Home

Starting January, from 7:30 to 7:00. First Friday remains 6pm.

Read This First: Our Community Passover Seder is less than 3 weeks away.

SEATING IS Limited! Get your tickets NOW. Info below.

The Song of the Turtledove is Heard throughout the Land
I don’t know if I have ever heard a turtledove, but birdsong does wake me every morning now, and geese are waddling around my apartment complex. Spring is here with Passover, and, I guess (I try so hard not to pay attention), Easter right around the corner.

Like Christians, we celebrate the renewal of earthly life all around us: The reawakening and blossoming of trees and flowers, new births in forests and pastures. But our focus is on liberation in this world, physically and spiritually, which manifests on several levels.

1. We remember and relive slavery and our escape to freedom,
2. We are reminded to be grateful and honor our Covenant with our God, who lead us outof Egypt to be our God.
3. We are enjoined to look around the world and our backyards for contemporary forms of slavery and their captives,
4. And find ways to do something about it.
5. We are commanded to remove hametz from our homes and pride from our souls,
6. For pride is a form of slavery, it restrains us from true relationships with ourselves, each other and God, however you define God.
7. Just like pride, these things also curtail our spiritual and relational freedoms: self-centeredness, jealousy, resentment, anger, secrets, fear, routine, preoccupation, screens, the tapes we run over and over in our heads (that’s mine), habit, addictions….

You get the picture.
These days, in our community, most of us don’t go to great lengths to remove actual
hametz from our homes and cars. In more halachlic observant synagogues, every corner of
every home is cleaned for hametz, cars vacuumed, carpets cleaned.

All of this physically symbolizes the spiritual process of preparing for Passover, the unleavening of our puffed up, captive souls. Passover is more than a nice dinner with commentary. It is a pre-ordained time in our chaotic year to consider our lives and the ways
we are not fully free to be the human beings created in the image of God.

So here’s my Passover challenge: Choose from above or your own life, one or two ways you are not fully free and address them. Problem solve. Make some beginning steps out of your personal bondage. I’m here to lend a hand if you wish.

And get those tickets to the CBS Community seder, and/or make one of your own. Maybe together we will hear that turtledove.

Bayt Shalom's FaceBook Page