From The President
David P Lewis
e: president@greatsynagogue.org.au
Dear Friends,
LIGHTING OUR STAINED-GLASS WINDOWS
This Shabbat members will be able to see a lighting option I have been working on over the past 12 months. Behind the President’s chair we have installed a temporary form of backlighting to highlight one of our magnificent windows.
When the Shul was first opened in March 1878 there was no building behind the sanctuary and the 14 stained-glass windows at the West of the sanctuary were “lit” by natural light.
These windows, four in the men’s and four women’s galleries together with another 6 in the Choir Loft, have been unreachable since rear access was lost around 100 years ago when new structures were built. Our air-conditioning works have allowed more advanced examination of these spaces.
In time, we will light all of these windows and fix the Dome above the Choir Loft as well so that the brilliance of these 1878 windows can be restored. We also plan to put these new lights on a separate switch thereby ensuring that they can stay on even when the rest of the gallery lights are off!
We are working on the appropriate colour along with other technical lighting issues and hope to have these resolved in the near future so we can progress with this initiative.
THE JOHN & ANNA BELFER ORATION - THE HISTORY OF JEWISH PHILOSOPHY IN CONJUNCTION WITH UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME AUSTRALIA – 30 JUNE
I would like to thank Rabbi Elton for his outstanding Oration last Monday night. The Rabbi’s speech will be published in full shortly and will be made available to members via links on the Shul’s website.
I would also like to thank The University of Notre Dame’s Centre for the History of Philosophy for their commitment to this annual event over the next five years.
FRIDAY NIGHT 11 JULY – SHABBAT DINNER TO CELEBRATE RABBI ELTON’S BIRTHDAY
Next Friday night, 11 July, please join us in celebrating Rabbi Elton’s birthday at the shul commencing 5:30pm. There will be a choral Kabbalat Shabbat service with The Great Synagogue Choir and then we will head to dinner. We will also hear from International Musician Daniel Rojas who will be joining us as the guest speaker for the evening. Bookings are essential for the dinner – HERE.
WOMEN’S AUXILIARY AGM 16 JULY
The Women’s Auxiliary will hold their AGM on Wednesday, 16 July at 10am in the Israel Green Auditorium. Guest speakers are Kira Weiss and Tamsin Knight who will speak on “NSW Homelessness Strategy”. Morning tea will be served. Please register your attendance HERE
To all those in our community who are suffering an illness, we wish you a Refu’ah Shleima — a complete and speedy recovery; and to all those commemorating a Yahrzeit, or who have recently suffered a loss, we wish you a long and good life, full of Simchas.
Shabbat Shalom
.
From The Rabbi
Rabbi Dr Benjamin Elton
e: admin@greatsynagogue.org.au
DVAR TORAH – CHUKAT 5785
It has been an extraordinarily busy week at the Shule. The Belfer Oration in Jewish philosophy on Monday night and the Live at the Great concerts on Tuesday and Wednesday night each brought hundreds of members and friends to the Synagogue and maintained our position as an intellectual and cultural keystone in Jewish and civic life in Sydney.
In Parashat Chukat we confront death in general, and then three deaths in particular. The parasha begins with the ritual of the red heifer, which was sacrificed and burned, and the ashes mixed with water and then sprinkled over a person who had become impure through contact with a dead body. Through that ritual, purity would be restored. Later, Miriam and Aaron both die, and Moses was told he would die before entering the Land of Israel, as a result of striking the rock to bring forth water, instead of speaking to it as God had told him to do.
The Talmud teaches that God provides a cure before the malady. In this case, He provided the antidote to death before the Israelites experienced the deaths of their beloved leaders. We can see how necessary this was. When Moses was just a day late coming down Mount Sinai the People built a Golden Calf. What would stop them going completely off the rails when Aaron and Miriam died, and when Moses was condemned to die?
If the answer is the ritual of the ashes of the red heifer, then it does not seem to be a particularly satisfactory one. The ashes bring back purity, but they do not bring back the person who has died, so how would this reassure the People experiencing or facing the prospect of the death of leaders?
The teaching of the red heifer is not that death can be reversed, that the problem of loss can be solved. Rather, the idea is that there will be a time after the loss, a new normal, a return to regular life; different but not so different that we cannot look forward with confidence and purpose. Ritual impurity represents the shadow that death casts over the living. Eventually that shadow will pass and life will carry on. The gap is not filled, although there can be compensations in the forms of new presence or fullness, but the darkness can lift.
Through learning about the red heifer ritual, the People were being told that they could withstand the loss of Aaron and Miriam, and even of Moses himself. There would be a new High Priest to replace Aaron, there would be outstanding women leaders in the future in the mould of Miriam, and Moses’s place would be taken by Joshua, who would lead the People successfully into the Land of Israel.
The wisest teachings about loss do not make far-fetched promises that grief can be avoided – the only way to avoid grief ourselves is to inflict it on others – but instead show us that we are strong enough to face loss, to come out the other side changed but not diminished, and though there is death, life carries on, with all its beauty and meaning.
..