@Kehillath Shalom Synagogue 12/24 - 12/27 & 1/1 - 1/3

It is a quiet time for our small community.  
There will be no services 12/26 or 1/1.
Hebrew School will resume on 1/10.

We wish you all a happy, healthy and joyous 2016

Shalom!

This Weekend at Kehillath Shalom Synagogue 12/18 - 12-20

Saturday, December 19th
Torah Study and Services begin at 10am
at 11:15 Nissim presents the next in his series of Forums on Israel
Those Controversial Settlements; Facts You Won't Learn from the Media

Sunday, December 20th
Bagels and Books at Arlene's 
This month: All I Love and Know by Judith Frank

Movies and Munchies is December 16th!

Come join the crew for Movies and Munchies on Thursday, December 16th for Fill the Void

Watch the movie beforehand and meet to eat and chat about it with your KSS friends.
                                         Movies & Munchies Wednesday Dec 16                              
Our next Movies & Munchies movie is Fill the Void - a wonderful Israeli film! 

The award-winning Israeli drama "Fill the Void," [told by Rama Burshtein, in her remarkable debut feature] is about a naive 18-year-old girl in an ultra-orthodox Hasidic community who dreams of finding the perfect match in an arranged marriage.

Graceful, complex, and beautifully layered, Fill the Void offers a sympathetic portrait of an insulated culture by exploring universal themes. Shira is forced to weigh the claims of family loyalty, religious duty and her own desires.   Watch the trailer!! You'll want to see the whole movie! 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQuWarA9KXg

Call 631-367-4589 for details

Hanukkah Celebration 2015

Scenes from this year's Hanukkah Fair

This Weekend at Kehillath Shalom Synagogue 12/11 - 12/13

Join us for latkes and singing on Friday, December 11, 2015 with Cantor Judy


Saturday, December 12th 
Torah Study 10am
Services 11am

Sunday, December 13th

Exploring Judaism: Hanukkah through History part 2
Sunday,  Dec 13th 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Join the Kehillath Shalom Synagogue community for the second in a two-part Adult Ed. series led by Rabbinic Intern Greg Hersh. What are we celebrating when we celebrate Hanukkah? Many of us think of Hanukkah as 8 days to give and receive gifts, but there is actually much more to celebrate. We will explore the story of Judah and the Macabees and show how it can still speak to us today. We will discover where myth and history diverge and meet in the Hanukkah story, and also look at how the holiday has been celebrated through the ages. Join us and learn how to bring holy light into the darkest and coldest days of the year.

No need to have attended the first class 

to learn from the second!

 And coming next week - Bagels and Books at Arlene's!

What Is Reconstructionism - Belonging, Behaving, Believing by Greg Hersh

Reconstructionist Primer  

by Rav Gregory Hersh

         Here is one of the most famous stories told about Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism: Kaplan used to teach homiletics, the art of giving a sermon at the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative Movement seminary) in New York, where he worked and taught rabbinic students for 50 years. His habit was to give a sermon to the class each Monday based on the Torah portion of that week and then assign one of his students to give a sermon on Friday, five days later based on the same Torah portion. Kaplan was infamous for his blistering criticisms of practically every sermon that his students gave. 

         So, as the story goes, one week an enterprising student copied Kaplan’s sermon down word for word on Monday, and when Friday came and it was his time to present his own sermon, he simply delivered Kaplan’s sermon exactly as Kaplan himself had written it. When he finished, Kaplan stood up and thundered, “That was terrible!” To which the student replied, “But Dr. Kaplan,that was the sermon that you gave on Monday.” At which point Mordecai Kaplan looked back at the student and said, “Yes, but I have grown since then.” 

         Mordecai M. Kaplan, born June 11, 1881 in Lithuania to Rabbi Israel and Chaya Kaplan. He came to New York with his mother at the age of 8 to join his father who was working with the Chief Rabbi of the Orthodox community. He grew up living in two worlds – the world of strict Orthodox practice (and it was assumed throughout his childhood that he would grow up to take his father’s place as an Orthodox rabbi), and the world of early 20th century rationalist, scientific thinking. He studied philosophy and science, sociology and anthropology at City College of New York, and then Columbia University, and as a young man was dauntingly brilliant and perpetually questioning. 

         He started his career as an Orthodox rabbi and helped create the Young Israel movement of modern orthodoxy, but he soon realized that when, in spite of his Orthodox life, he rejected the idea that God was a supernatural “Being” who acted on the world and directed the lives of human beings. So Kaplan felt compelled to fashion a philosophy and theology of Judaism that would help Jews to reconcile the richness of Jewish tradition with the modern scientific understandings of how the world really worked. 

         The result of his own intellectual struggles was the creation of the basic principles of Reconstructionist Judaism and the transformation of American Judaism for all time. What Mordecai Kaplan did for American Judaism first was to resolve one of the great intellectual questions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – namely was Judaism a religion, a race, or a culture? Today no one even thinks about such questions, but at the turn of the 20th century it was perhaps the sociological issue of the Jewish world. Kaplan’s solution was to define Judaism as “The evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people,” and in so doing he changed the way we have understood Judaism and the centrality of the Jewish people ever since. 

         He recognized that Judaism is not simply a “religion” in the traditional sense of the word – meaning a system of beliefs. In his brilliant explanation of the origins and nature of religious identity, he was the first to recognize that all religious identity is formed from the three “B’s” of “Believing, Behaving, and Belonging.” He explained in simple language that in the western world, we understand religious identity primarily through the Christian lens, for obvious reasons. So most people in America think that the foundation of religious identity begins with “Belief.” 

         As an expression of that belief (which for a Christian would include such ideas as belief in Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God, Heaven and Hell, and personal salvation through the acceptance of Jesus as one’s savior), there are certain “behaviors” in which one would engage: go to church on Sunday, celebrate Christmas, Easter and other holidays, recite certain prayers, baptize one’s children and whatever other rituals and customs would be the appropriate expressions of Christian belief. 

         Then, if, for example, you were doing these behaviors like going to church on Sundays, you might feel that you “belong” to that church. And so your religious identity as a Christian would begin with your belief, find expression in your behavior, and encourage you to belong to a particular church or parish to give expression to those beliefs. 

         Kaplan realized that Jewish identity is formed from the same three “B’s” of “Believing, Behaving, and Belonging,” but for us the order and importance is totally reversed. What Kaplan recognized and used as part of the basis of Reconstructionist thought, is that what gives Jews our identity is not primarily “belief,” but rather “BELONGING.” It is our sense of belonging to the Jewish people, belonging to the Jewish family that is the ground of being for Jewish identity. 

         In fact, we Jews literally trace ourselves back to an alleged real family – the Biblical family of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel and Leah (and Bilha and Zilpah). Since Jacob’s name is changed to “Israel,” it is essentially Jacob’s sons (along with his two grandsons Ephraim and Menashe) who become the “Children of Israel”, and then “the twelve tribes” of Israel and ultimately, with the passing of thousands of years, all of us the Jewish people. 

         So our identity is grounded in a profound and powerful sense of belonging to the same physical and spiritual family. The “behaviors” of Judaism – our rituals, customs and traditions – like what we are doing right now in celebrating Shabbat, or Jewish holidays, having a bar or bat mitzvah, giving our children Hebrew names, putting a mezuzah on the door, or eating bagels and lox, function primarily as a way to reinforce our sense of belonging. Simply put, when we do Jewish we feel Jewish. 

         “Believing” is a distant third in our hierarchy of religious identity. Most of us can’t even list Jewish beliefs no matter how Jewish we are other than “monotheism,” that we believe in One G-d. Of course we also believe that human beings are created in the image of G-d, although what exactly that means is also a matter of interpretation. Belief is not the driving cornerstone of Jewish identity, as it is for other religions.

         Reconstructionism differs in that it isn’t a religion like most others at all – it is, as Kaplan correctly recognized, an evolving religious civilization, with language, literature, art, culture, music, food, common history, family roots, a common historical homeland and more. It has been organically evolving for over 4,000 years and continues to do so because we, the Jewish people are constantly involved with adding, subtracting, transforming, innovating, creating and recreating our traditions and rituals, our customs and religious way of life. We reject the myth that Judaism has been unchanged from Moses to today.

         Reconstructionism differs as well in that it is the original “power to the people” movement. Since the central core of Judaism revolves around the idea of belonging, the focus of power and authority for what is acceptable as Jewish tradition, practice and values lies with the community itself. In all other movements of Jewish life – from Reform to Orthodox, the ultimate power for resolving questions of Jewish ritual, tradition, or behavior lies with Rabbis.

         For the Orthodox it is a recognized Rabbinical authority of any given era or generation; for the Conservative movement it is the rabbinical law committee of the Rabbinical Assembly, the association of Conservative rabbis, and for the Reform movement it is the individual rabbi within a given congregation. Although Reform Judaism, which originated in Germany in the 19th Century, grew out of the central notion of individual autonomy from traditional rabbinical authority, in practice in America it is the individual rabbi of any given congregation who is vested with the authority to make ritual decisions regarding what is proper within his or her individual congregation. 

         In a Reconstructionist congregation, the power and authority for what we do lies with the congregation itself. With Kaplan’s famous phrase, “The past has a vote but not a veto,”  Reconstructionism differs in that we are challenged to engage in a process that we call, “values based decision making,” whereby we first are challenged to identify the values that form the foundation of our community, then to examine how the Jewish people responded to any given issue or challenge in the past, and finally to adopt our own contemporary decision regarding how we are to act, the rituals we are to adopt and the way we choose to practice the Judaism of today. 

         Perhaps where we differ the most, is that once Kaplan rejected the idea of God as a supernatural being, the traditional notions of the Messiah, resurrection, and of the “exclusive chosenness of the Jewish people” suddenly no longer made sense. If you don’t have a “chooser” you can’t be “chosen” in the traditional understanding of the word. Of course both Kaplan and Reconstructionists recognize the uniqueness of the Jewish people, the uniqueness of Jewish history, the singular contributions that the Jewish people have made to the world in so many different ways – from our insistence that there are ethical demands of human behavior that apply to all people, to our contributions to society in so many different fields. 

         But having a unique history and making unique contributions to society is not the same as asserting that the power that created the universe, that separated the darkness from the light and the sea from the land, chose this planet from all the planets of the universe and the Jewish people from among all peoples of the earth to bestow the gift of sacred wisdom alone.

         That notion we rejected and instead Reconstructionism teaches that all people choose their own unique answers to the same fundamental questions of life. That no one religion is the “right” religion and chosen by God. That human beings are, in fact, fundamentally the same, with the same hopes and dreams and longings to feel that who they are matters and their lives can have meaning and purpose. 

         So yes, Reconstructionism differs – it challenges us to live lives of justice and compassion,  grounded in the thousands of years of authentic Jewish tradition while continuing to be part of the evolving nature of Jewish civilization, championing the equality of men and women, Jews and non-Jews alike as part of an inclusive, spiritual community of belonging.

         Since the Charlie Brown movie is premiering tonight, I’ll share an episode from the old series -- There was once a Peanuts cartoon where Linus is talking to Charlie Brown about Halloween. “And then on Halloween Night the “Great Pumpkin” rises up out of the Pumpkin Patch and he brings toys to all the good little children in the world,” he says. “You’re crazy!” replies Charlie Brown. “All right,” says Linus, “so you believe in Santa Claus, and I’ll believe in the ‘Great Pumpkin.’ The way I see it, it doesn’t matter what you believe just so you’re sincere.”

         Belonging, Behaving, Believing – a new way to understand the foundations of modern religious identity, and just one of the many intellectual gifts that Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan and through him Reconstructionist Judaism gave to the modern Jewish world. Things that we take for granted today, like the Bat Mitzvah, female rabbis, LGBT rabbis -- all began in our movement, and every day we continue to renew our practices and keep them alive and meaningful for generations to come.
 

This Weekend at Kehillath Shalom Synagogue - October 2nd - October 5th

A busy weekend here at Kehillath Shalom Synagogue!

Friday, October 2nd
Friday night Services 7:30pm

Saturday, October 3rd 
Torah Study 10am
Services 11am including Simchat Torah Celebrabration

Sunday, October 4th
Hebrew School starting at 9am
PACKS at 11:30am

Monday, October 5th 
Yizkor Services at Kehillath Shalom Synagogue at 5:45
Community-wide Simchat Torah Celebration at HJC at 7pm

See you there!

Honor Dalia with a Booster Ad

2016 Gala – The Kehillath Shalom Community Honors Dalia Rosenthal for Her Contributions, Energy and Spirit

April 3, 2016 – Huntington Crescent Club

Journal Ads/Personal Messages

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Digital formats: PDF, TIFF, EPS, JPEG

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Back cover     $375

Inside cover     $275

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 February 26th!

Please make checks payable to Kehillath Shalom Synagogue and attach to this form and mail to: Kehillath Shalom Synagogue • 58 Goose Hill Road • Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724 • Attention: Journal

Sukkot Celebration in the Sukkah in the Huntington/Cold Spring Harbor are

Friday, October 2nd at 7:30pm

Join us for an unforgettable Oneg in 

Kehillath Shalom's own Sukkah 

with Rav Greg 

This Weekend at Kehillath Shalom Synagogue Sept 25th - 27th

Saturday, September 26th 

Torah Study at 10am 

followed by Services at 11am

Sunday, September 27th 

Hebrew School classes starting at 9am

Followed by a Special Sukkot Service at 11:30

and Pizza In the Hut

Can't make Pizza in the Hut?  

Join us Friday, October 2nd for 

a special Sukkot Oneg in the Sukkah

Kol Nidre is Tonight at Kehillath Shalom Synagogue

Join the Kehillath Shalom family along with Rav Greg Hersh and Cantor Judy Merrick as we celebrate this most holy eve. 7pm

Call (631) 367-4589 to reserve your seats

Services for Yom Kippor at 10am on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015

This Weekend at Kehillath Shalom Synagogue - September 18 - 20

Please note:  there are no regular services for this weekend

Saturday, September 19th

...BUT...

There is Hebrew School Registration on Sunday, September 20th at 9:30am

(and Hebrew School starts 9/27)

And we look forward to seeing you at Kol Nidre on Tuesday, September 22nd at 7pm

May you have an easy fast.

Sukkot and Simchat Torah in the Huntington/Cold Spring Harbor Area 2015

Add the dates to your calendar today!

Upcoming Dates to Keep in Mind

Kol Nidre Sept. 22^nd 7:00pm

Yom Kippur Services for adults, children & teens Sept. 23^rd 10:00am

Sukkot Services & “Pizza in the Hut” Sept. 27^th 11:30am

Pre Simchat Torah Service & Celebration October 3^rd 10:00am

P.A.C.K.S. “Apples, Honey, & Torah” October 4^th 11:00am -

With Special Guest Janice Buckner

Tonight is Erev Rosh Hashanah 5776

Tonight is Erev Rosh Hashanah!

Wishing  you a sweet, happy, and 

healthy New Year!  

Shana Tovah!  See you at services!

This Weekend at Kehillath Shalom Synagogue - September 11 - 14, 2015

Join us for regular Torah Study and Services as we head into 5776 High Holidays!

Saturday, September 12th 10am Torah Study followed by Services at 11am

Erev Rosh Hashanah services begin at 7pm on Sunday, September 13th.

Upcoming dates and times (add them to your calendar today)

Rosh Hashanah Services for Adults, children & teens Sept. 14^th 10:00am

Tashlich Sept. 14^th 4:00pm

Rosh Hashanah Services Sept. 15^th 10:00am

Kol Nidre Sept. 22^nd 7:00pm

Yom Kippur Services for adults, children & teens Sept. 23^rd 10:00am

Sukkot Services & “Pizza in the Hut” Sept. 27^th 11:30am

Pre Simchat Torah Service & Celebration October 3^rd 10:00am

P.A.C.K.S. “Apples, Honey, & Torah” October 4^th 11:00am - 

With Special Guest Janice Buckner

Our thoughts and prayers go out to those grieving this weekend.  In remembrance of those lost on 9/11

And just a reminder to those families with children!

Registration is open - call the office.  

In-Person registration is 

September 20th 

And Hebrew School begins 

September 27th.

Tashlich 2015 - Huntington/Halesite area

"A moving and beautiful experience. More than any other ritual of the High Holidays, Tashlich makes me feel washed clean."

-Deborah Globus

Hebrew School with Heart!

Selichot Services are this Saturday, September 5th, 2015

- Selichot Services - 

Saturday, September 5th, 2015 8:30pm

please note: no morning services

High Holidays at Kehillath Shalom Synagogue 5776/2015

Selichot Service Sept. 5th 8:30pm

Erev Rosh Hashananh Sept. 13^th 7:00pm

Rosh Hashanah Services for Adults, children & teens 

Sept. 14^th 10:00am

Tashlich Sept. 14^th 4:00pm

Rosh Hashanah Services Sept. 15^th 10:00am

Kol Nidre Sept. 22^nd 7:00pm

Yom Kippur Services for adults, children & teens 

Sept. 23^rd 10:00am

Sukkot Services & “Pizza in the Hut” Sept. 27^th 11:30am

Pre Simchat Torah Service & Celebration 

October 3^rd 10:00am

P.A.C.K.S. “Apples, Honey, & Torah” October 4^th 11:00am With Special Guest Janice Buckner            

  

Call the Office at (631) 367-4589 to reserve passes