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Simchas, milestones and the new year
The following is our Spiritual Leader’s Annual Report which was given by Cantor Wunch at our 2023 Annual General Meeting.
Thank you all for being here and supporting the important work of this AGM. I will try to make my comments brief, as I do my best to recap a very eventful year. I know that I will miss some events in my report, so please forgive me in advance.
Since our last AGM, we have had many milestones and simchas in our congregation. We celebrated the naming of 2 babies. We celebrated 4 B’mitzvahs – including an adult b’mitzvah that brought us our community’s first ever Selichot service. We completed the first year of our new B’mitzvah class, and started year 2.
We celebrated Purim with a fantastic spiel online – thank you to our coordinators and performers - and we are planning on an in-person Purim celebration for this coming year.
Our monthly lunch and learns have been a joyful and enlightening way to spend an hour together, and attendance has grown.
Our Pride Havdalah brought a large crowd, as we continue to strengthen our relationship with LGBTQ at the J, and more of our events are being advertised to the greater community. Speaking of the greater community, we participated in planning and presenting at the first ever community-wide Chanukah event called IGNITE – thank you to our fabulous volunteers who ran and presented at our poetry salon. We will be represented at the event again this year, so I hope you all register and attend.
This past summer, we were set to host a tot-shabbat in conjunction with the Miles Nadal Jcc, but unfortunately it was rained out. I know we have a few families who are hoping to attend regular Tot Shabbats, and I can assure you that this is on our list of priorities for the coming year.
Our newsletters have been full of pertinent and interesting information. Our Board of Directors has been collaborative and supportive. Our volunteers have been dedicated and energetic. This is a community full of blessings.
Our High Holy Days were joyful and reflective, we published our own machzor, thanks to the hard work and dedication of our machzor committee, and we finally got to hear the fantastic voices of our choir and vocal ensemble in person. What a joy it was to hear the harmonies live. We also introduced a new Rosh HaShanah family service that was well attended and it was so delightful to learn and sing with some of our youngest members.
And finally, through personal connections and support from the board, I was able to secure a new Torah for our community. Our original Torah, while beautiful, has several sections where the ink has worn off, and certain portions are difficult or impossible to read. It would cost far too much to have it repaired. We had been considering fundraising in order to purchase a new Torah, but a friend of mine at Shaarey Shomayim congregation in Thunder Bay happened to mention in passing that his community was looking to donate one of their Torahs to a congregation who needed one, and I responded that I know just the place that would love to take him up on that. We are still trying to research the history of this new Torah, so that we can learn more about it – and once we have information to share we will do so.
We had planned a Simchat Torah celebration to welcome the new Torah to our community, but that celebration was scheduled for October 7th. When we woke up to the news that morning of the attack Hamas had carried out in Israel, we quickly realized that our celebration would be postponed. Instead, we dedicated our morning to praying for peace – and those prayers have not yet been fully answered. The temporary ceasefire and slow return of the hostages is a blessing, but it is temporary – and we can only pray that real peace will be coming soon. I am so impressed and comforted by how our community has come together to support each other through these very dark times.
So, what’s next for our community?
We will continue to provide joyful, musical, participatory monthly services. We will continue to celebrate holidays and simchas, and we will mourn together in times of grief. We will continue to make ourselves known in the greater community, so that anyone who wants to find our beautiful congregation is able to do so.
We want to spend more time with each other in person. We want to continue to build relationships and the sense of kinship that you had before the pandemic began. We want to provide more opportunities to learn. We want to host more social events, times to just be together, talk, and help our newer members get to know everyone.
But what comes next really relies upon you. We need your ideas, and we need your time. Ideas are wonderful, but implementing those ideas take time and peoplepower. Please help us continue to grow. Please help us by volunteering to set up kiddush, or perform in the Purim spiel, or sing in the choir, or host a gathering. Help us by volunteering to be on our board. Help us by stepping forward, when you can, and saying Hineini – Here I am. Like we learned throughout our High Holy Days – Hineini is the response to the call.
I am looking forward to everything that we will accomplish together in the coming year. I have grown to truly love this congregation and am so proud to be its Spiritual Leader. I always welcome your feedback and my calendar is open to anyone who wants or needs to speak with me. I pray that the coming weeks and months bring us more joy than sadness, more laughter than tears, more togetherness than isolation, and please God, more Peace.
If you need to talk, please contact me at cantorwunch@gmail.com, or make an appointment at https://calendly.com/cantorwunch
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