Temple Shalom Reform Congregation

Newsletter Post – April 9, 2026

August Adelman — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:21:36 +0000

I’ve spent much of this week glued to the coverage of Artemis II. I am in awe of the astronauts’ work as scientists and explorers. As one observer noted, “It’s not a coincidence that the astronauts who’ve traveled further than any human don’t speak like they know everything. They speak like students and explorers. Their wonder and curiosity are on full display. That’s what science does to you. It dissolves your ego and forces you to confront the vastness of the unknown. It makes you more careful with your words, more open to being wrong, and more in awe of the questions than obsessed with the answers.”

Being more in awe of the questions than obsessed with the answers sounds like an extremely Jewish quality! While curiosity is of course innate to the human condition, questioning is innate to looking at the world through a Jewish lens. One line from the haggadah has been sticking with me since our seders last week. In the description of the Four Children, the last is called “שאינו יודע לשאול – she’eino yodeia lishol, the one who does not know how to ask.” The other children – the wise, wicked, and simple – appear to be personality characteristics, while the fourth child sounds like an ordinary developmental phase all infants go through as they learn to communicate with the world around them. But perhaps this quality of not knowing how to question too is a personality trait. After all, the haggadah does not call this child “the one who does not know how to speak.” Perhaps the one who doesn’t know how to ask is one who is too caught up in their own hubris and certainty that their knowledge, opinions, and outlook on the world is sufficient. Or, the one who does not know how to ask is a person who has become too complacent, too accepting of the world as it is. They don’t question the status quo; they don’t bother imagining the world as it could be.

Questioning what is and imagining what could be are essential to redemption. The one who does not how to ask has the potential to be just as fatal to Jewish continuity as the traditional depictions of the wicked child. We must let go of our tight hold on our own certainty, and question the world around us. We must soften, and open our eyes to the possible.

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Spring Lifelong Learning Series

August Adelman — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:09:45 +0000

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Newsletter Post – April 1, 2026

August Adelman — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:07:47 +0000

Tonight, Jewish families and communities around the globe will gather together for seder. In the collection of songs that closes out the haggadah, Chad Gadya – One Little Kid – is often a beloved favourite for its animal noises and general silliness at the end of the night. But this addition to the haggadah describes a strange and violent story: a goat is eaten, a cat is beaten, a dog is struck, in a seemingly never-ending cycle of violence. It seems like an inevitable pattern, and an unusual take-home message for the seder. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, however, looks at the final stanza, in which God is the victor over all, even death, as a note of hope: “I find it almost unbearably moving that a people that has known so much suffering can summon the moral courage to end this evening of Jewish history on a supreme note of hope and write it into the hearts of its children in the form of a nursery rhyme, a song…We end the night with a prayer and a conviction. The prayer: ‘God of life, help us win a victory over the forces of death.’ And the conviction? That by refusing to accept the world that is, together we can start to make the world that ought to be.”

This does not have to be the take-away message of the seder. Rabbi Shai Held teaches that the seder is not only about memory, but about redemptive memory. We can interpret our people’s Egypt experience in different ways. An entirely reasonable reaction would be, “No one helped me when I was in Egypt, so why should I help the stranger in our midst now?” But Torah teaches something different: “You must not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The purpose of the seder is to teach us how to use our memory and our collective story to orient ourselves away from violence, and towards empathy, towards hope.

This week, the Knesset passed a law mandating the death penalty for West Bank Palestinians convicted of carrying out deadly terror attacks. There is no right of appeal. This law contravenes everything Jewish ethics and Jewish history teaches about the sanctity of human life, our Jewish orientation towards empathy and away from violence. It is yet another chapter in the never-ending cycle of violence of Chad Gadya.

I pray that our people will win a victory over the forces of death – both those forces within the Jewish people and within Israel, and those external forces that wish to see us eradicated from the earth.

Wishing you and your families a joyful Pesach of hope.

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Newsletter Post – March 26, 2026

August Adelman — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 03:06:33 +0000

Yet again, we prepare for Pesach in a world rent by war and uncertainty. Our Israeli loved ones continue to shelter from Iranian missiles, and here in Canada, we face a never ending onslaught of news of antisemitic violence both here, in the US, and around in the world, and news articles predicting more. Over March break, we watched Fiddler on the Roof here in our house, in preparation for seeing the Yiddish production in Toronto later this spring – a quintessential Jewish identity formation moment! Explaining pogroms and the tense relationship between the shtetl community and the Russian authorities reminded me of just how incessant this cycle is. We can tell a Jewish story in the style of Jewish historian Salo Baron’s “lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” It would be a story filled with truth – the violence, the hate, the suffering that our people has faced throughout history, and continues to face today – through war, through school board policies, through bullets fired at an empty synagogue that sends the message: It is not safe for you to pray here.

But Pesach calls us to tell a different story. The Mishnah (one of our foundational rabbinic texts, dating to approximately 200 CE) reminds us that one of the core themes of the Pesach seder is the trajectory “from degradation to praise.” The seder begins in the lowest place – our enslavement to Egypt. And we end with praise, with songs of hope, with the expression that next year, things will be better. Notably, when this phrase is first introduced in the Mishnah, it comes right after the section introducing the 4 Questions, and framing our children’s questions as a core part of the seder. This is how we move from degradation to praise – by opening ourselves to curiosity, to imagining a new way forward, to reminding ourselves – and the next generation – that the way things are and the way things have been, is not the way they must be.

Wishing you and your families a chag Pesach sameach – a joyful Passover holiday!

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Newsletter Post – February 12, 2026

August Adelman — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 03:41:29 +0000

Like many of you, I imagine, I have been glued to this year’s Winter Olympics. I can’t wait to cheer on Israel’s first ever bobsled team (nicknamed Shul Runnings!) when they compete next week, I was devastated when the US women’s hockey team shut out the Canadian team, and I love hearing the individual stories of triumphs and challenges from athletes across the globe.

Lindsey Vonn’s story is one that I’ve been closely following. Vonn is an American alpine ski racer, who returned to the Olympics this year at the age of 41 for the first time since 2018. She crashed in a World Cup race last month, and was determined to compete in Milano Cortina. At Sunday’s race, she crashed and had to be evacuated by helicopter for surgery on a broken leg. But the part that stands out is what Vonn herself said after Sunday’s injury: “And similar to ski racing, we take risks in life. We dream. We love. We jump. And sometimes we fall. Sometimes our hearts are broken. Sometimes we don’t achieve the dreams we know we could have. But that is also the beauty of life; we can try. I tried. I dreamt. I jumped.”

Vonn’s words are not that far from the Talmudic story of Rabbi Eliezer, who told his students that they should repent the day before they died. The students replied, “But how do we know when that will be?” Their teacher responded, “Then you should repent today – just in case!” Judaism reminds us that life is uncertain – we need to live fully with the days that we have. While our version of living fully may not be hurling ourselves down a mountain with a torn ACL (to each their own!), Judaism calls us to live in the present, knowing that our mortality is inevitable.

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Makom by Sarah Dermer

August Adelman — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 02:11:10 +0000

[Originally presented by Sarah Dermer during Shabbat Morning service, January 24th, 2026]

As some of you know, my dad passed away at the beginning of December.

Dr. Joel Goldberg, one of my dad’s colleagues, volunteered to lead the afternoon and evening service on the second night of shiva. Joel is one of those lay leaders who really knows what he’s doing. He has a way of making a service feel traditional, with the standing and the sitting and the fast mumbling of Hebrew under his breath, while also jazzing it up with beautiful camp-style singing and invitations to join along. So, that was wonderful. But then, a surprise. Joel shared a story about my dad in the middle. He started with the prayer that is said at the end of the shiva period:

הַמָּקוֹם יְנַחֵם אֶתְכֶם בְּתוֹךְ שְׁאָר אֲבֵלֵי צִיּוֹן וִירוּשָׁלַיִם

It means: “May G-d comfort you together with all of those who mourned for Zion and Jerusalem.” He said, in this case, in this prayer, “hamakom” is another name for G-d. But, Joel reminded us that “makom” also means place. He talked about the place, the makom, that my dad created when they worked together at the Hamilton Program for Schizophrenia in the 1980s. Joel talked about how my dad made a place in the community, not only for those living with schizophrenia and their families, but also for folks like Joel, who my dad recruited, in particular, to be part of the multidisciplinary team that he put together. And then? Joel tapped his chest. Indicating the special makom that he held for my dad in his heart.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about this word makom, how it’s a name for G-d and also the word for place. Now that I am aware of it, I see it everywhere. I just read Camilla Gibb’s 2021 book The Relatives and she has a character reciting the makom prayer on page four! On page 122 of the book The Shabbat Reader that I’ve had forever, I came upon another reference to “makom” in an essay by Ileana Nava Kurshan, who writes: “One of the Hebrew names for G-d is Makom, place; indeed, we can feel G-d’s presence not just by consecrating time but by setting aside places as well.”

I’ve been thinking about how we make “makom” here at Temple Shalom. Are we feeling G-d’s presence by setting aside place and consecrating time on Shabbat morning together? In November, Gilda, my daughter, celebrated her bat mitzvah here. My mom’s cousin Sheila from Toronto said about our small synagogue, “It was wonderful being in such an intimate space with the warmth enveloping us from the bima.” And I think that warmth and intimacy that cousin Sheila is referring to isn’t just something she felt. That warmth and intimacy is because of something that we create here on Shabbat mornings. How we, together, have made Temple Shalom not just a building we come to, but, by sitting side-by-side, singing prayers together, touching the Torah together as it passes, greeting each other as we enter and exit the sanctuary, we create a special “makom”. Maybe it feels too woo-woo or too orthodox Jewish to talk about “feeling the presence of G-d.” But, perhaps we can talk about makom-ness? That even one-time visitors like cousin Sheila from Toronto can feel the makom-ness, the spiritual place-ness we make together. It’s coming from here, the makom in our hearts and, most definitely, going to that makom, too.

If you turn to page 185 of our siddur, you’ll see a prayer that ends with the lines, “May this synagogue be, for all who enter, the doorway to a richer and more meaningful life.” And I think that is what we are doing here. Temple Shalom is providing all of us a doorway to something warm, intimate, rich, meaningful. It’s providing us an opportunity to feel a sense of “makom,” a sense of spiritual place. For that, I am extremely grateful.

Let us turn to to page 186 for our prayer of gratitude, Modeh/Modah Ani

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Newsletter Post – January 29, 2026

August Adelman — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:16:35 +0000

As the world swirls around us, it can be hard to determine where our focus should be. What is worthy of our emotional energy? Of our grief, of our rage? How do we cut through that grief and rage to find moments of joy, or to merely go through the motions of everyday life (like shoveling 40 cm of snow!)?

We started this week with the news of the return of the last hostage, Ran Gvili. Like too many painful endings over the last 27 months, Master Sgt. Ran Gvili was killed in captivity, and his remains were brought home on Monday to his family for burial in Israel. This is a moment of sadness and grief, but also a moment of exhale, a moment of relief. As Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin said on Monday, “We are looking forward to tomorrow morning for the first time in 844 days, not having to put masking tape over our hearts.” Throughout Israel and the Jewish world, yellow ribbons, empty chairs, hostage photos, and dog tag necklaces have been packed away. It is an ending, but our collective joy is tempered.

This week’s Torah portion, Beshallach, is typically a joyful Shabbat, Shabbat Shira, which we celebrate at Temple Shalom in a beloved tradition with musicians and singing. The Torah portion tells the story of the Israelites finally leaving Egypt, crossing the sea, and rejoicing in their freedom. In the process of getting ready to leave, the Israelites remember – they cannot leave empty-handed. Their ancestor Joseph, on his deathbed many generations before, requested that his bones be buried in the land of Israel. ‘And Moses took with him the bones of Joseph, who had exacted an oath from the children of Israel, saying, “God will be sure to take notice of you: then you shall carry up my bones from here with you.'” (Exodus 13:19) Dr. Andrea Weiss notes that “the Sinai journey [is] a funeral procession as well as a trek to freedom.” The Israelites rejoiced in their freedom – and carried generations of grief and pain with them on their backs and in their hearts.

We do both – we hold the grief and the joy at the same time. We see the world “burning and blooming” in the words of poet Karen Salmansohn. We bear witness to the devastation, and to the potential of beauty, growth, and life that the future holds.

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Newsletter Post – January 15, 2026

August Adelman — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:00:04 +0000

I’ve been thinking lately about Jewish life on the margins. Those Jewish communities, like ours, outside of or on the periphery of larger Jewish population centers like Toronto, New York, Los Angeles. The kinds of towns and cities where, when you say you’re from there, or that there’s a synagogue in that place, people respond with, “Wow, I didn’t know there was a Jewish community there!” or “How many Jews live there??” As a rabbi, I’ve had the honour of serving Jewish communities beyond the epicentres of Jewish life – Spokane, WA, Great Falls, MT, Singapore, and of course, our community here in Waterloo. Jewish life is just as vibrant – and sometimes even more so – beyond the reach of Federations with multimillion dollar budgets, and communities with a robust infrastructure of buildings, professionals, and programming. This is a truth we know deeply in KW – Jewish life here rests on the shoulders of generations of committed volunteers who pour their hearts into building this community and ensuring that a Jewish presence – and a progressive Jewish presence! – exists.

Last weekend, a horrifying antisemitic hate crime took place in Jackson, Mississippi. Beth Israel Congregation, a Reform synagogue and the largest synagogue in Mississippi and the only one in Jackson, was badly damaged in an arson attack. The congregation has about 150 member families, and at its peak 15 years ago, the Jewish population of Jackson was about 600. But Jackson, and Beth Israel Congregation, have long functioned as a hub for Jewish life in the American South, as the home for the Institute for Southern Jewish Life, which supports small Jewish communities all over the southern US. Jewish life (and sadly, in these times, antisemitism and hate) is not limited to the places where we “expect” Jews to live. Beth Israel Congregation is embarking on a difficult path of rebuilding its synagogue, and healing from the trauma and grief of the attack.

Last week, before the fire, Joe Roberts, a Jewish professional in yet another Jewish community on the periphery, Tulsa, Oklahoma, wrote powerfully about how Judaism’s future in North America is not limited to large Jewish population centers in big coastal cities. What he describes in his community sounds very familiar! “These communities are not helpless, and they are not waiting to be rescued. Generations of Jews have poured their sweat, their tears, and their philanthropy into making sure there would be something here for their children to inherit. They built buildings and balance sheets, but also habits of showing up for minyan, for committee meetings, for carpool, for shiva.” Roberts puts forth a powerful vision for Jewish life in smaller communities, where communal continuity rests not on inertia, but on intent. “The map of Jewish resilience cannot be reduced to a few major metros and a nostalgic belief that they will always carry the rest.”

This is the holy work that we are engaged in at Temple Shalom. We are building a distinct Jewish community, healthy and vibrant for the next generation of Jewish families seeking a place for Tot Shabbat, a religious school for their kids, a place to come on Shabbat to get a break from the week, Jewish friends with whom to celebrate holidays. You are each a part of this important project, and in smaller communities, every single person’s presence counts. Thank you for being part of our community.

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Newsletter Post – January 8, 2025

August Adelman — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 22:45:05 +0000

A beautiful contemporary midrash imagines Moses, a young prince growing up in Pharaoh’s palace, ignorant of his Jewish heritage and family. Every night, Moses wanders outside the walls of the palace, feeling restless, and seeking something that he can’t name. Eventually, on a fortuitious Friday night his wandering brings him to the Jewish neighbourhood. He peers into one of the homes and sees a family lighting Shabbat candles. This strange action seems bizarrely familiar to him, but Moses has no idea why. The next night, Moses is drawn yet again to the same neighbourhood. This time, he observes a Jewish mother tucking her children into bed, telling bedtime stories with strangely named characters — Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel. After the stories, the mother quietly sings Shema and kisses her children. Those stories and that song resonated deeply in Moses’ heart and soul, but he has no idea why. The following night, Moses once more walks to the Jewish neighbourhood, this time following a familiar yet delicious scent that he can’t place. He reaches the home of a Jewish family, with a pot of chicken soup simmering on the stove. And in that moment, Moses realizes that he belongs here – that he is Jewish, that these people are his people.

This story is not really about whether or not the ancient Israelites were simmering chicken soup like my Hungarian and Polish great-grandmothers (more likely, their chicken soup was flavoured with something like the Yemenite hawaij spice blend than the celery and carrots I grew up with!). It is really about the call that our Jewish souls here, even after years of distance and disconnect from Jewish family, Jewish heritage, Jewish community. It’s this same call that often brings people into our community and our people through conversion – a sense of seeking that leads them to Judaism and its ancient wisdom and practices. It’s this same call that has brought many of you into deeper engagement with Temple Shalom, and has brought thousands of Jews to seek Jewish life in the months and years since October 7.

Just like Moses, I hope when you hear that call, you will answer it affirmatively, leaning into our community, our heritage, and our traditions.

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A Hanukkah Message from Rabbi Miriam

August Adelman — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 17:16:54 +0000

I spent most of yesterday driving back to Hamilton from a family simcha in New York, a welcome respite from being glued to the news and to social media reports from Sydney of increasing fatalities in the aftermath of yesterday’s terrorist attack in Bondi Beach at a Hanukkah candlelighting event that has left 15 dead.

In an attempt to bring in some Hanukkah spirit, I turned on a Hanukkah playlist. The lyrics of “Light One Candle” left me bawling, which I wouldn’t recommend while driving through lake effect snow.

Light one candle for the pain they endured,

When their right to exist was denied…

What’s the commitment to those who have died,

When we cry out they’ve not died in vain?

But then the Hebrew song Mi Yemaleil came on.

Mi yemaleil gvurot Yisrael?

Otan mi yimneh?

Who can retell the heroes of Israel?

Who can count them?

The English version of the song we often sing changes the translation. We typically sing, “Who can retell the things that befell us, who can count them?” But the Hebrew song is not about a recounting of the too many painful moments in our history. Instead, it calls us to remember, recount, and tell the story of our heroes. Those who stood up to save lives, to shine lights in the darkness. Heroes both within our community and beyond it, heroes like Ahmed al Ahmed, a bystander who did not hesitate to tackle one of the gunmen, likely saving countless lives.

As we gather tonight for the 2nd night of Hanukkah, bringing more light into the world – may this be a holiday when we tell the stories of our heroes, not of our enemies. May the lights we kindle remind us that this is the legacy of our people, and the message of Hanukkah – our heroism, our bravery, our commitment to Jewish values and ideals will outlast all those who live lives filled with hate.

May we know better times,

Rabbi Miriam

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