TBZ Prepares to Celebrate 13 Years of Rejuvenation, May 5. Reb Moshe & Rav Claudia
January 1st, 2012 | Events, General News, Thoughts From The Rabbis
We join together in community preparation for TBZ’s Bar/Bat Mitzvah.
Let’s wish ourselves a mazal tov.
We have been successful over the last 13 years to rejuvenate a synagogue and create a caring and compassionate community. But as we are continuing in this process we mark this time with a celebratory rite of passage.
As we have our children prepare for their bar/bat mitzvah and the taking on of new responsibilities, we too, as a community, are preparing ourselves for the next level of our growth, both spiritually and communally.
We began the process with the “13 for 13” campaign, based on our b’nai mitzvah baMitzvotav project, in the months leading up to the High Holidays. At Rosh HaShana, we were offered an opportunity to choose (via our “tickets”) those mitzvot we felt drawn to. Many of us have taken them to heart. There is, of course, always time to take these mitzvot/connecting points to heart. See our website for more information.
Our b’nei mitzvah also take on developing new skills that, we hope, will spike their interest in seeing their rite of passage as a beginning, not an end, to their Jewish education. Many master the order of services, tefilot, and all of them master Torah reading and Torah interpretation skills.
We are offering all of us an opportunity to acquire these skills over the next months.
We would hope that many of you will spend time with the Rabbis and others in the community in a number of workshops and classes to learn the order of our service-tefilot, to read Torah, and to write a dvar Torah, a brief Torah interpretation.
We hope that the latter offering will encourage many of us to write divrei Torah on the parsha of that week, Kedoshim, the “Holiness Code”.
At the exact center of the Torah, in Sefer Vayikra, the Book of Leviticus, is a collection of the most cherished verses that have inspired Jewish values for thousands of years; values we continue to pass on from one generation to the next. These brief divrei Torah will be collected and published on our website as an ongoing gift to ourselves.
Mark your calendars for a community mitzvah project at Family Table, our community’s food pantry, March 25, 9:30-12:30. If you are already involved in a mitzvah project, please let us know so others of us may join your efforts.
Please help make this a celebration of our commitment to the future of TBZ and our future as Jews. TBZ has served us well in creating a creative and unique Jewish home for us all. Let’s join together in our wonderful simkha.
Looking forward to celebrate together,
Reb Moshe & Rav Claudia