Jamie Adams will present "Lamas, Bagels and the Jim Hendrix Girl: Notes on Culture, Traditional  and Religion Along the Silk Road in China and Mongolia, Summer 2019" He will discuss the revival of Buddhism and the persistence of Shamanism in Mongolia, the problems faced by Tibetan region within China proper, the story of the Buddhist grottoes in Dunhuang and experiences in Uighur areas of Xinjiang.

A central part of our Jewish spiritual practice is to cultivate memory - not simply the dry history of textbooks, but the memory of a touch, a feel, a love.

Jonathan Safran Foer writes in Everything Is Illuminated that " For for Jews, memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks – when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain – that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?”

Join us for Torah and chanting. We are adding Zicaron (remembrance) to the afternoon service. As a community of the living we will gather together at the time of their yahrtzeits to remember our loved ones who have died. This will be an opportunity as part of a regular service on Shabbat to sing, to share memories, to recite the mourners kaddish and to bear witness to our loves and our losses.