Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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It’s good to be back

The great period of COVID hibernation is coming to an end. Many people, I among them, used to complain about how packed the Jewish community calendar was, how impossible it was to keep up. What a burden!

Now, it’s a blessing. What a joy to be back these past few weeks — to greet old faces and to see or listen to new venues or voices.

Kavod Senior Life’s annual event introduced me to the Broncos practice stadium at Dove Valley. I’d never been there. Here is a setting for which the word “awesome” is not an exaggeration. What a beautiful setting for a community event. It was good to see Sandie Eichberg after many years.

Do the offices of JEWISHcolorado and Rose Community Foundation qualify as “new venues?” Technically not, but they were closed by COVID very shortly after they were put in place, replaced by Zoom. It was a great feeling to meet Jco head Rabbi Jay Strear inside the beautifully remodeled Jco itself and to sit with Rose Community Foundation’s Katie Peshek inside its impressive new digs.

Friday dusk found me at The Jewish Experience, where I was treated to a spirited and spiritual rendition of Lecha Dodi by Rabbi Raphael Leban. It was a fitting start to Shabbos. Meanwhile, I spotted a book on the shelf that with a small, repercussive chapter on my current Torah study focus: numbers. Mind and soul were enriched. And family: cousins Gloria Ginsberg, Dr. Ellice Goldberg and Moshe Zirinsky were present for the community Shabbos dinner.

At the ADL civil rights reception, I was speechless at Rebecca Gart’s recounting of a high school experience in the Philadelphia area in the late 1980s. A black girl was named Homecoming Queen. White students stood in protest and marched out. The faculty supervisor rigged the rules so that a black girl could not be named queen the next year. This ran utterly contrary to my experience at George Washington High School in the early 1960s. It’s hard to learn new things cooped up by COVID.

Rabbi Shay Schachter, on his way from the East to Montana, delivered an amazing talk at EDOS. Among his gems: If, as the Talmud says, a person should look at the world — and himself — as half good and half bad, then if a person adds one good deed, he tips the fate of the entire world for the good. Can one person really change the world? asked Schachter. Is this not naive? Yet, millions of people take off their shoes every day in airports around the world because of one deed of one person — the shoe bomber. Yes, one person can change the world. And if one person can do so for the bad, one person can do so for the good.

Speaking of EDOS, among Rabbi Dani Rapp’s many learned Torah lectures this past summer was one on the even numbers in the ancient Israelite tribal censuses. Twelve tribes and two censuses yield 24 tribal counts. All but one is rounded in the hundreds. How could this be? One answer is that an odd numbered count is rounded up. Question: As a number in a Jewish sacred text is rounded up — say, from 49 to 50 — does the meaning of the number change? If so, can it be illustrated in human experience?

Barry Hirschfeld’s 80th birthday “Boys Night Out”: I’ve never seen a party like it. Hundreds of people. It was a who’s who. Both of Colorado’s senators. Mayors Hancock, Coffman and Suthers of Denver, Aurora and Colorado Springs, respectively. Community servants like Sid Wilson. Paul Rosenthal, Harvey Allon, Charlie Gwirtsman, Doug Seserman, Gene Kay and many others — so many people I haven’t seen in person since before the pandemic. And a new face, Josh Cobb, head of school at Graland. Barry knows how to gather the world.

For close to 40 years I have sat on the floor in Yeshiva Toras Chaim on Tisha b’Av to recite kinot, the lamentations for the day. No one gives explanations. No one rushes. It takes some four hours. I like it without explanations. I can stop and ponder any verse or pogrom by myself. I can ponder the poetry or the commentary, I can mourn in my own way, I can sit, overwhelmed, saddened to the depths by the Jewish tragedy, in my own way.

Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone is a native Denverite who was the chief of staff to the American ambassador to Israel during the Trump years, when the Middle East was radically redirected toward peace. Thanks to Dr. Harley Rotbart, Lightstone spoke at Denver Jewish Day School about the Abraham Accords. He was by turns optimistic, disturbed, passionate, humorous, but mostly insightful. The Abraham Accords have changed the course of history.

It is critical to build on them and to call them by their name, he said. He offered inside stories on how they came about, and introduced his book that tells the story in detail, Let My People Know.

The main evidence that things are back: I cannot get everywhere. I need to split up the duties with other IJN staff members, Larry Hankin and Shana Goldberg. At this point, even all of us together probably cannot get to all of the community’s events.

We’re back.

P.S. If getting back out is a joy, it carries with it a greater appreciation for staying in, becoming closer to oneself or to family, or, in my case, to both, especially my precious wife Elaine — a great blessing within the curse of COVID.



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IJN Executive Editor | [email protected]


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