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Where am I this week?5/2/2023 --by Rabbi Shoshana
I’ll admit that I was quite surprised when I learned that Birmingham Progressive Synagogue still holds its Friday evening services solely on Zoom. It actually makes sense for this community, whose members in some cases need over an hour to travel to the synagogue even without the traffic of late Friday afternoons. The 6:30 pm Friday time slot is now generally known as “candlelighting” rather than Friday evening services. In my two months here, I’ve generally led 30 minutes of singing, along with candlelighting and the prayers over wine and challah. One of my first purchases here was a lightweight, waterproof guitar case for transporting my borrowed guitar around town. My feeling was that if I was only going to be on Zoom, people would get a greater sense of spirit and enthusiasm if I played along on the guitar. At this point, my guitar has been to many different locations: Eve, the lovely ritual coordinator here, has arranged for me to visit a new home each week! Most Friday afternoons, I’ve loaded the guitar into the back of Margaret’s very small car and driven north, south, east or west as required. Following our short service time, I get treated to Shabbat dinner. On several occasions, I’ve even been hosted overnight and enjoyed further conversations over coffee the next morning. Sometimes, it’s been an intimate gathering with just my hosts for company. Other times, I’ve been one of a number of guests. Some recollections from two of my most memorable Friday evenings, which both happened to be considerably to the west. Just this last week, I drove an hour from Birmingham to the little hamlet of Wellington where Eve and her husband Jim have lived for many decades. The view from their back porch is the photo at the top of this blog entry. They live surrounded by farm country, and the feel couldn’t be more different from busy Birmingham. On Friday night, the dining room was packed full of guests from nearby—meaning less than a half hour drive! I was amazed to meet these Jews who somehow managed to find each other before the Internet and had become family for each other. I was delighted to discover that many of them were enthusiastic singers with beautiful voices. It was a joy to have a whole chorus on hand as we sang a number of Shabbat favourites. After a quiet night sleeping in this 250 year-old house, I had my coffee in the morning and then Eve and I drove in for Shabbat morning services. My other recollection is from late March. Longtime congregants David and Val picked me up at 3:30 pm on Friday afternoon to drive to Welshpool, just over the border into Wales. Google Maps tells me that its 67 miles/100 kilometres to Welshpool. It took three hours to get there! I don’t know whether the traffic is that terrible every Friday, or whether it was just because the school term had ended that day. I sat in the backseat of the car and enjoyed watching the green pastures roll very slowly by. More than a dozen people had journeyed in from around northern Wales for the evening, which was shared on Zoom for the very first time. I had great difficulty getting everyone to stop talking long enough for me to run the service, which was joined by twenty people from their own homes. When it was time for kiddush, our host apologetically had no wine to offer—only single malt whisky! Again, a disparate group of people living in a very non-Jewish corner of the world who had somehow managed to connect. In a few weeks, I’ll be travelling to the Warwick area for another Shabbat gathering. This group held its own Pesach seder for 15 people last month, and it sounds like it was a great success. Local regional communities seem like a wonderful way to be together as part of a congregation whose members are scattered all across the Midlands. How wonderful it is to see people finding each other!
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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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