auslander, Kastner and
their contemporaries, as they shuffle various pieces of the Jewish identity
puzzle through their psychological playlists.
This particular game was
one of our all-timers. It came down to the final hand, with my two teenagers
and I each having a chance to win. With the game on the line, we doubled the
stakes and pulled out two descriptive cards: “odd” and “offensive.”
Ethan and Dan played “
You see, I had just drawn
“Anne Frank.”
We have a little rule in
my family, one suggested to us by a close friend. Whoever plays the “Anne
Frank” card automatically wins that hand. No questions asked. The idea is that
it would be offensive to Anne’s memory, and by extension, all Holocaust
victims, for Anne to lose to, say, “Joan Rivers” or “potato kugel.”
But here, the exact
opposite would be occurring. Anne would win for matching “odd” and “offensive.”
How could we shame her in this way?
I succumbed to that logic
and pulled back the card. I lost the battle but won the war, as my family then
engaged in a dialogue about how, just as Anne’s is no normal card, the
Holocaust is not just any old piece of the Jewish identity puzzle.
This Golden Age of global
free expression is busting boundaries and demolishing dictatorships everywhere.
But in our yearning to infiltrate the Great Wall, let’s remember to preserve
that fence around
God, Judaism and the Internet
On Wednesday, I had the
pleasure of participating in a Jewish Week forum on Jews and the Internet. Read the Editor’s Blog report on the evening here.
Check The
Jewish Week's web site over the next several days for videotaped
highlights. Below are some quotes and
sources that I shared to help spark the discussion.
1) Rabbi Avraham
Ya’akov of Sadigora (19th
century)
“You can learn something from everything:
o
From the
railway – we learn that one moment’s delay can throw everything off
schedule;
o
from the
telegraph we learn that every word counts;
o
and from
the telephone we learn that what we say Here is heard There.”
2) Martin Buber “All real
living is meeting”
3) Fritjof Capra,
“The
Web of Life”
“To regain our full humanity, we have to regain our
connectedness with the entire web of
life. This reconnecting, religio in
Latin, is the very essence of the spiritual grounding
of deep ecology.”
4) Chris
Anderson, “The Long Tail”
“The era of one size fits all is ending, and
in its place is something new, a market of multitudes.” “The mainstream has been shattered into a zillion different cultural
shards. * Increasingly the mass market is turning into a mass of niches.”
* In Lurianic Kabbala, holy sparks are embedded in shards of shattered divine vessels scattered
throughout the universe.
5) The great Hasidic
master Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav: “It is good to have a special room set aside for
sacred study and prayer, secluded meditation and conversation with God….and speak with Him about everything that is going
on in your life. Confess to Her all your sins, transgressions and failings, and speak to
Him freely as one speaks to a friend.
You should speak at length, talk and talk some more,
argue with Her, sigh and weep, and ask that S/He have mercy and allow us
to achieve true devotion."
6) Joshua Hammerman, “thelordismyshepherd.com: Seeking God in
Cyberspace”
Sit down in front of your computer
late at night and see what is there. Reach out to connect — and not necessarily
with people. Simply connecting to the latest news, to stock results or late
ball scores, is enough to evoke a feeling of “humble surrender” and awe. How
lovely can this universe be, how orderly and sound, when, without waking a
soul, I can order cut-rate plane tickets to
7) ON PRIVACY: Joshua Hammerman, "Invasions of Privacy" (The Jewish Week
7/27/2007 )
“The ancient rabbis wondered what was it that moved the Moabite prophet Balaam to bless
Much later, in the 10th century, a sage named Rabbenu Gershom decreed
opening someone else's mail to be punishable by excommunication, from which
is derived the general principle that we can't pick through our neighbor's
garbage to search out secrets. What's private must be
respected. How often are we forwarded e-mail
notes that were sent by a third party, without the permission of that third
party? Gershom would have had a problem with that.
J-Date vs. Genesis and Yenta the Matchmaker: A
Comparative Grid
J-Date Eliezer Yenta
|
3rd Party
Involvement |
Minimally |
Yes (plus camels) |
Yes |
|
Cost |
$30/month and up |
Slave wages |
Yenta gets to gloat |
|
Privacy |
The whole world can know |
You get to wear a veil |
The whole town WILL know |
|
Success
Rate |
“Countless” marriages |
Excellent – if you have
camels |
1 in 5 success rate with Tevye |
|
Potential
for Deviants |
yes |
no |
Lazer Wolf |
|
# of People
Served |
Over 600,000 |
2 |
Anatevka |
|
Compatibility |
Profiles viewed/ Click!system Similar tastes |
Veiled (Gen. 24:50 - look
for opposites) |
“The way he sees and the
way she looks…” Compatibility of families |
Nurit and Melanie’s Holiday
Songs
Now
available in our gift shop, a new CD compilation of children’s holiday songs
from our own Nurit Avigdor, assisted by Melanie Roloff, daughter of TBE teacher
Galit Roloff. Nurit has entertained and
taught children here for generations, and her music
continues to enchant children here every week on Shabbat morning and three
times a month at Tot Shabbat on Friday.
This CD contains some of our all-time Nurit favorites. Check it out at our gift shop!