Happy New Year

Shalom Chevrei:

As I look back on this most challenging year and as I look forward to a new and better year, I am grateful for the opportunity to serve you and our Emanuel family.

During this pandemic, we have reinvented ourselves as a community. We have persevered through trial and tribulation. We have deepened our reservoirs of resilience, even as Covid-19 has disconnected us and left us quite lonely at times. And we have responded creatively, finding new ways to pray and learn and connect with each other.

I am grateful to all of you for sticking with Emanuel and helping us to strengthen our mission, even as we have redefined how to achieve it. And yet as always, no matter what the circumstances, we remain committed to “open[ing] our doors to all who seek richer, more meaningful lives.” And together as a diverse and inclusive community, we engage “in prayer, lifelong learning and tikkun olam (repairing the world) - empowering adults and children alike to apply Jewish values to our everyday lives and to be a collective force for good.”

As the hourglass runs out on this strange and difficult year, and as we face a new and improved one, I offer you some prayerful words adapted from Alden Solovy’s This Grateful Heart (pps: 75-77):

God of time and space,

Another year slips away,

As do they all.

Another year opens before us,

As do they all:

With one hundred choices,

One thousand possibilities,

And one sacred duty.

Life. This life. Our lives...

To live in grief or joy,

Fear or awe,

Tears or laughter.

To lift our lives in glory and radiance,

To be a shining light of kindness and love.

On behalf of Betsy, Cara, Jared, and our beloved Zeus, I wish you a Happy New Year - one that is healthy, safe, productive, transformative, and full of light.

Make it a year of blessing, be a force for good, and stay in the fight!

Zei gezunt:

Rabbi Craig Marantz