November 10, 2017 | 21 Cheshvan 5778
Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash
Love is a Sanctuary
by Ellen Frank-Miller

After a childhood of what therapists call “trauma” and “complicated grief,” my 40 th birthday was a cliché – really. I had the world’s most amazing kid whose love sustained me (hey, give a Jewish mother a break – I’m sure yours is the world’s most amazing kid, too). I had a nice home. And, I had a place in a University of Chicago PhD program that I loved and that was flattening me like a tractor. But, I still hadn’t found true sanctuary after a divorce and seven years of single motherhood. The Cosmic Frog Theory was failing me (you know, that’s the theory that says that there’s a Cosmic Number of frogs that you have to kiss before you find your prince…but you don’t know what the number is, so you just have to keep kissing frogs… yuck ).

There was no way I could know that four months after that birthday where hope was hanging by a thread, my future husband would walk into my life and I would find my sanctuary at last under the chuppah with him and my son. Jean Valjean from Les Miserable said it best, “To love another person is to see the face of God.”

Love is a sanctuary.

My second twenty-fifth birthday is about a month away (do the math) and it’s like night and day. My sanctuary has not only been built, but is now decorated with those million gorgeous tiles that you see in Moroccan synagogues. After everything, I’ve made it here at last.

Many of us spend our lives trying to heal our wounds and we do our best. But love is the sanctuary in which we can truly heal. Scars are forever but when we can take sanctuary in love, it’s enough. More than enough, in my blessed case.

When I meet someone who is in a really difficult place in their lives, I tell them,
“It looks like a well – but it’s actually a tunnel.”

I’ve been there. I know it for a certainty. And I pay it forward any way I can because that is what love demands of us.

Love is a sanctuary…love of family, love of friends, love of God.

Shabbat Shalom.

If you’d like to share your thoughts with the congregation on what sanctuary means to you - a time in which you felt like a sanctuary dwelled within you, or how we can extend sanctuary to those who need it, feel free to reach out to Ellen Blum Barish and David Barish . 
Ellen Frank-Miller, PhD (at last) is the proud mom of Danny Frank-Siegel, a Beth Emet Early Childhood, Beit Sefer, and Kabbalat Torah graduate and now a member of the Macalester College rugby team (oy). She is married to Steve Miller, her beshert and sanctuary (and her Cosmic Frog). The devoted servant of Amelia, the pure-bred American mutt, and a 20+ year member and board member at Beth Emet, she lives in Evanston where she is a telecommuting-researcher and adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Upcoming Events
Sanctuary - 2nd Annual Post-Election Rally
This Sunday, November 12 at 2:00 p.m. at Lake Street Church's Chicago Ave. Yard (607 Lake St., Evanston)
Join the Evanston Interfaith Clergy and Leaders Group, along with our allies and friends! Listen to diverse, inspiring speakers, learn about the Sanctuary movement and opportunities to take action.
Indivisible - a film about the fight to reunite families separated by deportation
Saturday, December 2 at 4:00 p.m.
Indivisible is an award-winning, feature-length documentary film about the real people at the heart of our nation's immigration debate. Renata, Evelyn, and Antonio were young children when their parents brought them to the U.S. in search on a better life; they were teenagers when their mothers, fathers, and siblings were deported. Today, they are known as Dreamers. 

Free and open to the community. RSVP appreciated or call 847-869-4230 ext. 300.
In Exodus 25:8, God says to Moses, “Create for me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among them.” These words set the building of the Tabernacle into motion. But the verse’s ending has an interesting grammatical anomaly. Instead of telling the Israelites to create a sanctuary so God can dwell within it, the wording suggests that the dwelling may be amon g the people, or within them, suggesting that God can live within us rather than exclusively in a physical sanctuary. This year at Beth Emet we’ll explore the multiples meanings of sanctuary—as physical space to gather as a community for prayer, as spiritual space where we feel safe and whole, and as an attitude that is welcoming and accepting of everyone.

This weekly e-mail project, curated by David and Ellen Barish, allows congregants to express themselves in any of a variety of media: speechmaking, poetry, essay, story, photography, film, paint, sculpture, printmaking, textile, sound or music. If you'd like to contribute, please email Ellen and/or David .

Logo designed by Marco Siegel-Acevedo
Beth Emet The Free Synagogue
1224 Dempster Street
 Evanston, IL 60202
                          847-869-4230                           

If you do not wish to receive this email, please   contact us . If you use the unsubscribe button, you will no longer receive any emails from Beth Emet (including EmetMail, Lifecycle notices, etc.). 
Facebook