Vignettes from a Friday night at Emet V'Shalom

The blessings of an evening at our congregation are numerous, colorful, and diverse.

Let's start with the music:

- the spirited singing and playing by Israel Horowitz, our beloved rabbi, a trained cantor from Argentina

- a melody for "L'cha Dodi", recently introduced to us, written by another Argentinean cantor, a friend of Rabbi Horowitz -- a touch of the flare, passion, and even melancholy of that country in the Southern Hemisphere

- a Moroccan tune for "Adon Olam", with obvious stylistic connections to Arab music, the kind you can easily pick up from many local radio stations

Let's talk more about the people:

- Alice Nauman, an American of Polish descent, who delivered a very spiritual and impassioned drasha ("sermon") in fluent Hebrew. Afterwords, at the kiddush, I hear her conversing easily in Russian with some of the congregants; next week, she leaves to spend a couple of weeks in Austria, speaking in German about Israel

- Shimshon, a tall, strong, sturdy man who must be at least in his 80s (if not 90s), almost certainly from Germany, he probably arrived here before the Shoah (Holocaust) -- when he's present he reads the middle paragraphs of the "Shma":

והיה אם שמע תשמעו אל מצותי...

V'haya im shamo'a tishma'u el mitzvotai... ("And if you really listen to my instructions...") -- really, he doesn't merely read them, he declaims them, elegantly, in עברית נכונה Ivrit n'khona ("correct Hebrew", an important thing for his generation especially) -- the jarring jumping back and forth between 2nd person singular and 2nd person plural, a distinction lost 3 or 4 centuries ago in English:

ולימדתם אותם את בניכם לדבר בם, בשבתך בביתך, ובלכתך בדרך, ובשכבך ובקומך, וכתבתם על מזוזות ביתך ובשעריך.

v'limadtem otam et b'nekhem l'daber bam, b'shivt'kha b'vetekha, uv'lekht'kha vaderekh, uv'shakhv'kha uvkumekha. ukhtavtam al m'zuzot betekha uvisha'rekha. ("And you(pl.) will teach them your(pl,) children to speak of them, when you(sing.) sit in your(sing.) house, and when you(sing.) go on the road, and when you(sing.) lie down and when you(sing.) get up. And you(sing.) will write them on the doorposts of your(sing.) house and on your(sing.) gates.") -- words written and surely also later edited, in this very land (or not far away), at least two and half millenia ago, and yet easily understandable, in their original language, to any average Israeli -- and now to me, as well!

- the bar mitzvah boy, very typically Israeli, but his parents' names are .... Igor and Olga, a clue about where they are from originally!

- the multitude (probably a majority) of congregants from South America, most of them a decade or so older than we are -- some speak Hebrew, but many do not

- a gentleman from Moscow who attends virtually every week, who was formerly involved with the Soviet missile program (as I was formerly in the U.S. missile program -- what an irony!) -- now he teaches Russians in Israeli about Judaism, something they were forbidden to study during the dark Soviet years