Friday Night Shabbat Services
Tonight 11/03, at the regular time of 7:00 PM. Mitzvah of the month is collecting canned goods for the Food Bank, especially as we approach Thanksgiving. We have a box by the front door. Please bring your non perishable food and drop it off at Beth El.
Shabbat morning services are a week away Saturday November 12 (shhh – it’s the birthday of a very special person in the shul who also goes by the name, Chazzan, Cantor or Tzahi ) so please come and celebrate!
Sunday school this Sunday November 6 at 10 AM. We welcome Gregg Philipson to talk to the students (and interested parents) about famous Jews in Sports. ** See below for more upcoming guests.
See the article in the Jewish Outlook by Shereen Ben-Moshe about the Sunday school.
https://www.etypeservices.com/…/Magazine14…/Full/index.aspx…
Huge thank you to Arie Stavchansky and Josh Kadosh, our Baalei Kriya last week who valiantly read from the Torah’s first book, Bereisheet.

Candle lighting in Austin is at 6:23 PM
Cantor Ben Moshe’s Message

This week we read Parshat Noah, in which the eponymous hero is instructed by God to build an ark in order to save his family as well as animals and birds from a world-destroying flood. Many have noted similarities to the story of Utnapishtim from the Babylonian “Epic of Gilgamesh”. Here, the gods decide to flood the world, but a human names Utnapishtim builds an ark and escapes with his family and animals.
Obviously, both stories draw from a common source, a story perhaps of a great flood in Mesopotamia. There is however, a crucial difference. In the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, the gods send the flood as part of an internecine conflict, almost out of caprice, and Utnapishtim is saved because the gods like him. The Biblical account is quite clear-the Flood is meant to cleanse the earth of violence and other wrongdoing, and Noah is saved because of his righteousness. The difference between the pagan and the Israelite world-view is thus plain. To the pagan Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians (as well as to most other pagans), the gods act out of motives that may or may not be noble. They fight, they quarrel, they abuse humans-they are basically humans with superpowers, no more moral than any mortal. God in the story of the Flood is the arbiter of morality-the Ultimate Judge, Whose own morals are absolute. Our Tradition insists that there is an absolute standard of righteousness which applies to the whole universe, and which our Torah comes to teach. May we always strive to live up to that standard, even if we cannot, as God comes to realize in our parshah, always live up to it. Shabbat Shalom.
Hazzan Yitzhak Ben-Moshe

HOLD THE DATES: First Friday speakers at Beth El. We look forward to welcoming Gil Levy, head of Jewish Family Services who will come and give a talk/Dvar Torah on Friday December 2. Friday January 6, Rabbi Daniel Septimus CEO of the Austin JCC will likewise be our guest speaker at Beth El. We would love to see you and greatly look forward to hearing these dynamic speakers.
Happy November birthdays! Diana Jurist, Sarah Butler, Bob Miller, Hannah Cramer, Cayla Canady and of course, Cantor Ben-Moshe!
Please send us your birthday so we can give you a shout out.

Thank you to our teachers including our amazing Morah Bev for cleaning and sorting the teacher resource room. It was truly a labor of love!

The sisterhood is planning some exciting events.
** November 13 at Beth El at 1 PM we will be having a cooking class with chef Mirit Solomon-Shimoni, chef and caterer, yoga instructor and Mom extraordinaire. Mirit will be making a three layered parev Israeli cake as well as a parev side dish to accompany your Thanksgiving meal! All sisterhood members and older kiddos are welcome.
**Hold the date for Sunday December 4th at 1 PM for Hannukah themed art project with artist Sharon Yam-Sananes.
Pictured above at the Austin Jewish Book Fair are Michelle, Bertha, Claudia and Doris. A fun evening enjoying a great author.
Cool happenings at Sunday School!
We have some exciting guests who will be coming to Sunday school classes in the coming weeks and will help enrich the lovely experience our children are having.

Sunday November 6 – 11:30 AM Gregg Philipson avid historian and collector will talk to the kids about famous Jewish men and women in sports.
Sunday November 13 – 11:30 AM Arielle Levy of Jewish National Fund will come to talk to the children about the amazing work that JNF does in Israel.
Sunday December 4 – 11:30 AM Aviv Canaani will talk about his experience leading Birthright trips to Israel and Judith Golden will talk to the kids about being a participant in this life changing trip to Israel.
If you would like to share something fun with the kids, please let us know. Pictured below is the awesome Ms. Carol Rubin and Anat Inbar singing and dancing with the BERS (Beth El Religious School)!
RABBI DR. PETER TARLOW, EMERITUS RABBI TEXAS A&M AND CENTER FOR JEWISH HISPANIC RELATIONS.

If Genesis’ first parashah was both problematic and puzzling, this second parashah, named after Noah serves only to increase our sense of bewilderment,
You can find this week’s parashah, called “Noach” in Hebrew, in the Book of Genesis 6:9-11:32. Based around the story of climate change, known in the Bible as the great flood, this week’s section addresses a world gone mad with violence. We find a world where violence becomes justified by political double-speak, truth has given way to lies, murder lurks everywhere, and hope has been replaced by despair.
The section begins with a verse that is easy to read and hard to understand. In the original Hebrew it reads: “Noach ish tzadik tamim haya bdorotav et ha’elokim hithalech Noach/Noah was a naively righteous/just man for (in) his generations (times) who walked (around) with G’d.” The Hebrew leads us to a number of questions: What does it mean to be naively righteous? Are righteous people naïve? Was Noah really a good person, or did G’d have to settle for the least bad? Would we have called Noah righteous if he had lived in another generation? It is less difficult to be righteous in a righteous generation but almost impossible to be righteous when everyone else lives in a world bereft of morality, does this mean that to be righteous in a generation of crime is to be more righteous than in a generation filled with good people? Finally, exactly how does one “walk with G’d?
These are eternal questions without exact answers; we have nothing more than personal interpretations and ideas. Perhaps we can find one possibility for the reason that G’d brought about the flood because (6:13) the earth is filled with “hamas” meaning “lawlessness” or “terrorism.” In other words, G’d had no alternative; simply put, the experiment called creation needed major adjustments.
The text forces us to ask if civilization can exist in a world of terrorism, in a world where people are willing to kill other people in order to express through violence their political agenda and express their frustrations and aspirations. If there is no truth, can there be justice?
If that is an underlying message in this week’s section, then we are forced to ask still some other questions: Was Noah too trusting? Is there room for good but naive people in places where violence exists? Is the text telling us that when we are offered panaceas we must be careful, and when we confuse style with policy then societies begin to crumble.
How do we balance our need for a just/righteous society in a world where some are intent on murder?
These are hard questions that still plague us to this very day. What do you think?
COMMUNITY NEWS:
The annual Jewish Book Fair at the J is currently on and has some amazing authors featured. Check out the website below.
http://www.jewishbookfair.org/
The annual Jewish Film is hot on the heels and starts this Saturday night. Again, for a full list of films, please see the link below. Congregation Beth El is a proud co sponsor of the Austin Jewish Film Society. Please support the community by seeing some of these wonderful movies.
http://austinjff.org/wordpress/
Check out the wonderful article about Gregg and Michelle Philipson’s collection on exhibit at the Bob Bullock Museum.
http://www.mystatesman.com/…/collecting-family-artif…/ns2JD/
Please consider a tax deductible donation to help us
http://bethelaustin.wpengine.com/donate/
Other ways to help include, sponsoring a kidush for a special event or in memory of a loved one, or bringing needed supplies. Ask us how you can help.
Community News:
Snout by Snoutwest at the JCC. This Sunday come and enjoy a fun afternoon with dogs galore at the J. From 12- 4 PM

Friday Night Shabbat Services Tonight 10/21, at the regular time of 7:00 PM.

Shabbat morning services are a THIS Saturday OCTOBER 22. Story time for children at 11 AM. Kidush lunch immediately following sponsored by the Koellers in honor of our Jewish home Beth El, a place that has helped elevate our Jewish lives and enriched it in boundless ways.

Sunday school this Sunday October 23 at 10 AM.

Simchat Torah THIS Monday October 24 at 7:15 PM. Come and dance with the Torah!

Candle lighting in Austin is at 6:34 PM

Cantor Ben Moshe’s Message

This Shabbat we take a break from the cycle of Torah readings for the Festival of Sukkot, but resume again on Simhat Torah, when we read the last parshah of the Torah and then immediately begin with the first. The last word of Parshat V’zot Hab’rachah is Yisrael, ending with the letter “lamed”. The Torah begins again with Parshat B’reshit, which begins with the letter “bet”. Together, the last letter and first letter of the Torah spell “lev”, heart. The Torah has been the heart of our People from ancient times-telling us where we came from, and pointing the way that we should go. May we always follow our heart, our “lev”, not only at this holiday season but at all times. Shabbat Shalom umo’adim l’simhah.

Hazzan Yitzhak Ben-Moshe

Fun fact following the Chazzan’s message: Did you know that recent studies have found that when people sing together, their heartbeats synchronize. Let’s sing and join with one heart this weekend at services!

Happy October birthdays to: Herschel Hochman, Iris Daniel, Patrice Jones, Natalie Bowers-Benderly, Amanda Golden, Elyse Tarlton, Nathan Finkelstein and Rachel Union.
Please send us your birthday so we can give you a shout out.

We greatly appreciate every person in our shul. As you know, we always keep our dues affordable, but rely on donations to run this sweet little shul. Please consider a tax deductible donation to help us
http://bethelaustin.wpengine.com/donate Other ways to help include, sponsoring a kidush for a special event or in memory of a loved one, or bringing needed supplies. Ask us how you can help.

Thank you to our dedicated “Shabbat Shefs”, Michelle, Iris, Shereen and Claudia. We are currently recruiting more shabbat shefs who can help us prepare kidishes every two weeks. Let us know if you would like to join! All you need to do is know how to chop and chat!

Sukkot For Our Time (extract from Koren Sacks Sukkot mahzor). Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.

Of all the festivals, Sukkot is surely the one that speaks most powerfully to our time. Kohelet could almost have been written in the twenty first century. Here is the ultimate success, the man who has it all – the houses, the cars, the clothes, the adoring women, the envy of all men – who has pursued everything this world can offer from pleasure to possessions to power to wisdom and yet who, surveying the totality of his life, can only say, in effect, “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.”

Kohelet’s failure to find meaning is directly related to his obsession with the “I” and the “Me”: “I built for myself. I gathered for myself. I acquired for myself.” The more he pursues his desires, the emptier his life becomes. There is no more powerful critique of the consumer society, whose idol is the self, whose icon is the “selfie” and whose moral code is “Whatever works for you.” This is the society that achieved unprecedented affluence, giving people more choices than they have ever known, and yet at same time saw an unprecedented rise in alcohol and drug abuse, eating disorders, stress related syndromes, depression, attempted suicide and actual suicide. A society of tourists, not pilgrims, is not one that will yield the sense of a life worth living. Of all things people have chosen to worship, the self is the least fulfilling. A culture of narcissism quickly gives way to loneliness and despair.

Kohelet was also, of course, a cosmopolitan: a man at home everywhere and therefore nowhere. This is the man who had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines but in the end could only say, “More bitter than death is the woman.” It should be clear to anyone who reads this in the context of the life of Solomon, that Kohelet is not really talking about women but about himself.
In the end Kohelet finds meaning in simple things. Sweet is the sleep of a labouring man. Enjoy life with the woman you love. Eat, drink and enjoy the sun. That ultimately is the meaning of Sukkot as a whole. It is a festival of simple things. It is, Jewishly, the time we come closer to nature than any other, sitting in a hut with only leaves for a roof, and taking in our hands the unprocessed fruits and foliage of the palm branch, the citron, twigs of myrtle and leaves of willow. It is a time when we briefly liberate ourselves from the sophisticated pleasures of the city and the processed artefacts of a technological age and recapture some of the innocence we had when we were young, when the world still had the radiance of wonder.

The power of Sukkot is that it takes us back to the most elemental roots of our being. You don’t need to live in a palace to be surrounded by clouds of glory. You don’t need to be rich to buy yourself the same leaves and fruit that a billionaire uses in worshipping God. Living in the sukkah and inviting guests to your meal, you discover – such is the premise of Ushpizin, the mystical guests – that the people who have come to visit you are none other than Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their wives. What makes a hut more beautiful than a home is that when it comes to Sukkot there is no difference between the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor. We are all strangers on earth, temporary residents in God’s almost eternal universe. And whether or not we are capable of pleasure, whether or not we have found happiness, nonetheless we can all feel joy.

Sukkot is the time we ask the most profound question of what makes a life worth living. Having prayed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to be written in the Book of Life, Kohelet forces us to remember how brief life actually is, and how vulnerable. “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” What matters is not how long we live, but how intensely we feel that life is a gift we repay by giving to others. Joy, the overwhelming theme of the festival, is what we feel when we know that it is a privilege simply to be alive, inhaling the intoxicating beauty of this moment amidst the profusion of nature, the teeming diversity of life and the sense of communion with those many others with whom we share a history and a hope.

Most majestically of all, Sukkot is the festival of insecurity. It is the candid acknowledgment that there is no life without risk, yet we can face the future without fear when we know we are not alone. God is with us, in the rain that brings blessings to the earth, in the love that brought the universe and us into being, and in the resilience of spirit that allowed a small and vulnerable people to outlive the greatest empires the world has ever known. Sukkot reminds us that God’s glory was present in the small, portable Tabernacle Moses and the Israelites built in the desert even more emphatically than in Solomon’s Temple with all its grandeur. A Temple can be destroyed. But a sukkah, broken, can be rebuilt tomorrow. Security is not something we can achieve physically but it is something we can acquire mentally, psychologically, spiritually. All it needs is the courage and willingness to sit under the shadow of God’s sheltering wings.

For more inspiring talks by Rabbi Sacks, go to