Skip to main content

The reunion

This was quite an extraordinary weekend. Just about one hundred people gathered to celebrate fifty years since the founding of Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts.

It could be that you never heard of Havurat Shalom or that you never were part of that community or even attended services there. Even if that is true, it is awfully likely that if you have ever been in a synagogue in the past few decades you have experienced something that germinated in that house on College Avenue.

If you have ever sat through a service that included a nigun, a wordless tune, to help set a mood, or attend services where synagogue members share in the reading of the Torah or attend a service where a community member delivers the d'var Torah, the sermon, or attend an egalitarian synagogue where men and women have the same rights and responsibilities you have been touched by some of the experiments that began at Havurat Shalom. If you consult with a rabbah, have created a do it your self bar-mitzvah, or got a copy of The Jewish Catalog for your bar mitzvah, then your life was touched by Havurat Shalom.

Many of the people who were the earliest members of that community had gone to  Jewish camps, and so it was only fitting that this reunion took place in a retreat center that started out as a camp a century ago.

Our drive up was spectacular.






It was New England at it's most beautiful.  We stopped to let this pheasant and its many chicks cross the road. you can't see the chicks, but, trust me, they were scurrying across the road.

Over the course of the weekend, we experienced truly stellar Shabbat services.  My husband has been close to many of the people who attended since he was the age our youngest is now. Some have become family to us.

Like many Jewish camps,
there was a campfire on Saturday night.

The weather turned cold and damp.
I felt sorry for the people who had chosen to camp.
Our friends who in their twenties started a revolution in the organized Jewish world are the people who now head up Jewish organizations of various kinds. Many of them are professors of Jewish studies, Jewish educators, or clergy. They brought the creative energy of Havurat Shalom along with them in their professional lives.

Our friend Afie pointed out that while many people who started their adult Jewish lives in the yellow house on College Ave not all of them became Jewish professionals. For Alfie and for many others being Jewish was not their vocation, but their avocation. I think about how my husband has worked to create a life that is deeply Jewish as he earned his living doing public relations.

I came to know these people that helped to form and change my husband when the two of us met. When I first met them they were in their  30's. Now they are approaching 70-- or even older. It was a weekend of taking stock of lives that made a real difference in this world.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...
1 comment
Read more

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...
8 comments
Read more

A Passover loss

 My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of  linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin.  You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...
2 comments
Read more