Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation

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Creative Spirit at the AARC Beit Sefer

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Thank you to Rabbi Gabrielle Pescador for this article, which appeared in the April 2026 Washtenaw Jewish News. See page 7 HERE


 


 For the past several years, the children and madrichim (teen leaders) of the Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation Beit Sefer have taken on an unusual and joyful responsibility: they write their own Purim spiel.
 
Yes — the entire thing.
Not just acting it. Not just rehearsing lines written by adults. But imagining, scripting, adapting, and producing their own interpretations of the Book of Esther.
 
At first glance, it might look like a fun educational exercise. And it is. But it is also something deeper.
 
In Reconstructionist Jewish education, we don’t simply hand children inherited forms and ask them to replicate them. We invite them into the creative process of Judaism itself. We encourage them to see that Jewish tradition has always been a living, evolving conversation.
 
The Purim spiel — historically irreverent, satirical, and playful — is the perfect vehicle for this.
 
Over the past few years, our students have:

  • Set the Purim story in modern times
  • Played with contemporary political satire
  • Reimagined characters with surprising nuance
  • Written jokes only their generation could write

In doing so, they’ve learned something essential: Jewish ritual isn’t static. It is something we participate in shaping. For example, the setting for this year’s spiel started out underwater and ended up on the beach. It incorporated a running tongue-twister gag about a Shushan shoe store. It reimagined Haman’s defeat not as a hanging but as a demotion from palace advisor to shoe shiner.
 
Our madrichim, too, become co-creators. They guide, encourage, and sometimes gently redirect, and resist the urge to control. The result is not always polished, but it is authentic. It belongs to them.
 
In a time when so much of Jewish identity can feel inherited rather than chosen, giving our children authorship matters.
 
Purim itself is a holiday of reversals — hidden identities revealed, power structures flipped, laughter used as resistance. When our students write the spiel, they are not only retelling the story. They are enacting it. They experience what it feels like to speak boldly, creatively, even subversively within Jewish tradition.
 
Perhaps most importantly, they experience joy – and not as passive entertainment, but as active participation. When they stand on stage delivering lines they wrote themselves, they are not just performing Judaism. They are practicing it.

Beit Sefer director Shlomit Cohen notes:

“I’d like to pay homage to Marcy Epstein, a teacher in the U-M Comprehensive Studies Program and a past director of the AARC religious school. As director, Marcy led the families in a workshop on writing the Purim Spiel. This is a tradition that continues to be going strong and is passed on from student to student. As the current director, I wanted to honor this successful tradition, so I allowed the space for the students to write and run the show with a highly dedicated parent, David Speyer.”


In both the Friday night service and the children’s Purim Carnival, the children, dressed up and with noise makers in their hands, sang a quote from Pirkei Avot:
 “Mi Shenichnas Adar Marbin Be’Simchah” 
”משנכנס אדר מרבין בשמחה”
Translation: “When the month of Adar enters, we are joyous.” – We had a very happy Purim indeed!
 
“Learning about our traditions, interpreting them in meaningful ways, and emphasizing joy and creativity are key to the AARC Beit Sefer experience,” says Shlomit.

About the AARC

The AARC is a caring, inclusive and music- and art-loving community of people who want to practice and study Judaism, or simply be around people who share a commitment to Judaism’s values. The AARC’s spiritual leader, Rav Gavrielle Pescador, is known for her warmth, her collaborative spirit, and her incredible voice and harp playing. You are invited to visit https://aarecon.org/ or email info@aarecon.org to learn more about the Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation.

To learn more about the AARC Beit Sefer, where K-7th graders enjoy interactive, creative group activities as well as individual attention, please visit https://aarecon.org/what-we-do/learning/religious-school/  

Reconstructing Judaism Through the Lens of Dreaming – By Rabbi Gabrielle Pescador

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Reconstructing Judaism Through the Lens of Dreaming

Why questioning, creativity, and shared experience matter to me as your rabbi

By Rabbi Gabrielle Pescador

I recently had a powerful dream that has stayed with me—not because it was comforting, but because it was clarifying.

In the dream, there was an image of a lion hanging high on the wall of an attic. The attic was tall and narrow, almost chimney-shaped, with brick below and white walls only at the very top. A tall wooden ladder was required to reach the image. Facing the image was a small window.

A man and I were standing on the roof peering through that small attic window from the outside. The man shared with me that the previous evening, he saw a terrifying monster lurking inside.

I told him I would investigate the situation and began climbing the ladder. I was cautious and tentative at first, but with each step of ascent, my curiosity grew stronger than my fear.

As I moved from rung to rung, I noticed changes in the light that interplayed with the changes in distance and proximity to the top. These effects played tricks on my eyes and caused the image of the lion to change. From certain angles and degrees of light, the lion appeared animated, almost as if it might leap off the wall. When I finally reached the top of the ladder, however, I could see the two-dimensional image clear and stable in full light.

I shared my experience with the terrified man on the roof. I explained that the image itself wasn’t changing, but our perception of it was, depending on the amount of light and how close we were willing to get to the image.

When I reflected on the dream, I was struck by how explicitly Jewish its symbolic language was.


The lion evokes the symbol of Judah—strength, responsibility, sacred power. The image
functions like a shiviti: a visual practice meant to help us focus on and recognize the Divine Presence in our lived experience. Many traditional shiviti images are flanked by lions for precisely this reason. They are not meant to soothe, but to orient us toward truth and meaning.

The ladder, too, has unmistakable Biblical resonance, pointing to Jacob’s dream of the ascending and descending angels. The rabbinic imagination associates Jacob’s dream with spiritual inquiry and connection. We ascend rung by rung and sometimes need to step back down again. We investigate and then back off for a bit and retreat. The search for meaning has stops and starts, but the ladder remains—stabilizing us on that journey.

And the light—its changes, its timing, its absence and return—may be the most Jewish element of all.


Light, prayer, and living with change

Jewish prayer is structured around shifts in light: morning, evening, Shabbat candles, the Havdalah flame, the waxing and waning of the moon. The same references to light and darkness feel different at Shacharit (the morning service) than they do at Ma’ariv (the evening service). Those references can inspire awe in one moment and fear in another.

Judaism does not deny this instability of perception—it ritualizes it. Prayer trains us to live in liminal space, to notice how meaning changes as light changes, and to remain present anyway.

In the dream, the lion was most terrifying in the dark. That is not a failure of faith. It is a spiritual truth. Awe arises not from eliminating darkness, but from staying in relationship long enough to let light return.


Why this leads me to Reconstructing Judaism

I share this dream because it reflects why I am drawn—again and again—to Reconstructing Judaism, and why I feel at home in it as a rabbi.

Reconstructing Judaism is often described as “the intellectual denomination.” And yes—ideas matter. Thought matters. But that label is far too narrow.

What draws me to Reconstructionism is its insistence that Judaism is not sustained by intellect alone, but by the fullness of human experience: imagination, creativity, emotion, memory, art, ritual, culture, and shared communal life.

Mordecai Kaplan emphasized that Judaism is a living civilization—one that expresses itself not only through belief, but through creativity. For Kaplan, culture, art, music, and evolving human experience are not secondary to religious life; they are among the primary ways Judaism stays alive, meaningful, and responsive to the world we actually inhabit.

That insight continues to feel radical—and necessary.

Art, dreams, and communal meaning

Artistic and creative pathways are not “extras.” They are interpretive tools. They help us
metabolize power, change, grief, joy, and awe. They allow us to encounter Judaism not only as something we analyze, but as something we live.

Dreams belong here, alongside poetry, music, ritual, and visual art. They are symbolic languages through which the soul processes truth. They are not arguments to be proven, but experiences to be attended to—especially when they resonate with our tradition’s deepest patterns.

Reconstructing Judaism makes room for all of this. It refuses to reduce Jewish life to certainty or conformity. It invites us to question—not to dismantle Judaism, but to keep it alive. To climb the ladder. To let in more light. To expect surprise not as disruption, but as a way of understanding.

An invitation

I share this not as doctrine, but as orientation.

As your rabbi, I am drawn to a Judaism that is brave enough to keep becoming.

The lion in the dream is not meant to be feared. It is meant to be encountered—with curiosity, with courage, and with awe.

But the ladder may hold the deepest meaning.

A ladder is not self-sustaining. It must be steadied. It must be held. In the shiviti image above, two lions stand on either side, gripping the ladder between them.

We do not climb alone.

We hold the ladder for one another — through study, through art, through questioning, through shared prayer and shared experience. When one of us is afraid of what we see in the attic, another climbs. When the light shifts, we help each other interpret what is revealed.

The ladder remains between us — steady, imperfect, necessary — inviting us upward, together.

That, for me, is the promise of Reconstructing Judaism.

AARC Participates in JFS Community Needs Drive – From the AARC Board

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Many of us have expressed the desire to take social action together as a congregation and also to connect more with other Jewish groups in our area. As yet another Hannukah miracle, we have a unique opportunity to do both this season. Because hundreds of newcomers and neighbors in need are counting on us this winter, AARC has partnered with JFS, Beth Israel Congregation, Temple Beth Emeth and others in organizing a “Community Needs Drive” to spread warmth and dignity to our local newcomers and neighbors. You can participate by donating needed supplies and/or helping to prepare the goods for the needy families.

Our goal is to collect donations of essential supplies—like soap, diapers, shampoo, toothbrushes, cleaning items, feminine products and grocery or gas gift cards—to bring physical comfort and a sense of belonging to hundreds of families in our community. When you come to services, or any other time you are at the JCC between now and December 22nd, you will find a large, labeled box to receive your donations.  We are grateful to the JCC for their support of this important work.

Thank you!

Rosh Chodesh Tammuz – June 26, 2025

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As we enter the month of Tammuz on the Jewish calendar, we step into a season steeped in myth, mourning, and memory. Interestingly, the name Tammuz comes from Babylonian tradition. Tammuz was a beautiful young vegetation god who died, was mourned, and then returned to life.

Also known as Dumuzi, Tammuz was associated with the fertility of the land—a corn god whose death marked the drying of the fields—the tears of those who mourned him were believed to fertilize the soil for future harvests. He was also known as Dumu-zi-abzu, Tammuz of the Abyss, a name that links him to water—not only through tears and the primordial waters of creation, but also through the rivers that sustained Babylonian agriculture.

The mourning of Tammuz was a ritual event, in which women gathered to weep for the dying god in acts of devotion that mirrored the agricultural cycle: the seed buried in the soil was symbolic of death, watered or revived by tears, to sprout and be reborn in the next season. A powerful metaphor for the life cycle (birth, death and rebirth) and moving through grief.

Tammuz in the Tanach

Tammuz makes a brief but pointed appearance in the Tanach, in the book of Ezekiel:

Then [God] brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the House of YHVH; and there sat the women, bewailing Tammuz.

The prophet Ezekiel is outraged. The weeping for Tammuz is framed not as sacred, but as idolatrous—a betrayal of covenantal faith. Here, Babylonian religious practice crosses into Israelite consciousness but is rejected and shut down.

Mourning in Jewish Time: The 17th of Tammuz to Tisha B’Av

Coincidentally—or perhaps not—the month of Tammuz also begins our own traditional season of mourning: the Three Weeks, which culminate in Tisha B’Av, the day of destruction. On the 17th of Tammuz, we commemorate the breach of Jerusalem’s walls—an ominous precursor to the fall of the Temple. By Tisha B’Av, we are fully immersed in mourning over the destruction of both Temples and other collective Jewish tragedies.

While distinct from the mourning of Tammuz in Babylon, echoes linger. Some scholars suggest that though official Tammuz cult practices were never sanctioned in ancient Israel, remnants may have survived “in the streets of Jerusalem and other cities,” as Jastrow writes—not in the Temple, but among the people.

What Do We Make of All This?


The human impulse to ritualize grief—to mourn what is lost in nature and in society—is still with us. Tammuz reminds us of the ancient roots of spiritual practice, and of the ongoing tension in Jewish tradition between integrating with the cultures around us and celebrating the particularity of our Jewish identities with their unique customs, rituals and folkways.

This year, we don’t have to look far to feel the sorrow this season invites. As we enter Tammuz, our hearts are already heavy—with grief for lives lost, for communities shattered, for the pain in Israel and Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, and other places torn by war and violence. We grieve also for the erosion of democratic values and freedoms closer to home.

May we learn from our ancient, cross-cultural spiritual roots and allow our tears to sow seeds of compassion, justice, and peace.

May not all hope be lost as we continue to keep our hearts open. May our tears flow together and form a stream of healing that irrigates the soil—so it becomes fertile ground for creativity, bridge-building, and repair. May we be patient and steadfast on this path and hold one another close.

Chodesh Tov!

B’ahavah,

Rav Gavrielle

Pride Liberation Shabbat

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Written by Robin Wagner

This Shabbat, on June 14 at 10 am, we will be holding a Pride Liberation Shabbat and we hope all will attend. The Torah portion is Beha’alotcha—Numbers 8:1-12:16—which recounts the story of people who requested a second chance to offer the Passover sacrifice. In essence, that’s what we are going to do on our Pride and Liberation Shabbat: we will have a second shot at Passover. Only, this time our “seder plate” will be full of symbols that bring some of the rich and important history of LGBTQ liberation to life.

What will be on our seder plate? 

Exotic Fruit. Queer people have demonstrated our strength in part by seizing words that have been used to disparage us and making them our own words of strength and pride. We embrace the “fruit” as a symbol that we are made in Ha’shem’s image: and that we are sweet and tart and unusual and creative and so many realities at once.

A Pink Triangle: just the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing, they forced homosexuals to wear a pink triangle. The pink triangle today is a badge of honor, resistance and identity. Similarly, the black triangle designated Nazi prisoners who were “asocial”—people with disabilities, Roma and Sinti people, and others. After WWII, lesbians claimed the black triangle as a symbol of defiance against repression. I have worn a black triangle earing in my right ear since 1995 for this reason.

Bricks and Stones: New York City, June 28, 1969. The Stonewall Inn Riot was the birth of the modern queer rights movement. Police came to the Stonewall Inn, a gathering place for gay men, lesbians, and transgender people, to break up the gathering and arrest employees for selling alcohol without a license. But instead of running in fear, the crowd held their ground, hurled bottles and debris at the police, and refused to take the harassment any longer. Bricks and stones can be both weapons and building blocks. We took these weapons and with them built a movement for liberation and pride.

Join us and celebrate the liberation of queer people and Pride month!

Pride Shabbat will take place on Saturday, June 14th at 10:30 AM, please join us earlier for an in-person meditation led by Anita Rubin-Meiller at 10:00 AM-10:20 AM for a pre-service meditation at the Jewish Community Center of Ann Arbor. Light Kiddish to follow.

To join on Zoom:  https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81318454149?pwd=UrfpVW2G0mRg40KdpGLZb09QhGpqmG.1 

Meeting ID: 813 1845 4149
Passcode: 397483

Volunteers Needed for Set-Up for Pride Shabbat Saturday Service. Please email me at aarctiara@gmail.com if you would like to volunteer.

Welcoming Newcomers

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– by Carol Lessure


Many years ago, Deborah Dash Moore shared a story that had a lasting impact on me. A
renowned Jewish scholar, I have learned much from Dr. Moore over the years. This time, she shared a personal story.

Dr. Moore arrived from NYC to lead the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies over the summer of 2005. Of all the many Jewish colleagues that she met at the University of Michigan, only one invited her to attend High Holiday services at their congregation. This invitation was most welcome and it led her to build a lasting connection with that congregation. It was not the Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation which was a fairly small Havurah at the time. As a third generation Reconstructionist with a long history with the West End Synagogue in New York City, Dr. Moore found us. She has been an active AARC member for twenty years sharing her expertise with Yom Kippur workshops, rabbinic leadership, and reading Torah.

Her story demonstrates the power of personal invitations and connections. As we enter a time when new people arrive to Ann Arbor to learn, teach and/or work, I encourage each of us to welcome newcomers with kindness and, if possible, an invitation to do something together. You will likely have new work colleagues, new neighbors, or new families at your children’s schools.

If they happen to be Jewish, please invite them to an AARC event, share what you like about our congregation, and perhaps offer to host them for Shabbat dinner. By the end of July, let them know that AARC has ticketless high holiday services that are open to all. If they have young children, share information about our small family-like Beit Sefer.

By late August or early September, you can share the schedule of our High Holiday services and programs. These will be a featured part of our website front page. Perhaps you can offer to meet them for services, a children’s program, or invite them to join you for the end of Yom Kippur when AARC provides afternoon workshops, a unique Memorial Service, a short lovely Nielah service with a Shofar blast, and a communal Break the Fast (be sure to pay & pre-register for the meal, please).

AARC Welcomes Tiara Hawkins as Program Manager

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The AARC is delighted to welcome Tiara Hawkins as our new program manager. Tiara has a history degree from the University of Michigan Flint and a background in human resources, office management, and legal assistant work.  “I’m excited to bring my skills into this role with the AARC, and I’m truly looking forward to doing the best job I can while learning from each of you in this incredible congregation.” Tiara comments.


Tiara says, “My husband Scott and I have three amazing kids—Ryan, who’s 5 and turning 6 in July, Aurora, who will be 3 in just a few days, and our youngest, Harlee, who just turned 1. All three of them attend the Early Childhood Center at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, and it’s been such a wonderful experience for our family. I converted to Judaism in 2019, right before Scott and I got married, and it’s been such a meaningful part of my life ever since. My hobbies are reading, swimming, and spending time with my family.” 

Tiara will be in charge of AARC communications, event coordination and more.  Tiara’s first time coordinating AARC Fourth Friday services was May 23, 2025 and she did an outstanding job, alongside Emily Ohl.   The congregation extends warm appreciation to our previous program manager, Emily Ohl. We are so glad that Emily will remain in the AARC community.

When you see Tiara at an event, be sure to introduce yourself and don’t be shy to ask if you can lend a hand!

Calling All AARC Artists and Creatives!

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Join us as we launch an Artist Collective within our spiritual community—a space to share our creative work, explore what moves and inspires us, and connect with like-minded people. Whether you paint, write poetry, sculpt, play music, or engage in any form of artistic expression, this is an opportunity to build community through art.

We’ll begin with a teaching on Jewish amulets, exploring their history and spiritual significance. From there, we’ll embrace the creative process—perhaps making art together, sharing our artistic interests, cheering each other on, and finding joy in the holiness and healing potential of creative expression during this tumultuous time.

This is about connection, inspiration, and the joy of creating together—a playful space to uplift and encourage each other through art.

Come join the fun, spark ideas, and search for meaning through artmaking!

Date:  Monday April 28, 2025 

Time:   7 pm

Place:  Idelle Hammond-Sass’ art studio

RSVP:  Email Idelle at hammond_sass@msn.com and she will send you her address.