The Shabbos Project Adelaide

The Adelaide Shabbos Project was an amazing success! After watching this video:

Rebbetzin Rachel was inspired to bring the Shabbos Project to Adelaide, South Australia.

With the help of the whole community, the Shabbos Project in Adelaide was a huge success!

Learning a new way to braid challah at the Adelaide Shabbos Project Great Big Challah Bake

Thursday night was a challah bake that brought together three spiritual leaders and women from all walks of life, from Israelis to first-time challah bakers. (Read more here!)

Friday night the ladies of the community joined with WIZO South Australia in a communal candle lighting ceremony.  This was followed by a kabbalat Shabbat service led by visiting Rabbi Philip Heilbrunn of Melbourne, whose booming voice led Adventuring Akiva to clap and dance in the aisles.

After the service was a communal dinner with preparation led by a long-time community stalwart.  With nearly 40 people in attendance, the Adelaide Jewish community was well-represented.  Ages ranged from under one to the 80s!  Food included a first course of dips and salmon mousse, a main of half a dozen salads and chicken, and dessert of sorbet and berries.  Rebbetzin Rachel introduced our visiting rabbi with some stirring words about Jewish unity and how to use technology to keep Torah better.  Rabbi Heilbrunn then gave an inspirational sermon about the importance and the power of Shabbat.

Saturday morning saw a popular service led by Rabbi Heilbrunn, followed by a community kiddush.  Then there was a delicious lunch of homemade hummus and tehini, spinach salad with heirloom tomatoes and balsamic vinegar pearls, tropical barbeque salmon, lasagna, and a selection of homemade sorbets, held at the rabbi’s house.

Congregants at the AHC enjoying refreshments during the havdallah concert

Finally, the Shabbos Project ended with maariv services and a havdallah ceremony.  Then there were mini-concerts given by Rabbi Heilbrunn and Rabbi Ben, a performance by the Jewish Adelaide Zionist Youth (JAZY), a sing-along and kumzitz, and refreshments prepared by Rebbetzin Rachel and the cheder girls.

All in all, the Shabbos Project Adelaide was a big success!  Visitors came all the way from Melbourne to participate and Jews from all walks of life, from the strictly observant to the strictly secular, came together in a display of Jewish unity.  Adelaide Jews are already asking Rebbetzin Rachel to begin organizing for next year!

Kol hakavod, Adelaide and the Shabbos Project!

The Shabbos Project: The Great Big Challah Bake!

In Adelaide, South Australia, I decided to organize our own challah bake in solidarity with Jews all over the world who were participating in their Shabbos Project challah bakes.  We may be a small community, but this was a great chance to have some unity!  Jewish women from all walks of life showed up to bake challah. It was an amazing event! Just check out some of the photos below!

Parshas Noach: Shabbat – A Lifeboat for All of Us

This weekend we will be participating in The Shabbos Project.  This is a grassroots attempt to get Jews worldwide to experience the magic of the Sabbath, just once.  Last year, it happened in South Africa, where almost every single Jew participated – even if they were not at all religious! That’s because you don’t have to be “religious” to participate in Shabbat.  Shabbat is not some sort of punishment, it is a gift, given by G-d to all Jews, religious or not.  There are some special aspects of Shabbat that have actually been studied and advocated for by scientists!  You don’t have to be religious to appreciate that having the whole family sit down for dinner together once a week is proven to be good for family unity, or that putting down phones, computers, and all other screens for a 24 hour period is great for improving relationships with your children and spouse.

In this week’s parsha, Noach was faced with a world of decadence and decay – sadly, not that much different from what we experience today.  We open our email and find obscene spam, we turn on the television and see scenes of murder, and we turn on the radio and hear foul language.  Shabbat is our chance to turn off all the garbage and focus on what is good and meaningful in our lives – our real-life, face-to-face relationships.  Just as Noach had to build an ark and G-d had to wash away the garbage that the world had become, so too we can build ourselves an ark in time and each and every week wash away the mundane so we have space to illuminate the spiritual.

This week, we have many opportunities to connect to this precious gift of Shabbat in a community setting.  Unlike Noach, we don’t have to go it alone on our arks. We can keep ittogether!  Women can join the Rebbetzin for a challah bake on Thursday night, one of the special mitzvot for ladies.  And everyone is welcome to join in the community celebrations of Shabbat over the weekend: community candle lighting on Friday night, followed by kabbalat Shabbat services and a delicious dinner at the Shul; Saturday morning services led by visiting Rabbi Heilbrunn from Melbourne, followed by a Kiddush and then community lunch at the Rabbi’s house; and finally, a havdallah ceremony, concert, JAZY performance, and kumzitz sing-along at the Shul.  Let’s build our ark and keep it – TOGETHER!

Shabbat shalom!

(To indicate participation in the Shabbos Project, please feel free to tag photos and videos of your involvement with #shabbosproject and #keepingittogether !)

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Rosh Hashanah and the Circle of Life

As I sit here writing, the smell of sweet challah fills the room. Yes, the holiday season is here – let the baking begin!  Round challahs, circular pies, and sweet spherical apples abound in my kitchen this time of year.

Undoubtedly the sweets are one of the parts of Rosh Hashanah we all look forward to most.  After all, most of us have a sweet tooth – even if we don’t like to admit it!  The New Year just wouldn’t be as tasty without sweet raisin challahs, honey on apples, simmering tsimmes, and delicious desserts.

The symbolism of honeyed foods during our New Year’s celebration is obvious in the way we wish one another a sweet new year.  But our celebration of symbols goes much deeper than taste. We also have the visuals to consider.

So, why are our challahs round?  The simple answer is the same reason we eat round foods like lentils and eggs when we are mourning: to symbolize the circle of life.  Circles and cycles are a crucial part of our Jewish faith.

The secular world tends to view birth as the start and death as the end, full stop.  Similarly, each year is viewed as its own entity that begins at January 1^st and ends at December 31^st.  Judaism is different.  We view life as a cycle that simply goes around.  We don’t look at death as an ending so much as a new beginning – before we were born we were spiritual beings with no physical presence and after we die we return to that state.  Similarly, we do not view each New Year as the end of an old year so much as the return to the beginning of a new one.  It is a circle.

This is epitomized in our reading of the Torah.  As soon as we finish the Torah we immediately begin again.  The Torah is not just a novel that has a beginning and an end.  Once we read it we don’t put it down and say “Oh, that was a great read.”  No! We immediately start again.  The Torah is circular (even the shape of a scroll is round!), so that the end is just the start of beginning again.  Think about it – a bar mitzvah boy does not wait for Bereishit to start his reading of the Torah – a bar mitzvah boy begins reading the Torah right away, as soon as he becomes bar mitzvah.  The Torah is a circle and can be begun at any time!

The round challah at Rosh Hashanah symbolizes this life cycle.  Just as the seasons go round and round with no definite beginning and end, so too does Jewish life.  Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of another season and the round challah reminds us that we would like to continue to go round and round until we once again arrive at Rosh Hashanah again.

We would like very much to thank the Adelaide Jewish community who has been so lovely to us during this past year.  We are looking forward to celebrating the cycle of Jewish life with you again in 5775.

Chag sameach and shana tova!

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Parshas Nitzavim-Vayelech: The Power to Choose

We all have the freedom to choose how to act. We can choose to do good things or not good things. We can say things to make others smile or to make them cry. We can use our hands to hit or to hug. The choice is up to us.

This is why G-d doesn’t punish and reward us straightaway for the things we do. If He did, we would in effect have no choice. Imagine, if you were immediately struck down with lightening for breaking Shabbat, would you break it? Of course not! G-d wants us to choose to do the things He asks.

But isn’t He asking a bit much of us? After all, 613 commandments sure sounds like a lot. And some of them, like keeping Shabbat, are pretty demanding. But remember – nobody has to keep all of them because not all of them apply to us. Some mitzvot apply only to kings or priests. Some apply only to women and some only to men. There is no person on the planet to whom all of them apply. So perhaps keeping the Torah is not as hard as it seems.

The fact is that G-d created us. He knows what we are capable of. He knows our limitations. There is no mitzvah for us to fly around everywhere because we have no wings. On the other hand, there is a mitzvah not to speak gossip because we have mouths and we can choose what to use them for, even if it is hard!

In this week’s parsha, Moses reminds us that the Torah “is not beyond you nor is it remote from you. It is not in heaven… It is not across the sea…. Rather, it is very close to you, in your mouth, in your heart, that you may do it.”

This coming week, as we sit in the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah this is something we must keep in mind. We can keep the mitzvot, if only we try. We have to stop thinking that things are too big or too much. It is like climbing Mt. Everest. It seems very tall, but if we just take one step at a time, we will find it is far from impossible.

Shabbat Shalom!

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