After missing three weeks of Saturday morning services due to the move, today I was back in the bosom of Or Shalom, my spiritual community at 10th and Fraser, much closer to my new East Side home. It was such a joy to walk into the sanctuary and hear Rabbi Hannah Dresner singing a lovely niggun (wordless melody). The photo here, showing Hannah in the foreground, was taken on a Sunday because we don’t use cameras in the synagogue on Shabbat.
After Hannah guided us through Pesukei d’Zimra (verses of praise), Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan and Charles Kaplan led Shacharit (morning prayers) – all very beautiful and soulful. It was so good to be in my spiritual home once again. Here are some of the faces of Or Shalom.
I lingered on at the potluck lunch catching up with friends, and making a time on Tuesday to get together with Pat, who I’m teaming up with to produce the Passover issue of Keren Or, Or Shalom’s newsletter. Kind of déjà vu all over again – I edited the newsletter for eight years from 1994-2002.
This past week’s Torah portion is particularly relevant to me because it recounts the completion of construction and the dedication of the sanctuary in the desert where the freed Israelites wandered for 40 years. A perfect week to have dedicated my own newly constructed home. It got me searching my photo archive for mezuzah hangings from the past.
This goes back to the mid-’80s when Rabbi Hillel Goelman helped us dedicate the home we built in Vancouver’s Point Grey.
Hanging a mezuzah on the doorpost of my home in Kampala, Uganda.
Using all three hands to put up a mezuzah at my home in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kerrisdale.