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March 2
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February 13, 2026 |
Dear Friends,
This week, we completed our third cycle of studying with our friends and neighbors from the Riverdale Presbyterian Church. This time we stepped out of our comfort zone and engaged with texts both from the Jewish canon and the Christian canon. It wasn’t always easy, but it was incredibly worthwhile. The process of reading texts familiar to Christians (some part of the Tanach – Jewish Bible) heightened the truth that each of us sees the world from our own vantage point and the challenge is step out of our comfort zone and look beyond. There are texts that one community sees in 60 point font while for the other it is in no more than 10 point font.
A recent example of that was watching the Super Bowl halftime show. Did you catch all of the references? It didn’t matter; for so many of us, we caught the much-needed joy and the invitation to embrace love and not hate.
Announcements
Mitzvah of the Week
There is always so much that needs doing; it is important to remember that even our smallest acts of lovingkindness have the capacity to have rippling effects.
Tuesday, January 27th is Holocaust Remembrance Day as designated by the United Nations. Knowledge and understanding of the impact of the Holocaust is at a particularly low ebb at the moment, especially with fewer survivors among us to share their stories.
These stories of the past are echoing powerfully all around us as we see families detained simply because of the color of their skin. We are living in a moment where a love of Hitler and Nazi Germany can be proclaimed with little or no response. There is little or no understanding of what the storm of fascism unleashed.
Our actions, both large and small, matter. The one thing we cannot do is stand idly by as the past is ignored. We know that standing together makes a difference.
| Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu ve'al kol Israel, ve'imru, Amen. |
| May the One who makes peace in the heavens, make peace for us all and all the people of Israel. |
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