If you enjoyed the music over the High Holy Day season this year, get ready because you are in for a real treat! We have something for you that is dynamic, unique and deeply inspiring for ALL ages. Music without Borders: Experience an orchestra like you have never experienced it before. Hear music emerge from an instrument that is feet away from you. This year our concert entitled, “Music without Borders” explores the universal and timeless story that began with the Jew’s exodus from slavery. We will traverse time and space with music that elevates voices of Jews, Afro-Cubans and those who resisted Nazi Germany. Through it all, the music will teach us that it does not matter where we end up, with faith and God as our foundation, music is our true home. Free! Sponsored by Marvin and Ann Goldstein. November 4th at 4pm, right here at TE. For ALL ages. Advance registration appreciated.  Click HERE From Darkness to Light Vedem magazine, the longest running underground magazine … [Read more...]

As you’re reading this, over 70 women and girls from our Temple Emanu-El community are gathered in the social hall engaging in the spiritual act of preparing challah dough for Shabbat as a part of our 40th Anniversary Women’s Challah Bake. That’s around 650 cups of flour, 350 eggs, 140 cups of water, 140 Tbsp. of yeast, 75 cups of sugar, 70 cups of oil, and 70 Tbsp. of salt. Each of these ingredients has a higher spiritual connection that we can incorporate into the act of preparing the dough. We think about where each ingredient came from: The hands of the workers who handled the machines that picked the wheat and ground it into flour, the hands that harvested the sugar, the truck driver who drove the oil, the plant workers who give us access to clean water, the person at the check out counter who rung up the yeast and the salt, and the chickens who laid the eggs. We are now deeply connected to the ways of the world that allow the ingredients to sit at our prepping … [Read more...]

A Fiddler Fiddler on the Roof is the best Jewish film/play/book of all time. The film and play are based on the book Tevye the Dairyman written by the prolific Yiddish author Shalom Aleichem (Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich). Besides being a dark comedy of life in the shtetl, Fiddler on the Roof is the personal tale of one dairyman’s confrontation with modernity. For centuries, Jews were denied freedom of movement. They lived in shtetls, ghettos, at the fringes of civilized society. Then, in a whirl of revolutionary air, Jews were given the same political rights as their Christian neighbors. Jews suddenly went from shantytown communities to living the heart of bustling, industrial Europe. A Franz When our ancestors left the ghetto walls, they gained their freedom, but they also lost a bit of the heart of Jewish community. For better and for worse, the shtetl kept Jews Jewish. Today, among the many challenges we face, we struggle to balance our Jewish identity with our identity as … [Read more...]

My favorite space at Temple Emanu-El is our Sanctuary. Over the past three years, my view of the sanctuary has been drastically different from yours. My view is…you: the amazing people that make up our congregation; each congregant with real stories, emotions, and connections creating a weave of presence that makes my ‘view’ from the bima quite holy. But once in a while, I’ll go into the congregation and sit with my family, or a friend, for silent prayer.  Sometimes I don’t look down at my prayerbook, but rather, I look up… and see your view.  I see the Ner Tamid (everlasting light) of Jacob wrestling with the angel, the twelve tribes that ascend our ark doors, the symbolic flames coming from the Torah brace, and the ‘secret’ Hebrew words spelled out on our podiums.   Holding my gaze further still, I see two flags, American and Israeli, like bookmarks of who we are in this moment; and I see the mosaics of the ten commandments shaded in light and dark, with scenes of Moses … [Read more...]