Water’s Nourishment
Another glorious week has unfolded and will soon draw us into Shabbat for a full day of re-ensoulment and renewal. May we all find a way to create a meaningful and restorative Shabbat.
In addition to the larger GJC events this summer, I continue to be enriched by more intimate conversations with many of you over the course of my Rabbi Coffee Hours and other occasions where you invite me to share time with you. These opportunities to connect more deeply with community members have been a weekly highlight. I enjoy helping you to connect with Judaism through holidays, and I hope we will study and pray together more frequently. However, offering an open ear, soft shoulder, compassionate heart, and listening carefully to your Jewish journey and needs is at the center of the holy responsibilities I feel as your spiritual guide and rabbi. Through our conversations, you have shared pieces of yourself that I hold sacred, and you have helped me to better understand your individual and family needs, as well as your concerns and aspirations for our Glacier Jewish Community more broadly. Denali wisely scheduled these at a variety of locations, and I have had the pleasure of time with members of our community at Wild in Whitefish, Uptown Hearth in Columbia Falls, and Ceres Bakery in Kalispell. I look forward to meeting up with you at Fleur in Whitefish next week.
Last week, I mentioned the change in the Amidah that speaks of the descent of summer’s dew, and how extraordinary it is to see how the flora of the Flathead Valley manages in the dry heat of summer. When the rain fell on Tuesday, for the first time (during the day) since I arrived in early July, it was almost as if a prayer for a bit more moisture had been offered (and answered). I am ever-grateful to Mike Kordenbrock for teaching me (in Wednesday’s Flathead Beacon Daily Roundup) the word (conceived, according to Mike, the year before I was) for the amazing aroma produced by rain on warm, dry earth. As one with a keen olfactory sense, I had been breathing deeply and appreciating this extraordinary aroma throughout the day on my prayer-walks between rain clouds. I was especially enamored of the deeply pleasing scent of the pine needles that blanket so much of the ground around here.
Continuing with the theme of water’s nourishment, early Monday morning, I welcomed a sweet baby boy into a covenantal relationship with our People. On the banks of the tiny Roe River, fed by Giant Springs, in Great Falls, we created a sacred ritual of welcome for this sweet infant, using elements of Jewish tradition and innovation. I was moved by the profound appreciation of ritual expressed by both his Blackfeet and Jewish elders and felt the sanctity of the natural spring water bubbling up through the earth.
This Shabbat, some of us will be co-creating sacred space together at a retreat center just east of Lincoln, where we will be beside water. We hope that we are sowing seeds for a statewide Eco-Jewish Shabbaton (retreat weekend) for families and individuals next summer. In the meantime, we intend to have a wonderful time and hope that those of you who will be elsewhere will be creating Shabbat joy.
Please consider meeting me at Depot Park in Whitefish on Wed. August 7 at 7 p.m. for our last weekly learning session of the summer. We will have a conversation about the upcoming month of Av and its timeliness this year, as we are holding so much of the angst and anger of the political climate here and around the world. Please let me know (614-592-9593) if you are planning to attend.
I leave you with a bit of intellectual and spiritual nourishment as we complete, this Shabbat, the book of Bamidbar (in the Wilderness), aka Numbers, with a double Torah portion. I enjoyed reading this offering appreciating the contradictions of Torah – from the weekly email sent by Maharat (the Orthodox Yeshiva in NYC which ordains women to serve as spiritual leaders of Orthodox communities). And this piece is a spiritual teaching from my friend Rabbi Yael Levy as we prepare to enter the month of Av.
