Suedah Shlishit is sponsored by he Bernsteins in memory of Larry's father, Carl Bernstein (Bezalel ben Simcha) ע ה. May his neshama have an aliyah

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1 בס ד THIS WEEK S BULLETIN IS SPONSORED BY RANDI & ARNIE SPIER IN HONOR OF STEVE PLOTNICK. LET S GO METS! נא לא לדבר בשעת התפילה PLEASE NO CONVERSATION DURING SERVICES שבת פרשת לך לך SHABBAT PARSHAT LECH LECHA 4 MARCHESHVAN/OCTOBER 24 Haftorah is Isaiah 40:27-41:16. Final time for Kiddush Levanah of Cheshvan is Tues. night, Oct. 27, until 12:13 AM (15 MarCheshvan). FRIDAY NIGHT CANDLE LIGHTING - 5:47 PM MINCHA - 5:55 PM TZAIT - 6:50 PM SATURDAY SHACHARIT YOUTH - 8:20 AM SHACHARIT MAIN - 8:45 AM LAST KRIAT SHEMA - 9:59 AM GEMARA SHIUR - 4:35 PM MINCHA - 5:35 PM SHKIA - 6:03 PM MAARIV/HAVDALAH - 6:48 PM Rabbi Uri Goldstein BULLETIN INFORMATION TO REQUEST A BULLETIN ANNOUNCEMENT (BY 7:00 PM WEDNESDAY) OR DEDICATE A BULLETIN FOR $36 ($54 W/PHOTO), SEPLOTNICK@GMAIL.COM. CONGREGATION AHAVAT ACHIM SADDLE RIVER ROAD FAIR LAWN, NJ Sunday (10/25) Monday (10/26) Tuesday (10/27) Wednesday (10/28) Thursday (10/29) Friday (10/30) Earliest Talit 6:24 AM 6:25 AM 6:26 AM 6:27 AM 6:28 AM 6:29 AM Shacharit 8:15 AM 6:15 AM 6:25 AM 6:25 AM 6:15 AM 6:25 AM Gedolah 1:07 PM 1:07 PM 1:07 PM 1:07 PM 1:07 PM 1:06 PM Mincha (Sun./ Fri) - Maariv WEEKDAY DAVENING INFORMATION 5:30 PM 8:00 PM 8:00 PM 8:00 PM 8:00 PM 5:45 PM Shkia 6:02 PM 6:01 PM 5:59 PM 5:58 PM 5:57PM Tzait 6:47 PM 6:46 PM 6:44 PM 6:43 PM 6:42 PM Jews all over the world will be experiencing one complete Shabbat together, this Shabbat, Oct. 23/24. Thank you to our sponsors: Chullent ($118): Garfunkel & Plotnick; Pulled Beef ($72): Riskin, Solomon/Lader & Spier; Meatball ($54): Agress & Schweb; Deli Platter ($36): Baron, Brenenson, Farajun, Greenbaum/Goldman, Greene, Komet, Melanie Kwestel, Lewis, Lewissohn, Racenstein, Sonnenblick, Strich, Wechsler, Wigod & Winchester. Thank you to Andrea & Randi for all your efforts to getting this done! Suedah Shlishit is sponsored by he Bernsteins in memory of Larry's father, Carl Bernstein (Bezalel ben Simcha) ע ה. May his neshama have an aliyah Our new website has launched! Thank you to Zvi Dubin, Aryeh Brenenson and Jonathan Schachter for all their hard work over the past few months, and to Leslie Gabor for maintain our website over the past number of years. Check it out at Team Ezra is again forming to honor Ezra Fineman in the Walk for Life, to be held Oct. 25, Saddle River Park, Fair Lawn/Paramus. Please consider donating to our team here: For every $60 raised, a donor is added to the registry with the potential of saving a life. President Stephen Agress "1

2 Kiddush Information Kiddush cleanup for the month of October is Brooks, Chass, Dubin, Dworkis, Eis, Eisman, Farajun, Fineman, Finkelstein, Fontaine, Freund, Gabor, Garfunkel, Goldgur Kiddush setup for this Shabbat is Brenenson, Riskin, Wolfson Kiddush setup for next Shabbat is Dubin, Finkelstein, Freund Adult Education GEMARAH SHIUR - Rabbi's Shabbat afternoon gemarah shiur takes place one hour before Mincha. Tuesdays, after Maariv (approx. 8:15 PM), Adult Ed. lecture series: The Great Torah Commentaries - Their Lives and Learning, Part I- Rashi. Numbers & Info ERUV UPDATE MIKVAH At Shomrei Torah, weekdays 9:00 PM 10:30 PM, Motzei Shabbat from 11/4 hours after Shabbat ends for 1.5 hours. Kaylim Mikvah: Sunday 10 AM-3 PM FACEBOOK: facebook.com/ groups/ahavat.achim/ ע ה Gita Cooperwasser Youth Program Youth groups are back! This week s leaders are Serena, Uri, Hannah, and Tamar. Mah Jong this Shabbat, Oct. 24, will be at Dina Greene s home, Marie Court. See you then! The shul has 4 new faucets for the upstairs restroom sinks. We are looking for someone who is handy and can install them so that the shul can avoid the plumber expense. Let us know if you can help! Upcoming Events Oct Siyum Mesechet Nazir at Suedah Shlishit Nov Package Party with Dairy Desserts Nov JNF Breakfast Nov Sisterhood Planning Meeting, 8:00 PM at Lori s home. Nov Kiddush is sponsored by Joyce Heller in memory of her father Oscar Mueller ע ה on his Yahrzeit. Nov Sisterhood Book Club at the Sonnenblick home discussing Left Neglected, by Lisa Genova. Dec Shabbat Chanukah Dinner Dec Max Agress Auf Ruf Dec Family Bowling Party Jan. 6 - Sisterhood Paid Up Membership Meeting and Challah Braiding and Making Extravaganza! Feb Ben Wechsler Bar Mitzvah Feb Yachad Shabbaton Mar. 5 - Pre-Purim Wine and Cheese Tasting. April 15 - Pre-Pesach Shabbat Dinner The Gita Cooperwasser ע ה Youth Program is participating in Mitzvah Day 2015, packing up school supplies for kids in homeless shelters and underprivileged schools. It s on Sun., Nov. 1, BUT WE NEED YOUR HELP NOW! Please contribute school supplies to this effort - especially backpacks. Buy now what you can and contribute it. We will be collecting the supplies in a box in Rabbi Goldstein's office, or you can bring them to the Bernstein home, Tanis Pl. Remember, this is a drive for the entire shul - not just youth! From the Sisterhood - Annual coat drive for Center For Hope And Safety (formerly Save Our Sisters Shelter) is Sun., Nov. 1, 2015, from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. This organization houses and supports abused women and their families. Bring donations of outerwear (gently worn, but not torn) to the Bickel garage, Hale Place, Fair Lawn. All sizes are needed Shirley Vann has dedicated this week s Covenant & Conversation (used with permission of. ע ה the Office of Rabbi Sacks) in memory of her beloved mother Necha bat Yitzchok "2

3 Journey of the Generations Lekh Lekha - 24 October 2015 / 11 Cheshvan 5776 Mark Twain said it most pithily. When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. Whether Freud was right or wrong about the Oedipus complex, there is surely this much truth to it, that the power and pain of adolescence is that we seek to define ourselves as different, individuated, someone other than our parents. When we were young they were the sustaining presence in our lives, our security, our stability, our source of groundedness in the world. The first and deepest terror we have as very young children is separation anxiety: the absence, especially, of the mother. Young children will play happily so long as mother or caregiver is within sight. Absent that, and there is panic. We are too young to venture into the world on our own. It is precisely the stable, predictable presence of parents in our early years that gives us a basic sense of trust in life. But then comes the time as we approach adulthood, when we have to learn to make our own way in the world. Those are the years of searching and in some cases, rebellion. They are what make adolescence so fraught. The Hebrew word for youth the root n-a-r has these connotations of awakening and shaking. We begin to define ourselves by reference to our friends, our peer-group, rather than our family. Often there is tension between the generations.

4 The literary theorist Harold Bloom wrote two fascinating books, The Anxiety of Influence and Maps of Misreading, in which, in Freudian style, he argued that strong poets make space for themselves by deliberately misinterpreting or misunderstanding their predecessors. Otherwise if you were really in awe of the great poets that came before you you would be stymied by a sense that everything that could be said has been said, and better than you could possibly do. Creating the space we need to be ourselves often involves an adversarial relationship to those who came before us, and that includes our parents. One of the great discoveries that tends to come with age is that we begin to realise that having spent what seems like a lifetime of running away from our parents, we find that we have become very much like them and the further away we ran, the closer we became. Hence the truth in Mark Twain s insight. It needs time and distance to see how much we owe our parents and how much of them lives on in us. Creating the space we need to be ourselves often involves an adversarial relationship to those who came before us, and that includes our parents. The way the Torah does this in relation to Abraham (or Abram as he was then called) is remarkable in its subtlety. Lekh Lekha, and indeed Jewish history, begins with the words, God said to Abraham, Go from your land, your birthplace and your father s house to a land I will show you (Gen. 12:1). This is the boldest beginning of any account of a life in the Hebrew Bible. It seems to come from nowhere. The Torah gives us no portrait of Abraham s childhood, his youth, his relationship with the other members of his family, how he came to marry Sarah, or the qualities of character that made God single him out to become the initiator of what ultimately turned out to be the greatest revolution in the religious history of humankind, what is called nowadays Abrahamic monotheism. It was this biblical silence that led to the midrashic tradition almost all of us learned as children, that Abraham broke the idols in his father s house. This is Abraham the Revolutionary, the iconoclast, the man of new beginnings who overturned everything his father stood for. This is, if you like, Freud s Abraham. Perhaps it is only as we grow older that we are able to go back and read the story again, and realise the significance of the passage at the end of the previous parsha. It says this: Terach took his son Abram, his grandson Lot, son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Harran, they settled there (Gen. 11:31).

5 It turns out, in other words, that Abraham left his father s house long after he had left his land and his birthplace. His birthplace was in Ur, in what is today southern Iraq, but he only separated from his father in Harran, in what is now northern Syria. Terach, Abraham s father, accompanied him for the first half of his journey. He went with his son at least part of the way. What actually happened? There are two possibilities. The first is that Abraham received his call in Ur. His father Terach then agreed to go with him, intending to accompany him to the land of Canaan, though he did not complete the journey, perhaps because of age. The second is that the call came to Abraham in Harran, in which case his father had already begun the journey on his own initiative by leaving Ur. Either way, the break between Abraham and his father was far less dramatic than we first thought. I have argued elsewhere (in my new book, Not in God s Name), that biblical narrative is far more subtle than we usually take it to be. It is deliberately written to be understood at different levels at different stages in our moral growth. There is a surface narrative. But there is also, often, a deeper story that we only come to notice and understand when we have reached a certain level of maturity (I call this the concealed counter-narrative). Genesis is a classic example. Hidden in the guise of a simple genealogy at the end of the previous parsha is a far deeper truth that Abraham was actually completing a journey his father began. When we are young we hear the enchanting indeed empowering story of Abraham breaking his father s idols, with its message that a child can sometimes be right and a parent wrong, especially when it comes to spirituality and faith. Only much later in life do we hear the far deeper truth hidden in the guise of a simple genealogy at the end of the previous parsha that Abraham was actually completing a journey his father began. There is a line in the book of Joshua (24:2) we read it as part of the Haggadah on Seder night that says that In the past your ancestors lived beyond the Euphrates River, including Terach the father of Abraham and Nahor. They worshiped other gods. So there was idolatry in Abraham s family background. But Genesis 11 says that it was Terach who took Abraham, not Abraham who took Terach, from Ur to go to the land of Canaan. There was no immediate and radical break between father and son.

6 Indeed it is hard to imagine how it could have been otherwise. Abram Abraham s original name means mighty father. Abraham himself was chosen so that he will instruct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord (Gen. 18:19) that is, he was chosen to be a model parent. How could a child who rejected the way of his father become a father of children who would not reject his way in turn? 1 It makes more sense to say that Terach already had doubts about idolatry and it was he who inspired Abraham to go further, spiritually and physically. Abraham continued a journey his father had begun, thereby helping Isaac and Jacob, his son and grandson, to chart their own ways of serving God the same God but encountered in different ways. Even when we thought we were running away, we were in fact continuing their journey. Much of what we are is because of what they were. Which brings us back to Mark Twain. Often we begin by thinking how different we are from our parents. It takes time for us to appreciate how much they helped us become the people we are. Even when we thought we were running away, we were in fact continuing their journey. Much of what we are is because of what they were. To read an introductory essay to this year s Covenant & Conversation series for 5776 on Spirituality, please visit 1 Rashi (to Gen. 11:31) says it was to conceal the break between son and father that the Torah records the death of Terach before God s call to Abraham. However, see Ramban ad loc.