RABBI GARY ATKINS

BETH HILLEL SYNAGOGUE ....

COMBINING TIMELESS TRADITION WITH CONTEMPORARY VISION

“Our faith is over 3000 years old, our thinking is not.”

WEEKLY E-SHUL....  HAKESHER  (THE CONNECTION)

BETWEEN RABBI ATKINS AND HIS CONGREGATION

NUMBER 31    May 7, 2008 3 IYAR 5768

SHABBAT EMOR

YOUR RABBI’S RAMBLINGS....

Last week, Thursday through Sunday were days of both remembrance and learning for me and for many members of the Beth Hillel Community….. Starting Thursday evening, with our community Yom HaShoah remembrance service, going through our Scholar-In- Residence weekend at Beth Hillel with Dr. Avinoam Patt, whose presentations were both learned and meaningful, and ending Sunday evening, when a number of synagogue members attended the opening presentation of the special Jewish Historical Society exhibit, "Scream the Truth at the World." We learned about the ups and downs of Jewish history in this century (and before), with special emphasis on the Holocaust and Eretz Yisrael.  Those who participated were greatly enriched thereby.

This coming Shabbat, at an early 6:15 service, we celebrate Israel60 and Yom HaAtzmaut with a congregational Shabbat dinner, with our young students leading the service and celebrating their knowledge. We will be celebrating as well Paula Baram’s 30 years of teaching with Beth Hillel Synagogue. There will also be a school graduation service and Matan Siddur ceremony. President Rona returns that day from her mission to Israel, and may be present to share some thoughts. Our Shabbat dinner will include couscous and israeli salad to compliment the dinner and hummus, babaganoush and olives and pita for an appetizer.  We KNOW it will be good!

We have 100 small Israel flags to share in celebration of this special day. Come and get one Friday night! And then, at sometime during the week, stop by the office and get your Beth Hillel Synagogue coffee mug!

On Shabbat morning we will have both Musical Musaf and a special Israel-centered learning service…. which will continue over to May 17^th, as announced in the May bulletin.

Today, Thursday, is Yom HaAtzmaut…. The 60^th anniversary of the State of Israel. I saw recognition of this in the Courant this morning, and I am told that the Israel flag is flying on the State Capitol Building. (The actual day is 5 Nisan, but it is “moved up” when that date is Shabbat.) There is a beautiful prayer in our siddur that we say on this new holiday…..

“In the days when your children were returning to their borders, at the time of a people revived in its land as of days of old, the gates to the land of our ancestors were closed before those who were fleeing the sword. When enemies from within the land together with seven neighboring nations sought to annihilate Your people, You, in your great mercy, stood by them in time of trouble. You defended them and vindicated them. You gave them the courage to meet their foes, to open the gates to those seeking refuge, and to free the land of its armed invaders. You delivered the many into the hands of the few, the guilty into the hands of the innocent. You have wrought great victories and miraculous deliverance to your people Israel, revealing Your glory and Your holiness to all the world.”

I recently re-watched the movie Exodus, made “way” back in 1960. Paul Newman was younger then, and many of the actors are no longer in the “land of the living,” but it brought to the forefront thoughts of the sacrifice and the struggle for Israel in a most meaningful way! Anyone want to borrow the DVD, just let me know!

Friday morning at 11am is the 30^th Annual State of Connecticut Holocaust commemoration at the State Capitol. Especially if you work downtown…. It is a worthy event to attend.

Remember to make your reservations and ad journal submission for the annual fundraiser, the UConn Puppeteers, on Sunday, May 18.

 COME "CATCH THE MAGIC" AT BETH HILLEL SYNAGOGUE

SHABBAT SHALOM....  RABBI GARY ATKINS

SHABBAT CANDLE LIGHTING

THIS WEEK  7:38pm DST  NEXT WEEK 7:45pm 

Services THIS Friday eve. 6:15pm, Saturday, 9:30am, 7:30pm Mincha/ Maariv

Daily Minyan Times: Morning Services 7am Monday - Friday   9am Sunday

Evenings 7:30pm Sunday – Thursday

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT THESE AND ALL OTHER ACTIVITIES AT BETH HILLEL SYNAGOGUE, SEE THE SYNAGOGUE BULLETIN..... AVAILABLE AT WWW.BETHHILLELSYNAGOGUE.ORG.

UPCOMING CONGREGATIONAL EVENTS .... 

• Friday, May 9…. Congregational Shabbat dinner (6:15 service) ….. Religious School Graduation…. Honoring Paula Baram for 30 years of teaching

• Saturday May 10…. Musical Musaf with Dr. Ethan Nash

• Friday, May 16…. Israel Tour Shabbat…. Yom HaAtzmaut / Israel 60 Celebration

• Sunday  May 16 – Fund Raiser – Uconn Puppeteers and Dinner, starting 3:30pm

• Friday, May 23…. Young Emissary Speaker/ Israel program 

WEEKLY TORAH COMMENTARY… This week courtesy of Rabbi Michael Gold

“The Lord said to Moses, speak to the priests the sons of Aaron, and say to them, none shall defile himself for any dead person among his kin, except for relatives that are closest to him.” (Leviticus 21:1-2)

                   A man spoke to me this week about a difficult dilemma.  He is a kohen, a direct descendent of Aaron, the brother of Moses and the first priest of the ancient Israelites.  According to Jewish law as spelled out in this week’s portion, a kohen cannot be in the same room as a dead body nor go onto the grounds of a cemetery.  The only exception is for the funeral of an immediate family member such as a parent, a sibling, a spouse, or God forbid, a child.  (Often at Jewish funerals you can see certain men standing outside or by the road, not coming near the deceased.  Such men are not being rude; they are kohenim following an ancient tradition.)
                   The man who spoke with me was an observant Jew who took seriously these obligations of being a kohen.  He had gone to the funeral of a grandparent.  He planned to stand back by the roadway while the rest of his family said the mourners kaddish at the graveside.  But his family was upset by this decision.  To the family, it was important that everybody be together at graveside.  They believed it would be an affront to the memory of the grandparent for a grandson to stand back by the roadway.  The man tried to explain the traditional Jewish position to no avail.  Tradition or no tradition, his family wanted him there shoveling earth on the casket with everybody else. 
                   He was torn between his faith and his family.  He made a decision and wanted my opinion as a rabbi; did he do the right thing?  It is a decision that many people must make who are torn between their religious practices and their family commitments.  Should a Jew who strictly observes the dietary laws of Passover go to a family seder that will not be kosher?   Should a Jew who will not drive on the Sabbath make an exception to go to a niece’s bat mitzvah?  When a Jew believes that intermarriage is wrong, should he or she attend such a wedding of a sibling?  How do we decide between faith and family?
                   From a traditionalist point of view the answer is clear.  Faith trumps family.  Last week in the Torah reading we read one verse that taught a person should both revere their parents and keep the Sabbath.  The Rabbis interpret this verse to mean that if your parents tell you to break the Sabbath, you do not listen.  Observance is more important than family.  Or as the Talmud teaches, “Moses said let the law pierce the mountain.”   The law is the law and family needs to live with that law.
                   From a secular point of view as practiced by most Jews today, the answer is also clear.  Family trumps faith. Religious observance is wonderful, but it is not of ultimate importance. Religion may add a certain spiritual dimension to life, but when it comes to matters of ultimate importance such as family, religion can be set aside. 
                   On a personal level, I have struggled with this issue throughout my life.  In my earlier career I would have sided with the traditionalists.  If there is a contradiction between your Father in Heaven and your father on earth, you obey your Father in Heaven.  But my ideas have evolved.  More and more I am convinced that God has commanded us to make commitments to family.  And there are times when I need to set aside even God’s laws to be with my family at key moments.  When my son’s college graduation fell on a Friday night, and my attempts to get his college to change the date were ignored, I made a decision.  I would go to the graduation, even if it meant some compromises in my Sabbath observances.  I have no regrets (and I was not the only one wearing a yarmulke at the graduation.)
                   Going back to the man in my story, he was truly torn between religious and family commitments.  He decided to break the traditional prohibitions regarding a kohen and stand by his family at graveside.  Did he do the right thing?  I believe so.  I believe that God was smiling on him that day.

FOR YOM HASHOAH….. an inspiring story….

From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit

By JAMES BARRON… from the New York Times

      The back story of how a Torah got from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to the ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street is one the pastor of the Lutheran church down the street sums up as simply “miraculous.” It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim who buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed in and later renamed the city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewish prisoners who sneaked the rest of it — four carefully chosen panels — into the concentration camp. It is the story of a Polish Catholic priest to whom they entrusted the four panels before their deaths. It is the story of a Maryland rabbi who went looking for it with a metal detector. And it is the story of how a hunch by the rabbi’s 13-year-old son helped lead him to it. This Torah, more than most, “is such an extraordinary symbol of rebirth,” said Peter J. Rubinstein, the rabbi of Central Synagogue. “As one who has gone to the camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the Holocaust, this gives meaning to Jewish survival.”

      On Wednesday, the restored Torah will be rededicated in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which for more than 20 years the congregation of Central Synagogue has observed in conjunction with its neighbor, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, at Lexington Avenue and 54th Street. The senior pastor, the Rev. Amandus J. Derr, said that next to Easter, the Holocaust memorial is “the most important service I attend every year.” The Torah from Auschwitz “is a very concrete, tactile piece of that remembrance — of what people, some of whom did it in the name of Christ, did to people who were Jewish,” Pastor Derr said, “and the remembrance itself enables us to be prepared to prevent that from happening again.”

      A Torah scroll contains the five books of Moses, and observant Jews read a portion from it at services. Its ornate Hebrew must be hand-lettered by specially trained scribes, and it is considered unacceptable if any part is marred or incomplete. For years, Jews around the world have worked to recover and rehabilitate Torahs that disappeared or were destroyed during the Holocaust, returning them to use in synagogues.

This Torah remained hidden for more than 60 years, buried where the sexton had put it, until Rabbi Menachem Youlus, who lives in Wheaton, Md., and runs the nonprofit Save a Torah foundation, began looking for it about eight years ago. Over two decades, Rabbi Youlus said, the foundation has found more than 1,000 desecrated Torahs and restored them, a painstaking and expensive process. This one was elusive. But Rabbi Youlus was determined.

      He had heard a story told by Auschwitz survivors: Three nights before the Germans arrived, the synagogue sexton put the Torah scrolls in a metal box and buried them. The sexton knew that the Nazis were bent on destroying Judaism as well as killing Jews. But the survivors did not know where the sexton had buried the Torah. Others interested in rescuing the Torah after the war had not found it. As for what happened during the war, “I personally felt the last place the Nazis would look would be in the cemetery,” Rabbi Youlus said in a telephone interview Tuesday, recalling his pilgrimage to Auschwitz, in late 2000 or early 2001, in search of the missing Torah. “So that was the first place I looked.”

       With a metal detector, because, if the story was correct, he was hunting for a metal box in a cemetery in which all the caskets were made of wood, according to Jewish laws of burial. The metal detector did not beep. “Nothing,” the rabbi said. “I was discouraged.” He went home to Maryland. One of his sons, Yitzchok, then 13, wondered if the cemetery was the same size as in 1939. They went online and found land records that showed that the present-day cemetery was far smaller than the original one. Rabbi Youlus went back in 2004 with his metal detector, aiming it at the spot where the g’neeza — a burial plot for damaged Torahs, prayer books or other papers containing God’s name — had been. It beeped as he passed a house that had been built after World War II.

      He dug near the house and found the metal box. But when he opened it, he discovered the Torah was incomplete. “It was missing four panels,” he said. “The obvious question was, why would the sexton bury a scroll that’s missing four panels? I was convinced those four panels had a story themselves.” They did, as he learned when he placed an ad in a Polish newspaper in the area “asking if anyone had parchment with Hebrew letters.” “I said I would pay top dollar,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The response came the next day from a priest. He said, ‘I know exactly what you’re looking for, four panels of a Torah.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

      He compared the lettering and the pagination, and paid the priest. (How much, he would not say.) The priest “told me the panels were taken into Auschwitz by four different people,” Rabbi Youlus said. “I believe they were folded and hidden.” One of the panels contained the Ten Commandments from Exodus, a portion that, when chanted aloud each year, the congregation stands to hear. Another contained a similar passage from Deuteronomy. The priest, who was born Jewish, was himself an Auschwitz survivor. He told Rabbi Youlus that the people with the four sections of the Torah gave them to him before they were put to death.

     “He kept all four pieces until I put that ad in the paper,” Rabbi Youlus said. “As soon as I put that ad in the paper, he knew I must be the one with the rest of the Torah scroll.” (Rabbi Youlus said that the priest has since died.) Rabbi Youlus said that nearly half the Torah’s lettering needed repair, work that the foundation has done over the past few years. Thirty-seven letters were left unfinished: 36, or twice the number that symbolizes “life” in Hebrew, will be filled in by members of the congregation before the service on Wednesday, the 37th at the ceremony. Rabbi Youlus called it “a good sturdy Torah, even if it hasn’t been used in 65 years.” The plan is to make it available every other year to the March of the Living, an international educational program that arranges for Jewish teenagers to go to Poland on Holocaust Remembrance Day, to march from Auschwitz to its companion death camp, Birkenau. “This really is an opportunity to look up to the heavens and say, he who laughs last, laughs best,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The Nazis really thought they had wiped Jews off the face of the earth, and Judaism. Here we are taking the ultimate symbol of hope and of Judaism and rededicating it and using it in a synagogue. And we’ll take it to Auschwitz. You can’t beat that.”

ISRAEL NEWS… Music and Yom HaAtzmaut… posted by Rabbi Avinoam Sharon in Israel

To understand Israel, one has to be able to appreciate how Israelis see things. One insight may be provided by their taste in music. Israel's Channel One - the station of the "establishement" - ran a competition, complete with a panel of professional judges, performances by pop stars and a live audience, to choose the best song of the last 60 years. The fairly predictable results placed Jerusalem of Gold in first place, Horef 73 in second place, and Shir HaRe'ut in third. Hardly surprising from a "competition" run by the stuffy official state channel that is supported by the Television Tax. MTV would surely have come up with something a little more representative of current tastes and priorities than those three chestnuts. Or would it?

Army Radio (Galei Tzahal) also ran a competition for HaShir HaIvri HeAhuv BeYoter The competition was conducted entirely online, and voting was open only to soldiers in regular service. The results from over 300 popular songs: First Place: Shir HaRe'ut, written by Haim Guri and Sasha Argov during the War of Independence. Second Place: Jerusalem of Gold, as sung in 1967 by Shuli Natan  [Horef 73 was not forgotten. It placed 8th].

It would appear that Israeli soldiers like the same songs that their parents and grandparents liked. When you understand that, I think you begin to understand something important about Israel and Israelis. Another insight may be drawn from a telling story that was published the same day. There was a report of a vocal argument between a Holocaust scholar and advisor to Beit Lohamei Hageta'ot - Prof. Hana Yablonka - and members of the IDF general staff in regard to the value of sending IDF soldiers and officers to Poland on programs like the March of the Living. It was argued that the army gains nothing by it. It's a waste of the defense budget, represents a victory of the Shoah over Zionism, of pessimism over optimism, and that rational choices cannot be made in the shadow of Auschwitz. One might understand why generals might feel that the defense budget would better be spent on new weapons systems, even if  a Holocaust scholar and historian believes that studying the Holocaust yields results that are more valuable even if not as tangible and easily quantified. But that is not what happened. It was the IDF generals who supported visits to Poland, and who told Prof. Yablonka that she didn't know what she was talking about, and argued that the IDF Holocaust education program and missions to Poland led to better, more morally aware soldiers and officers.

SHABBAT SHALOM U’M’VORACH!!!!