What’s Greening at Sinai?

In this issue

Rabbi’s Corner 2Cantor’s Notes, Reflections 3Lifelong Jewish Learning 4May Calendar 5Staff News, Adult Learning 6Family Picnic 7B’nei Mitzvah 8Women of Sinai, Affirmation 9Donations 1050/60’s Havdalah,May Yahrzeits11

Shabbat & Holiday Schedule

SINAI NEWS

Rabbi David B. Cohen • Cantor Rebecca Robins • Rabbi Emeritus Jay R. BrickmanInterim Executive Director Stacy Schwab • Director of Lifelong Jewish Learning Sherry H. Blumberg, Ph.D., R.J.E.Sinai News - Nicole SetherCongregation Sinai • 8223 N. Port Washington Road• Fox Point, WI 53217414.352.2970• 414.352.0944 (fax)• www.congregationsinai.org

Shabbat

Achrei Mot-Kedoshim

Leviticus 16:1-20:27

May 1 Family Shabbat Service 7:00 pmMay 2 Torah Study 8:00 amMorning Minyan 9:30 amDavid Arena Bar Mitzvah 10:00 am

Shabbat

Emor

- Leviticus 21:1-24:23

May 8 Shabbat Service w/ Daniel Coranparticipating 6:15 pmMay 9 Torah Study 8:00 amMorning Minyan 9:30 am

Shabbat

Behar-Bechukotai

Leviticus 25:1-27:34

May 15 Musial Shabbat Service 6:15 pmMay 16 Torah Study 8:00 amMorning Minyan 9:30 amNoah Shor Bar Mitzvah 10:00 am

May 2009 • Iyar/Sivan 5769

Shabbat

Bamidbar

- Numbers 1:1-4:20

May 22 Shabbat Service 6:15 pmMay 23 Torah Study 8:00 amMorning Minyan 9:30 amMacabee Pereira Bar Mitzvah 10:00 am

Shavuot

May 28 Affirmation Class ShavuotDinner 6:00 pmShavuot Service 7:00 pmShavuot Study Session 8:00 pm

Shabbat

Shavuot

- Deuteronomy 14:22-16:17& Numbers 28:26-28:31

May 29 Shavuot Service & Yizkor 9:00 amAffirmation Service 7:30 pmMay 30 Torah Study 8:00 amMorning Minyan 9:30 amSamantha Allie Bat Mitzvah 10:00 am

Look at My works! How beautiful and praiseworthythey are!…Be careful [though] that you don’t spoil or destroymy world – because if you spoil it, there is nobody after youto fix it.

(Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:13)Spring is here!! As the air warms and green thingsappear, our thoughts turn to the earth’s renewal and ourpersonal expression of that: GARDENING. With the help of urban school children, First Lady Michelle Obama literally“broke ground” with a vegetable garden for the WhiteHouse. One of her goals is to help children appreciate theconnections between gardening, great tasting fresh foodsand nutrition. With growing awareness of the need to protect our environment and resources, people are discovering that buying and/or harvesting locally grown food can be costeffective

and

delicious. The Greening of Sinai Committee isworking with our landscapers to plan a “Sukkah Garden” onSinai’s grounds. What can you do to join the Spring Greenefforts?Here are a few eco-garden starter ideas:

Compost.

Spring is the perfect time to start a new habit of recycling food scraps, mulched leaves and soil. In a fewweeks, you can begin to create a rich enhancer for your gar-dens. Contact the Urban Ecology Center,www.urbanecolodycenter.org for inexpensive bins and moreadvice.Make your own

non-toxic weed killer

: Mix 1 ounce orangeoil and 1 teaspoon liquid soap with 1 gallon of 10% whitevinegar. Put some in a spray bottle and use it to spot spray

Continued on page 11

At our calendar’s most festive occasions, we greeteach other with “Chag Sameach.” In the Torah, “Chag” meanspilgrimage festival (like the Arabic “Haj”), and refers to the three occasions – Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot – during which Israelites would make pilgrimage to Jerusalem.The Torah explicitly sets the dates on which to cele-brate Sukkot and Pesach but is curiously silent about Shavuot.All we’re told is that we should begin counting seven weeks of seven days – forty nine in all – from the Shabbatduring Pesach. When we reach the end of this pe-riod of counting, referred to as “the counting of theOmer”, it’s time for Shavuot.Why doesn’t the Torah set a date certainfor Shavuot? Why are we compelled to count it out?The answer is found in the nature of thefestival. Before the Exodus, there was a festival of Pesach, which celebrated the first harvest of barley.Coming later in the Spring, Shavuot celebrated thefirst harvest of wheat.During the interval between the two holi-days, farmers brought a measure (an “Omer”) of barley to theTemple in Jerusalem every day. It was offered as a sacrifice inorder to assure a bountiful wheat harvest come Shavuot. Thisritual was called the “counting of the Omer.”In later times, Jews dwelled less on the holiday’s agri-cultural underpinnings and more on their historical meaning.Pesach became the time to recall the Exodus and our libera- tion from slavery. Similarly, Shavuot marked the giving of theTorah to Moses and the Jewish people at Mt. Sinai.Accordingly, the 49 days between Pesach and Sha-vuot - the counting of the Omer - no longer marked a growing season. Instead it signified the journey the Israelites under- took from the shores of the Red Sea to the foot of Mt. Sinai.Those seven weeks gave us a chance to shed the cultural im-prints of Egypt, to get ready to pledge allegiance to God. Likechildren anticipating a birthday, the Israelites counted thedays in anticipation of receiving God’s greatest gift, the Torah.Why then do we continue to count the Omer? Be-cause we too are on a journey. Revelation did not end at Sinai.Every generation has its own relationship to Judaism, and per-force engages anew with God, the covenant and the Torah.Like any relationship, the Brit (covenant) changes over time,and demands our ongoing care and commitment.Counting the Omer reminds us to consider every day,every moment, a potential revelation. A time to ask: how can Imake the most of the time I’ve been allotted here? How mightI best fulfill the responsibilities I have to those around me?How can I best express the gratitude I ought to feel for theblessings I’ve received?“Teach us to number our days, that we may acquire aheart of wisdom,” wrote the Psalmist. May the period of count-

Rabbi’s Corner

Page 2 May 2009

What does the Number 150 stand for?

ing the Omer, which enters its 2nd day as I write, teach us tonumber our days, that we might grow in wisdom, too.Rabbi David B. Cohen* * * *In his book,

From Optimism to Hope

, Rabbi Jona- than Sacks, Great Britain’s chief rabbi, charts another jour-ney at the center of the Jewish experience. As wecount the days from Pesach to Shavuot, i.e. from the redemption at the shores of the sea to therevelation at Mt Sinai through the giving of theTorah, we reiterate the important movement from the interior experience of optimism to the exter-nal, action oriented element of hope. In a publicappearance several years ago, Rabbi Sacks said:“One of the most important distinctions Ihave learned in the course of reflection on Jewishhistory is the difference between optimism andhope. Optimism is the belief that things will getbetter. Hope is the faith that, together, we can make thingsbetter. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great dealof courage to have hope. Knowing what we do of our past,no Jew can be an optimist. But Jews have never - despite ahistory of sometimes awesome suffering - given up hope…Hope does not exist in a conceptual vacuum, nor isit available to all configurations of culture. It is born in thebelief that the sources of action lie within ourselves. Hope is the knowledge that we can choose; that we can learn fromour mistakes and act differently next time; that history is notwhat Joseph Heller called it, a "trash bag of random coinci-dences blown open by the wind", but a long, slow journey toredemption, whatever the digressions and false turns along the way.Hope is a human virtue, but one with religious un-derpinnings. At its ultimate it is the belief not that God haswritten the script of history, that He will intervene to save usfrom the error of our ways or protect us from the worst con-sequences of evil, but simply that He is mindful of our aspi-rations, with us in our fumbling efforts, that He has given us the means to save us from ourselves; that we are not wrong to dream, wish and work for a better world. In the end, greatsystems of thought are self- validating. To one who believes that the human condition is essentially tragic, the humancondition will reveal itself as a series of tragedies. To onewho believes that we can rewrite the script, history revealsitself as a series of slow, faltering steps to a more gracioussocial order.”

“Countdown to Sinai”

(See page 9 for the answer)

The old “saw” about thecamel being a horse designed by acommittee is a repudiation of thedemocraticprocess.PresidentObama hascalled for abi-partisanapproach to the criti-cal issuesconfronting our nation.This necessitates consulting with the opposition in the process of formulating legislation. There areof course negative consequences;you do not attain all the elementsyou think essential to the nation’swell being. But you do unite all but the lunatic fringe of the society be-hind the process.There was a time, our tradi- tion teaches, when individuals(designated prophets) could clearlydiscern the teaching of God. Peo-ple at that time were well advised to heed the prophet’s admonition.But prophecy ceased with Malachi.To determine the word of God thereafter, rabbis met in counciland hammered out their differ-ences. One group thought the me-zuzah should be vertical on thedoor post, the other, horizontal.Their compromise was the slanting position with which we are familiar.The Bible, which most of us believeis the word of God, was similarly acompromise document. The moreOrthodox insisted on including thebooks of the Pentateuch which, inaddition to eternal moral standards,demand a plethora of minute in-scrutable ritual obligations. The“liberals” introduced highly skepti-cal works like Job and Ecclesiastes,plus the Book of Ruth, which de-picts a non-Jewish woman as theancestress of both King David and the messiah.Rabbi Jay Brickman

As the month of Sivan comes in, wewelcome it with the singing of

torah Sivanlanu Moshe

– in Sivan Moses brought us the torah from the top of Sinai. While somechoose to understand ‘torah’ in this contextas the “Ten Commandments,” others under-stand ‘Torah’ to mean the firstfive books of the bible, whileothers believe ‘torah’ is thecollected wisdom of our peoplefrom Sinai until tomorrow…Regardless of how you choose to understand it, as Shavuotcomes it is certainly the “time of the giving of our torah” and wehave much to celebrate.In the wintertime,when we are in the midst of thestory of the miracles our peopleexperienced on the shores of the sea, and the subsequent gift of the Law amidst clapsof thunder on Mount Sinai, we may begin toenter the discussion of what was really givenat Sinai – what is Torah, or torah to each of us?On Shavuot, we read the famous“Ten Commandments” in our synagogues –a list, not really of the “big ten,” but perhapsa representative sampling of what the wis-dom and law of the torah contains. In thesecommandments we read about how to re-gard God and how to regard one another –what we should and should not do. Whilewe may never be able to remove the imageof Charlton Heston from our minds, we muststop at Shavuot to ask ourselves – whatdoes this mean,

z’man matan torateinu

– the season of our receiving of our torah?Perhaps there is something to be learnedfrom the cantillation of the

asseret dibrot

– the ten commandments.

Page 3

May 2009

In studying the ten command-ments, you will see two sets of trope, or cantillation marks instructing in how the pas-sage is to be read in synagogue. These setsof markings are referred to as

ta’amei ha-elyon

, the upper trope, and

ta’amei hatach-ton

, the lower trope. In syna-gogue (or any public reading venue), we read the upper trope.The upper trope divides eachcommandment (no matter itslength) into one distinct unit, orsentence. For study, however,we read from the lower trope. In the lower trope, the

p’sukim

, orsentences, are divided into aver-age length.I cannot help at this time of year, as we begin to pre-pare for Shavuot, to wonder if the double

ta’amim

, trope marks, are teaching us asmall lesson. Perhaps we read publicly insuccinct and specific sentences to make agrand statement to elicit the feelings of di-rection and guidance our ancestors musthave experienced at Sinai. And then, whenwe are studying alone or with friends, we relyon our innate ability to make meaning andsense from the text – for our feelings now, in this present time of the giving of the Torah, to shape our understanding of the sentences. And for our own knowledge to de-fine for ourselves, year after year, what is torah.Best wishes to you and your familyfor a

Chag Sameach

– a Shavuot of joy andgratitude.Cantor Rebecca Robins

Compromise

Cantor’s Notes Reflections

Save the date & your extra stuff!

Start saving your electronics, bikesand home goods for Sinai'sRummage Sale, which will take place July 26, 2009.For more information, contact Jennifer Moglowsky at jlmog@wi.rr.com.More details to follow.