Parashat Vayaqhel

Friday Night Shabbat Services and Dinner Tonight 3/4, at the special time of 6:30 PM.Delicious Pasta dinner immediately following.

Candle lighting in Austin is at 6:14 PM We’ll light them together at Beth El!

SAVE THE DATE FOR PURIM- March 23 – Klezmer Music with Los Klezmeros and much more!

Cantor Ben Moshe’s Message
This week we read Parshat Vayaqhel, which describes the beginning of the construction of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle. We are told about the gathering of materials as well as the actual crafting of the components and furnishings of the Mishkan. The Torah describes the People of Israel as enthusiastically contributing to the project-in fact, the description is similar to the the description of the making of the Golden Calf. We can perhaps see the incident of the Golden Calf as one not of deliberate wrongdoing, but of misplaced zeal. Religious enthusiasm can be a wonderful force for creative endeavor, as described in our parshah, or a terrible force for destruction, as we saw last week.
May we always be mindful of our actions, and may all of our deeds be truly for the sake of Heaven-may we always build Holy Sanctuaries in our lives and not idols. Shabbat Shalom.
Hazzan Yitzhak Ben-Moshe

Yoga while standing on one foot – Last Sunday the sisterhood had an absolutely wonderful yoga class with Yoga instructor Lisa Feder of Being Well yoga. Huge thank you to her donating her time and talent.

BERS, Sunday school class meets this Sunday, March 6 at 10AM. The children will be making Purim goody bags for our Purim party on March 23rd as well as making hamentaschen.

Are you ready for Purim at Beth El – we are gonna rock the house. Special treats in store for Wednesday March 23, 7:30 PM. Entertaining Megilla reading, music, delicious hamentaschen, some L’ Chaims and a few surprises – such as….. KLEZMER MUSIC with LOS KLEZMEROS!

Kidish Crew Kudos! Thank you to the wonderful crew of Javis, Yosef, Claudia, Vania, Mary, Genevieve, Sarah and Iris.

Community News: The Mysteries of the 613 Commandments.

Beth El is proud to be a host and sponsor of this fascinating educational program. Wednesdays 12-1:30 PM $18/class or $50 for the entire three part series.

By tradition, there are 613 commandments, or mitzvot, in the Hebrew Bible. For Jews, these mitzvot – taken together – inform the life by which God calls us to live. Jews have all sorts of differing ideas about which of these mitzvot should actually be followed and how. But rarely do we give them a fresh look to study and discuss how they might give guidance to how we live in our own time. This session will attempt to begin that discussion in our community by exploring a way of examining the mitzvot as classified by Maimonides. Taught by Sandy Kress. This is a lunch and learn, please bring only dairy, parve or veggie.

Series 2: “Our Relationship with Others”: March 23, 30, April 6 at Congregation Beth El, 8902 Mesa Dr.

Series 3: “The Requirements of Justice” : April 20, 27, May 4 at Congregation Agudas Achim, 7300 Hart Lane To register please go to:www.shalomaustin.org/jll

RABBI PETER TARLOW’S WEEKLY PARASHA – BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!
From the Center for Jewish-Latino Relations.
http://www.latinojewishrelations.org/
This week’s Torah portion is called “VaYakhel”. You will find it the Book of Exodus 35:1-37:38. Upon reading this text for the first time, we often feel that we are drowning in a sea of irrelevant detail. The text goes into a great many specifics from teaching us the art of fundraising (this seems to be a permanent part of religion) to how the Tabernacle is to be furnished. Perhaps this week’s portion spends its greatest amount of space with specifics dealing with the construction of the National Menorah (candelabrum). Given the amount of detail provided we cannot blame a modern reader for becoming frustrated. While fundraising is still a religious necessity, we have to wonder why so much space is devoted to a building that was to be used in the wilderness and no longer exists.A more careful reading however, makes us realize that while the text appears to speak about the topics mentioned above, in reality it has a much more profound goal. The key to understanding this goal may be found in the text’s dominant word: “esh”. Esh is often translated as “fire”, but this translation is simply not adequate to express the text’s true message. Esh is the combination of energy and matter. Is it also the point where nouns and verbs unite into a single unit? Where destruction meets creation and from the old comes the new?Any Hebrew reader will quickly note the spelling of the word: alef-shin and how close that spelling is to the word for human/man “ish” (alef-yud-shim = ish). The Yud in Hebrew is often an indication of the Divine. This Biblical play-on-words makes readers ask: what is the relationship between the words esh and ish? Are human beings on fire, in the best sense of the word, when the fire of human passion meets the spark of the divine? Is passion like fire, being both a means to create and a means of destruction?This strange duality forces us to question the existential idea of what is esh (fire). Esh is the “nothing” that is “something”. We classify fire as a noun, yet in reality it is pure verbal energy. The second component is the divine spark, the sense-of-purpose that makes us more than just an object, but a creative force in the universe.What can be said of one person may also be said of a group of people, even a nation. When Israel left Egypt, it lacked passion. The “people” were more a riffraff that a nation. It was only at Sinai when they understand their divine purpose, to become a light unto the nations that the energy resulting in a national passion was born. VaYakhel (meaning, “gather together”) is more than merely assembling the people and forming a nation. This text teaches us that we build nations when we combine the energy of creativity with the goodness of G’d and thus, we become G’d’s partners in creating sanctity.In this text, beauty is two sided. There is the outer beauty of the “esh” combined with the inner beauty of the Yud. This combination transforms raw energy into substance by mixing our potential with its actualization, our hopes with our accomplishments, and our dreams with the daily tasks of life