Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation

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It’s Shabbat – come meditate

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Words by Anita Rubin-Meiller

In my first week of the Flourish course, a meditation teacher’s training offered by
the Institute of Jewish Spirituality, we were given a text by R. Shalom Noach
Berezovsky. R. Berezovsky identified Shabbat as an ark that enables us to find
refuge from the flood of chaos and overwhelm in the weekday world. He
states…”the deficiency of the generation of the Flood was in its scattered da’at
(awareness, mindfulness) which is the root of all harm…” He suggests we repair
such scattering of da’at through Yishuv hada’at (a settling, calming, centering of
mind). Without this, we are lost, unable to be truly connected to ourselves, or to
the Creator, who “renews our very being from moment to moment.”

Calming, Centering, Connecting through meditation has deep roots in Jewish
practice and is written about by many sages past and present. It is a practice that
is at once simple but difficult, in that it requires compassionate patience with
oneself and the ramblings of our minds that seem determined on scattering our
attention. It is a practice that has increasing benefits over time.

I was first exposed to meditation in a Jewish context in 2019 when I was blessed
to attend a 6-day silent retreat with Rabbi Jeff Roth, Rabbi Sheila Pelz-Weinberg,
Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein, and Zen priest Norman Fischer. Since then, I
have been meditating multiple times a week with Rabbi Roth’s Awakened Heart
Community. While meditation doesn’t necessarily change who you are, it does
impact how much you accept and love yourself as your critical mind calms, as
compassion heightens, as your attention to each moment deepens.

There are many approaches to meditation- from sitting with attention on the
breath; to mentally reciting a word or phrase; to following a guided script that
offers an intention and imagery. Each approach offers the opportunity to bring
your attention inward, to notice what arises in mind, body and heart moment to
moment without getting caught up in it, to perhaps find that precious still point
and rest there for a moment.

I am pleased to be able to offer an opportunity for our community to gather
together to practice for 20 minutes of meditation on the second Saturday of the
month before services. Check the Tuesday mailer for exact times and location.
I hope to see you there.

On Continuity of Care

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Young Jewish children sit at tables in the childcare center at the Joodsche Schouwburg in the Amsterdam Jewish quarter, 1942. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Hilde Jacobsthal Goldberg

Over the past week, I have processed the election results both privately and in community. I was especially grateful for our Second Saturday Shabbat Service, where I could connect with our community and be held by the sounds of our liturgy. As I parse through my feelings, my worries and fears always come back to the children in my life.

I spend my weekdays in the Duck Room at the JCC, a toddler classroom of 13 brilliant and beautiful souls. I feel so honored to be trusted with their care, to see them forming words and learning how to use their bodies. More than anything, I treasure the deep, loving, trusting connections I have built with them and their families. 

When the Ducks were dropped off last Wednesday, I exchanged quiet looks of sadness, anger, and fear with their parents. A few of them said they wished they could just stay home and be with their kids. I certainly hugged them extra tight throughout the day.

Although it was a sad day for many of the adults, it was business as usual for the toddlers. Their routines and rituals are what keep their world round. I was, and am, grateful to the presence that these children require. They keep me much too busy to allow my mind to wander to matters of dread and despair. 

My thoughts have also been with our class of Beit Sefer students in this time. Their relentless energy, curiosity, wit, talent, stubbornness, and playfulness give me hope and solace. 

We will be staging a mock Kabbalat Shabbat this Sunday, using ritual objects made and decorated by the students, and led by Rav Gavrielle. When the future is unknowable, I hope the practice and passing down of traditions may help us feel rooted in safety and security.

Finally, I think of my niece, at almost three months old, and what the world has in store for her. There are infinite paths of fear and doubt that I could go down. Thankfully, however, there are just as many of strength and perseverance. 

In grieving and in growing, as we stand on this precipice, I come back to the priestly blessing we sing at the end of services. May all of the children in our communities, both near and far, know safety, health, courage, and ease.

Re-Rolling the Torah Together

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Words by Keith Kurz

The Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation met with the Hebrew Day School’s third grade.

In preparation for Rosh Hashanah the Torah needed to be re-rolled from nearly the end to nearly the beginning. Deb Kraus led the third grade class in a prayer for doing the mitzvah.

The students asked good questions and sang songs during the re-rolling. Intermittently Deb stopped the rolling of the Torah to point out many items, including the beginning of each book, the 10 Commandments, the Shima and the place where Avram changed his name to Avraham and Sarai to Sarah. Noah learned to re-roll the Torah and perform hagbah.The Hebrew Day School hopes to have more activities with AARC.

Welcome Back, Dieve Family!

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We are excited to see Mark, Stacy, Bass & Sappho Dieve back in Ann Arbor from their three year stint in Switzerland. They left in June 2021 just after Bass’ Bar Mitzvah and just as our congregation restarted meeting together outside for services. 

Both Stacy and Mark kept up a steady stream of stories of their Swiss adventures on Facebook that included trying to find challah, chocolate gelt and matzah. They particularly missed decent Mexican food. Along the way, they made some significant friendships from local purveyors of cheese, bread, coffee and wine as well as their neighbors and French teacher. 

The Dieve’s made their way to Switzerland for Stacy’s job as a Strategic Trade Manager for Cisco while Mark continued his work remotely as a certified herbalist and consultant, check his work out at rootedhealth.com. 

They are excited to get back to their home in Ann Arbor and to return to the Jewish community in real life. When you see Bass, ask him about his job and his interest in theater. Sappho is eager to get back to art and learn to play the guitar. 

Besides filling up on library books in English and as much guacamole, salsa and tortilla chips as they could eat since returning stateside, Stacy says “we are so happy to be home and very glad to have our Jewish community again.”  

Join us in welcoming the Dieve family back to town – do provide them with suggestions of new places to try Mexican food, find decent bread and coffee shops that might provide them with a little European experience. Stacy added, “We already miss being able to walk out of our apartment to the local boulangerie and buvette – the Swiss version of lakeside cafe. But mostly it is the people who make the place – and so we are excited to reconnect with all of our friends at AARC” 

Paddling Together through the Fog

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Words by Adrianne Neff

“Ships are safe in harbor, but that ain’t what ships are for” 

–from Harbor by Carsie Blanton

Emily asked me to write about an experience that I shared in services this past Friday. On July 13, I rowed in the Blackburn Challenge, a 20-mile race around Cape Ann, Massachusetts. I’ve been training for this event for almost 2 years, going from being barely able to get in my boat to doing long solo open-water crossings. Usually I relish being out on the water alone, and I have a wonderful time. But sometimes when I’m alone and far from land, I do get scared. At first I found this fear paralyzing, and in order to move through it, I developed a practice of singing out loud as I rowed. Anything rhythmic and simple will do: I sing sea shanties, bim bam melodies, Jewish folk songs, Hindu chants. I sing badly, but the seagulls never seem to mind. 

I didn’t anticipate being alone or afraid during the race: there were 150 other boats participating, and I knew I’d always be in sight of land. The forecast was for rain showers, gusty winds, and patchy fog. The first part of the course was challenging, but I was making good progress and having fun. Midway through the race the weather shifted, and all of a sudden we were enveloped in thick fog. I couldn’t see the shore, the horizon, or a single other boat. The fog was completely disorienting, and the lack of stationary landmarks to focus on made me violently seasick. I lost all sense of direction, and I became convinced that my navigation tablet was malfunctioning. My subjective sense of direction was very strong but completely wrong; had I followed it, I might still be rowing across the Atlantic. I was as scared as I’ve ever been, panicking, flailing at the water with my oars. I was realistically afraid of being hit by a motorboat in the fog, but also filled with irrational fears such as capsizing and being attacked by sharks. (My boat is very stable and wouldn’t capsize even in much higher seas. And though there were probably a few sharks around, they certainly weren’t going to attack my boat.) As I tried to calm myself, I remembered how I’d learned to deal with unreasoning fear by vocalizing, so I cast around for something to sing. What came to mind was something I’d never sung before while rowing, but that has become much beloved to me from recent Fourth Friday services:

May I be safe

May I be strong

May I be courageous

May my life be at ease

May you be safe

May you be strong

May you be courageous

May your life be at ease

May we be safe

May we be strong

May we be courageous

May our lives be at ease*

At first haltingly, then strongly, I sang this to myself. I sang it again, this time “May we be safe,” and as I sang, I felt the support and power of our community with me out on the water. My heart stopped hammering, my panic eased, and my rowing steadied. I was still sick and scared, but I rowed on through the fog and the bobbing lobster buoys, no longer paralyzed. I finally reached the safety of Gloucester Harbor, finishing the race in 5 hours and 48 minutes, the longest and hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m proud of myself for persevering, and so grateful to my congregation for being with me.

*This song is a version of a Loving Kindness meditation, also known as Metta meditation in Buddhist traditions. There are many variations, and I’m not sure if what I sang was exactly what we sing in services or just what I needed at the moment. I tried to learn more about this powerful practice, and I found many pieces written about it. Here’s one I liked by Jon Kabat-Zinn: https://www.mindful.org/this-loving-kindness-meditation-is-a-radical-act-of-love/, and another by Rabbi Jill Zimmerman that includes a video of a lovely version sung by Elana Arian: https://ravjill.com/lovingkindness-practice/.

Passing the finish line buoy in Gloucester Harbor, photo by Samuel Lurie

Rowing on another misty (but not scary) day on the Huron River, photo by Pam Shore

Reflections on Liberty

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As I donned my red, white, and blue and clothing yesterday morning for the ECC’s Independence Day picnic, I couldn’t help but wonder what my ancestors might think of me today.

Carrie Bradshaw references aside, I am now a little over one month into my new position at the AARC. As I have been showered with welcome and congratulations, I have also begun to consider what I think of me.

This past weekend, my mom’s family gathered to commemorate my Grandpa Burt’s 20th yahrzeit. While visiting his gravesite, I felt a magic and electricity as my mom and uncles shared memories of their father.

This aliveness I feel always seems to come about in such moments of profound connection and remembering. The same feeling I get from reading memoirs of women like Mary Antin or Letty Cottin Pogrebin. Jewish American women, each from different generations than my own, and all of us with different, yet parallel experiences of our Americas.

Mary Antin’s The Promised Land provides the perspective of a young girl immigrating to late 1890s New York who must reconcile two greatly different worlds. Antin was also a contemporary of Emma Lazarus, a Jewish poet whose words adorn the Statue of Liberty.

Cottin Pogrebin’s, Deborah, Golda, and Me on the other hand, illustrates the author’s reckoning with the patriarchal aspects of her Jewish American upbringing through the lens of second wave feminism.

There are many things that tether these women’s stories to my own and to those of our congregation. We all have our own unique experiences and perspectives of what it means to be Jewish in America, and this can bring up a host of feelings, particularly around the 4th of July.

I consider myself fortunate to be a part of a community in which we, especially non-men, are free and encouraged to participate and think deeply and critically about all aspects of our tradition.

Politics and parades aside, I feel proud of the Jewish American life that I am making, and hope my ancestors, both near and distant, feel similarly.

Whether you are lighting fireworks this year or simply enjoying some rest, let us not forget those who came before us, and what they might think.

Creating a Culture of Holiness

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By: Anita Rubin-Meiller

I was blessed to attend Rav Gavrielle’s Rosh Chodesh service on Friday morning,
June 7 th and felt moved to write this short blog in case it might wake up the desire
for others to join the next month’s gathering.


In his book, “Me, Myself and God”, Rabbi Jeff Roth states that “creating a culture
of holiness is what will deliver us…it is within a culture of holiness that we all can
gain the wisdom and support to open our hearts”. With her wise and
compassionate presence, our Rabbi, is giving us yet another opportunity to
experience connection within the community in a way that accomplishes this.

Although we were on zoom, and not in person, the intimacy of our connection
could be felt as we were invited to pray the Shacharit service together and
welcome the New Moon of Sivan. The service had all the elements of meaning
and beauty that Rav Gavrielle creates in our monthly Shabbat services. We
chanted, we shared gratitudes, we offered healing prayer and observed Kaddish.
We also learned about the significance of the new month we had just entered and
how it aligned with this week’s torah portion, BaMidbar, as the Israelites created
camp at the base of Mount Sinai, preparing to receive the torah on the sixth day
of Sivan, now celebrated as Shavout.


Daily prayer- morning, afternoon, and evening- is a central aspect of traditional
Jewish practice, but my guess is that few of us engage with our Judaism in this
way. The root of the Hebrew word for prayer, tefillah, has multiple meanings
including, to judge, clarify, and decide. A definition of prayer that follows from
this is “the soul’s yearning to define what truly matters…”(Siddur Avodas HaLev) I
found the opportunity to have this space of communal prayer and ritual
observance beneficial for aligning my heart and mind in calm and gratitude before
stepping into the tasks and activities of the day. I look forward to gathering again
in this way.

Malchuyot Drash

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By Deb Kraus

Malchuyot is about majesty, kingship, power.  

Because this past year I finally visited Israel and Palestine, I can’t think about power without thinking about the abuse of power.  We don’t usually tackle this problem from the Bimah and while I know what I’m about to say is pretty mainstream in our core community, I am aware that some visitors may be shocked by my candor.  But Marge Piercy challenged us in a poem last night, “where have I spoken out? Who have I tried to move?”  And the message I picked last night from theblessing box said, “may my words 

So here goes: 

Our group went to several Palestinian communities where power, on the part of the Israeli government, and the  soldiers and settlers they support, has been institutionalized:

 Ir David (city of David) is a national archeological site in disputed territory that appears to exist solely to document the presence of ancient Jews, so as to lay claim to the area.  18 year-old soldiers stand around in their crisp brown uniforms chatting with each other uzi’s strapped to their belts.  In Silwan, which is where Ir David continues to expand, Palestinians are being thrown out of their homes, and to add insult to injury, they are expected to pay to have their homes demolished.  

On another day, we picked olives near Bethlehem with a Palestinian family whose home has been destroyed not once, not twice but four separate times.  We used our power as Jewish Americans to prevent them from being bullied during the harvest.

But the situation which was the eeriest to me happened when we visited Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust Museum.  We were stunned to realize how many of the same tactics were used by both regimes.  For example, people’s homes are routinely broken into in the middle of the night and those detained have no due process. Palestinians can’t travel without going through slow , crowded checkpoints and out-of-the-way airports.  It is illegal for our guide, a Palestinian Christian, to live with her husband, an Arab Israeli.  Palestinians have few rights and no voice, and constantly live in fear that their basic needs will be taken away, if in fact, they ever could count on them at all.  

I know what collective trauma can do to a people, and I want to emphasize that I get “never again,” truly I do.  But in this case the new Israelis made the calculation that military strength and personal intimidation, humiliation, were the ways to insure “never again.”  And over time. this results in those 18 year-old soldiers I mentioned already, acting like this is normal.  And it results in settlers, some now in their third and fourth generation, militantly believing that this land, which is clearly within Palestine, is indisputably theirs.  

And so the oppressed became the oppressors.  Most ironically, of course, this has not resulted in peace or security for anyone.

I knew about all this, of course.  I’m a good progressive Jew.  But to see the many facets of this was mind-numbing.  And as an American Jew, this happens in my name.  In all our names.  

Sheila Weinberg, who we just quoted in her prayer for peace in the Mideast, was our trip leader along with her husband Maynard.  One day she pondered, “Jews never had power before.  And you never know how you’ll deal with power until you have it.”  This was after visiting Hebron, where settlers daily rain garbage and human waste down on Palestinian merchants… just meters away from where Abraham—Ibrahim—is buried.

While the Mideast is not simple, the overall message is: Power is so easily misused.  

So as we rise and prostrate ourselves for the Grand Aleynu, let us think about our relationship to our power and privilege and vow to become more aware of it.  And to stand up for the powerless, in our groups but also beyond them.  Do what you can, when you can, even if just so Marge Piercy’s words don’t sting as much next year.  For awareness is always the first step towards change.

Kavanah Alef 3

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By: Jim Morgenstern

One of my favorite aphorisms says:  Institutions [and religion, universities, corporations all qualify!] … “Institutions by their nature transform experience into dogma.” 

The inference that is drawn [ albeit subconsciously!] is that by practicing the dogma we will recover the actual experience.  Clearly not correct.

Yom Kippur is a Jewish moment in the year where we have the great desire for recovering the experience [of t’shuvah / Kipur /  atonement].  And we do not lack for dogma or rituals or practice: Consider:  We have Five services in lieu of the usual one or two or three or four, we have more prayers in every service than usual, we recite the  confessionals aloud as a group, we fast for 25 hours, we retell the ritual of the scapegoat and Temple service, etc.  Tennis shoes, anyone ?  I do not mean to ignore these pieces of dogma – They are all useful tools in our toolbox or arrows in our quiver – choose your metaphor!  

If I go through my to-do list of ritual today and check off each item as I accomplish it – will I therefore automatically experience the feeling of t’shuvah?   Is it sufficient to focus on V-ing all my check-boxes? Or is there a gulf between the practice and the experience and if so how do I bridge that gulf?  and no – I do not have the magic answer to this.  moreover, I think it unrealistic to expect that a single answer would be applicable to all in the community.  

It strikes me that one of the key aspects of today’s Judaism is that our spiritual experience is the responsibility of each of us individually — I do not now have go-betweens between me and God … no pope, no ‘high priest’, no “spiritual leader” to intercede for me.  To me,  the beauty of the Reconstruction Movement is that it recognizes THAT individuality of practice.  

But I need to ask the burning question:  How can I during the course of my day transform the practice of the dogma of Yom Kippur into the experience that I seek? 

I think that the best I can do for myself is to recognize that this gulf exists – between executing the rituals, practicing the dogma as it were,  and recovering the experience.  I think that aspiring to the Yom Kippur experience extends beyond executing the checklist of rituals and I need to open myself to the search towards recovering the experience.

gmar hatimah tovah

Cultivating Gratitude in Challenging Times

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By Carole Caplan-Sosin

I was out in the hoop house when I got the call. It was late march and all of my winter planning had turned into spring planting, and I was now surrounded by hundreds of tiny seedings which were to become the farm’s produce and products for the coming year.

I hesitated to answer when I saw that it was her. There’s no planning, no preparation, you know, for a call like that.

“Hello dolly,” I finally said.  “Mom”, she answered, “it’s cancer.” A blackness that had almost devoured me ten years earlier, began to grow thick around me and threatened to suck me in. 

I’ve been asked to speak this morning on how one cultivates gratitude in challenging times. I honestly thought this would be an easy piece to write. After all, I’ve had my share of challenging times, and as a yoga teacher and teacher trainer I’ve been talking about gratitude practices for years. But the truth is, as I sat down to write, all that became clear was just how difficult it is to cultivate gratitude—especially in challenging times! Sometimes gratitude simply seems out of reach.  It’s ok.

In the US in 2022, an estimated 290,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer were diagnosed among women and over 40,000 died from the disease.  At age 30 you have less than one-half of a percent chance of being diagnosed. Elana had turned thirty less than three weeks before her diagnosis. We were stunned. I packed for San Diego, where she was living with her father, not knowing when I would return. 

It was on the plane ride out that an unwelcome but familiar fear began to take hold. Ten years earlier her father had dragged me—and our family— through a long, unnecessary and devastating court case. With good therapy, however, I had learned to refer to this time of my life simply as “the crash,” and see it mainly through a rear view mirror.  Still, I realized I hadn’t spoken to this man in years, but would now have to be with him daily for months to come. But the panic eased with incredible gratitude I had that a friend was letting me stay in her beautiful San Diego home, and that, somehow, amazingly, her home was no more than 8 or 9 houses away from his. Sometimes gratitude comes gifted from and for what others do for us. Let them.

Every night at dinner since they were very small, I would ask my kids to share their best and worst thing of the day. Rules were you could have two bests, but never two worsts. My first night in San Diego Elana announced her worst was that she had been diagnosed with cancer, but her best was that her parents were together with her, sharing shabbat dinner in her father’s home. Sometimes gratitude just shows up and blows your mind.

A breast cancer diagnosis is a portal through which you pass and are changed forever. We agreed that we would look towards the BEST POSSIBLE outcome—whatever that might be, grateful for the incredible privilege we had to get Elana the care that she needed. Elana extracted and froze her eggs, proactively shaved her head and thoughtfully donated her long curly hair. We bought wigs and scarves to adorn her beautiful baldness, but we also bought donuts and bagels to bring to each chemo and doctor visit, consciously offering thanks to those who devoted their lives to helping families like ours. Elana decorated each box with colorful markers as we waited in endless waiting rooms. It wasn’t a lot. But it was something we could do. Sometimes gratitude comes from and for what we can do for others. Just do it.

You will not hear me say that ‘everything happens for a reason’. I’m just not convinced life works that way.  And I will never say that I’m grateful for Elana’s cancer. Yet who knew a possibility existed where my ex and I could talk and laugh and sing karaoke and love our child together as she went through the horrible thing she did? Who knew that Elana’s cancer journey would allow me to so deeply heal that part of me horribly damaged years earlier? Sometimes gratitude disguises and surprises. Let yourself be amazed by it.

But can we actually cultivate gratitude? I don’t know. Maybe the best we can do is surrender to all that we can’t control, and learn to live with radical acceptance of what shows up in our lives. Perhaps work to cultivate a lifestyle that allows for the possibility of moments of gratitude to become accessible. I walked early every morning in California and consciously took notice of the flowers, the sun and the sea. It filled me just enough so that I would have something to offer her when I arrived as she woke each day. Sometimes gratitude is no more than the by-product of softening inner spaces that we hold so tightly closed. Let gratitude set you free.

While I was in California tending Elana, the weeds on the farm grew uncontrollably, swallowing perennials whole. Fruit trees bent and broke under the weight of untended fruit. Those seedlings that I had nursed that previous winter and early spring—they all died. But tomorrow is Elana’s cancerversary- and together we will celebrate her being one year cancer-free. Of the 4 million breast cancer survivors in the United States today, it’s easy to be grateful that my daughter is one of them.

I pray that this year we all may find gratitude, or that gratitude may find us so that our minds may be a little more open, and our hearts a little more free.  G’mar tov.