Friday night services and Splash Bash

We hope you had a wonderful week and would like to invite you to our Friday night services tonight, June 6th at 7pm.  Our next Saturday morning services are next week, Saturday June 14 at 9am.  This coming Sunday, June 8th at 11am, our Sunday school children and any congregants who  wish to come, will be going to the JCC’s annual Splash Bash party at the pool of the J.  The event is free and open to all in the community.

Shabbat shalom to you all and with deep appreciation of all our World War II veterans who helped liberate Europe on D Day seventy years ago!

There is an old expression that someone is”digging their grave with a knife and fork”, which is to say that a person is overindulging in food in an unhealthy way.  This week’s parshah, B’ha’alot’khah, illustrates this saying in a graphic way.  As the People of Israel are moving away from Sinai on their journey through the wilderness, they begin to complain about the monotony of a steady diet of manna, the food which appeared with the morning dew.  They begin to say that they would rather be in Egypt, where they had meat, fish and vegetables (forgetting of course the scanty rations that slaves received).  God gets annoyed and says to Moses,in effect, “They want meat?  Fine, I’ll give them meat!”  The next morning, large numbers of quail appear around the camp, which the Israelites gather and begin to greedily devour.  As the meat is “between their teeth”, God strikes them with a plague in punishment for their ingratitude and greed.  The place is known thereafter as “Kivroth Hata’avah”, “The Graves of Greed”.
Our Torah and our Tradition certainly encourage us to enjoy what we have in this world-Judaism is not a religion of asceticism and self-mortification.  However, we need to indulge our appetites moderately, in a healthy way.   We shouldn’t dig our own “Graves of Greed”, but rather we should strive to live healthy and happy lives, in service to God and in pursuit of righteousness.  Shabbat Shalom.