Month: <span>September 2016</span>

Shabbat Candle Lighting Times for
Moscow, Russia
Friday, November 4th
Light Candles at 16:25

Join us Tonight!
Weekly Kabbalat Shabbat Services 20:30

Shabbat, November 5th,
Shabbat Ends 17:40
Torah Portion: Noach

Creating Rainbows

Clouds.

We know how they’re formed.

A. Water fills the earth’s streams, lakes, rivers and oceans.

B. The sun’s rays evaporate some of the water,

C. Droplets rise to form clouds (which eventually yield rain back to the earth).

Now, let’s phrase it differently: Clouds represent the Earth’s ‘feedback’ to the skies, bringing welcome precipitation to our environment, creating overcast days, and sometimes bringing storms to shake our world.

A little deeper:

The ‘heavens’ – the sky for the purpose of this conversation – represents G-d, while the Earth represents Humanity. And the clouds, hovering between Heaven and Earth, represent our behavior; our behavior is our feedback to G-d, our response to His gift of life.

G-d created us for a purpose: To make this a better [Holy] world. We can either acknowledge – and try to live by – that mission, or we can ignore it and live in misalignment with our core selves. Either way, we’re sending up clouds.

So what do we do when we feel that life is overcast?

We look for a rainbow, and they only occur when the clouds aren’t too thick and opaque. When our lives are heavily centered on self-focus, we leave no space for the rainbows. Living a good life means thinking about purpose. When we stop asking ourselves “what do I want out of life?” and begin asking “what does life want out of me?” we allow a bright ray of G-dliness to shine through.

When you stand at the right attitudinal angle, looking at your day with the right perspective, you can catch the majesty of the Rainbow. And it has a message from G-d: “Let Me shine through; I’ll show you the beauty that can be found in the diverse challenges I give you. Just let your life’s droplets refract My light.”

Position yourself wisely. And look for that rainbow.
Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Yanky and Rivky Klein

This email is In Loving memory of my dear father
R’ Yerachmiel Binyamin Halevi ben R, Menachem Klein OBM

Shabbat Candle Lighting Times for
Moscow, Russia
Friday, September 9th
Light Candles at 18:44

Join us Tonight!
Weekly Kabbalat Shabbat Services 20:30

Shabbat, September 10th,
Shabbat Ends 19:57
Torah Portion: Shoftim

We Are One

Some folks think of people much as we think of cars on a highway: each with its own origin and destination, relating to one other only to negotiate lane changes and left-hand turns. For cars, closeness is danger, loneliness is freedom.

People are not cars. Cars are dead. People live. Living beings need one another, nurture one another, share destinies and reach them together. When you’re alive, closeness is warmth, loneliness is suffocating.

People belong to families. Families make up communities. Communities make up the many colorful peoples of the world. And all those peoples make up a single, magnificent body with a single soul called humankind.

Some chop this body into seven billion fragments and roll it back into a single mush. They want each person to do his or her own thing and relate equally to every other individual on the planet. They don’t see the point of distinct peoples. They feel such distinctions just get in the way.

But we are like leaves extending from twigs branching out from larger twigs on branches of larger branches, until we reach the trunk and roots of us all. Each of us has our place on this tree of life, each its source of nurture—and on this the tree relies for its very survival.

None of us walks alone. Each carries the experiences of ancestors wherever he or she roams, along with their troubles, their traumas, their victories, their hopes and their aspirations. Our thoughts grow out from their thoughts, our destinies are shaped by their goals. At the highest peak we ever get to, there they are, holding our hand, pushing us upward, providing the shoulders on which to stand. And we share those shoulders, that consciousness, that heritage with all the brothers and sisters of our people.

That’s why your own people are so important: If you want to find peace with any other person in the world, you’ve got to start with your own brothers and sisters. Until then, you haven’t yet found peace within your own self. And only when you’ve found peace within yourself can you help us find peace for the entire world.

Every Jew is a brother or sister of a great family of many thousands of years. Where a Jew walks, there walk sages and martyrs, heroes and heroines, legends and miracles, all the way back to Abraham and Sarah, the first two Jews who challenged the whole world with their ideals. There walk the tears, the blood and the chutzpah of millennia, the legacy of those who lived, yearned and died for a world to come, a world the way it was meant to be.

Their destiny is our destiny. In us they are fulfilled. In all of us and every one of us, and all of us together. For we are all one.

When one Jew does an act of kindness, all our hands extend with his or hers. If one Jew should fall, all of us stumble. If one suffers, we all feel pain. When one rejoices, we are all uplifted. In our oneness we will find our destiny, and our destiny is to be one. For we are a single body, breathing with a single set of lungs, pulsating with a single heart, drawing from a single well of consciousness.

We are one. Let it be with love
Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Yanky and Rivky Klein

This email is In Loving memory of my dear father
R’ Yerachmiel Binyamin Halevi ben R, Menachem Klein OBM

Shabbat Candle Lighting Times for
Moscow, Russia
Friday, September 2nd
Light Candles at 19:03

Join us Tonight!
Weekly Kabbalat Shabbat Services 20:30

Shabbat, September 3rd,
Shabbat Ends 20:17
Torah Portion: Re’eh

A Family that Eats Together . . .

The old adage has it that “a family that prays together, stays together.” Yet I’m not sure I fully agree. I know too many people who were regularly dragged to services as children, yet now wouldn’t set foot back in a synagogue and don’t have much to do with their parents, either.

You’d like to think that if parents demonstrate their priorities for religion, their children will watch and be inspired, but it doesn’t always happen that way. You can’t force someone to believe, and it takes a host of factors and circumstances to motivate the new generation to follow in the path of their parents.

From my experience, more important than praying together is eating together. Making time to sit down as a family on a regular basis, catching up on each other’s lives in a non-threatening environment and breaking bread together, is a sure recipe for harmony. The highlight of Shabbat is not just the synagogue services but the Shabbat meals, with fine food, communal singing and pleasant conversation. Though not an overtly religious experience, this is often the glue that binds generations together.

I don’t know many people who became religious from going to services; more commonly, it’s those people who are coming closer to Judaism who start attending synagogue. But I do know lots of people who are observant today because their family ate Shabbat meals together.

A few months ago, I was speaking to a middle-aged lady, a grandmother many times over, who recalled being invited to her first-ever Shabbat meal some 30 years ago and being entranced by the easy interactions of her host family. She walked out of their house knowing that she wanted the same one day for her future children.

We read in the Torah, “And you shall eat before the L rd, your G d . . . so that you may learn to fear the Lord, your God.”1 The context of the text is pointing out that the surest path to learning to fear G d is by eating before Him. It’s not the food that does it. Rather, it is our ability to transform the seemingly mundane act of eating into a religious experience.

Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Yanky and Rivky Klein

This email is In Loving memory of my dear father
R’ Yerachmiel Binyamin Halevi ben R, Menachem Klein OBM