OrH Newsletter

Biweekly Newsletter

21 December 2021

The End of the Calendar Year

Well, we have made it to the end of December. It looks a little different to us this year, as the customary running around and family visiting is understandably muted. We are happy to have the memory of Hanukkah’s glow as we slide into 2022, looking for the light. As you can imagine, we have paused our cautious foray into in-person events, but the news isn’t all bad. For our annual fundraising campaign, we are slightly closer to the halfway mark. Please take the opportunity to donate - you may be the one to push us over the 50% line! We also have some wonderful events to look forward to: a Tu Bishvat Seder (we get to celebrate TREES!), a glorious return of the Repairing the World group, and a brand new class to keep our brains active… Liturgy 101. Despite the challenges, we begin 2022 with joy.

OrH Annual Fundraiser

Our annual fundraising campaign is on! We are going strong with just over $12,000 in donations, but we still have a ways to go before we reach our goal of $32,000. Why did we decide on that number? This year is the 32nd anniversary of Or Haneshamah’s founding. It doesn’t hurt that in Hebrew, the number 32 is written "לב" or "lev", which is also the Hebrew word for heart. 

As a small congregation, the cost of running a shul adds up quickly. If you would like to contribute, visit our 5782 Annual Campaign page, where you can see the donation tracker update in real time. Payment can be made by credit card, etransfer or cheque. All donations are eligible for a tax receipt, which will be issued at the end of the year. If you have any questions, or need help navigating the donation process, please email our treasurer, who will be happy to assist you. 

Message from the President 

There are lots of ways to stay connected this winter. We are now well into winter… But we are also into Omicron. Rest assured that services and educational events will continue online – and so will community support. 

The Re-Opening Task Force is continuing to consult regularly on safety concerns.

In the meanwhile, we will be holding a Tu Bishvat Seder online Sunday, January 16. Check the website for more details!

Shira, as Rituals Coordinator, is planning a Liturgy 101 series (a practical intro to service structure and prayers). It begins January 17, so check out the details on the website. She will also be leading 4th Saturday Shabbat services, starting January 29.

I also want to highlight the great work of our Learning coordinator, who has lined up educational opportunities for the next winter months. Please check our website for events on Indigenous reconciliation, climate change and racism, and Israel/Palestine. Our Learning coordinator is also helping with a Board priority, which is to get some signage in our Cleary Avenue space rented from the First Unitarians. We will be meeting back there at some point, and it would be lovely to have some signs so that folks can find us.

The Board was approached by Reconstructing Judaism to test out a new Racial Diversity, Equity and Inclusion audit tool. The short-term task force went through both ritual materials and our physical space using a checklist, and are also reflecting on next steps to make our very inclusive congregation even more so. We hope to report back on results – to the Congregation and to the Reconstructing Judaism Convention – in March. 

Not only are we presenting to the RJ Convention, but Rabbi Liz is getting a 25-year service award. I want to remind you that  B’Yachad: Reconstructing Judaism Together Convention is from March 23-27, 2022, and it is online! There are so many great opportunities to learn, sing, and celebrate and I hope you will join us. Please register.

Best wishes from
Carolyn, on behalf of the Board (Elijah, Nicola, Shira, Diana, Myrna, Andrea, Lyn)

Reopening Advisory Committee -
How We Approach In-Person Events

As case counts go down and vaccination rates go up, we look forward to in-person events, for holidays, Shabbat, and learning. To do this safely, the Board has convened a Reopening Advisory Committee, composed of 5 health professionals within the Or Haneshamah community and chaired by the Rituals Coordinator. This group meets as needed and provides recommendations to the OrH board, who makes decisions to protect the health of our community. While we would all love to know when we can go back to "normal" shul life, the only thing we can know for certain is that the situation is always changing. With that in mind, we can share some of our basic principles as we move forward:

• Anyone (including children) participating in an indoor activity at Cleary Ave must be fully vaccinated, i.e. 2 weeks past their second dose.
• With rare exceptions for a person leading an event, everyone remains masked even indoors.
• At this time, eating indoors still represents a high risk of transmission.
• We use an online tool created by MIT which takes into consideration room size, air circulation, and activity level, among other factors, in order to evaluate risks and determine capacity limits.
• Even as we plan in-person events, we will continue to offer hybrid access (for online participants) as much as possible. 
• The Board will consult with the Reopening Advisory Committee, the Rabbi and the Educator as circumstances change and whenever we need to reassess our guidelines.

We will have more information about our reopening approach on the website shortly, and we will work to keep our communication clear and up-to-date. Questions can be directed to rituals@orh.ca.

Words of the Spirit
Whose Christmas Is It? Some Of Ours, Too!

Is this you? You have a “Christmas Family.” They are your in-laws, your grandparents, or your cousins. It could be the beautiful kinship network that is your family-of-choice, or your partner. May your children celebrate with their half-siblings. Maybe, in those years when you go home for the Holidays, your childhood home is festooned with green and red, even as the wax from the spent Hanukkah candles still flashes from the windowsill.
This is us, these days, and it has been us for a while. And it’s time for all of us to see and acknowledge that the ‘we’ that is the contemporary Jewish people include Jews who do Christmas. 

Part of what is weighing on me is a tendency to clump all objections or concerns about Christmas into one exclusively blue-and-white wrapped package. Even if the pervasive and relentless commercialization of an ancient religious holy day seems to obliterate and monopolize the season, even when playlists seem to be overtaken by bad covers of classic carols, even though we recognize the MANY Christmas songs penned by Jewish songwriters, even as these and other factors can legit make us cranky, it’s imperative that we lift the weight of shame experienced by the large numbers of Jews who actively participate in Christmas.

In my activist spheres, there’s a phrase: Nothing about us without us. So I’d like to highlight voices of those who speak about this from their lived experience, and encourage you to click on the links below to hear directly from two young Jews speaking eloquently about their Jewish identities, along with their Christmas-celebrating backgrounds.

Catherine Horowitz, a university undergraduate, writes: 

I began writing this article intending to interview other Jewish people who celebrated Christmas and see what they thought about it, or if they shared my complex feelings. Quickly, however, I began to realize that the issue ran deeper than Christmas itself. What’s worth exploring is what Christmas has come to symbolize for me and many others: the feeling of shame that I have when I think about it, the feeling of having to prove that I am Jewish enough despite it …

She probes a number of interconnected issues such as assimilation, the impact of liberal-progressive vs. anti-assimilationist Jewish upbringing, and the alienating impact of the Jewish communal “continuity” discourse.

My colleague Rabbi Emily Cohen both celebrates and interrogates her multicultural, interfaith ancestry, and grounds her reflections in Torah, citing the example of our biblical forefather Jacob blessing his grandsons Ephraim and Menasheh, whose mother Asnat is the daughter of an Egyptian priest: 

They were raised in Egypt by a Hebrew father and an Egyptian mother. Menasheh and Ephraim may have been bilingual and were certainly bicultural, and Jacob chose them above all his other descendants as role models for future Jewish generations…Next Shabbat, on December 25th, I will be opening presents and having Christmas lunch with my Catholic grandmother, Quaker mother, and Jewish dad and sisters. There might even be a Christmas tree present. I’m a Jew and was raised as such. I trace my ancestry to shtetls in Poland and bustling towns in Prussia. But I also trace my ancestry to the exiled Portuguese Jews-turned-Catholic of the Azores and to the first waves of Pilgrims in New England. While I have always been clear about my religious identity, I have also been equipped to translate between Jewish and non-Jewish traditions. Like my ancestors Menasheh and Ephraim, I understand what it means to walk in multiple worlds and to love and be loved by people who don’t share all my beliefs.

As for me, this Christmas Eve, I’ll be covering for my Christian colleagues as a member of the Multifaith Spiritual Care team at Queensway-Carleton Hospital. Who knows? Maybe, if I’m paged and go in, and the opportunity is right, I can sing one of the many, many, Christmas carols I know from my  childhood – not from my home, but from school, from listening to the radio, and then from years of singing in churches. Christmas means something to me, as well, though it wasn’t part of my family of origin. 
I can – and we all should – bring to bear as much respect for those who celebrate from within our community as we do to those who celebrate in theirs. Have yourself a merry little erev shabbat/Christmas eve.

Rabbi Liz

Experience Tu Bishvat!

“Tu Bishvat comes at precisely the most precarious moment in the cycle of nature.” (Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Seasons of our Joy)

It is the New Year of the Trees, but here
the ground is frozen under the crust of snow. . . . 
In the white and green north of the diaspora
I am stirred by a season that will not arrive
for six weeks, as wines on far continents prickle
to bubbles when their vines bloom.  (Marge Piercy)

On January 16, let’s join together to plant seeds of the spirit. We will build a multi-dimensional “tree of life” on a structure created by the rabbis of Sefat in the Middle Ages, which mirrors the “four cups” and special foods ritual format of the Passover seder. We will share four cups, deepening from white to red, while blessing and munching on fruits and nuts; we will sing and read and create our tree for this New Year of the Trees. And, if you wish, you can plant actual seeds for your seders in the spring. Join in this hands-on, creative, participatory experience.

HAVE AVAILABLE SOME OR ALL OF THE FOLLOWING ITEMS: 

red and white fruit of the vine:  wine or grape juice (about two “cups” each per person)
something from one of the “Seven Species”:  wheat, barley, grapes, figs and pomegranates, olives, dates
fruit or nut with a hard shell: bananas, almonds, walnuts, oranges, pineapple; 
fruit or nut with a hard center: avocado, peach, date, cherry; 
fruit soft in and out: grape, strawberry, fig
Optional:  parsley and radish seeds with pots and earth to plant them in

See our event listings for more info. 

Repairing the World Group 
 
After a summer and fall hiatus, the Repairing the World group is reactivating! A meeting has been planned to ring in the New Year. We will congregate online to talk about possible next steps, hear about OrH initiatives and get reacquainted. If you have not attended a Repairing the World meeting before, you are certainly welcome. Please have a look at the OrH website to see the anti-racism learning that we did last year. As always, pre-register for the meeting in order to receive the zoom link.
 
Date: Tuesday Jan 4, 2022
Time: 7:30 pm
Register: here  
Don’t forget -  registration needed to get the zoom link. 

New in Our Service Schedule:

4th Shabbat Morning Services
 
Starting January 29, join Shira as she davens (prays) a traditional Shabbat morning service on Zoom. Traditional but still Reconstructionist, these services will be conducted with more Hebrew and lots of singing. These services will be slightly less interactive and will include less English, but provide a chance to sink into the melodies and prayers and to enjoy the flow of morning blessings, psalms of praise, the Shema and the Amidah. As time and interest permits there will be an informal discussion of the parashah. These services will be listed in our events as we get closer to the date.

Liturgy 101 - A Practical Course
 
What exactly goes on in a Shabbat morning service? What is the structure of the service? What are the essential prayers? This course is for anyone who would like to know more about our Reconstructionist Shabbat liturgy but will be aimed particularly toward those just beginning to explore Jewish liturgy. The course is intended to be practical, enabling people to participate and even lead elements of a service. A familiarity with the Hebrew alphabet is helpful but not necessary. (A free course to learn or review the alphabet can be found here.) The course will include learning melodies, blessings, and essential liturgical terms. Class sessions will be recorded to be posted on the OrH website along with course resources. The course is free to members (with donations suggested and appreciated). Questions and registration: email rituals@orh.ca
 
This class is starting Monday, January 17, 7:30-8:45 PM Zoom (and every other Monday thereafter: January 31, February 14, March 1, March 14 - more dates to be scheduled as needed)

Upcoming Services and Events

Shabbat Morning Torah Service
Saturday, January h 10:00am to noon
Zoom  
 
Schmooze ‘n Learn
Sunday, January 9 10:30-noon
Zoom  
Reimagining our future:  Climate change and Racism: How climate change is racist, how we benefit from that, and how we can start thinking differently about it. Jean Hanson will lead this thought-provoking, interactive workshop.

Tu Bishvat Seder 
Sunday, January 16th 7:30pm to 9pm
Zoom  

Reconstructionist News and Events

* Participate in a Reconstructionist Movement Project!
Calling all Reconstructionist singers, musicians, dancers, artists. etc. to participate remotely in a video that will premiere at Reconstructing Judaism's 2022 convention. Sign up and find additional information here. Deadline to indicate interest is 12/30/21.

* “Reconstructionism Without Zionism”   
Wednesday, January 12 - 8:00-9:30 
OrH members must register (free)
Rabbi Rebecca Alpert is Professor of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. She was among the first women ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where she served as Dean of Students. She is the co-author of Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach, author of Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition and Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism as well as several edited volumes and numerous articles. 

Convention 2022 
B'Yachad: Reconstructing Judaism Together
Convention Registration opens Sunday, September 26!
Come gather together from March 23 – 27, 2022 for B’Yachad: Reconstructing Judaism Together. Over these four days, both in person and virtually, we will learn from and with experts, scholars and lay leaders. We will engage in conversations, ask questions, and listen. We will pray together, sing together, dance together and celebrate all that we do every day in our communities to reconstruct Judaism. Our convention will take place in the versatile spaces of the beautiful Hilton McLean Tysons Corner hotel, located in the Chesapeake region. Reserve a hotel room for our convention at a special rate.

In The Ottawa Community
* = New item this week
 
Community Events and Announcements

* Kamionkowski Bet Midrash is offering 50% off their online Classic Hebrew Fundamentals course. This class is for folks who can read Hebrew, but who may not understand it. Take advantage of this amazing deal!
The school is also offering a new webinar series which will run for four sessions on Mondays. The series is an introduction to the Book of Exodus as understood by biblical scholars. There are careful readings of the plague narratives, the famous Hollywood splitting of the sea, and more! If you can't make a session, no problem - you can access the recordings. You can sign up for the webinar series here .

Donations to OrH

Donations are a significant part of the funding for activities and rabbinic support in our community. You can direct your contribution to different areas of Or Haneshamah’s activity, including: general donations to fund programming, rabbinic leadership, donations in honor or in memory of a person or event, or dedication of ritual objects. We also welcome donations to the Gita (Tova) & Zvi Taub Memorial Fund, the Rabbi's Discretionary Fund, the Or Haneshamah Endowment Fund. Federal employees or retirees can also give to OrH through the Annual Government of Canada Workplace Charitable Campaign. Information on all these programs and how to give can be found at this link, or by clicking on the "Donate" tab on the main menu of the OrH website.

Board of Directors

Chair: Carolyn, president@orh.ca 
Treasurer: Elijah, treasurer@orh.ca
Secretary: Nicola, secretary@orh.ca
Communications: Andrea, communications@orh.ca
Membership: Myrna, membership@orh.ca
Learning: Diana, learning@orh.ca
Ritual/Many Hands: Shira, rituals@orh.ca ​​​​​​​
Interim Member-at-Large: Lyn


Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton: rabbi@orh.ca
OrH Members are welcome to contact Rabbi Liz, the Hesed team (hesed@orh.ca),
or any member of the board, regarding pastoral needs.

Or Haneshamah
30 Cleary Ave., Ottawa, ON, K2A 4A1
613-239-4988
www.orh.ca
info@orh.ca

** Disclaimer Regarding Community Event Postings **

Or Haneshamah frequently receives requests to post notices of upcoming events in the community at-large.  These events run the range from cultural, educational, and in some cases explorations of topical political issues.  In the interest of providing information to our congregation about the diversity of interesting events in the Ottawa community we will post notices of these events in our regular newsletter.

We recognize also that from time to time we are requested to post notices of events which are highly controversial in nature and reflect a wide range of opinions among our congregation on particular issues.  We are, however, of the opinion that it is appropriate for us to post events taking place in the community which may challenge us, which may cause discomfort, and which may cause us to reflect on some of our beliefs.  Our openness to post notices for a wide range of community events, however, does not mean that we have abdicated our responsibility to show discernment and to distinguish between those events which demonstrate an open-minded and thoughtful approach to specific issues and those which do not appear to reflect such values.  So, we will make judgments about what notices we believe are appropriate to post and those which we believe will not contribute to a thoughtful and balanced exploration of ideas and issues.

Will we make mistakes along the way?  Probably.  But the possibility of errors of judgment does not mean that we can excuse ourselves from the responsibility to show judgment in posting notices about events in the community and we promise to do so with openness tempered by a sense of responsibility.

In agreeing to post any notice of an event in the community, Or Haneshamah does not endorse, support or promote any perspectives, positions or ideas expressed in the events which are posted in our newsletter.