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Jacksonville Jewish News • November 2017
opinion and cartoons JJN’s Rabbinically Speaking: Taking a breather during November BY RABBI RACHAEL BREGMAN of relief. Jewishly, we’ve just spent the last several months doing Temple Beth Tefilloh a major internal overhaul. We In this month of November, have looked deeply into our souls, we celebrate…nothing! While looked at all the ugly bits and done in the secular world we may be what we can to clean them up. gearing up for Thanksgiving and Now, here we are off again to the Black Friday, two great American daily grind and the freedom for a holidays, Jewishly we move into moment to give our own selves a the month of Cheshvan. Cheshvan little less scrutiny. has absolutely no holy days in it So what is so bitter about this? beyond, of course, our weekly Perhaps the rabbis of old were taste of holiness, Shabbat. The full being a little tongue-in-cheek name of the month is MarCheshwhen they named the month a van. There is some debate over bitter one. Or perhaps they were how the month got this name. lamenting the difficulty of living Some scholarship suggests it’s a the lives we have imagined for typo with two letters transposed. ourselves during the holy days. With this transposition returned, Being our better selves is chalwe would get the words eight and lenging work. Shouldering up to moon. This would make sense the task of holding our own feet since Cheshvan, or MarCheshavn, to the proverbial fire or water is is eight months since Passover not always easy, especially as we which is held as one of four Jeware just getting started on making ish new years. However, Mar, in good at our new year’s resolutions. Hebrew, means bitter. Suggesting Maybe the bitterness is just the that the month is bitter because it yoke of responsibility for enacting is holiday free. our loftiest goals. I don’t know about you, but Personally, I think the bitterafter Tisha B’Av, Elul, Rosh Hasha- ness of Cheshvan is also this after nah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini an extended period of time of Atzeret and Simchat Torah, a little coming together with increased time out from feasting and fasting frequency with our families and is welcome in my life. Instead our communities, we miss one of bitter, if you don’t mind me another. While getting through confessing, this break from all the tachlis, the details of the holy the preparation and leading while days may have had its moments of juggling the rest of my life is a bit frustration or anxiety, the being
RABBINICALLY SPEAKING there together, all of us throughout time and space, is something to behold. It is an intense reminder of how interconnected we truly are and, perhaps, of the oneness of God. And now on the other side, we are faced with the bitterness of our solitude and maybe even our loneliness. But here is the thing to remember. This is temporary and an important part of the process. After the heights of joy at a wedding, the couple immediately goes off for a period of seclusion known
as yichud which can mean both singular as well as together. It is a brief moment to let the enormity of what has just taken place settle in. And that is us right now. We need a second not just to catch our breaths, but to solidify all we have allowed ourselves to hope for and imagine. To wobble a little bit on our shaky new legs and try on this new self we have crafted. It’s learning how to walk all over again. And while we know there are others nearby to catch us if we falter, we must now take these early challenging steps all by ourselves. And once we have done this, we celebrate and rejoice next month again with Chanukah. The calendar of time forever, brilliantly and beautifully moving us forward again. Rabbi Rachael Bregman is the first female to serve in that capacity at Temple Beth Tefilloh in Brunswick, Ga., which has been in operation since the 1880s. She grew up in the suburbs of Boston and was actively involved in NFTY, the Reform Movement’s youth group and spent most of her summers at Camp
Ramah in New England, a Conservative Movement summer camp. She earned a Bachelor’s degree from Boston College in Human Development and Psychology with a double minor in Jewish Studies and Studio Art. Upon ordination in 2010, Rabbi Bregman took a position with The Temple in Atlanta, where she served for three years as The Rabbi for Open Jewish Project, a grantfunded endeavor under the umbrella of Synagogue 3000 and NextDor. After coming to Brunswick to be the congregation’s first resident rabbi in more than half a century, she has served on the boards of Truah (formerly Rabbis for Human Rights), The Jewish Community Relations Council, and is a founding member of Tzedek Georgia. She has recently been accepted into the first cohort of CLAL’s Clergy Leadership Incubator and continues to speak regularly against human trafficking. In addition to her congregational work, Rabbi Bregman continues to build community and focus on Jewish engagement in Atlanta and beyond. Bregman has a daughter, Lillith and the two reside in Brunswick.
If you are a Rabbi, hazzan or religious leader in NE Florida and would like to contribute your inspirational thoughts for a monthly column, please e-mail jjn@jewishjacksonville.org
Shlicha Corner: Recalling a Somber Time in the Secular Calendar
BY SHELLY SHALEV
Community Shlicha jaxshlicha@jewishjacksonville.org
By the time you are reading my column, the Chagim are already over and the routine of our daily lives is kicking in as the next holiday on the horizon is Chanukah. It is safe to say now after this wonderful time spent with many of you this holiday season, I have no doubt in my mind that I chose the best place to spend my upcoming year and I thank you for your warm and loving hospitality into the many homes and hearts in the community. The month of November marks the beginning of the winter as the ‘Yore’, which means the first rain of the year in Hebrew. As it arrives, the jackets are slowly coming out of the closet, but the autumn months, more specifically, the 4th of Nov., marks two very important
dates. One is my father Yossi’s 55th birthday. Second, and sadly, on this date we will commemorate the 22nd year of the assassination our former prime minister of Israel Mr. Yitzhak Rabin. In 1993, Rabin negotiated the Israel-PLO accords with Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, with the aim of sanctioning Israel’s withdrawal from occupied territories and the hope of ending conflict between the two groups. In Oct. 1994, Rabin also signed a peace treaty with King Hussein bin Talal of Jordan following secret negotiations. In December of that year, Rabin was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Arafat and Peres, who was serving as Israel’s foreign minister at the time. Then on that fateful night Nov. 4, 1995, after speaking at a Tel Aviv peace rally, Rabin was gunned down and killed by Yigal Amir, an Israeli law
Dry Bones Cartoons by Yaakov Kirschen
student and right-wing extremist. I was just five years old that day, but I remember it so clearly and vividly, as I recall watching the TV screen with my parents and how upset they were as they began to grieve over Rabin’s loss. This day was initially supposed to be a
happy one, celebrating my father’s birthday, but on that day, the state of Israel stopped because not only did we lose a great leader, we also lost a sense of hope for the future, witnessing our prime minister gunned down by in the name of politics, of insanity, of extremism.
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