From the Rabbi

The Jewish year cycle can be understood as an object lesson in extremes, at least at the beginning of the calendar year.

We start in joy, celebrating a new year, and wishes for sweetness, but shaded in the colors of teshuvah throughout the days of repentance. Ten days later, we are at our most abject, fasting and praying through an evening morning and afternoon.

A mere four days after breaking the fast, we’re eating a celebratory meal, a key phrase for the holiday of Sukkot translating as: be happy with your holiday, be completely joyous! This first of the three festivals ends, as they all do, with a yizkor service, which draws us back not just to our memories of lost loved ones, but the recent experience of yizkor on Yom Kippur. But it also concludes with Simhat Torah, where we explode in a frenzy of dance and song and abandon.

One could easily suffer from spiritual whiplash in the Jewish month of Tishrey.

Because then what follows is ……. nothing! A month of NO holidays. Not even a minor fast day, a specific megillah, or tractate, or theme. Heshvan. MarHeshvan, as the rabbis dubbed it, bitter month.

Actually, it seems not bitter or sad to me, but rather wise. Because we actually do have something to look forward to, in the regular Torah cycle. It’s that perpetual opportunity to see ourselves, our ancestors, our community our family, our values in Torah, that which we have carried and venerated in our sanctuary through that fall festival cycle.

Our regular engagement with Torah is what makes us a kehillah kadosh¸ a holy community.

Rabbi Liz