Our next guest blogger, Dan Bush, was the development officer for Habitat for Humanity of Greater Lowell. He now works for the Jericho Project. He is great for brainstorming the non-profit world, preferably over a cup of coffee. As we approach the 911 anniversary, his words are especially dear to me as I was on a Habitat for Humanity jobsite in Lowell on 9/12. When all the world seemed to be collapsing, and it was. I saw the smoke the day before. We, the clergy of Lowell, were building. It remains one of my most powerful experiences ever.

In astronomy, there is an optical phenomenon that is called the ‘green flash’ which occurs only occasionally. When the conditions are just right at sunrise or sunset, a green dot appears on the horizon above the sun. It only lasts for a moment, and you have to be ready for it. Some people have been fortunate and have seen this phenomenon many times thanks to their professions as pilots.

I look upon community organizing in the same way which is why I enjoy working in the community with Jericho Road.

There are times working on a project, an event, or interacting with community or a family that you have been serving in the both the beginning and the end where this same flash occurs, and it is a tremendously fulfilling moment. It only comes when circumstances are just right, and you have to be not only lucky, but open to experiencing it.

As a professional fundraiser for Habitat for Humanity for many years, and a community builder for even more, there are a few moments where this is likely to happen, sometimes because like the pilot, you are placing yourself in a reasonably predictable line that will increase your odds.

Working with a committee that is trying to address a need in their community, there is always such a flash. As the professional advising, the odds are great that you will be present when the committee or the sponsors ‘see’ the future flash of success. It’s always a rewarding moment.

In the context of my work with Habitat, and helping families see their own green flash, my favorite moments have always been after the dedications, and after the crowd has dispersed.   A few weeks after the ceremonies, the sponsor signs and the Habitat banners come down, and in a brief moment the families inside the homes are no longer labeled this or that, they are just people. Success!

This is an electrifying connection to share with the family and the community both.

The flash is only a moment. Circumstances have to be just right, and you have to be ready!

Look for it! Put yourself in the way of success to find your own green flash!

Shalom
Dan Bush
National Executive Director
Jericho Road Project

We are still playing catch up. But here is Elul 22:

Tonight is Selichot. It is my favorite service of the year. It is held on Saturday night just before Rosh Hashanah and sets the tone. It is when we begin saying the “selichot” prayers—those very prayers that G-d taught Moses to say to ask for forgiveness. Those prayers include the repetition of the 13 Attributes of the Divine.

The Lord! The Lord! A God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin, yet He does not remit all punishment, but visits the iniquity of the fathers upon children and children’s children upon the third and fourth generation.

Yet in the liturgy it is truncated, exactly as G-d taught us to say it. We end at G-d forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin. Period.

In Numbers 14:11-20, after the incident with the spies returning from Canaan, Moses pleads again for mercy on behalf of the Israelites. He invokes the divine attributes and concludes, “Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to Your great kindness, as You have forgiven this people ever since Egypt.” (Numbers 14:19). The Lord answers, “I have pardoned according to your plea.” (Numbers 14:20) This verse becomes the central reassuring answer to Kol Nidre and is repeated during Ne’ilah. God has pardoned and will pardon according to our plea.

In the Talmud, in Rosh Hashanah 17b, is where we learn that G-d taught Moses these very words to be said on Selichot:

And ‘the Lord passed by before him and proclaimed [etc.]. (Ex. 34:6) R. Johanan said: Were it not written in the text, it would be impossible for us to say such a thing; this verse teaches us that the Holy One, blessed be He, drew his robe round Him like the reader8 of congregation and showed Moses the order of prayer. He said to him: Whenever Israel sins, let them carry out this service before Me, and I will forgive them.

‘The Lord, the Lord’: I am the Eternal before a man sins and the same10 after a man sins and repents. ‘A God merciful and gracious:’ Rab Judah said: A covenant has been made with the thirteen attributes that they will not be turned away empty-handed, as it says, Behold I make a covenant. (Ex. 34)

What a wonderful image. That G-d taught Moses to pray. And that those words are “I’m sorry.” And the 13 Attributes.

Saturday night, we began with Havdalah to separate Shabbat from the rest of the week. On the Saturday of Selichot it always seems especially bittersweet. But I love the dimmed light, the bright braided candle, the sweet wine and the spices. Maybe we will be ready for the new week, for the new year. Maybe we are never fully ready. Come on. It is coming fast now. We asked two questions that were part of the beginning of my Guatemala trip. What do you need to leave behind this year to be fully present? What do you bring to the group?

We heard the haunting strains of Kol Nidre on the cello, so ably and beautifully played by Kerena Moeller of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra. The piece is divided into several sections. We are all pretty familiar with the opening measures, but then it morphs. It sounds like angels (or what I imagine angels might sound like, perhaps because it reminds me of the year Sarah was an angel in the Nutcracker Suite. That piece sounds like this too). It is a bridge between heaven and earth, between what we did and what we hoped we would do, and in that instant I feel like it is all good, that heaven is attainable and that even if I am not perfect, I can be forgiven. That’s what I hear.

Then we had two workshops. One on visual arts where we took a blank puzzle, wrote Hashivenu on one side, “Turn to us O Lord and we will return to You. Renew our days as of old.” We sang two different versions of it. I remembered back to when my mother was dying and I was in Grand Rapids for Kol Nidre. I “snuck out” of the hospital to go to Kol Nidre with her blessing and I cried when I heard this song. What does it mean in that case to “renew our days as of old”. What does it mean any year?

People were then supposed to draw, color, paint, what makes them whole on the other side. What pieces of the puzzle need to be put back together to make them whole. How do we renew our days as of old?

Part of that is by turning around. Turning back. Admitting your mistakes and saying I’m sorry. But Moses did that. And G-d did that. It is hard work. It can be painful. It takes courage. It can be scary. But we have good role models. No one is perfect. Maybe not even G-d.

Then we had a poetry writing workshop. List 5 verbs ending in ing. List 5 nouns. 5 adjectives. All to do with the upcoming holidays. My verbs were chanting, praying, cleaning, singing, ascending, dancing, turning. The nouns were apples, prayer books, Torah, bimah, prayers, moon. My adjectives were white, whole, peace, joy, renewed. Someday I may even write that poem. But others did. Some will even be read over the next 10 days in the community.

Then we ended with the words of Selichot and an exercise relearned in Guatemala. We stood in a circle and knitted ourselves together with balls of yarn we tossed to one another. It created a spider web effect connecting us powerfully as community. as we sang the Shlomo Carlebach song, “Return again, return again, return to the land of your soul. Return to who you are. Return to what you are. Return to where you are. Born and reborn again.”

Return. Come journey with me.

We have been studying community for three weeks now. Rosh Hashanah is only a week away. Our next guest blogger is Rabbi Neil Kominsky. Neil was my rabbi in my “home congregation” at Temple Emanuel of the Merrimack Valley, through much of rabbinical school. He was my ordaining rabbi. He remains a good friend and a study partner. His words are always wise. His advice welcome and practical.

By my best reckoning, I have participated in Shabbat services in some communal setting on most Sabbaths for past sixty years or so. I’ll grant you that about forty years of that could be attributed to my professional responsibilities as a congregational and campus rabbi. The fact of the matter is, though, that my personal need to participate in group worship was part of what led me to the rabbinate in the first place, and what has kept me attending with great regularity in retirement.

Why do I do this?  I could simply answer that it is a mitzvah, a Divine commandment, to which I respond, but my theology really does not assume that God demands that I be there.   It is I who need to be there, addressing God in the company of other Jews who have come to join in worship together. What is that about?

Jewish worship is, fundamentally, a communal activity. It is not that one cannot pray alone—I often do—but that the dynamic of a community joined in prayer together is greater than the sum of its parts. Whatever each of us brings through the door with us, whatever kind of day or week we’ve had, in shared worship we become part of a larger whole, a community. There have been times when I have shown up largely out of habit, not feeling particularly worshipful, but, almost always, once the service gets going, I find myself lifted and borne along by the music, the shared words, the sheer presence of fellow worshippers sharing a common desire to worship God in community.

It is significant to me that nearly all our prayers, even when we say them alone, address God as Eloheynu, Our God. Only in a very few instances does the singular Elohai, My God, occur. The message is that even when we pray alone, we are part of a larger community that the words of our prayers acknowledge.

This is about more, however, than what makes meaningful worship. It is about the significance of being deeply committed together. The Ten Commandments are addressed to the individual: You (singular) shall have no other Gods before Me, and so on. The words following the Shema are addressed in the singular: You (singular) shall love the Lord your God…. But the Torah also commands us to be holy, and when it does so, it does it in the plural: You (plural) shall be holy, as I your God am holy.

Few, if any, of us are comfortable thinking about how we, individually, can become holy. It seems like an exercise in chutzpah to even think in such terms. As a community, however, we can aspire to holiness if what we do collectively contributes to making a holier, indeed a wholer (the original root meaning of shalom) world. When we work together to see that hungry people are fed, homeless people are housed, we are creating holiness. When we work to make our society and our world a more just place for the poor and powerless, we are creating holiness. When we deepen our understanding of Jewish tradition and find ways to pass what we know and have learned on to another generation, we are creating holiness. When we exert our utmost effort to recognize the Divine Image in every human being we encounter, we are creating holiness. When we comfort the grief-stricken, visit the sick, befriend the isolated within our community, we are creating holiness. And, yes, when we join our mouths and our hearts and our souls in worship, we are creating holiness.

We know that congregations often bear Hebrew names—Beth this or B’nai that. When the full name of the congregation is spelled out in Hebrew, though, it is often prefixed with the Hebrew letters Kof”Kof. This stands for Kehillah Kedoshah—Holy Congregation, which is precisely what our Jewish tradition understands by the banding together of a group of individual Jews, whether few or many, to meet each others’ needs and to join in community for a higher purpose.

Working together, we can fulfill God’s commandment; we can create holiness. That is what community is for.

Rabbi Neil Kominsky

Our next guest blogger, Dick Johnson, is the very first person I met in person at Congregation Kneseth Israel. He is the one who picked me up at O’Hare and drove me to Elgin when I came to “audition”. Before we were out of the airport, we discovered we shared a love of running. He has helped with moving, hanging pictures, finding the perfect burger and so much more. And yes, getting me back into running. He is practical and down to earth. He is our financial secretary and a board member. But most Saturdays you will not find him in the synagogue. You will find him out running, or biking or swimming. And coaching others in the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Team in Training. I call him Coach!

Community may be defined as: a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common; a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals. Thus we all may live in many different “communities” at the same time. Allow me to tell you about one of my favorite communities: the running community.

On the surface, long distance, endurance running may seem to be a very solitary pastime, but in reality I have found a community of runners who have definitely formed a closely knit family. For nine years now, I have been part of the TEAM IN TRAINING family. We have trained together, raced together, laughed together and yes, even cried together.

Several years ago one of our family members, Firoza Mohideen, who had already beaten Leukemia once before, discovered that her Lymphoma had returned. But this time it was even more advanced than before. Firoza would need a stem cell transplant! Neither her husband nor their children were suitable matches for the transfusion, and no one in the National Stem Cell Transplant Data Base was a match either. Firoza has several sisters in her native Sri Lanka and each was tested but none was a perfect match. The last sister who was tested proved to be the best match available for the transplant and was flown to Chicago for the procedure. This was the first time the sister had had ever left Sri Lanka.

Thankfully the transplant was successful. While this part of the story is definitely about family, it is not the family I am writing about. Immediately after her diagnosis, “Firoza’s Angels” was formed and put into operation. The members of our community banded together. Every day someone either sent her a greeting card, not a “get well” card, but rather a “stay strong” or a “thinking about you” card, or they sent a small gift to keep up her spirits. Others went to her home to do small projects to help the family such as cleaning or mowing the lawn.

My contribution for the community was a little different. During this time, Sue and I had been using a service called “Comin Dish”. This was a service that allowed you to come in and create prepared meals. I approached everyone with this concept of preparing these meals for Firoza’s family after she returned home from her quarantine period and asked if anyone would care to contribute toward the costs of these meals. I had hoped to collect enough money to provide a week’s worth of meals for the family, but the team could not give me money fast enough! We were finally able to provide two full weeks of meals for the family. As a community, we all worked very hard to help Firoza and her family to endure an extreme hardship and together we were successful.

This story is not just Firoza’s! It is also Marie’s and Patti’s and Oliver’s and Mark’s and Sue’s and many others who belong to our little community. Throughout my nine years with this organization, each and every time someone in the community has faced adversity, we have all strongly and actively come together to support that individual or family. We are Community!

Today I had a very varied day. It started with coffee, of course, with a congregant. Isn’t it nice that pumpkin spice latte and salted caramel mocha are back? Then I had apples and challah and honey with eight people at an assisted living center. Somewhere in there I spoke to the rabbi I grew up with and shared our High Holiday sermon topics. Then I met a congregant who wanted to talk to me. Then I had lunch with a congregant to discuss martyrology and the Avodah service on Yom Kippur. Then I had Hebrew School.

But what was remarkable about each of these conversations was the care and level of commitment to Judaism and the deep thinking in each. And that builds community.

Let me explain. In coffee one. (Really, people, I only have one a day but it has to be good), we discussed the Iranian deal, the refugee crisis, racism in America, and what I should or should not say on the bimah. He encouraged me to be bold. To not equivocate and to do it from the source of Jewish values. That’s what I took away from the rabbi in Grand Rapids, too. He is being really bold, I think this year. He and I talked about story telling and how his most effective sermons have been when he has shared his own journey. I agreed. And that fits with what I was learning in Guatemala and what I am learning in Ron Wolfson’s book on Spiritual Welcoming. We talked about sharing our dreams and our visions. And that helped me frame what I want to say in the next few weeks.

At the Victory Center, I gathered with eight women who shared their visions. Using the same exercise we used Saturday night for Selichot, they told us they want to leave behind grudges, jealousy and pettiness, anger, their canes and walkers, pain. They want to bring to others congeniality, patience, their whole selves, their families. They were not sure they had any unique gifts although one made a crib blanket for every grandchild! They sampled the apples and honey and challah. They listened to the sounds of the shofar, which are supposed to sound like crying. And one cried.

I did not go get a second coffee—although someone called and wanted to meet for one. But I did meet to discuss the Avodah service. Why do we need an intecessor? What role did that play then? What roles does that play now? How is it relevant? What role does martyrology play? Do we need the gore to experience the pain? If it is only the pain then what is the point. It was a profound discussion with just the right questions (and I think the right approaches). It helped my own preparation.

Then Hebrew School. I had the opportunity to then teach the Avodah Service and see what a 12 year old thinks. He actually thinks it is relevant. His words. Because the story alone helps us renew and commit not to sin. (Out of the mouth of babes) But he is not sure that the concept of a high priest is relevant. Stay tuned! And ruach was great. We learned a new song, Ivdu Et HaShem B’Simcha. Serve the Lord with Joy! We continued our discussion of prayer. We heard the shofar. These kids are really bright!

Somewhere in there I had a discussion as well about air conditioning and landscaping. And supplemental readings. And email lists. And permission slips. And memorial plaques. And challah. Today was the day to pick up challah at the synagogue that Hadassah sells every year.

All of these encounters builds community. One cup of coffee. One lunch. One study session. One person at a time.

Our next guest blogger, Suzy Zemel, is a member of Congregation Kneseth Israel where for many years she directed the children’s choir. Currently she sings in the adult choir and the house band and serves as Sisterhood president and on the education committee. I am reminded of a line in an old Woody Allen film. When asked what Jews do when they get in trouble, he answered, “They sing.”

One of my favorite things to do is to sing. I sing when I am happy. I sing to help me become happier. I was fortunate to have a dad with a beautiful voice. I cannot hear “Old Man River” from Showboat without thinking of my dad’s low, low notes sounding so powerful, or the way he hit the high notes at the end of the song, and the strong emotions that came out as he sang. One of my favorite family memories growing up is our singing together. We often sang in the evenings, instead of turning on the TV. Driving in the car on long rides gave us more opportunities to sing. When other family members were around, they joined in.

Yes, we were a family, magically we became a community of singers.

I was in singing groups growing up from third grade and well into college. Singing in choirs, small groups, music camps, and musicals, to name a few, were great ways to demonstrate how strong a community could become. Picture back to high school days. There were the various groups of students that hung out with only certain peers. Somehow, when we sang together, our clique status didn’t matter. We worked together practicing over and over the various voice parts, and as a whole, until we blended into one sound. We were individuals that through music, pardon the pun, found our voice. We might not have associated together outside of the choir room, but when we were a community, working for the betterment of our cause, which was to sing our hearts out and to sound as good as we possibly could.

Ah yes, our school halls were alive with some beautiful sounds of music!.

Then, there was also our synagogue’s High Holiday choir. I was fifteen when I joined this choir. This was quite a change from my singing at our local high school. We had a good-sized group. Many of them were friends of my parents, thus it seemed as if they were pretty old! There was only one person younger than me.

Age and stage of life didn’t matter. This was a group that did more than make beautiful music together. There was bonding, support, laughter, friendship, and indeed the lovely, moving traditional music.

At Congregation Kneseth Israel, where my husband, children, and I joined close to 30 years ago, I feel fortunate to have music play an important role in my participation within this community.   I had the opportunity to lead our children’s choir for 11 years.

I was also in a couple of Sisterhood musicals. What fun we had, and the closeness that occurred from performing these. I also was the director of our High Holiday choir for a few years.

Lucky for us, we now have a professional musician that is our director. He does a great job and has a lot of patience through all the silliness that seems to happen regularly at our rehearsals. Laughter and music go together. I find that after our rehearsals, I come home feeling more relaxed and cheerful. We had a few new people join the choir this year. New voices, and more opportunities to work together as we strive toward making moving and meaningful music during the High Holidays. Somehow, these new members have added magic to our group. We now have more power, so as I sing soprano, I can hear the low notes from the bass singers. Our voices blending with each others’, is exciting. I love to listen for the harmony, or even to hear us singing the same note well. This small “band of singers” is an important community within our synagogue. It is an honor to make music together. I will admit I really did not know some members prior to our commencement as a group. Today, I consider all of them my friends.

Would this have happened without our choir? Probably not to the degree we have today. Just think about this, all I have written about is community through singing. I never even mentioned our small synagogue band. Just think about all the communities created through choirs, bands and orchestras everywhere. Ah, this makes my heart sing!

Suzy Zemel

Our next guest blogger, Gareth Mann Sitz,  is a member at Congregation Kneseth Israel, is a director and producer of plays, a poet, and a retired teacher. Except she still teaches a memory writing group and a poetry workshop at Gail Borden Library. Her latest play will debut at the Elgin Fringe Festival the weekend of September 17-20. http://www.elginfringefestival.com Here she teaches us about community:

As an only child, I have spent most of my life reaching out to other people. I have always had an instinctive need for community—to be part of a supportive and nurturing group of people.

As an adult, I find that one of my purposes in life is to build community in any setting in which I happen to find myself. My world is the theatre, and I have been directing plays since I was seventeen years old. I have always felt that being in a play builds community. For the duration of the rehearsal period, the cast and crew becomes a family. If the director does her job well, this communal spirit enables the artistic process to proceed smoothly.

As a theater practitioner, I want my actors to become close to one another, to have a sense of belonging. I want them to feel accepted as they are, and I want them to feel that their contributions to the creative process are valuable. When cast members arrive at rehearsal, I want them to feel an immediate sense of knowing and being known, that they are part of a community.

In 2008, I founded an all female improvisation and acting troupe called Femmeprov. Over time, we have developed into a writing and performing cooperative. We meet on a regular basis to process our ideas, and we develop scripted material through group process. Time passes quickly during our sessions, and we laugh a lot, tickled with the wit of our comrades.

Our quality time together extends beyond the confines of our theatrical activity. In addition to working on our scripts, we have lunch and dinner together on a regular basis. We sometimes attend plays in the Chicago area with other group members, and we make an effort to attend productions in which any of our members is involved.

Our group ranges in age from 16 to 75 years of age. What we have in common is a commitment to creating theater that will entertain and enlighten people about issues that are important to women.

Our core group of women has morphed over time, yet any of the women who have participated in script development since 2008 are included in our social activities, whether or not they are still involved on a regular basis.   We have been known to have 15-20 women gather for half price burgers at our favorite local pub. It’s not uncommon for people to bring their friends or relatives to join us.   Once in awhile, we even welcome a man to our table! Newcomers to the acting troupe, usually referred by other members, have been embraced fully into the process. Our community has been enriched the past year with the addition of younger members, and we love the intergenerational aspect of our work together.

I lovingly refer to Femmeprov as “my gals.” The degree of comfort and mutual admiration is phenomenal. I feel very fortunate to be part of such a close knit artistic community.

Today on the American calendar is Labor Day. It is a day where thanks to the organizing of the labor movement, if you are lucky you don’t have to work. It is the end of a three day weekend. It is the unofficial last day of summer. Perhaps there is a barbecue or a picnic or a parade or one last trip to the pool or beach. And you better not wear white after Labor Day!

The Labor Movement really got its start in two places. In Lawrence, MA with the Bread and Roses strike. Plenty has been writing about this. While it maybe apocryphal that the women in Lawrence carried signs saying that “We want bread but we need roses too”, the myth has stuck and every year on Labor Day the State Park in Lawrence hosts a Bread and Roses Concert.

Long before there was the Bread and Roses Strike, women were working to improve working conditions. Jewish women in particular were at the vanguard of organizing other young Jewish women to fight for better wages, safer working conditions and even the women’s right to vote. One of those women has Rose Schneiderman, whose speech, “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too,” is what became the title of the poem, Bread and Roses, and later was set to music.

Rose Schneiderman was born in Swain, on the Russian/Poland border and actually went to Hebrew School, usually reserved in those days just for boys, in Chelm, before coming to New York. Her father died when she was young, leaving the family in poverty. Her mother, trying to keep the family together worked as a seamstress, but for this immigrant mother, it wasn’t enough and she had to give the children up for a short time to an orphanage.

From this beginning, Rose understood the importance of community and taking care of others. She was already a union organizer by the time of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911 and that tragedy propelled her activism further. In 1920 she ran for US Senate. She didn’t win but her platform called for the construction of nonprofit housing for workers, improved neighborhood schools, publicly owned power utilities and staple food markets, and state-funded health and unemployment insurance for all Americans. Today these are all things that we think a strong community needs.

Along the way, activists made friends and colleagues—maybe even comrades. They created their own community, including theater, movies, poetry readings, lectures, dinners. An entire social network.

They also understood, many from their Jewish roots, the value of rest. Of not working 24×7. Of a work week that was only 40 hours. Of government mandated breaks in the work day. Of child labor laws.

So today, while those of us who are lucky to enjoy a Labor Day picnic or barbecue, let’s remember those in the Jewish community, who built community, strengthened community by making sure we have fair labor laws, including today being a holiday. And let’s remember to thank those people who are working today so that we can enjoy time with our families.

A note: There was a problem with WordPress in terms of credentials. Simon had administrator privileges and could edit. I as an editor no longer could. We’ve decided for the next few days there will be two posts in order to catch up.

G-d said to Abraham, “Lech lecha, Go.” There is lots of commentary on this text.  Abraham is told to leave his land, the place of his birth, and his family and go to the land that G-d would show him. It is a model of concentric circles. It is hard to leave your land. Harder still to leave the land of your birth. Hardest still to leave your family—everything familiar. And yet, that is what G-d asked Abraham to do.

This resonates with us today. Today we live in a very transient society. It is common for kids to leave for college and not return to the land of their birth. It is common to hear people say, especially at holidays like Thanksgiving, that their friends are the ones they choose to celebrate, that those friends have become their family. There are even famous scenes in every sit com in America–Seinfeld, Friends, Modern Family, How I Met Your Mother–all about the family we choose.

It seems to me that there are pluses and minuses in this. On the one hand, if you are not living near your family, it creates independence and self-reliance. On the other hand, if you have an emergency or just need a babysitter for a night out, your parents are not around the corner and your extended family may be in another state. Grandchildren may not have a close relationship with grandparents. Parents may not teach kids how to change the oil in the car or hang a picture or water the garden or mow the lawn. Mentoring may be harder to come by.

And the nature of community may change.

Yet, people still want to belong. They want to experience something bigger than themselves. They want to feel connected. They want to know that there are people they can count on—and those people may not be in their own families.

So when they leave their families, and the land of their birth, they begin to create community. It maybe a college extra curricular club. Or cheering in a football stadium. It maybe a group of people that gathers for a casual dinner or pizza on Friday night. It maybe the people you meet at the health club. Or the neighborhood pool. It maybe a group of parents who meet on the playground or who gather for a playgroup. It maybe the soccer moms or the Little League coaches. It maybe a PTO board. Girl Scouts. Boy Scouts. Or the Torah school parents who sit at the round tables on Sunday mornings.

Or it may be your workplace. The lunch room. The water cooler (do people still have these?) The cookie exchange. The Kiwanis or Lions or Rotary. For me it maybe places like the Martin Luther King Commission or the U46 Clergy Council or the Coalition of Elgin Religious Leaders. At one time it was the dance academy that Sarah attended and through which she danced five years of the Nutcracker. Each year the kids would make an ornament to place on the tree that grew–and the director talked about community. Sarah might tell you that she is part of the theater community or the running community.

In each case there is an expectation that these are people that you have a shared experience with and that you can count on. They are the families that you choose.

Community—your family, the place of your birth and wherever you wander, wherever G-d might lead you. Each is a place of community.

Our next guest is Tina Wolf. A member at Congregation Kneseth Israel for almost 20 years, and a day care owner, she always has a warm smile and a can-do attitude. I’m delighted that she has chosen CKI, and continues to do so!

The communities to which I have belonged have changed throughout my life. Stitch n’ bitch, book club, and concert going affiliations gave way to such communities as Boy Scout Troop 56 and St. Charles North’s soccer, swim, and music boosters – then returned again. However, as a soon-to-be twenty year member, CKI is the one community that I have CHOSEN to belong to for the longest period of time.

Originally joining to provide my children with some type of Jewish education and identity, I remain a member of CKI because of the sense of connectedness that I have with others within this organization and its Sisterhood. This sense of connectedness, or community, stems from shared values and common goals and interests. More importantly though, the CKI community, like all good communities, develops and maintains this sense of connectedness by exhibiting concern about the welfare of those who belong to it. CKI provides me, and all its members, with support – it helped me celebrate simchas, mourned with me when I lost loved ones, and provides me with the resources (whether they be educational, spiritual, social, or material) to grow and become not only a better Jewish person, but a better citizen of the world.

In return, I (and what I believe is a growing number of members) have become just as concerned about making the CKI grow and improve. I believe that this reciprocity is a necessary component of any successful community. CKI must view its members as an asset and strive to meet their needs, and we, the members of CKI’s community must view CKI as an asset and take action to ensure its continuation and development too.

Yet another characteristic of a good community is flexibility. I believe that CKI possess this trait because of its conscious effort to embrace diversity. This act is key to promoting tolerance of differing views and opinions as well as making all feel welcome, comfortable, and accepted – yet another key facet of a great community.

Tina Wolf