Congregation Etz Chayim

Being Jewish in 2020: Making Meaning for Ourselves & Our Children with Sue Bojdak Sunday, March 1 at 10:00 am What’s Jewish for you? Bagels. Synagogue. Passover. Shabbat candles. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. What’s Jewish for your children? Religious School. Challah. Bar/Bat Mitzvah. Hanukkah. And why does it matter? What does it mean to have a Jewish worldview? How does it get expressed? How do we cultivate it in our children? Come explore your own Jewish practices, ideas and commitments as we wonder together about what being Jewish means to us and how being Jewish can help us make meaning for our children and ourselves. Sue Bojdak is the Director of Education at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco and the Recruitment Coordinator for the Mandel Teacher Educator Institute. Sue has been working in Jewish education for more than 20 years, teaching people of all ages. She holds a BA in Religious Studies from SUNY Stony Brook and an MA in Divinity from theUniversity of Chicago. Sue is also the mother and stepmother of four teens.

For the month of Adar (Purim), we will bake Esther cookies!!! What are Esther cookies? They are the delicious, luscious, triangle-shaped cookies filled with sweet symbols of life (fruit, seeds, chocolate, etc.). Let’s refuse to say the name that must be blotted out. No more calling the cookies that are shaped in the symbol of women and filled with deliciousness after the evil dude! That was some patriarchal trickery to take a symbol of our juicy, rich life energy and name it after you know who. NO MORE! Let’s take a stand to reclaim women’s creativity, fruitfulness, passion and power and rename those cookies. We’ll get started at 1pm to give us time to get organized and bake all the cookies. To sign up to bring dough, filling, or other needed materials for our baking party, go to: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/60b054baca723a0fc1-rosh

The Etz Bookworms next selection, by Edward Kritzler, is Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean; How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom--and Revenge. It's a tale from history of an unlikely group of swashbuckling Jews who ransacked the high seas in the aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition. At the end of the fifteenth century, many Jews had to flee Spain and Portugal. The most adventurous among them took to the seas as freewheeling outlaws. In ships bearing names such as the Prophet Samuel, Queen Esther, and Shield of Abraham, they attacked and plundered the Spanish fleet while forming alliances with other European powers to ensure the safety of Jews living in hiding. We'll meet to discuss this book on Sunday, March 1, at 4:30 pm at Etz Chayim in room 10. Unfortunately, this book is not available in a book club set from the Jewish Community Library, but it may be found at your local public library or at your favorite bookseller. There is one copy at the Etz Chayim library; act quickly, and you can be the one to check it out.

The Hebrew month of Adar is a time of joy and fun ("Mi She'nichnas Adar Marbim B'Simcha" — when Adar arrives, we increase our joy). Join us on Friday night, March 6th, for an extra joyful version of Friday Night Lights and an early taste of Purim! Friday Night Lights is our Shabbat program for the 8 and under crowd and their families. It features a scavenger hunt, Shabbat blessings, singing, a light dinner, and time for children to learn and play while their adults shmooze over wine and cheese. This potluck program is free and open to all, but please sign up in advance so we'll know how many to plan for. Go to the front page of our website to RSVP.