The Needs of the Community

Dear family of friends, 

If you’ve ever been in the vestry while services are going on, you know that the sound from the sanctuary is played on the speakers downstairs. This is so that members engaged in childcare or food preparation can feel a sense of connection to what is happening above them, even when they can’t be present in the sanctuary. Rosemarie Curran recently shared with me that the music of the service isn’t the only thing keeping her in a prayerful mood when she is preparing for kiddush. She finds the work itself – preparing food for the community – feels holy to her, and asked did I know a blessing she could say on such occasions? It just so happens that the traditional Prayer for the Community which follows the Torah service on Saturday mornings mentions “all who faithfully engage with the needs of community,” and from that phrase I fashioned the blessing you see above. Similar to the blessing for engaging with words of Torah, it catalyzes the action one is about to take into a mitzvah - a commandment that brings holiness into our lives. 

I thought of this blessing again on a recent Sunday morning, as the Board of Directors met, in the presence of a few engaged members of the congregation, for our Annual Meeting, to review the holy work we’ve done over the past year: how we came together to dedicate Harmony Park as Jewish burial ground in the fall, named babies, held a wedding and funerals in our sanctuary, prayed and studied Torah together, celebrated holidays, collected groceries for the food pantry and for shelter donations on Purim, and welcomed new members into our community, not to mention engaged in all the mundane work of paying the bills and keeping the lights on. All these, as with the study of Torah, are “duties whose worth cannot be measured.” 

Truly, all who contribute to this holy work – board members, Sisterhood and Brotherhood volunteers, and anyone who has helped facilitate any of our activities, even by your mere presence, deserves our gratitude and praise. We really couldn’t do it without you. I would particularly like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the dedicated work of our outgoing co-chair of the Board, Mike Peckman, and thank our incoming co-chair Jon Sisskind for stepping up and putting his shoulder to the burden. As the Prayer for the Community puts it, “my the Holy One pay them their due … and send blessing and success to all the work of their hands, along with all [the people] of Israel, and let us say, Amen!”

Reb Josh