Beha’alotecha

This week we read Parashah Beha’alotecha in the Book of Bamidbar – we open up with instructions about kindling the lamps of the Menorah. We read that the Menorah is of hammered out gold, from its base to the opening of its flowers.

This week is also our Annual General Meeting, Thursday evening at 7 pm. This is our opportunity to be present as members are elected to the Board – where they will take on a different kind of enterprise. They will be hammering out policies and projections of plans to keep Kolot Mayim thriving.

We all have the capacity to bring light from the candle of our own souls. I heard a breathtaking phrase this week from a video clip with Rabbi Manis Friedman. Rabbi Friedman suggested that after the utterly unspeakable evil horrors of the Shoah, every single person in our world should strive to bring forward unimaginable good – good enough to be unimaginable, not just conventional good, but to be unimaginably good, astonishingly good. This level of goodness might bring forward, in some small but very necessary way, a measure of tikkun, of repair to our broken world.

I think of the light of the Menorah, lit by the potential of our souls, as unimaginably good and I am filled with wonder at our very potential. May this coming year be a year of light and of connection for us all. Just as the hammering of the Menorah required each candle to be hammered out of a larger whole, each of us is part of the larger k’lal Yisroel. May we all be unimaginably good, together.

With great love,Rabbi Lynn