Friday, April 7, 16 Nisan 6:00 PM Please join Rabbi Marcia Plumb and Ellen Allard for a Hybrid Kabbalat Shabbat Service.
Saturday, April 8, 17 Nisan, 9:30 AM Please join Rabbi Marcia Plumb and Cantor Ellen Band for a Hybrid Shabbat Morning Service
If you have a simcha, please share it with us and receive a special blessing from Rabbi Plumb during an upcoming Shabbat service. Sponsor a Kiddush by virtually inviting us to your home as you lead the community in Kiddush and HaMotzi prayers. (we will provide challah and grape juice!) Please contect Rosalie Reszelbach, Janet Stein Calm or Toni Spitzer to arrange.
Please click here for the link to the new Conservative prayerbook, Siddur Lev Shalem: Shabbat Shaharit Siddur Lev Shalem The prayers will be the same as in our usual blue siddur, so feel free to use that instead if you wish.
Please click here for the link to the page numbers for Shabbat morning prayers in Sim Shalom (Blue) and in Lev Shalem Page Numbers for Shabbat Morning
Dear CMT Friends,
Welcome to the Pesach season. I hope you have wonderful sedarim. As Pesach begins, so does the Omer, the 49 days between Pesach and Shavuot.
Every year at Congregation Mishkan Tefila, we count the Omer with a special thought for the day. The Omer began on Thursday evening, April 6. This year, I will greet you, every morning, with a short video message to help you start your day in a positive inspired way.
I invite you to celebrate someone you love by sponsoring a day of the Omer. Choose someone to honor, who has instilled an important value in you. You may choose someone in your family (past or present), a teacher, a friend, or anyone who has taught you an important life lesson. Please share their name, and yours, so we can celebrate you both. The cost to sponsor a Day of the Omer is $118. Be sure to read the morning emails to see your day!
Thank you so much, and we look forward to celebrating the Omer with you, Rabbi Marcia Plumb
Thursday Robert Shaw Barbara Gillson Susan deVries
Friday
A Teaching from our Rabbi
In the Haggadah, you may have noticed a puzzling passage about a group of rabbis who seem to study the Haggadah all through the night. They stop only when their students come to tell them it is time to say the morning shema.
What is going on and why does this story appear right in the middle of the telling of our freedom from oppression?
This story is reported to contain a secret message. The named rabbis in the story were secret plotters against oppressive Roman rule around the time of the destruction of the second temple. They pretended to study but they were really planning a revolt, a last stand for freedom and their rights. The students were the lookouts who came to warn them that Romans were heading their way so they should begin to pray and stop plotting.
The story is in the Haggadah because it is also a story about freedom and the rights of Jews to practice their faith as they wished without tyrannical intervention.
The fact that the telling of the exodus from Egypt includes a story about a similar yearning for freedom, but several hundred years later, reminds us to continue to work for freedom in our day too. Some of you may have included readings, as we did at our family Seder, about Ukraine, racial Justice and freedom and democracy in Israel.
In our family, we begin the Seder under a homemade tent, to help create an atmosphere of ‘you each came out of Egypt.’ On our cushions, we lean, drink, ask, discuss, sing, and pray for freedom for all in our country and around the world.
May the work for freedom continue through our days and nights until it is there for all.
Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Marcia Plumb
Congregation Mishkan Tefila 384 Harvard St. Brookline, MA 02446
