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Nov
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Embracing Life
October 2005
From the Desk of Rabbi Cohon
I set before you today a choice: life and death,
blessing and curse. Choose life! -- Deuteronomy 30
A central and beautiful lesson of Judaism is that life is to be lived fully, and we are given the opportunity
to make choices that lead to blessing. The corollary,
of course, is that we can also make choices that lead
to negative results, criticism, and failure—curses, as
the Torah puts it. It is up to choose to embrace
life.
On a personal level, we choose life by challenging
ourselves to achieve new levels of caring, intimacy,
and knowledge. In the coming High Holy Days we are
entrusted with the sacred task of seeing our lives
honestly and completely, and of finding ways to
improve. We have the opportunity to live to a higher
standard on a daily basis: to act with greater
integrity, with more vision, and with greater
compassion. With God’s help we can make our lives
into real blessings for our family, our temple, and
our community.
The opposite of hope and growth is fear and
stagnation. When we choose to do as we have always done, to lock ourselves into the prison of the past
and the chains of habitual behaviors, to blind our own
vision, we are not being careful or conservative. We
are, in fact, choosing a kind of living death, the
“curse” that our traditions speak of so clearly, for
only the dead are truly static.
Living, really living, at heart, means change. And
embracing life means committing to change for the
better. That is our task, yours and mine, in the
coming weeks of reflection and introspection.
This same choice is also present for our temple, which
has risen from great depths just seven years ago to a
place of accomplishment, honor, and respect. That
place is now threatened.
While most of you—our members—have joined Temple
Emanu-El in the last six years or so, it is worth
remembering that for many years our temple was not
well or ethically run by either lay leadership or the
professional staff. This led to a situation in which
the very existence of the historic synagogue for all
of Arizona was in question.
Fortunately, Temple Emanu-El chose in those dark
moments to embrace life, and chose as well to create a
positive environment in which a partnership between the rabbi and the board could flourish, and in which
dynamic new services, Jewish education, and
programming could thrive.
That has been our story for the past six and a half
years: of the growth of our temple from 350 to 800
families, of the creation and dramatic development of
wonderful educational programming in our Strauss Early
Childhood Education Center, Adult Education Academy,
and Religious and Hebrew Schools, of an unparalleled
outreach program, of new and innovative work in every
area of Jewish and communal life. It has also been
true of the ways in which we have found the resources
to support these essential and highly successful
reflections of Judaism and community.
That success was the result of the embrace of Jewish
life as vital, positive, and holy. We have retained a
spirit that embraces the possible, that sees the
opportunity and remarkable potential in each
challenge.
We are again faced with such a challenge. Whether we
as a congregation choose to embrace a future of
growth, excellence, and blessing is an open question. But with God’s help, we still may do so. Perhaps your
own example will serve to demonstrate how that should
be done.
May your own personal teshuvah, your self-reflection
and improvement, lead you to a higher and holier
place. And may God help our congregation to a renewed
commitment to goodness, to growth, and to blessing.
On behalf of Rhody, Boaz, Gabriel, and Cipora, I wish
you l’shanah tovah umetukah, a good and sweet New Year
of blessing!
L’shalom v’rei’ut, in peace and
friendship,
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon
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