Synagogue Updates

Good morning and Shabbat Shalom,

Home Stretch! T-Minus one week til Rosh Hashanah. Cue party hats and noisemakers - ok wrong new year (and even though I said good morning - I am actually writing this around 11ish on Thursday night - so please forgive the bad jokes)

Our full high holiday calendar is available here: https://www.tbhbe.org/high-holidays.html and includes our variety of service options.  Zoom links will be sent out early next week to members. I am happy to talk with any of our ECC families that are interested in membership or with anyone that has questions about their membership bill. 

Before I get into the meat of this email, two reminder links:

Bring a Bag/Take a Bag 
Experience the Light from the Ark

And now for the newish stuff:

Guest Tickets: We have had a number of questions about guest tickets. The security of our high holiday services is critically important to us. We know that this year presents a unique opportunity for family members to be a part of the same prayer service and we want to encourage that. We are asking all of our guests that want to virtually attend our services on zoom to fill out this form. There is no guest ticket fees this year, but we are requesting donations. In addition to being able to join our myriad of services via zoom, the main sanctuary service will be streamed to http://www.tbhbe.org/stream.html. 

Join us in the Lobby: One of the comments that we have repeatedly heard is that people will miss the opportunity to run into each other in the lobby. So we have decided to bring the lobby to you. We are setting up a separate zoom session that will just be available for people to pop in, see who is there and say hi. We hope you will check it out. The link will be included in next week's email. 

Tashlch: We have five different tashlich locations. Each one has its own time, location, coordinators and targeted age group. You and your family are welcome to choose which one you would like to attend based on those facts. RSVPs are required and space will be limited. The coordinators will send more exact meeting locations to those that sign up. You can sign up here. 

Shofar Rely and Shofar in the Neighborhood:  On the 2nd day of Rosh Hashanah, we are excited to partner with Adath Israel for a shofar relay. The shofar blowing will start at Adath, we will have people stationed every 100 yards or so blowing the shofar all the way to TBH-BE and back. This program will start at 2:30pm and we encourage people to arrive a few minutes earlier. Here is a map of the route and there will be people holding red signs to announce the locations. 

From Sunday - Thursday night next week at 7:00pm, we will have shofar blowers in different neighborhoods and at the synagogue. The list is being finalized and we will be emailing people that live in the areas with the schedule. The final schedule will be sent with our Sunday email. If you are a shofar blower and would like to blow shofar in front of your house, we are happy to include you!

The first session will be held on Sunday at 7:00pm at Wiltshire and Yarmouth (29 Wiltshire Road), and will be led by Rachel Dunaief. Please RSVP to me if you will be able to join. 

Inclusion and Accessibility: In some ways, our new virtual format increases our ability to be inclusive, in some ways it provides extra challenges. We are loaning out our high holiday mahzorim - if you would like a large print version, we have some available. For tashlich, we have marked the option that we believe is most accessible. We are attempting to use closed captioning for the Rabbi's sermons. Having never done this before - we will email the sermon out in advance to those whom having a copy in front of them would be helpful. Please let me know. We will email it to the entire community after the holiday. We will be streaming the service to our website for those whom might have a challenge accessing zoom. Our assisted listening system is available to those that are in the sanctuary with honors. If there are accommodations that would make the holidays more accessible or meaningful to you, please let me know and we will do everything within our power to help. 

We are very excited to share the holy days with you, and as Rabbi Cooper has written about, we believe that there is a real opportunity to make them even more special than usual. We are here to help make them as meaningful as possible. 

I look forward to seeing many of you tonight at our New Member Shabbat tonight and others via zoom tomorrow as we share our first Bar Mitzvah from the sanctuary. 

Shabbat Shalom - because once again, we should all be doubly blessed. 

Ken