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Rabbi Nathan's Blog: 9 Av ‐ The Beginning of Teshuva

August 2024

In his spiritual preparation guide for the High Holidays entitled This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared, Rabbi Alan Lew z"l starts his reflections with the Jewish holiday of the 9th of Av, the moment that we mark the calamitous destruction of the Temple and our subsequent exile. (The holiday also encompasses later tragedies of exile and destruction as well.)

Rabbi Lew considers 9 Av, which falls exactly 7 weeks before Rosh Hashanah, to be the beginning of the High Holiday cycle. For Rabbi Lew, this moment of 9 Av offers a psycho‐spiritual roadmap for us. It is the beginning of the teshuva process, the process in which we begin not only to mourn our national calamities, but it is also the beginning of the process in which we to turn away from the destructive behaviors and patterns that tear down the houses of our relationships. In Rabbi Lew's words: 

Rabbi Nathan's Blog: Continued

[9 Av] is the moment of turning, the moment when we turn away from denial and begin to face exile and alienation as they manifest in our own lives ‐‐ in our alienation and estrangement from God, in our alienation from ourselves and from others. Teshuvah ‐‐ turning, repentance ‐‐ is the essential gesture of the High Holiday season. It is the gesture by which we seek to heal this alienation and to find at‐one‐ment: to connect with God, to reconcile with others, and to anchor ourselves in the ground of our actual circumstances, so that it is this reality that shapes our actions and not just the habitual, unconscious momentum of our lives. (p.41‐42)

I find Rabbi Lew's framing of 9 Av a useful one. While it is so important to delve into and seek to connect with the national calamities that have befallen our people, this approach can oftentimes for me be hard to...

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Tot Shabbat is Going Strong

Since last fall we’ve met on the 2nd Friday of every month, coming together to sing, color, play, eat, tell stories and celebrate Shabbat together as a community.

Over the past 6 months we’ve had 30 families participate, with about 5‐7 families per month.

Many thanks to our volunteers and our rabbinic interns, who make it all possible:  Aya Baron, Lynn Cashell, Nora Chernov, Alicia DePaolo, Elaine Feldman, Alisa Herman‐Liu, Lydia Kendis, Randi Raskin Nash, Alan Ross, Kathy Trow. And of course Rabbi Nathan and Rabbi Linda. Special thanks to student rabbi Koach Baruch Frazier, who joined us for our February Tot Shabbat celebration.
If you’d like to attend or help out at a future Tot Shabbat please reach out to Jackie Gelman.

Upcoming dates: 9/13, 11/8, 12/13

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