President’s Message
Good Evening to all of you. I am so pleased to see so many of you here tonight, coming together to begin this sacred day of Yom Kippur.
First, I want to take this occasion to thank all of our volunteers and our Temple Board and other committee members for helping make the last year such a successful one for our Temple. You have set a wonderful example of leadership that I hope the entire community both appreciates and will be willing to emulate
Every year we come to the sanctuary we pray, reflect and choose to deny ourselves sustenance because of our beliefs, strengthening and rebonding us to our Judaism. It is a rebirth if you will for all of us. So now that we have started this journey together, let’s talk a little bit about what lies ahead of us in the New Year here at Temple Shalom. Firstly I am only going to say this one time, Please pay your dues. There, all done- hmm I guess that means my speech is over:) Not so fast…
My goal is to grow our community with members who want to get involved, who want to help, who care about each other. When something challenging happens to a member of our community, we all want to help, sometimes we don’t know how. When something wonderful happens to a member of our community, we all want to share in the joy, sometimes we don’t know how. But I will tell you this, it usually always involves food!!
Food nourishes our bodies, what nourishes our souls?
Talking, laughter, crying, praying, those are all things we can do together and we SHOULD do them together. I want every single one of you to take a journey with me. Come with me the first time you entered our Temple. What did you see? What did you hear? What did you smell, touch and taste?
I hope you saw a building that houses both a church and a Temple- 2 congregations sharing one building. I hope you saw a wide variety of clothes being worn by our participants. See the diversity in us, respect it, and know that every express’ themselves in a different way and feel good knowing no one is being judged.
Hear the voices together in prayer. Hear that everyone gets a chance to voice his or her opinions in our open D’var Torahs.
Smell the delicious food being put out by all of our members for our weekly Onegs.
Touch the books that were put together years ago, knowing how much work went into the make of a book that marries English, Hebrew and Egalitarian Texts that we use week after week singing together on Shabbat.
Taste the juice and challah that is shared every week by a different family that wants to share their generosity with our community.
I hope newcomers feel welcome. I hope our smiling faces and singing voices make them feel at ease. I hope week after week they come back wanting to feel involved in our warm community.
I want every single one of you to take a role in this generous and caring community. We all want a congregation we can rely on in times of joy and in times of pain. I need all of you to take part in my vision of what Temple Shalom Community should look like. Please get involved in either the Refuah Shleima, Social, Chevra Kaddisha or Education committees. Each committee is important; the Refuah Shleima is our outreach committee that gives support, and help to members of our community that needs assistance. If you have a little time, please consider that committee. The Social Committee runs potlucks, evening Havdallah services and general events that we want to run throughout the year. It only takes a little time to write up emails and a calendar to plan events. I know many of you are skilled in organization, please consider sharing that with everyone. The Chevra Kaddisha is the committee that cares for the recently departed and their families. There are many different facets of this process. It is the highest honour in our religion and I hope all of you would take part in this very important task. The Education committee keeps the Religious School running smoothly and gives our children a Jewish education that will give them confidence about their Judaism for the rest of their lives. I heard somewhere it takes a village to raise a child, think about how many young families we have in our community and how you can take part in raising all of our Jewish children together.
To conclude… I NEED everyone to find a niche they can fit into so that your need to be involved in our community goes nicely with the roles needed to keep us running smoothly. So when something challenging happens to a member of our community, we all have roles to help and when something wonderful happens to a member of our community, we all have roles to share in that joy.
Shana Tova,
Michelle McDonnell
President, Temple Shalom