That Shabbat Feeling

That Shabbat Feeling

Mark Rothman | Jewish Long Beach

Many of you know the children’s Shabbat song, in which the key lyric is, “I’ve got that Shabbat feeling up in my head…up in my head…up in my head…”

I had that Shabbat feeling throughout a Shabbat in mid-August. It started at Shabbat by the Pool, thanks to Rabbi Scott Fox of Temple Israel, Rabbi Menachem Mirski, Ph.D. of Temple Beth Shalom, Rabbi Nancy Myers of Temple Beth David, and Jewish Long Beach’s Director of Jewish Life and Culture, Dana Schneider Chanzit. Each of them, with their guitars, their songs, and their prayers, brought the sacred joy of Shabbat to what would otherwise be a regular late afternoon in the sun.

I watched a small gaggle of children, enchanted, as they leaped and danced in front of the small table holding the Shabbat candles, wine and challah. I saw the pride in their parents’ faces. The parents – and their children – represented the broad range of Jewish engagement and experience that we welcome at Jewish Long Beach. I felt grateful that these parents trusted us at Jewish Long Beach to provide them and their children the deep satisfaction of connecting to their people and their traditions.

My memory of that late summer afternoon inspires me as we approach the cycle of Yomim Noraim, literally ‘the intense days.’ These days are intense not just because they are their own spiritual marathon, with the mile-markers including Rosh HaShanah, a ten-day kind of waiting period leading up to Yom Kippur, and the 8 days of Sukkot immediately afterwards. It can be intense just getting through all that.

Those days are also intense, of course, because of what we are called upon to do spiritually. On Rosh HaShanah, we celebrate the gift of another year. On Sukkot, we celebrate the abundance of godly protection. Yom Kippur falls in between, calling us to examine our own thoughts and actions as soberly as possible, and actually extends that intense self-reflection to the two holidays around it. Some may have even begun that self-reflection a month earlier, beginning in the Hebrew month of Elul. Talk about intense: a nearly two-month period in which we are expected to perform a heshbon hanefesh, an accounting of our souls.

Definitely not a religion for the faint of heart. Nor are the days we are living in for the faint of heart. It seems every day presents us with a new challenge to how we account for the world, how we count in the world, how we reconcile our own lives with and within such a precarious world.

That’s why, for me, moments like those at Shabbat at the Pool are so important. I need a weekly infusion of that shabbat feeling…up in my head to face a roiling world. I need the friends and family who help make meaningful the days of intensity – whether those days are religiously ordained or are just a random, challenging Tuesday. I need the connections between us all in the Jewish Long Beach community to stay balanced.

Our traditional blessing for this time of year is shanah tovah – may it be a good year. May Jewish Long Beach help you experience the joy, the meaning, and the connection we all need to make it a truly good year.