Friday, May 26, 6 Sivan 6:00 PM Please join Rabbi Marcia Plumb and Ellen Allard for a Hybrid Shavuot and Kabbalat Shabbat Service
Saturday, May 27, 7 Sivan, 9:30 AM Please join Rabbi Marcia Plumb and Cantor Ellen Band for a HYBRID Shavuot Shabbat Morning Service with Yizkor.
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
Saturday June 3 Congregation Mishkan Tefila celebrates The Bat Mitzvah of Vera Silk, daughter of Sandi and Ken Silk.
Please join us for the first in-person Bat Mitzvah since the beginning of COVID.
Support Vera Silk's Mitzvah Project
To make a monetary donation to The Brookline Pantry in Vera Silk's name click here.
Friday, June 16 Silver Lining Buddy Program Kabbalat Shabbat
We Remember: This week's upcoming Yahrzeit Observances
Saturday Thomas Fischer Lenore Patalano Marion Frager Julius Fischer Serena Fischer
Sunday Mildred Cohen
Monday Jack Adelson
Tuesday Zeone Howard Gertrude Kurzman
Wednesday Louis J. Risman Herb Kaplan
Thursday Estelle Mitchell Barbara Golov
Friday
A Teaching from our Rabbi
Chag Sameach!
Today we celebrate the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. The Ten Commandments symbolize the Torah, so it is as if we are given the whole Torah today. What a gift!
But is it really a good gift? Or is it the kind of gift we have to set out when Aunt Ruthie comes over and then put it away again until the next time she comes? We hope no one sees it around the house because we are embarrassed by it.
The Torah after all is full of lying, theft, trickery, murder, pornography, war, plague, and slavery. If any book should be banned under today’s ultra conservative microscopes, it should be the Bible.
The characters are flawed, the hero, G*d, has regular temper tantrums, and the people never seem to learn from their mistakes. Is this really a book we want to teach to our children?
The answer at Shavuot, is yes, for the same reason we need to read banned books. Because the characters are flawed, the heroes lose their tempers, and people make mistakes.
In the Torah and in banned books, the people in them reflect reality. They have real fears, errors, losses and gains, successes, and failures, hopes that are fulfilled and ones that are dashed. They mirror us and our messy chaotic ways of being in the world. As readers of the Torah, we can see our struggles reflected there, as well as our attempts to learn and improve.
The Torah is alive because of its ‘realness.’ It reaches out to us from the past and says, ‘Read me, because I am you, and you are me.’ When we read about Isaac mourning the death of his mother, or Moses praying for healing for his sister, Pharoah’s greed, and Moses’ bitter disappointment at not being able to enter the Promised Land, we remember the deaths of our loved ones, those who we pray for healing, our own egos, and our disappointments. It also celebrates life, birth, children, and grandchildren. We learn more about how to manage our lives by studying their lives, year after year.
So, bring on the banned books, and open our Torah scrolls again this Shavuot. When we do, it’s like we unroll a mirror; we see ourselves reflected back as we read from it. I hope we find something new in it, again this year.
Chag Sameach and Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Marcia Plumb
Congregation Mishkan Tefila 384 Harvard St. Brookline, MA 02446
