From the pages of Kadima, the newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:

A Message From Our President

Dr. Lance Strate

Author, Author!

I have often been struck by the fact that the most sacred object in our sanctuary, the Torah scroll, is a book. Sure, we dress it up nicely with our finest fabrics, decorated with lovely embroidery, and further adorned with silver breast plate and crown, as well as the silver yad or pointer, the silk sash or girdle that binds the scroll and keeps it closed, and the wooden shafts that the scroll is wound around. But it's still a book, a fancy book sure, a sacred book most definitely, but a book nonetheless.

Our worship is centered around the book, as we repeatedly face the Ark that holds the Torah scrolls during our worship services, show our respect by standing whenever the Ark is opened, and show our love by kissing the scrolls when they are carried down to the pews, albeit indirectly by kissing our prayer books. Reading from the Torah is one of our most sacred rituals, and our rite of passage from childhood to adulthood.

Our veneration of books extends to our printed prayer books and bibles, and in our tradition whenever one such text is dropped or falls to the floor, the person picking it up also kisses the book. And these books that contain the name of God are never destroyed when their usefulness is at an end, but rather buried as we would a loved one that has passed on.

Judaism is not the only religion that is centered around a sacred text, and in fact it was the Moslems who referred to Jews and Christians alike as people of the book. But there is something unique and special about our relationship to books, so much so that here in the United States, Jews purchase 23% of all hardcover books published, while we constitute only about 2% of the population.

As a people, we are bibliophiles, booklovers. And we are bookmakers, writers, authors. The Torah features Moses, who took dictation from God, and the Tanach ends with Ezra the Scribe. We gave the world the Bible, including the Christian version, which may be considered the all-time bestseller. More recently, of the 110 Nobel Prizes in Literature given out since 1901, 15 have been awarded to Jews including Henri Bergson, Boris Pasternak, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elias Canetti, Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Harold Pinter, Patrick Modiano, and Bob Dylan. (It's often cited that we Jews constitute less than 0.2% of the world's population, while accounting for over 22% of Nobel Prizes awarded in all categories, 11,250% above average.)

It should come as no surprise, then, that we have more than a few published authors among the membership of our Congregation Adas Emuno, not the least of them our own Rabbi Schwartz. As you may know, his new children's book, Adam's Animals, was published this past summer, and his newest book, Paths of the Prophets: The Ethics-Driven Life, is due out this March.

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Have you published a book or article, essay, story, or poem? Let us know, and let us celebrate together!

We express our love of books during services, Saturday morning Torah study, adult education programs, and especially through our religious school. We are the people of the book, and our houses of worship have always been houses of learning as well. The secret of our survival and our success is intimately linked to our religious tradition being wrapped around the Torah scroll, revolving around spirituality and schooling, and a love of books. On Rosh Hashanah we ask God to write our names into the Book of Life, and as readers and writers ourselves, we become authors of our own destiny. For this reason alone, we should never forget to write our shul into own book, the book that we all write, the book of our own lives, and those of our family, friends, and community. May it be so.

 From the pages of Kadima, the newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:

A Message From Our President

Dr. Lance Strate

Buildings and Grounds

As a religious tradition, Judaism emphasizes the importance of spiritual communion and transcendence. Unlike many other religions, however, for the most part we do not advocate complete separation from the material world. Jewish teachings generally do not focus on the nature of the divine or the hereafter, or on trying to know the unknowable, but rather ask us to direct our attention to the world we inhabit and the question of how we should live in our lives, on the practical concerns of education, ethics and social justice.

In other words, we are asked and tasked to remain well grounded, even as we acknowledge the presence of something greater than ourselves, and aspire to the heights of religious experience. We enter the sacred space of our sanctuary, and observe the sacred time of the high holy days, festivals, holidays, and Shabbat, only to return to the profane space and time of our everyday lives. As others have pointed out, the Fourth Commandment not only directs us to "remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy," but goes on to instruct us that "six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Adonai your God." We are commanded both to observe the Sabbath and also to fulfill our earthly responsibilities and get our work done.

With this in mind, I would like to point out that our labor, as a congregation, includes the maintenance and repair of our buildings and grounds. This includes our sanctuary and social hall, our religious school building, the rabbi's residence next to our religious school, the garden area alongside and behind the religious school, and our front lawn, driveways, and sidewalks. We are fortunate indeed that our congregation owns these properties outright, with no mortgage or liens against them, and to have our Buildings and Grounds Committee ably chaired by Michael Fishbein for many years.

The tasks that fall under the heading of buildings and grounds are familiar and numerous, and as profane as they come, whether it's taking out the garbage, cleaning bathrooms, changing light bulbs, shoveling snow, mowing the grass, fixing and maintaining heating and air conditioning, painting, replacing worn carpeting, fixing and replacing school equipment, and so on, and so on, and so on. I think we all pretty much know what it's like, after all.

It's not the sort of stuff we associate with a house of worship, and it's not the sort of stuff we like to think about anyway, but it's an important part of our earthly responsibilities, it's work that has to get done if we want to have a sanctuary, social hall, and school. And I think we all know that the costs associated with this sort of maintenance have only gone up over the years.

At our April Board of Trustees meeting, we took a long hard look at our revenues and expenses, and our membership dues, religious school tuition, and b'nai mitzvah fees. And we also looked at the building maintenance fee we ask all of our members to contribute to. And the funny thing is, no one could remember when it was last adjusted. Was it a decade ago? More? No one knew, but in the end, it didn't really matter. A long time ago the fee was set at $200, and it might as well have been a galaxy far, far away, given how much has changed since then.

I want to be honest with you. No one on the board wants to raise any of our dues or fees, we agonize over the issue, and over our fiduciary responsibility to our temple. The truth is that we are running at a deficit, and we need to increase our revenue to reduce the degree to which we are in the red. For this reason, the board voted to raise the building maintenance fee to $350, while agreeing not to raise membership dues, religious school tuition, and b'nai mitzvah fees. As this is the first time this fee has been raised in many, many years, we hope that you will understand and support this decision.

Our buildings and grounds are not our congregation. Our congregation consists of you and me, of us, together. But our buildings and grounds make most of what we do as a congregation possible. They are our common inheritance as a congregation, and our common responsibility, and it is incumbent on us to take proper care of our properties, so that we can pass them on to future generations.

I end this message with a further plea for donations above and beyond our dues and fees, because membership, tuition, and the like do not cover all our expenses. If you can afford to give something extra, please consider supporting our little shul on the hill, so that we can continue to be the little shul that could.

A Magic Carpet Ride

In case you haven't been by the temple in a while, back on July 3rd a new carpet was installed in our sanctuary, a project that was long overdue. Here are some images taken from that day:

Many thanks to Adas Emuno Treasurer and Buildings and Grounds Committee Chair, Michael Fishbein, for taking the photographs, sharing them with us, and overseeing the carpet installation.