by Rabbi Roberto Graetz
from the April 2008 Ruach
We learn in the Torah that Nisan, the month during which we celebrate Passover, our Festival of Freedom. It is truly the beginning of the year. For civic, historic, and cultural purposes, forget Rosh HaShanah; that is what the month of Nisan is for.
If you examine this issue of Ruach and the Temple calendar, you will quickly discover that we have embraced this notion. Everything begins in April! On the new Moon of Nisan, we will hold the Bobbie Collen Lecture; later that week we open the exhibit, The Colors of Israel, part of our celebration of Israel’s 60th anniversary. Passover comes a little later, and it culminates this year with our first Family Retreat at Camp Newman. Still during the Nisan moon, Anshei Isaiah has its kick-off dinner, and at the end… Isaiah’s first ever Golf Tournament. If you have time in between these events, you can attend classes on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings, worship on Shabbat and holidays with your community, bake, feed the hungry, learn a page of Talmud, sing and dance, all within one Hebrew month.
Looking at the range of our activities, one soon understands that though the worship life is at the center of what a synagogue does, we are more than merely a religious institution. We see ourselves as part of a people, a culture or, in the words of Mordechai Kaplan, “a civilization.” Sight, sound and taste, body and soul are involved in what we do and who we are as Jews. Through the calendar we connect ourselves to the life of the Jewish people, going back in time – this month to the Exodus from Egypt, the Jewish master story; through the calendar we connect ourselves to Jews everywhere – in Israel and across the globe. We have multiple entry gates to our lives as Jews: with our coming together, we strengthen our own sense of community, while at the same time we bolster our feelings and our obligations for that which lies just beyond ourselves, whether it is a larger Jewish world, or a world in crisis and in need all around us.
We play, we pray, we learn, and we serve as Jews. Ashreynu, how happy is our lot, how rich our heritage and great our chance to make a difference for good in the world we live in!
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