Rosh HaShanah President's Message 2008
Beth Or is entering an exciting time of transformation and change, and we cannot possibly imagine all the surprises and shifts ahead of us.
We are a spiritual community in the larger sense, a connected community. As such, you are part of these conversations. Especially now with the tough times ahead economically, politically, spiritually and in every aspect of our individual, communal and global lives.
In such complexity, we will need each other, and reminders of our core values, to help navigate the path ahead. No person or organization can be an effective co-creator with its environment without clarity about who it is intending to become.
A vision of Beth Or is that we are an evolving, participatory, liberal, Reconstructionist community, seeking to provide a fulfilling pathway for living a meaningful, involved Jewish life.
We are:
- Evolving, open to change as needed.
- Participatory and a truly connected community, based in our intertwining lives.
- Reconstructionist, based on the principles first articulated by Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, as well as his disciples.
- Offering tools and assistance for living meaningful, involved Jewish lives.
I believe our core values are also well articulated in the prologue to Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach:
“One does not become a Reconstructionist simply by joining a Reconstructionist synagogue or paying dues to a national organization. Our name itself implies active participation in a shared process. No mere passive adjective describing a “type” of Judaism, our name says that each of us engages in just that -- the reconstruction of Jewish life and tradition to integrate it with the particular lifestyle each of us chooses. The Reconstructionist community is not a body of synagogues and rabbis that others merely support. It is rather a community in the full sense of the term, in which no one’s duty may be done vicariously by others. It is a community of Jews who commit themselves to ongoing study, to discussion of issues, and to a life of intelligent decision making. ”
That is who we are. And we can’t help but notice that it is not a static definition. It involves and requires change. Implied here is also that we are “relational.” At the core of our processes as a community are the relationships we build and nurture and wrestle with. Just ask anyone on our board, or the crew that labored together to create the Services you are here to experience.
These are the values that will guide us through the coming changes, and we will need your help and involvement for it to be successful.
Beth Or is more than a person or family or a rabbi or a congregation. It’s a group of people who have a shared vision of Judaism and who choose to create a Jewish life together at a certain point in time.
In short, Beth Or IS a Jewish Reconstructionist community.
And it serves the real needs of those in our community. Not only bar and bat mitzvahs, but life cycle events, births, weddings, funerals, Shabbat. Beth Or offers Jewish learning for children and adults. We have lots of social activities. We visit the sick. We garden. We help those less fortunate. We participate in social action and much more.
If you look around, you will see the Beth Or community. It’s your friends, you family, children, spouses, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, your teachers, your students.
So as we go into this New Year, I will be asking you to share Beth Or with others who haven’t yet considered joining our Beth Or community. I will be asking you to invite others to come to our Shabbat and other services. Because Beth Or has an important place in the Miami Dade Jewish community and it is up to us to keep it strong and vibrant.