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.