Shabbat Recap: Wandering, Wondering, and Welcoming a New Bar Mitzvah

May Shabbat Recap

Our May Shabbat was one of the highlights of my year. Here’s what it felt like to be in the room.

Candles, and the Light We Make Together

We began, as we always do, with candle lighting. There is something about that moment, the match, the flames, that quiets a room full of people faster than anything I can say from the bimah. For a few seconds, the only sound was the blessing.

Singing That Filled the Whole Room

Sharon led us in song, and I mean lifted us. By the second prayer, I could hear voices in every corner of the room, the people who know every word and the people who were humming along and catching up by the chorus. That is what I love about Neshamah singing. Nobody is auditioning. Everybody belongs in the sound.

A Bar Mitzvah, and a Young Man’s Leadership

And then came the moment one family was waiting for.

Watching Ian lead the congregation in Sh’ma Yisrael on the Friday before his Bar Mitzvah service, surrounded by his family, brought an extra dose of simcha – joy, to our service.

He looked like he belonged on the bima, and like he had grown into his role as a Bar Mitzvah. Which he does and he did!

Mazel tov does not feel like a big enough phrase for what that moment is, but it is the phrase we use, so: mazel tov, from all of us, to your whole family.

Shabbat Bamidbar, and the Gift of Unstructured Space

This Shabbat landed right alongside a teaching I have been sitting with all month: that the most important things that happen to us are rarely the things we scheduled.

We are reading the opening of Bamidbar, the Book of the Wilderness, right now. The rabbis ask why revelation at Sinai happened the way it did, out in the open midbar, with no walls and no roof and no plan. Their answer is that the wilderness belongs to no one, so Torah can belong to everyone. You cannot receive something new if you are clutching too tightly to what you already scheduled.

I keep thinking about Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the young man who revived the Hebrew language. He had no roadmap when his big dream began. He was simply a student sitting in a Paris cafe in 1881, talking with two other Jewish men in conversational Hebrew for what may have been the first time in two thousand years. Nobody planned that conversation. Nobody scheduled it into an itinerary. And yet that unplanned afternoon is the reason an entire language came back to life.

That is the wilderness. That is Bamidbar. A dream rarely arrives on schedule. It arrives in the open space we leave for it.

Summer is when most of us have a little more of that open space than usual, and I hope we use it well. Leave an afternoon with no agenda. Take the road that looks interesting. Have the conversation you were not expecting to have. Somewhere in that unstructured wandering is the cafe table where your own next dream is waiting to begin.

Come Wander With Us

If you were with us, thank you for filling the room with your voice. If you were not, I hope this gives you a small taste of what Neshamah feels like, and I hope you will come find your seat with us soon. There is always room for one more wanderer. 

Join us for Shabbat online or in person.

Shabbat Shalom, and mazel tov again to our newest bar mitzvah.

With love and blessings,

Rabbi Amy