Parashat Ve’era – Special Friday services

We would like to invite you all to our Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service, tonight at 7pm. We will have our regular service, but invite the children of the congregation to come and join us in singing Lecha Dodi and getting a special blessing. We will have coffee, juice and cake at the end.

NEW E-MAIL: – PLEASE READ. We are transitioning to a new e-mail in order to better serve you. It is news@bethelaustin.org. Please subscribe to this email when you receive it as it is the only way that you will be able to get the e-mail. As always, we don’t send many, so you will never receive too many, but this is a very important way of communication. Please also bear with us as we transition.

On Sunday morning, we will have Sunday school at 10am.

PLEASE NOTE that there will not be an Intro to Judaism class this week though.

HOLD THE DATE : We will have another work day on Sunday January 25 and could use as many people as possible.

Wednesday evening davening will be at 7pm and the very popular class on Jewish concepts of Death and the afterlife will immediately follow.

Movies in the shul – remember our next one is motzei Shabbat, January 31, at about 6:30pm when we will be screening The Pawn Broker.

We are forming a Hebrew conversation class on Thursday evenings – please let us know if you are interested ASAP so we can get an idea of numbers and interest.

Cantor Ben-Moshe’s Weekly message:   This week’s parshah, Va’era, begins the narrative of the Ten Plagues, which came down on Egypt as a consequence of the continued enslavement of B’nei Yisrael.  The plagues begin as annoyances-water turning to blood, frogs, lice-and progress to dangerous and at the end deadly.  They come in three sets of three, and they are all natural phenomena, except the last Plague of the First-Born.  In this way, God proves the futility of worshipping the forces of nature.  None of the gods of Egypt, from the river-god of the Nile to the frog-goddess of fertility, to Ra, the sun-god, chief of the Egyptian pantheon, had any power.  Only the Creator of the Universe has that sort of power.  As Jews, we are called on to witness that there is only One Supreme Power, Who alone is worthy of worship.  As for Nature, we may see God’s presence there, but Nature is not God, and while we recognize that we are part of Creation, we look beyond the material world to the Spirit which is beyond.  Shabbat Shalom.