If there is any constant to the last two millennia of Jewish peoplehood, one would have to say it is resilience. Many times over the last year we have invoked the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. as, in some ways, a paradigm for our current moment: displaced from our sanctuary we had to reimagine how to worship, how to gather, how to learn, Jewishly.
And, while I don’t want to be too grandiose about it, just as our ancestors formulated what we now call rabbinic Judaism (or, really just Judaism) in the wake of this challenge, relying on prayer, Torah study, and the proliferation of mitzvot as the primary means of Jewish expression rather than sacrifices, so too in the last year did we and Jewish communities all across the globe find new platforms for Jewish expression.
In a couple of weeks we will begin a new phase in this journey. On March 15, the SHS Board of Directors, in consultation with clergy, staff, and our COVID-19 Risk Mitigation and Safety committee, passed a resolution re-opening our sanctuary, beginning, for now, with families celebrating children who are becoming B’nei Mitzvah with up to 25 people in attendance. It is a joyful beginning.
It also has very specific ramifications for the primary spaces in which we’ve adapted: technology-driven platforms like Zoom.
Those who have attended our Zoom services thus far have encountered a very specific look and feel. The Hazzan and I are looking directly into our respective cameras on our laptops, as are most of our attendees.
With some people returning into the physical sanctuary on Saturday mornings (Fridays will remain the same for now), things will look a bit different. Rather than looking directly into our cameras, we will be instead tending to the people in the room, helping them celebrate their simchas (joyous moments), while streaming the ongoings of the sanctuary to our community and to the celebrants’ family and friends around the world. Rather than having an interactive Torah study during services, we will be hearing Torah taught by our young person becoming B’nei Mitzvah, a title signifying that someone has entered a newfound relationship to Torah, to the Jewish people, and to our tradition. We have eight B’nei Mitzvah celebrations over 10 weeks, starting April 24. We encourage you to attend, helping take part in the generations-old tradition, welcoming a young person to a new stage of their Jewish and life journey.
Different settings—exclusively remote, exclusively in-person, and a hybrid of the two—call for for different technological approaches, as has been true throughout the Jewish millennia: moving from sacrifice to text study; from oral, improvisational prayers to fixed prayer books facilitated by the printing press; from translators to microphones; to, now our various approaches through Zoom and web streaming. We ask for your patience and for your engagement as we begin this next phase, which, like each phase before it, will contain challenges and new discoveries, hiccups and pearls of connection.
Thank you for journeying with us.
Wishing everyone a meaningful Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut,
