This annual event is going to be a lot of fun. Your support of Women of Temple Emanu-El is appreciated. Donations are still welcome. WOTE gives back to the synagogue.

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Tuesday, June 3–Temple Emanu-El Annual Meeting

Have you returned your ballot?

Come on down at 7:00 PM for a dessert reception. The meeting will begin promptly at 7:30 PM, including reports from Rabbi Magat, Temple officers, schools and auxiliaries. Awards will be given, retiring Board members will be recognized, and the results of the election will be announced.

Remember Tuesday, June 3 is Election Day – if you vote by absentee ballot, be sure to get it into the mail or remember to deliver it on Tuesday. If you vote in person, remember to vote.

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A week from Saturday, June 7

–Neighborhood Havdallah Event…

A wonderful way to say farewell to Shabbat and meet Temple friends from your area. Plan to bring an appetizer or dessert to share.

RSVP to Sharon Genkin (shosh4511@comcast.net or 268-8989) with how many people will be attending, including number of children under age 12. Then we can match you with a family in your neighborhood. If you are interested in hosting (all supplies provided), contact Kim Jackman.

Temple Emanu-El is seeking a Temple Administrator.

We provide a collaborative, warm and nurturing environment to work in.

We are looking for an experienced administrator who is responsible for supervising paid staff, directing volunteers, managing the budget and overseeing the day-to-day operations and facilities of our spiritual home. The Administrator acts as the liaison to members, clergy, the Board of Trustees, the preschool, religious school, committees and auxiliaries. Experience in running a non-profit enterprise is a plus.

The position is available immediately. If you know of someone who might be interested in and appropriate for the role, please contact Ruth Krandel, ruthkrandel@yahoo.com or 264-5376 or Pam Schuur, pamela.schuur@comcast.net or 483-6810.

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IN THE COMMUNITY…

Sunday, June 1, 2008, 11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco

The premier celebration of Israel and the Jewish community in the Bay Area is ready for lift off. More than 20,000 people will converge on Yerba Buena Gardens for the hottest and freshest in Israeli music, food, film and more.

This massive party is not to be missed. World-renowned musician Idan Raichel, whose enchanting blend of Ethiopian and Middle Eastern sounds has taken the Israeli pop scene by storm, headlines a full day of entertainment and cultural exhibits.

Teens, families, young adults and friends of all ages will love our interactive displays, awesome contests and prizes, and vast offerings of ethnic food, culture and fun. Come early and stay late. Lounge in the grass. Learn about short and long term programs in Israel and meet personally with top local organizations.

Summer Classes at the JCC & Beth David

Beginning Hebrew-12 Session Summer Class

Starts June 4^th at Congregation Beth David

Registration: Pre-registration required by email ( registration@beth-david.org ) or by calling the Beth David Office (257-3333). Indicate you are registering for the summer Beginning Hebrew class and whether or not you are a Beth David member. Non-members should pay at the first class.

JCC Summer Course List

For more information:
Rabbi Joshua Fenton, Director of the Center for Jewish Life & Learning, rabbifenton@svjcc.org or 408.357.7413

1. Creating a Jewish Home Crash Course

In just 6 weeks we will investigate what Jewish living is and what it means to build a Jewish home. Topics will include Shabbat, Keeping Kosher, Family, Charity, Jewish Holidays, and the Synagogue.

Mondays 12:30-2:00 6/30-8/4

$45.00 members; $55.00 non-members

No Hebrew Required

2. What is a Good Life?

Drop in and learn a little with Rabbi Fenton. In this informal study session we focus on the question, “What is ethical living?” as we investigate what classical Jewish texts have to say on the topic.

Wednesdays 11:00-12:15

Ongoing. Free. No Hebrew Required.

3. Silicon Valley Beit Midrash

The APJCC and participating local Synagogues are excited to announce the opening of the Silicon Valley Beit Midrash. Join local Rabbis on Thursday mornings in study and discussion.

9:00-10:00 Introduction to Jewish Thought Through Text

10:15-11:45 Advanced Talmud Study

Location: Congregation Sinai of Willow Glen

Ongoing. Free.

4. Hebrew Reading Crash Course Part II

Take your Hebrew reading skills to the next level with this course that promises further instruction in Hebrew reading with an added focus on comprehension. This course begins where Crash Course 1 leaves off.

Tuesdays 12:30-2:00 5/20-7/1 (no classes on 6/10)

$60.00 members; $75.00 non-members

Instructor: Rabbi Simcha Green

5. Summer Hebrew Intensive

Have you always wanted to spend some time and focus on improving your Hebrew skills? Join the APJCC Summer Hebrew Intensive. This 12 course program lasting 6 weeks will focus on practical Hebrew skills: conversation, strengthening reading and comprehension, and expanding vocabulary.

Some Hebrew required/Graduates of the Crash Course are welcome

Tuesdays and Thursdays 7:30-9:00 pm 6/24-8/7

$110.00 members; $125.00 non-members

Instructor: Sheryl Wit

Come to the Cabernet:

Wine Auction to Benefit the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center

Some of the finest names in wine are coming to the JCC on Saturday, June 14th, 2008, from 6:00pm to 10:30pm, to celebrate the renaissance of fine drinking and dining at the APJCC Wine Gala. The Wine Gala includes a wine tasting, dinner, and silent and live wine auctions, as well as the opportunity to meet local winemakers.

If you'd like to learn more about wine before attending the Wine Gala tasting & auction, you can sign up to learn from Jeff Moore--wine author, connoisseur and raconteur critic--in a two-part lecture series at the JCC on Thursday, May 29th at 6:30pm and Thursday, June 5th at 6:30pm.

The Wine Gala is $90 per person and the 2-part wine lecture series is $50 per person ($130 per person for both). To purchase tickets, contact Lisa Ceile Goldfus at lisa@svjcc.org or 408.357.7492. Check out the website for more information: http://www.svjcc.org/wine/

Silicon Valley Duck Race: June 22^nd

Adopt a duck -- Support Temple Emanu-El and Jewish Family Services by purchasing 1, 5, 10, even 25 ducks or more!

On Sunday, June 22^nd at 1:00pm egg-zactkly, 10,000 darling rubber duckies will dive under the bridge and into Vasona Lake, racing downstream into a prize picking net. The Lucky Duck winners will go home with more than $15,000 in prizes, with the possibility of winning a $1 Million nest egg.

The Silicon Valley Duck Race is a fun opportunity for the whole community. In addition to the race, there will be a festival, food and games, beginning at 11:00am. Bring the entire family! Jewish organizations in the South Bay are cooperating in this quacky fun day, sponsored by Jewish Family Services of Silicon Valley, which provides social, vocational, counseling, crisis intervention, refugee resettlement services and programs for seniors.

The best way to adopt your ducks is online at www.siliconvalleyduckrace.org. Go to the right of the home page and click on “Temple Emanu-El” as your team, and your synagogue will receive $2 for every $5 donated. Then come on down for all the fun on June 22^nd!

Friday, June 27, 2008, 10:00 A.M.

MAH JONGG TOURNAMENT

Is back at The Villages

$30.00 per person

includes lunch catered by Villages Clubhouse.

Make your reservations now: call Bernice Vitcov—408-832-6390

Leave your name and number.

TELL YOUR FRIENDS!

Join us for food, fun and maybe fortune. Have fun-support Hadassah!

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Refuah Shleymah – we pray for the following individuals – that they will be returned to good health in short order so they can resume a full life with their loved ones.

- Arthur Cagan

- Judith Siegel

- Eva Stanley

- Joelle Wolf

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Torah Portion of the Week from www.urj.org

B'midbar, Numbers 1:1−4:20
Shabbat, May 31, 2008 / 26 Iyar, 5768
The Torah: A Modern Commentary, pp.1,028−1,043; Revised Edition, pp.897−916;
Haftarah, I Samuel 20:18−42
The Torah: A Modern Commentary, pp. ,687−1,689; Revised Edition, pp. 1,495−1,497

To listen to this commentary, please click here.

D'VAR TORAH |

The Spirituality of the Wilderness
Jonathan E. Blake

"On the first day of the second month, in the second year following the exodus from the land of Egypt, the Eternal One spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting . . ." (Numbers 1:1).

The wilderness experience constitutes more than half of the Torah and gives this week's portion, and this fourth book of the Torah, its Hebrew name. B'midbar means "in the wilderness."

Few of us have ever lived in a wilderness. Even those of us who reside in sparsely populated areas enjoy easy access to any comfort or convenience. After all, these words, composed a few miles outside New York City, reached you electronically at the click of a mouse.

It is not insignificant, however, that we came of age in the wilderness, for it is in the wilderness—where the Torah tells us we spent forty years wandering—that we grew into self-respecting Jewish people, slaves to Pharaoh no more. The Torah locates the bulk of its legislation and cultic observances in the wilderness experience. The authors of the Torah wished to suggest that the basic standards of Jewish life originated and were adopted before the people ever set foot in the Promised Land, in an open, ownerless expanse. Thus did the wilderness represent a source of wisdom for our ancestors.

The wilderness has wisdom to offer us, too.

In February, I traveled to Israel with a congregational delegation. We went as far north as Haifa and as far south as Eilat. We spent a day exploring the Negev, the majestic wilderness that comprises sixty percent of Israel's land mass and ten percent of its population. The Negev is not a desert of sand dunes like the Sahara. It more closely resembles the rocky middle of Arizona.

We explored Timna, an archaeological park of copper mines that date to the late second millennium b.c.e., when mining expeditions arrived from the south to smelt copper ore for the glorious temples of Egypt. We traveled north to the Ramon Crater, a geological phenomenon called a machtesh, in which a closed body of water gradually drains through a narrow outlet, the erosion creating a deep impression in the middle of a mountain. We hiked the canyon of the water spring Ein Aved at and marveled at the panorama from the top. (Our legs reminded us, the next day, of our accomplishment.) We looked out from the grave of David Ben-Gurion into the vast midbar that extends to the horizon. Ben-Gurion dreamed of a future Jewish state that would cultivate and settle the Negev. He put his money where his mouth was by retiring to the untamed frontier, most of which remains uninhabited—a land crushingly difficult and expensive to irrigate and populate.

In these desert experiences we could imagine ourselves in the sandals of our nomadic forebears—walking that rocky wilderness, camping by springs with laden camels, seeking cliff-side shade in the summer heat. From the wilderness we began to experience a spiritual awakening uniquely suited to the geography. From the wilderness we heard two Jewish messages.

Radical Amazement
The stillness of the midbar commanded our attention. Here, for the first time in our travels throughout Israel, we found it hard to get a cell phone signal. Here we escaped the traffic of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the dense thickets of apartment buildings and stores and restaurants, the gaudy shopping malls of Eilat. We walked, each at our own pace, to a private space in the wilderness and heard nothing but the stones crunching underfoot and the sound of our own breathing.

Each of us reported a transformative experience in those few minutes of wilderness silence. Heschel would have called it wonder or radical amazement. "Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature. . . . He knows that there are laws that regulate the course of natural processes; he is aware of the regularity and pattern of things. However, such knowledge fails to mitigate his sense of perpetual surprise at the fact that there are facts at all. Looking at the world, he would say, ‘This is the Lord's doing, it is marvelous in our eyes' (Psalms 118:23)" (Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997], p. 45). Nowadays we are seldom granted this realization. Heschel observes that "s civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines" (ibid., p. 46). For Heschel, radical amazement paves the way for all religious awareness; sometimes it takes a wilderness to awaken amazement.

Humility
The vast emptiness of the midbar made us feel small—not insignificant, but rather awestruck by the enormity of our surroundings. Recognizing the scarcity of unspoiled wilderness in the world compels our attentiveness to the harm we daily cause the environment. For a moment we felt humbled by the forbidding landscape, which painted a picture of a world untouched by human hands.

A remarkable recent book by Alan Weisman called The World Without Us (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007) envisions, with hard science and deft imagination, a world suddenly depopulated of human beings. Weisman explores "how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; what of our everyday stuff may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe" (from the book description on the Web-site www.worldwithoutus.com/about_book.html). Weisman's vision of a midbar relieved of a human presence is humbling, to say the least.

A sojourn in the wilderness recalibrates our perspective. We no longer feel like we're the center of the universe. In the wilderness we come to understand the poet:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
(George Gordon, Lord Byron, from "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage")

When was the last time you enjoyed a few minutes alone, away from civilization? Take some time outside this week, away from buildings, cars, wires, and other people. Turn off your cell phone for fifteen minutes. Sit down by yourself. Who knows what you will discover!

Rabbi Jonathan E. Blake is associate rabbi of Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, New York. A graduate of Amherst College (1995), he was ordained at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in 2000 and was a regular contributor to 10 Minutes of Torah in 2005–2006. He is happy to receive feedback at office@wrtemple.org.

DAVAR ACHER |

Parashat B'midbar: All These Numbers!
Stephen J. Einstein

If I were to ask you to name the fourth book of the Torah, I suspect it is more likely that you would respond with "Numbers" than B'midbar . While the books of the Torah are titled in Hebrew according to the first major word that appears in the book (not counting such standard phrases as Vay'dabeir Adonai el Mosheh . . . , "The Eternal spoke to Moses . . ."), the English names are derived thematically, from a key event described in the book. English speakers are generally more familiar with these latter book titles.

The Book of Numbers opens with a census of the Israelites, tribe by tribe and family by family. Considering what has become common Jewish practice, it is astounding that such a census was completed and recorded. Throughout much of our history, the counting of people has been fraught with concern. While it was necessary in early biblical times to know how many men were able to bear arms for self-defense, in general we have been disinclined to come up with such specific numbers.

Think of a minyan. In order to conduct a public worship service, we require ten Jewish adults. The gender of those individuals is a matter of disagreement between the various movements within Judaism; in Reform congregations, women and men are counted equally toward the minyan. However, it is customary not to count the individuals directly. Rather we use a special Jewish style of numbering: "Not one, not two, not three," etc. An alternate method is to say a different Hebrew word from a verse while looking at each individual. It goes without saying that the verse contains ten words! We often use the Hebrew text of Psalm 28:9: Hoshiah et amecha uvareich et nachalatecha ureim v'naseim ad haolam, "Deliver and bless Your very own people; tend them and sustain them forever."

Why the reluctance to count directly? I believe it is related to the notion of ayin hara , "the evil eye." Life is shaky at best, and we simply don't want anything to go wrong. (At this point, some readers may feel impelled to spit three times!) There are those who might think of this as superstition; others would simply term it folk belief.

So what type of counting is permitted—even encouraged—by our tradition? An internal counting, as stated in Psalm 90:12: "Teach us to count our days rightly, that we may obtain a wise heart."

Rabbi Stephen J. Einstein is rabbi at Congregation B'nai Tzedek,
Fountain Valley, California.

Adult Study Retreat 2008
Registration is now open for the Summer Adult Study Retreat (formerly known as Kallah) July 8-13, 2008, Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, NH. The theme will be Israel at 60. http://urj.org/educate/adultstudy/summer/

EIE Adult Institute
Thinking of celebrating Israel's vibrant history, then you should explore Israel as part of the EIE Adult Institute, July 20-August 3. Travel through time and explore our rich history. Registration is open, http://urj.org/educate/adultstudy/eieadult/

Take your study of 10 Minutes of Torah to the next level by signing up for Eilu V'Eilu . Each month, two scholars will debate an issue and answer questions raised by you, the learner. Additional textual information will be available through the Eilu V'Eilu webpage.

For more information and to sign up, go to the Eilu V'Eilu webpage.