Interfaith service

I have the honor of leading a Talmud class each week for my fellow rabbis in which we have been studying Chapter 4 of Ta’anit.  Ta’anit sets forth the laws pertaining to public fasting.  Days of fasting, prayer, and shofar blowing were often proclaimed in order to beg God’s forgiveness and to stop punitive acts of God.  For example if a community was struck by a plague, or crop blight, or sickness, or draught then everyone was commanded by the sages to spread forth their hands toward heaven in supplication, confess, repent, and observe a series of increasingly stringent fasts until the disaster was alleviated (First Kings 8:35-39). 

During the Second Temple period, the entire community of Israel was divided into 24  m’amadot, corresponding the 24 mishmarot of Priests and Levites. The Israelites in each district chose pious and sin-fearing people to represent them for the 2 weeks a year to make communal sacrifices in the Temple in order to continue receive God’s blessings for the safety, health, harvest, and success of the entire community.  Since not all the representatives of the community were able to make the strenuous pilgrimage to the Temple, the ones who were left behind assembled in local proto-synagogues to offer their prayers to God on behalf of the Nation.  These communal prayer spaces developed into the first synagogues as we know them today after the destruction of the Temple and the unified sacrificial cult in Jerusalem.  One of the main purposes of Congregation Brothers of Israel is to give God fearing people in our community, far from the land of Israel, a place to pray to God for peace and health, sustenance and well being.

On Friday night November 11^th Reverend Lillian Gail Moore of Newtown’s Macedonian Baptist Church will be our pre-Thanksgiving guest speaker.  She is a friend of mine from the Newtown Interfaith Ministirium and she will speak about the importance of Brotherhood.  Last year she invited me to chant the Ten Commandments from her pulpit during their annual Martin Luther King Day observance.  It takes an entire community of Jews and non-Jews, Cohanim, Leviem, and Yisraelim working together in order to build a just and righteous society.  Please consider yourself to have been elected a member of the Congregation Brothers of Israel m’amad to represent our people before the Holy One, blessed be He.