The CBI March 2017 / Adar 5777 Newsletter is here!
In this month’s newsletter you’ll find Notes from the Rabbi, service times for Shabbat, the President’s Column, reminders about Purim (March 11) and our second-night community seder (April 11), remembrances of Tu BiShvat, and more!
Posted in Adar, newsletter
Dear all,
Shavua tov — a good new week to you.
Join us on Shabbat morning at 9:30am for Shabbat morning services led by Rabbi Rachel.
This week we’re reading Terumah. If you’d like to read some commentaries on this week’s Torah portion, here are a few:
Here is a commentary from my friend and colleague Rabbi David Evan Markus; Denominational ins and outs, the new mishkan.
And here are commentaries from the URJ: Terumah at the URJ.
Many thanks to our shamashim, the members who host our Shabbat services each week. If you would like to join that group, please contact the office.
Blessings to all,
Rabbi Rachel
Posted in Uncategorized
Dear all,
Shavua tov — a good new week to you.
Join us on Shabbat morning at 9:30am for Shabbat morning services led by Rabbi Lori Shaller, who writes:
Please join me this Shabbat morning as we explore connections between Parshat Mishpatim (Judgements) and Shabbat Shekalim, the Shabbat of the Shekels and one of four special Shabatot before Pesach. I look forward to being with you! — Rabbi Lori
This week we’re reading Mishpatim. If you’d like to read some commentaries on this week’s Torah portion, here are a few:
And here are commentaries from the URJ: Mishpatim at the URJ.
Many thanks to our shamashim, the members who host our Shabbat services each week. If you would like to join that group, please contact the office.
Blessings to all,
Rabbi Rachel
Posted in Shabbat
Dear all,
Shavua tov — a good new week to you.
Join us on Shabbat morning at 9:30am for Shabbat morning services led by Rabbi Pam Wax.
This week we’re reading Yitro. If you’d like to read some commentaries on this week’s Torah portion, here are a few:
And here are commentaries from the URJ: Yitro at the URJ.
Many thanks to our shamashim, the members who host our Shabbat services each week. If you would like to join that group, please contact the office.
Blessings to all,
Rabbi Rachel
Posted in Shabbat
This morning we sang excerpts from the Song at the Sea. We sang my favorite line from that song: עָזִי וְזִמרָת יָה וַיְהִי–לִי לִישֻעָה.
That line is often translated as “God is my strength and my might, and will be my deliverance.” But zimra doesn’t mean “might,” it means “song” — as in psukei d’zimra, our poems and songs of praise. Sometimes I translate this line as “God is my strength and my song, and will be my salvation.” I like the idea that both my strength, and my song, are ways of finding God. But the best translation I know is Rabbi Shefa Gold’s translation (and by the way, she also wrote the melody for this verse that we’re singing this morning): “My strength (balanced with) God’s song will be my salvation.”
My strength, balanced with God’s song, will be my salvation.
Some of us may be allergic to the word “salvation,” which feels kind of… Christian, somehow. Though of course the notion of a God Who saves us was a Jewish idea long before the birth of Rabbi Jesus. One paradigmatic example of God’s salvation is the crossing of the Sea of Reeds — which is in today’s Torah portion. God parted the waters and we came through. We sing about it every week when we sing Mi Chamocha — “the water is wide…”
Y’all probably know by now that I don’t understand this as a historical story. This is a true story in the way that great literature is true. This is a true story because it speaks to one of our deepest human hopes: that when we are in tight places, we will find a way out. That when we are trapped between an advancing army and the sea, we will find a way through. That if we step into the sea, if we cultivate faith in a better future, we can partner with something beyond ourselves to bring that better future into being.
We partner with something beyond ourselves. My strength, balanced with God’s song.
We need our own strength in order to cross the sea, to face whatever difficulties arise in our lives — and every life holds tsuris, “suffering,” which comes from the same root as Mitzrayim, “the Narrow Place.” Every life has times when we feel trapped in the narrowness of our own circumstance. Life’s challenges call forth our strength. Our task is to feel our own strength flowing through us, and to know that we have the inner resources the moment demands.
And we need God’s song in order to cross the sea. We need music that uplifts the heart. We need love to sing its melody in us. We need hope, and heart-opening, and joy. If we try to cross the sea without those things, we might manage to walk across the sand, but we’d be like the figures in the midrash who were so busy kvetching about the muddy sea floor that they forgot to notice the miracle all around them, and as a result, when they reached the other side they weren’t really free.
My strength, balanced with God’s song. That’s what gets us across the sea. That’s what gets us from the narrow place into expansiveness. That’s what enables us to experience spiritual growth and transformation. Our own core strength, balanced with the ineffable: with song and joy, with meaning and love.
This is the d’varling that Rabbi Rachel gave at shul on Shabbat (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)
Posted in divrei Torah
Dear all,
Shavua tov — a good new week to you.
Join us on Shabbat morning at 9:30am for Shabbat morning services led by Rabbi Rachel — followed by our Tu BiShvat lunch seder at 11am. (Please RSVP for the seder so we know how best to prepare!)
(See flyer, below.)
There will also be a kids’ service with puppetry and Tu BiShvat activities in the classroom during the same time as the “regular” service — please RSVP to maggiddavid@gmail.com for that.
This week we’re reading parashat Beshalach. If you’d like to read some commentaries on this week’s Torah portion, here are a few:
And here are commentaries from the URJ: B’shalach at the URJ.
Many thanks to our shamashim, the members who host our Shabbat services each week. If you would like to join that group, please contact the office.
Blessings to all,
Rabbi Rachel
Don’t miss Tu BiShvat! RSVP now:
Posted in Shabbat, Tu BiShvat
Right now in our cycle of Torah readings (parashat Bo) we’re reading about the plagues and the start of the Exodus. Looking for inspiration on this week’s parsha, I turned to the Hasidic master known as the Me’or Eynayim, “The Light of the Eyes.” (His given name was Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl.) He writes about Egypt as a place of existential exile, and about what happens to us spiritually when we are brought forth from there.
Slavery in Egypt is our tradition’s ultimate example of גלות / galut, existential alienation from God. It’s the paradigmatic example of constriction. When we talk about being slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt, we’re also always talking about experiences of constriction in the narrow places of our lives now.
For the Me’or Eynayim, galut is a state of not-knowing God. It’s a state of having fallen so far from unity that we don’t even realize we’ve fallen. This, he says, is what we experienced in the Narrow Place. And Pharaoh is the exemplar of exile. He saw himself as a god, and had no awareness of a Source greater than himself.
When one is in this kind of galut, it’s hard to know the difference between what will give life and what will deaden us. Torah instructs us to “choose life,” but it’s hard to know what will enliven us when we’re in a place of alienation from our Source. What the Exodus offers us is the opportunity to leave existential exile, and in that leaving, to regain the capacity for moral choice.
In the state of galut that we experience when we’re in life’s Narrow Places, there’s only katnut-consciousness, small mind. It’s a vicious cycle, because exile creates small mind, and small mind makes it hard to imagine breaking free from exile.
Emerging from the Narrow Place means being reborn from katnut into gadlut, from small mind into expansive consciousness. The words גלות / galut and גדלות / gadlut are similar, but there’s one letter of difference between them: the letter ד / daled, which — as I was powerfully reminded by Rabbi David Ingber in his extraordinary sermon on doorways and welcoming the stranger last night — is a delet, a door. Galut is exile; gadlut is greatness, or expanded-mind. We begin in exile. We go through a door, a transformation, a state-change. And then we reach gadlut, “big mind.” And once we’ve reached expansive consciousness, we can seek to know God wholly. That’s why we were brought forth from Egypt, says the Me’or Eynayim: in order to know God wholly.
We were brought forth from Egypt in order to see beyond the binaries of our own constriction. Once we begin to glimpse gadlut, the constrictions of exile fall away.
Exile can be self-perpetuating, because when we’re in it, it’s hard to see a way out. Depression is like that. Despair is like that. Overwhelm is like that. Sometimes if I look at everything that’s wrong with the world, exile rushes in and washes me away. But if we can open our minds even for an instant to glimpse the prospect of a better life, the fact of glimpsing a redemptive possibility makes that redemption possible.
Shabbat is our chance to glimpse the world redeemed — to live for one day a week not in grief at the world as it is, but in celebration of the world as it should be. May we emerge from Shabbat ready to roll up our sleeves, to combat small-mindedness wherever we find it, and to choose to bring more life everywhere we go.
This is the d’var Torah that Rabbi Rachel offered at shul this morning. (Cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)
Posted in divrei Torah
