To My Dear Temple Beth David Family,

I hope this note finds you all well and engaging in the blessings offered us by this warm summer season of growth. I would like to take this opportunity to invite you to join with us this year for the High Holy Days. As we are able to gather back together in person, we will try to return to our sense of TBD tradition while honoring the growth and changes we have made as individuals and as a prayer community during this past year and a half of the pandemic. We will allow ourselves to be immersed in the words and holy tunes of our prayers and Torah as the power of the High Holy Days is offered to us in the warmth of our sanctuary. To this end, to serve this yearning to find our way back to our traditions, I offer you the words of welcome below that invited us to join together in 5780, two years ago. They were important words then, and have come to be essential as our community has journeyed through this storm. So, please, join me these High Holy Days in answering the question: When God, when our tradition, when your community calls out and invites you in, will you join with us?

Religion, for many a modern thinker, is a fool’s set of answers to the universal questions: How does this all work? How did this all come to be? Why? Many look towards our religious texts and scoff and remark that better, truer answers to the mysteries of the cosmos have been found, that this has all been proven false and worthless. That science provides the best answers for these universal questions of our foundations and existence.

In my humble opinion, looking at religion through such a lens is wrong. It is a misunderstanding of the questions that religion seeks to answer. The question in our tradition is: Will you join with me?

It is a question asked of us by God, a question asked of us by our neighbors. It is the central Jewish question. In my moments of joy, in my moments of pain, as I break my teeth trying to learn a text, and as I sit outside in the yard and just let nature sing its way by: will you join with me?

It is the reason we pray in groups of ten, the reason our holidays always involve some form of breaking bread. The very foundation of our religion is an answer not to the scientific foundations of our world, but rather the gift of what is needed to build a community. The question is simply an invitation.

We are in need of students of Torah and life. We are in need of singers and songwriters. We are in need of cooks and hungry, grateful mouths. We are in need of friends and role models. We are in need of you. Yes, you!

We want to invite you and all those you love to come join us this High Holy Day season. We look forward to raising our souls with yours in song. We look forward to joining together in thought and action. We look forward to hearing your response to our invitation. Will you join with us?

 

We look forward to welcoming you home.

Sincerely,

Rabbis David G. Winship