MY SITE
Connections Expected and Unexpected3/19/2023 It has been a week of meeting people and discovering connections, expected and unexpected. On a personal level, we travelled to Melbourne and met my three ‘Australian cousins’, two of whom I had never met. My mother’s sister and her husband had moved to Australia in the 1960s when life became intolerable for them in Pakistan. Then as now, the British made immigration very difficult and although they had British family they were refused entry. We had a wonderful time, catching up on our family history and just enjoying being together. I also met Rabbi Fred Morgan and Sue after 25 years or more. Fred has been my first teacher of midrash, before I started to study for the rabbinate, and I still quote him when I teach midrash myself. Sue reminded me that we had bonded at the Greenham Common protest against the siting of nuclear missiles in England. I met members of the congregation who had fascinating stories to tell. Amongst them was an unsettling meeting with a congregant whose brother had died a few weeks after getting married in London. It turned out my father had conducted both the wedding and funeral and although I was young at the time, I remembered how shaken he and the congregation had been. More happily, I was struck on the same visit by the incredible view just outside the congregant’s house. It brought home to me that whatever the similarities between Birmingham and Adelaide, these were very different cities. The view was across woods to the ocean, just a few miles (or here I should say kilometres) away. The drive to the house had taken me along steep, windy roads through forested hills. The sky was blue, the trunks of the eucalyptus trees white, and there were signs warning about koala bears. I can see why people stay here, although Birmingham has different things to offer. Another congregant greeted me as she was gardening. She had a vast expanse of garden and clearly loved being outdoors. She told me they used to have a bigger place right out in the country, and she clearly still missed it. I went away with home grown spinach and a sorrel plant. I had a different sort of meeting at the Cheder this week which left me excited. Teenage boys are not the easiest group to teach but they have also given me some of my greatest moments of learning and excitement. In Birmingham, we have a Kabbalat Torah class, in which we encourage boys and girls who have had their Bnei Mitzvah to continue learning, which most of them do. So I’m used to slightly older children, and it has been a real joy over the years to see them mature from the beginning of their teenage years into adulthood. (It also helped me parent my teenagers knowing that teenagers did grow into responsible adults eventually!).
This Sunday, I helped to teach the 11-12 year olds who were approaching their Bar Mitzvah. We had suggested they choose names for their classes and one of the boys, who clearly had an interest in wolves, suggested that we call the class Ze’ev, Hebrew for wolf. So we decided to explore why that would be a good name for their class. What emerged was that in their class there would be togetherness like a pack; hunting for knowledge; keen sight to examine Torah; keen hearing to listen to each other and a keen sense of smell to think about the spiritual, which was beyond hearing and sight. In the coming weeks, we’ll see if they live up to that, but immediately afterwards we talked about what it was like to be the only Jew in their class or their school and they thoughtfully drew what Judaism meant to them so I’m looking forward to what will emerge over the rest of my time here.
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Leave a Reply.Rabbi Shoshana Kaminsky has been the rabbi of Beit Shalom in Adelaide, South Australia for the last sixteen years. She's very happy to be serving Birmingham Progressive Synagogue for the next three months.
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