Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation

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This Sunday, what an opportunity!

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This Sunday, June 14, Matthaei Botanical Gardens is the place to be for the Farm Education Day and Sustainable Food Fest. There is really terrific programing and incredible food planned. Two of the things I am most excited about are the connections the planners have made with young Jewish social justice activists who are living in Detroit.

Blair Nosan (right) and Chava Knox at work at Eden Gardens.
Blair Nosan (right) and Chava Knox at work at Eden Gardens.

Did you know that Hazon, one of the most creative, inspirational Jewish social justice organizations, is opening its Detroit branch this month? You can meet Detroit Hazon’s lead organizer, Blair Nosan,this Sunday at 11:15 for the workshop “Bread from the Earth: Jewish Practice and Sustainability.” The workshop will be co-led by Sue Salinger, the sister of AARC member Carole Kaplan. This is an opportunity not to be missed.

In addition, Detroit Jews for Justice is leading a workshop at 10:15, Mayim Hayyim: A Jewish Perspective on the Detroit Water Shut-offs with AJ Aaron. AJ was a Repair the World fellow last year.

AJ Aaron
AJ Aaron

If you need any inspiration over the next few days, read those links about the work Blair and AJ are involved in. And see you Sunday, let’s get inspired together!

Is there a new Jewish back to the land movement?

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green-things-logo-1Is there a new Jewish back to the land movement? Let’s talk about it together on June 14th when we gather at Matthaei Botanical Gardens for the Farm Education and Sustainability Food Fest and take a tour of Green Things Farm. Certainly Nate Lada, who with his wife Jill Sweetman are the owners and operators of Green Things Farm, sees a connection between his Hebrew Day School education and his commitment to sustainable agriculture. When he was a guest speaker at a UM Hillel Tu B’Shvat seder in 2012, Nate talked about the importance of agriculture and respecting the Earth as central to the Jewish tradition. Twentysomething graduates of the UM where they both studied Environmental Science, Nate and Jill have taken advantage of several opportunities created by longtime Ann Arbor environmental activists such as the Ann Arbor greenbelt program, a thirty year investment voted on in 2003. With the goal of starting a family farm, Nate and Jill spent two years (2011-2012) as part of the first cohort at Jeff McCabe and colleagues’ Tilian Farm Incubator Program. There Nate and Jill learned many of the basics of the business of farming while taking advantage of the program’s land, equipment, farming mentors, and community support. The land they bought to start their own farm, on Nixon near Warren about 5 miles north of downtown, was also part of the greenbelt program, in which the city of Ann Arbor bought development rights on the properties, making the land affordable for farming. [Read more…] about Is there a new Jewish back to the land movement?

Torah of the future at AARC’s Beit Sefer

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Clare Kinberg head shot
Clare Kinberg, Beit Sefer Director

At our Shavuot study this year, a group of AARC members discussed several Jewish texts and traditions surrounding the word “torah.” Sometimes Torah is used to name the five books in the scroll read weekly on Shabbat; sometimes “Torah” includes Talmud and other writings as well. At times Torah is understood as “law,” while, as Rabbi Michal pointed out, “torah” can also mean “aim,” as in a guide for our actions.

One of the Reconstructionist movement’s goals for religious education is to convey Torah as “the ongoing, creative, and sacred search for meaning in life, a record of human encounters with the Divine.” As the new director of our Beit Sefer, I embrace this creative and ongoing Torah as our model. Our goal is to instill in the students the sense that, with the tools of Jewish tradition, their lives are creating the Torah of the future. Just as the Jewish people’s experience of God, Torah, and peoplehood has changed and grown throughout history, the students’ own experiences will change Judaism.

Each aspect of Reconstructionist education is infused with creative, participatory purpose. For instance, the point of Hebrew language study isn’t only recitation of a Torah portion. We study Hebrew in order to participate in community and express ourselves: in ritual, prayer, and text study, fostering connections with Jewish civilization of the past, the present, and the future. These goals may be lofty for a supplementary elementary school, but we can achieve sparking the desire to reach for them, and the basis of the tools to get there.

mezuzah making
Beit Sefer and Mezuzah Making, 2015

Another hallmark of Reconstructionism is incorporating contemporary ideas and discoveries in science and psychology into Jewish practice. Starting Fall 2015, the AARC Beit Sefer will begin to use Project-Based Learning (PBL) as a teaching approach in our K-6 religious school curriculum. An inquiry- and innovation-based teaching method, PBL is a perfect fit for a Reconstructionist religious school. PBL lessons open with a driving question – something the students feel they need to know. The teacher then guides the students through a journey of discovery, using a variety of resources, such as storybooks, excerpts from texts, experimentation, parents, teachers and other students. Students choose how they will present the information they have discovered; the culmination of each project is sharing it with a larger audience. Questioning has always been the basis of Jewish learning, so combining these contemporary teaching methods in the Jewish classroom is a natural.

In the AARC Beit Sefer classrooms, the students will work in pairs or small groups, using our community’s deep human resources of artists, techies, musicians, teachers, etc. to investigate the yearly cycle of Jewish holidays, life cycle rituals, the practice of mitzvot, Jewish history, liturgy, and literature.

An example of a PBL lesson for the Kitanim, [Read more…] about Torah of the future at AARC’s Beit Sefer

Klezmer Dance All Age Fun!

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Friday May 22nd was really a special and beautiful evening. The room filled with the warmest of blessings for Rabbi Michal. And then the fun really kicked in. Many thanks to Allison Stupka, Barbara Rust Boyk and the whole crew that organized the evening. Let’s have Klezmephonic over again! Nancy Meadow took terrific photos of our klezmer dance party!

klezmer1 klezmer2 klezmer3 klezmer5 klezmer6 klezmer4

“We heard God’s words without using our ears.”

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Shuli and Me“We heard God’s words without using our ears.” So Shavuot is described at the end of Shuli and Me: From Slavery to Freedom, the storybook Omer calendar by Joan Benjamin-Farren you will hear at the AARC havdallah and Shavuot observance. The story, told from a freed slave child’s point of view, imagines those first seven weeks in the desert. We have been following the cloud. Today we are camped at the foot of the mountain. We’ve washed our clothes. We are waiting.

After havdallah, Rabbi Michal will lead us in a discussion of approaches to the concept of torah; the capital “T” Torah, the five books in our traditional scroll, and other uses of the concept of torah. A couple that speak to me, for instance: In a Kol Nidre sermon Rabbi Mona Alfi quoted the medieval scholar, Bachya ibn Pakuda: “Days are like scrolls, only write on them what you want to be remembered.” She explained, “In essence, what Bachya ibn Pakuda was saying is that each life is a Torah for future generations to examine and learn from.”

A description of Carol Ochs’ book Our Lives as Torah: Finding God in Our own Stories, says “Through the process of seeing our experiences in relation to Biblical stories, we begin to recognize our lives as part of the ongoing story of the Jewish people–as Torah.”

Let’s meet there, at the mountain, and discuss: May 23rd 7:30pm till ? At the home, still, of Rabbi Michal and Jon Sweeney, 2960 Lakeview Drive. Dairy, dessert potluck. Early evening all ages, after havdallah for adults, childcare available. Email Clare or Rabbi Michal.

Klezmephonic and Drake Meadow: Bringing Jewish Music and Dance together the Ann Arbor Way

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10931275_692424077523327_4042546703563411397_nCan a Contra dance caller lead a Yiddish sher (scissors dance)? Darn right, if it’s Drake Meadow! We will all get to experience the fun of it on Friday May 22nd as we gather to honor Rabbi Michal and appreciate her leadership of our community over the past two years. A special Kabbalat Shabbat beginning at 6:30 will be followed by a potluck dinner and entertainment by Klezmephonic, a new Ann Arbor klezmer band.

Klezmephonic’s first show was at the Old Town Tavern in Ann Arbor in June 2014, and they’ve played pretty steadily ever since, most recently, to a packed Kerrytown Concert House. Klemephonic’s guitar player, Alex Belhaj, and clarinetist and vocalist Jennie Lavine both attended the November klezmer workshop led by Maxwell Street Band and co-sponsored by AARC. There Jennie met Margo Schlanger, AARC board chair and intrepid viola player and our other member musicians Deb Gombert, Paul Resnick and Deb Fisch. Also at the workshop were Dan Peisach and Ralph Katz, both of whom play with Alex in the Celtic klezmer fusion band, ‘Twas Brillig and the Mazel Tovs’, which plays an annual contra dance that, this past year, was called by Drake Meadows.

Drake says it’s not really too much of a stretch to combine Contra and klezmer. After all, he says, Contra draws on all European folkdance. For instance the Virginia Reel, the classic American folk dance is a British dance, and yet it bears a close resemblance to a dance from Czechoslovakia. Similarly, Drake explains, a sher is an Ashkenazi square dance, same basic structure. For more than you probably want to know check out this transcript on sher and Contra dance from a 2007 Symposium on Yiddish dance.

Klezmephonic’s Jennie Lavine is also hosting klezmer jam sessions through Oz’s music and the band is currently in the process of mixing and mastering their first album.

What goes into a Mezuzah?

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mez pro 3 What goes into a mezuzah? Just ask an AARC Beit Sefer (Religious School) student! On April 26th and Mary 3rd, AARC member and Beit Sefer mom Marcy Epstein led an all-school mezuzah making workshop. The students learned about the difference between the mezuzah case and the scroll inside, and how we have come to name each part as the mezuzah. They discussed why and how Jewish homes have mezuzot on our door frames and demonstrated the ritual of kissing the mezuzah both entering and exiting the rooms of our homes. The students explored the letter Shin and many of the words that it represents, and then they learned about the prayer on the mezuzah scroll, the Shema and the V’ahavta. Marcy shared how these two prayers became so important that we would want them ever present in our homes.mez pro 4

The students rolled out their airdry clay and formed them into beautiful original cases, working with shapes and wood pieces for texture. Then Marcy and the teachers made the letter Shin for each child and set their mezuzot cases to dry, reminding them that over the week they might think about what prayer they would like to say while entering and exiting their bedrooms. The next week, the kids painted and embellished their beautiful cases. They then copied the Hebrew of the Shema and first words of the V’ahavta onto origami paper “scrolls” along with their own original prayers and set them inside the mezuzah cases to make their personalized mezuzot. By adding their own prayers to the scroll in the mezuzah, the students learned about Jewish “lifehacks,” explained by Rabbi James Brandt, director of the Jewish Federation of the East Bay in a January 2015 Jewish Week article “as this generation’s equivalent of ‘do-it-yourself Judaism,’ represented by the groundbreaking 1973 publication of the The First Jewish Catalog (co-edited by Michael Strassfeld), which offered a model of creating Jewish life ‘outside the official system.’”

mez pro 1Marcy hopes that our families might share a mezuzah hanging with the kids, not only so they can know where on the door frame to look for a mezuzah, but also to celebrate their warming embrace of the ancient ways with modern import reflective of their lives.

So, if you ask the students at the AARC Beit Sefer, you might find that in addition to the shema on a scroll, what goes into a mezuzah case is love, care, creativity, and their own heartfelt (or silly, but definitely personal) prayers.mez pro 2

 

A Torah Story

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Shabbat on the farm
Shabbat on the farm

Our Torah scroll was acquired, according to Bev Warshai, at the time when the Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Havurah was about to celebrate our first bat mitzvah, the Warshai’s daughter Gal. Although Bev and her husband Yuval belonged to both the AA Havurah and T’chiya, a Detroit Reconstructionist congregation, they wanted Gal’s bat mitzvah Torah service to be here in Ann Arbor. However, the Havurah did not have a Torah scroll, an ark, or a table to use during a service. Around this time, in 1997, several members of the Havurah–Aaron and Aura Ahuvia, Deb Kraus and Danny Steinmetz (and their children Isaac and Jonah Ahuvia (3 and 1 years old) and Molly Kraus-Steinmetz (2 years old)–drove together to Kenosha, WI for a regional Reconstructionist workshop. There they met a member of a Reconstructionist congregation in Chicago that happened to have an excess of Torah scrolls. How does a congregation acquire an excess of Torah scrolls? Danny suggests that “Back in the day, giving a Torah was a big thing, whether or not the shul needed another one. The symbolism of dedicating the ultimate sacred object (since the destruction of the Temple) in memory of deceased relatives is so strong, if a shul was around long enough and had enough members with some money, collecting Torah scrolls was not unusual.” Bev also remembers that two congregations merged, creating even more of an excess of scrolls. Deb remembers the initial discussion, “I was in a workshop and someone was lamenting that they don’t always have Torah readers and I said, ‘at least you have a Torah,’ at which point a person from a Chicago congregation said, ‘Talk to me after this. We have an extra Torah.’”

Arrangements were made. Because the Torah was a gift to the Chicago congregation, they could loan it to us and give us responsibility to take care of it. Although Yuval’s subsequent communications with the Chicago congregation indicated that they have relinquished all claims to the scroll, out of an excess of caution, AARC will continue to care for it in trust. If we ever come into possession of any other Torah, we could decide to gift this one on, again, to another congregation in need. But back to the story!

Yuval and Harry Fried made the trip to Chicago to bring the Torah scroll back to Ann Arbor. Alan Haber made the ark, and other necessities and niceties for a Torah service were collected. In future blog posts I will write more about those objects, including our Torah covers and our yad. So far, we know nothing more about the provenance of our Torah scroll. Since we’ve had it, the scroll has been repaired twice at Borenstein’s in Oak Park, including new wooden spindles. It still has need of stitching repairs and there are many faded letters that can make it challenging to read.

AARC has a fund for repairing or replacing the Torah, though it contains only a fraction of the money needed. Board member Jack Edelstein is leading a new effort to figure out the best path forward. If you’d like to be involved in this effort, contact Jack. And if you’d like to donate to the fund, click here.