Fellow Lovers of Judaism,
I hope this note finds you doing well. My name is Rabbi David Winship, and I wanted to take this opportunity to welcome you and invite you to join us this year for the High Holy Days. It has been a wonderful first year that we have had together as a community. We have grown and learned a lot together. I invite you to join us this High Holy Day season to reflect and reset as we move towards another exciting year here at Temple Beth David.
Judaism is a religion, like many, that believes strongly in the spiritual practice of continuously revisiting texts, spaces, and relationships. We believe in trying to find the new and unexpected in the spot you already looked at a thousand times. The texts and rituals of our High Holiday services are a perfect place to engage in this practice.
I like to think of Temple Beth David as the sanctuary in the woods. Come by most days and you’ll find someone outside, soaking in the light and enjoying our garden and our woods.
Sometimes that someone is me, sometimes friends coming to sit and have a cup of coffee, and sometimes, perhaps more often than not, it is our four-legged and winged friends. We go outside, to sit in the same place, with the same trees in view, and somehow though it is all the same, it is always different. A plant that has lain dormant all year bursts into life or a particularly musical bird decides to make our yard its home for the day. There is always something happening here, something in flux, despite the fact that it all seems to remain the same.
The rabbis of our tradition speak of people, great righteous ones (tzadikim), who are able to understand the language of birds or to grasp the voice that is the wind. It is said that these skills came to them, not through some great level of study, but simply because they took the time to stop and to listen. Our community has gone through many changes of late, and here, yet again, is another wind of change blowing through our calendars. I welcome you to come join me, to come sit with us here in the woods, where the view is still of the very same trees, but where if we listen, we too will be able to hear as those righteous ones heard. We will hear the new breath that has come into our community: a spirit shouting out nothing but love.
I hope to welcome you into our sanctuary in the woods this High Holiday season; that you come to sing, come to sit together in community, and come to feel what it is to visit this old space and to reset ourselves and prepare to listen.
Sincerely,
Rabbi David Winship
