“Parents: The Vital Combination of the Holydays and Festivals”

  A lesson I’ve taught for almost a half-century is that, like the old song says, “You can’t have one without the other.” The song referred to “Love and Marriage,” but I’m referring to our Holydays and our Festivals. Truth be told, if our children are encouraged, even forced, to participate in the services of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but Festivals such as Succot and Simchat Torah are ignored except perhaps for Religious School lessons, their understanding of Judaism is and will be, well, ZZZZZZZzzzzzz. And when that happens, they, and surely their children, will turn away from their heritage. After all, who wants to be bored!

  Ours is a religion that takes into account all of life. We laugh and cry; we dance and don’t. We pray and meditate; we are raucous and exuberant. Ours is probably the only faith community that encourages every possible emotion. 

  Tomorrow we’ll have a class on Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, the most cynical yet spot-on book of Hebrew Scriptures. Those of my generation will remember the Byrds singing “To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and a time for every purpose under heaven…” That’s from Kohelet and the biblical text goes on, “A time to be born and a time to die…a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which you’ve planted” (Pete Seeger wrote and recorded the original in 1959, six years before the recording by the Byrds).

  Yes, to everything is a season and to everything in life there is a proper response. 

   If you always cry, where is hope? If you always laugh, where is reality?

   Our special days teach us that from childhood on. If we are offered only the heavy Holydays that will be our view of Judaism, just as skewed as if Purim’s goofiness were the only experience of our religion our children are exposed to.

   Join us tonight via livestream as we read the final verses of Deuteronomy and begin the Torah cycle again with the reading of the opening verses of Genesis. Torah is never-ending, and while we cannot have the hakafot, the circumambulations (fancy for round-the-sanctuary parade) because of COVID-19, just as everything else nowadays we’ll do the best we can.

  And if you want to join in the Kohelet class tomorrow, check your email for my invitation to Zoom at 11:00 am. If you cannot find it, let me know and I’ll send an invitation to you.

  Shabbat shalom v’chag sameach....A Shabbat of peace and a holiday of joy to you and yours!