Thinking About Summer
July 1, 2010
by Rabbi Joey
Summer means a lot of things for the Jews. For one thing, it’s the traditional period during which Hebrew School teachers quit oppressing me and my friends. The hallways darkened and the final chalk conjugations of early May yielded to half-hearted reminders that people ate dairy at Shavuos. Mr. Gomborow and Mr. Shindler, immigrant classroom managers from European firestorms, removed their suit-jackets and wiped their brows. They despised these American kids, dropped off by mothers in curlers, who motored their wide gas-guzzling coupes like big fish in an aquarium. They were nothing but grief. It was the end of an era, and no one seemed to be paying attention. Even they, angry prophets bewailing their lonely fate in America, rented apartments at the beach only blocks away from where the graduates of Jewish learning academies lay on towels, got tans, and gawked at adolescent girls in bathing suits, while they listened to The Ventures and the Everly Brothers on transistor radios. Better to get some air by the sea than to get swallowed up by the beastly heat in the old synagogues.
Shavuot meant the way out, rather than the way in. Standing on Sinai in the mid-twentieth century, Moses would be disappointed when he’d come down. There would be few hangers on by the time we were in the thick of the sixties. When I somehow landed at a Jewish summer camp in 1963, I learned about the Torah portion dedicated to a foreign sorcerer who attempted to curse the Israelites in the desert, and instead ended up intoning Mah Tovu. I had never heard of Balaam, and the Hebrew School principal turned head counselor momentarily charmed me with this July lullaby. It would be a whole three years later, until I read passages from Elie Wiesel’s Night, and endured for the very first time the poignant communal mourning of millions hitherto unspoken of. A year later, during the summer of love, we all thought we saw a cameo appearance of the Holy One. That’s when our quaking for encircled Jerusalem turned into a liberation we cast in biblical terms. Summertime, until now the lacuna in a truncated American Jewish experience, redeemed the embers of a fire that had all but gone out.
There were the moods of summer too, the heartbreaks, the sizzling asphalt that gave rise to hallucinatory wiggles in the lower atmosphere and made teenagers wonder. We read Kerouac and Camus and fancied ourselves as potential solitary victims, alternately, heroes. We watched the film Z, we sang along to the theme song of Easy Rider. There were a host of chemical inducements to pry open the gap between the rest of the year when we were ostensibly geared to achievement and the hypocrisies and corruptions we perceived on the other side of the time off we called vacation. The life we had been assured was a good one seemed vacant.
All along we learned what we could about love. We now admit that men and women love differently, or at least, asymmetrically, but who knew these things then? This meant that I had to find out what I could away from home, unloved unconditionally, or loved on condition that each of us, apart and together, might construct a path out of the desert towards truth-telling. In this sense, the summer went on for years. The Torah being given in slow motion… Years later, a teacher myself, I began to take up the challenge of this patient time, in terms of the catch-phrase from Song of Songs: “I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.” I became familiar with the tradition that the initials of these words spell out the name of the summer month in the Jewish calendar that precedes Rosh Hashanah. In spiritual terms, I fathomed that recognizing one’s solitude and inevitable sadness, coming to terms with our limits and our lies, can be viewed as a way forward too. For it’s only this kind of awareness that can ultimately serve us.
If we are to plant on feet on the ground and hear the divine voice, it must come about as a result of some legitimate grieving. All those years of growing up and coming forth from a land where everything was a given, required an ecstatic level of being the truth. The summer’s heat can hold us to account. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Shabbat is Everywhere! Join us at the Pool and on the Farm!
June 9, 2010
Shabbat is Everywhere!
Why not celebrate Shabbat outside in the beauty of creation?
Join Havurah Shalom for Shabbat in the Pool, and on the Farm!
SHABBAT IN THE POOL
Saturday, July 24, 10:00 am, Sellwood Park
We have the pool to ourselves 10:00 am-12:00 pm, followed by Shabbat singing, storytelling, picnicking under the trees. All ages welcome.
RSVP by July 15, with family names and/or ages of kids, to enable us to reserve enough life-guards. We will send you directions and an inclement weather plan. Click here to RSVP!
SHABBAT ON THE FARM
Saturday, August 28, 10:30 am, Sauvie Island Organics Farm
We enjoy a brief Shabbat celebration amidst the fields of lovely vegetables. Then, we harvest carrots and corn, search for frogs, play ball in the field – and really sing out about the beauty of creation!
All ages welcome.
RSVP by August 17 to enable us to send you directions and to plan appropriately. Click here to RSVP
Shabbat School 2010-11 Forms and Handbook Posted
May 28, 2010
For links to the 2010-11 school year Shabbat School Handbook, Schedule and Registration Forms, go to this page on our website.
Two Rabbis and 20-Something Jews: Our Connection With Israel: A Conversation Worth Having
April 29, 2010
Thursday, May 13th at 7:00 PM, at Mittleman Jewish Community Center
We will show the acclaimed short documentary Eyes Wide Open, depicting the lead-up to the fabled trip that American Jews take to Israel. This film chronicles the complex sea of emotions and ideas that come up while people are there. Across the denominational spectrum and taking into consideration the range of spiritual and political concerns, we’ll connect with one another. Your generation’s yearnings and worries take center stage. Here’s an opportunity to meet people, speak out, and embrace our rich diversity.
We invite you to bring your friends, age 20-29. Food and beverages for all!
Rabbi Joey Wolf, Havurah Shalom and Rabbi Tzvi Fischer, Portland Kollel
This event is sponsored by Havurah Shalom, Portland Kollel, Mittleman Jewish Community Center, and Moishe House
Operation Reconnect: What We Heard
April 19, 2010
Operation Reconnect is a year-long, Havurah-community-wide process through which we will reconnect ourselves with each other and with our origins as a vibrant, participatory community, and restore our roots in Jewish values and history.
This is being done through a three-step process: 1) Interviews with a significant portion of Havurah members provided information on broad areas of agreement about priorities for the future. The Operation Reconnect Committee analyzed those interviews to isolate and list those priorities. 2) Parlor meetings in April and early May are eliciting group discussions to confirm the themes of greatest interest and help set priorities from among the programming ideas arising from the interviews. 3) A congregation-wide meeting on May 16 will present these findings and information about our plan to implement them.
Remaining parlor meetings are scheduled for April 19 and 25 and May 2. We encourage all Havurah members to attend one of the parlor meetings and the May 16 congregational meeting. What follows is a synopsis of the one-on-one interviews that were held earlier this year.
What We Heard in the Operation Reconnect Interviews
You told us that you are drawn to Havurah because you experience:
- A sense of community. Havurah is a safe, happy and affirming place for most people. This sentiment was articulated by a woman who described the times when her daughters went through their bat mitzvahs. She felt connected to other families in this process and appreciated the involvement of her daughters’ friends. People also commented on the variety of workshops and education programs offered by the education director, including a recent program on death and dying, as being meaningful and not pedantic. Others mentioned the role the Rabbi has played at critical moments of life change, such as offering a special blessing for an unborn child. Many people cited the impact of participation in Shabbat School and the lasting relationships that had emerged out of that experience. Many congregants noted the powerful impact of music in their experience at Havurah.
- A feeling of welcoming. We bring together a relatively diverse, Jewish-identified population, a wide range of belief systems and a wide range of experience with the religion, including a lack thereof. One person mentioned the impact of the Rabbi dropping everything to go to the courthouse to support the sanctioning of gay marriages. Many described opportunities to participate at their own ‘level’ of familiarity with Judaism, having a role in the High Holidays or learning as they led their Shabbat School class. Another person identified the ‘trust’ given to members to pay what you can for membership without requiring documentation. The acceptance of interfaith marriages among membership was also commonly mentioned as a characteristic of our welcoming environment.
Yet you described a Havurah that has become fragmented over time and challenging to connect into – especially for new members:
- People participating in Shabbat school experience Havurah mostly with people participating in Shabbat school. The same is true for people attending services who only see people in that context. Long time members continue to experience relationships with long time members, but no longer recognize anyone when they attend any number of events. These congregants want to engage with other members and participate, but find it difficult to overcome their feeling of being unconnected.
- The staff and their responsibilities are not well-known. There is a sense of an inner circle making decisions, such as who should participate in certain events or which Social Action projects should be emphasized, without a sense of how and why these decisions are made. Some interviewees would like more access to the Rabbi especially as they enter the congregation.
- Access points into Havurah are not clearly defined, nor easy to navigate, especially for newcomers who need to better understand what ‘joining’ means. New members do not understand the structure of Havurah, and the synagogue suffers from not knowing the talents of its membership. Some people wondered if the Rabbi knew who they were, others wanted to participate in services but did not know how to. Still others expressed a desire to connect with Havurahniks living in the same neighborhood but can’t find that information easily. While the overall sentiment towards Shabbat School was positive, there were clear statements about the uneven quality of the experience. Frustration with the wide range of teaching styles led more than one person away from the experience.
- Spiritual life, as might be expected, drew some of the most impassioned comments from congregants. Many people were moved by a more traditional delivery of services. Others prefer non-traditional services. Still others noted a lack of energy around Friday night and Saturday morning services. People raised questions about what the role of politics should be, if any, in services.
Still you expressed great energy around Havurah. You are willing and sometimes eager to make it a more dynamic place. You have some great ideas and some simple ideas for how to do this which we will talk about today.
We heard your desires fall into four overarching categories. Suggestions for concrete changes in programming and the function of Havurah will be discussed after providing these parameters for those suggestions. You want:
- A stronger community marked by clearer points of access. We need better membership (re)orientation, greeters visible at events, the opportunity to meet in mini-havorot and a richer adult education program. All of these points of access will be enhanced with greater emphasis on intergenerational participation.
- More transparency of process and greater accountability. Activities and the people running them need clearly stated goals, along with a sensible and workable communication structure. Everyone needs to know who is responsible for what.
- Increasing clarity around spiritual life issues, driven by a spiritual life committee which is already forming. Spiritual life issues, including low attendance at services and difficulties in getting leaders for Friday night services, have been identified as a concern over the last several years. The findings of Operation Reconnect reinforce that this is an area that needs to be addressed, and Rabbi Liebling has strongly recommended that we should establish a Spiritual Life Committee. We are in the process of getting a committee formed, and if you want to participate on that committee please let Herman Asarnow or Rachel Shimshak know.
- More Social action that is local in nature. You are proud of Havurah’s support for global issues, but you desire a deeper and wider engagement with local needs where participants, especially children, can more easily engage and see the results.
In addition, we want to build on the work done by the group that submitted the Music Grant this year. Unfortunately, we did not receive the grant funding, but we want to form a Music Committee to take that proposal, identify the top priorities and begin to move forward on strengthening music within our community. We believe that it fits with the findings from Operation Reconnect of music being a key way that people feel a connection to Havurah.