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It’s good to see so many of you here tonight. This will be the last time I directly address such a large part of the congregation as president. As many of you know, I was planning to step down at the next AGM, with our vice president, Dee, taking the reins. But due to some changes in my work life, the transition will come a little sooner—Dee will now take over after the High Holidays. I want to thank her for stepping up early and helping me find a healthier balance.

So this is not just a Kol Nidre welcome—it’s also something of a farewell. As I move into the past-president role, I’d like to share some reflections from my time as president that I hope will be useful for us all.

Let me begin by asking—how are you feeling tonight?

Me? I’m tired. Is anyone else feeling tired?

It’s been a lot, hasn’t it?

Being Jewish is never simple—but since October 7, it has been uniquely exhausting.

• We carry concern for Israeli friends and family.
• We grieve for the Israeli hostages and lament the cost of the war on Palestinian civilians
• We worry about the future of Israeli democracy and yearn for peace.
• And here at home, we’ve witnessed antisemitic expression unprecedented in our lifetimes –  in protests, in schools, in cultural spaces.

Not all of us have experienced or witnessed open hatred, but we’ve all heard the stories and seen the statistics, haven’t we?  And, we can’t often talk about it, right? I mean, at work, you can’t answer a polite and well meaning, “How are you doing, today?” with, “Thanks for asking.  As a Jew, I’m hurting today because of such and such news.” It’s like we carry a heavy and invisible burden all the time.

And within that weariness, we also carry a complexity of thought and feeling — especially when it comes to Israel. 

• Some of us feel Israel is fully justified in everything it does. 
• Some have lost faith entirely. 
• Others support some of Israel’s actions and object to others. 
• Some of us are confused or simply overwhelmed. 
• And for many, those feelings change day to day, even hour by hour.

No wonder we’re all so tired.

Here’s what I want you to know: however you’re feeling, you are not alone. For every reaction you’ve had, multiple others in this room have had it as well.  That’s part of what it means to be a community — to hold space for many truths, many hearts, and many burdens.

I’m no different from any of you in this regard and what I’ve learned wrestling with all of this myself is that what matters more than what life throws at us is how we see it and what we do with it.  We can’t control the world, but we can shape our own perspectives and deliberately choose our reactions.

Perspective

I recently attended an excellent anti-hate seminar hosted by the Waterloo Region Police Department. One key insight stuck with me.

Why are hate crimes considered more serious than regular crimes? After all, if someone is assaulted, it’s horrific regardless of motive. It turns out that hate crimes aren’t only about the victim. They ripple outward, sending terror through an entire community.  Psychological studies support this: people who share the targeted identity experience trauma equal to the victim’s own. Therefore, hate crimes are a kind of terrorism. And they are very effective.

Now add to that the reality of modern media. Every antisemitic incident, whether in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, the US, or Europe, reaches us in seconds. Our feeds flood with memes, petitions, and outrage. There is an incident somewhere in the world every week and psychologically, each new incident lands as if it happened next door. No wonder we’re overwhelmed.

But here’s the good news: if our feelings are magnified by constant exposure, then reality, by definition, is less dire than it feels. More simply, things are never as bad as they feel.

That’s not denial. It’s perspective. Yes, antisemitism is real. But so is the fact that we are as safe as we’ve been in 2000 years of diaspora history.  We live in a country that values pluralism and where the local and federal police invest a lot in protection of our community, not just reactively, but proactively as well. As a result, we can safely congregate here together tonight, just as we do every Shabbat, holiday, simcha, and funeral.  

Another insight I’ve noticed, anecdotally but consistently, is that those most engaged in the Jewish community tend to feel the least anxious.

It’s the people who come to synagogue, who volunteer, who light candles and celebrate the holidays, who have mezuzot on their doorposts that seem the least panicked. Meanwhile, those who keep their Jewishness hidden often carry the most fear. We draw courage from practicing Judaism with one another.

Let me share a story to illustrate this.

I was on a plane sometime post-October 7, seated beside an ordinary and unassuming looking woman, traveling alone. After takeoff, she quietly took out a pocket siddur and began to daven ma’ariv inches away from a stranger who, for all she knew, could have been a violent antisemite. I was moved by her serenity.

When she finished, I introduced myself and asked about her experience as an obviously Orthodox Jew post October 7.  I learned that she lived in Toronto. I asked if she was afraid there – in KW, we keep hearing that Toronto streets are unsafe for Jews.  She seemed almost surprised by the question and said, simply, “No, it’s all fine.”

That answer stunned me. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. She had a strong Jewish community. That support gave her courage—not just when surrounded by others, but even in vulnerable, solitary moments like on the plane.

It made me think: if hate crimes impact us all psychologically, maybe every positive Jewish experience—every service, every meal, every mitzvah—serves as a counterbalance. I’ve come to believe that the experiences we create together help rewire the fear we’ve absorbed from the outside world.

What We Should Not Do

Before moving from perspective to action, please allow me to touch briefly on what I’ve learned doesn’t help.

I suspect that if I were to start a real conversation about Israel within this room right now (don’t worry, I won’t!) —not on Facebook with distant acquaintances, but here, among people who know and trust each other—it would be passionate, emotional, and yes, loud. But I would still expect it to be respectful, safe, and humanizing. This would be possible—not because we all agree, but because of the strength of our community and the relationships we’ve cultivated here.

Let’s contrast that with the use of social media as a tool of political discourse. Political psychology tells us that people rarely shift their beliefs through logic, especially from strangers or acquaintances. Almost all of us form political convictions emotionally, then rationalize them after the fact.

You might feel better after posting your “hot take,” but I promise—your “friend” list isn’t listening. If you post on the topic frequently enough, most likely, many have muted you. Your powerful article from Jerusalem Post or CIJA on one hand or B’Tselem on the other may excite people who already agree with you, but they will absolutely not convert anyone who believes differently. Worse, these posts often fracture real relationships.

The same principle applies at the congregational level too. Over the past two years, I’ve been asked to have our synagogue sign petitions or issue political statements about Israel or Canada. We’ve consistently said no.

Why?

1. Our congregation is beautifully diverse. Any statement would align with some and alienate many others.
2. It has the potential to harm external relationships—with Jewish and non-Jewish partners.
3. There’s no real gain. The Carney government is not waiting on Temple Shalom’s official stance on Palestinian statehood.  And Netanyahu is not interested in what the Canadian diaspora thinks about war strategy.
4. We are not the Israeli government’s proxy and are not responsible for their actions. To assume otherwise is itself, antisemitic.
5. For those who want to be active in politics, there are many worthy organizations to join.  But, OUR mission is to foster Reform Jewish life in KW. That’s where we need to focus. We are a refuge—not a battleground.  

What We Can Do

Let me now suggest some things that are worth doing. There are two directions we can act:   inward, by building our own community; and outward, by building strong, trusting one on one relationships and then leveraging them.

1. Strengthen the Jewish Community

This is the predictable part of a synagogue president’s message: renew your membership if you’ve not already done so. But please don’t stop with your own membership. Encourage your adult children to join a shul wherever they live. Invite unaffiliated Jewish friends to come with you to a service or a seder. Reach out to those who’ve drifted away. Remind them what it means to belong.

And yes—if you’re financially able, please increase your donation. This building is now 30 years old and in need of generational repairs. We have a one-third-time rabbi who is exceptional – wouldn’t it be great to be able to invite her to spend more time with us.  And, while I maintain that things are not as bad as they feel, we do need to remain prudent and maintain our post-Oct 7 security expenses.

As we announced recently, 2025–2026 will be a year of building. We’ve launched a one-time capital campaign to fund major repairs and improvements. I’m thrilled to share that we’ve already received over $60,000 in early pledges. Please contribute however you can.

And please have uncomfortable conversations inviting non-members to contribute as well.  They also benefit from our continued health. We have the only egalitarian Jewish space in KW for celebration and meeting.  Our employment of a rabbi is the only reason that there is someone in the region who can officiate a b-mitzvah, a wedding, or a funeral, or guide someone through a conversation process.  Our organization has shown the ability to bring in police chiefs and MPs when we need to be heard and solicit help. Encourage those who benefit from our existence—even from the sidelines— not to take us for granted and support us even if they choose not to join us.

Besides funding, the building needs volunteer work from time to time.  There is not enough t’shuvah in the world for our CMC chair, Steve Goldstone, to forgive me if I neglected to mention this need.  If you are handy and can help in any way with facilities, please email Steve at cmc@templeshalom.ca.

2. Build Relationships Beyond Our Walls

Our lives are busy and sometimes alienated. But now more than ever, we need real human connection. That starts not with debate, but with warmth.

Volunteer with Shalom’s SEAC group or external organizations that support causes you’re passionate about.  Get involved with interfaith groups. Meet with your local MP or police EDI team. Connect with your children’s teachers or school board. Show up as a Jew—visible, thoughtful, and open-hearted.  Start building personal relationships.

But, it’s not just about public engagement.  Intimate engagement is where we have the greatest impact.  Invite Temple members, volunteer partners, neighbors, coworkers, and your children’s classmates’ parents into your home. Talk about your dreams, values, and hopes for our families and communities and not just our lovely Canadian weather. I bet you’ll find we’re not nearly as different as we appear to be from the outside.  Build relationships, shared identity, and trust.

Then, once those relationships are strong, once influence is finally possible, you may find space for harder conversations – take that risk if you can.  Remember that we don’t build relationships from hard conversations; we build relationships so that hard conversations become possible—because true change begins with trust, not tweets.

In Conclusion

To sum up, let me offer six takeaways from these past few years:

1. Things are never as bad as they feel—fear distorts, but community restores.
2. Broadcasting rarely changes minds—but it can harm relationships.
3. Real influence starts with real relationships, built patiently and with care.
4. We can all change the world—one conversation at a time.
5. Jewish strength comes from Jewish connection—from showing up for each other
6. Now is the time to build—spiritually, communally, and materially.

I want to thank you, truly, for the honor of serving as your president. It has been the greatest privilege of my life outside of my role as husband and father. Thank you all for your trust and support these last few years.

May this year bring peace—to us, to Israel, and to the world.

Shanah tova, and g’mar chatimah tova.

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This is the 30th anniversary of our annual High Holidays food drive. Since our first food drive in 1995, Temple Shalom has donated nearly 18,000 pounds of food and over $60,000 to the Food Bank of Waterloo Region. We have provided more than 170,000 meals for our community over the years. Last year alone, with the help of one of our Temple families who matched the contributions of Temple members, we donated nearly $10,000 to the Food Bank, providing 20,000 meals for the many households struggling to put food on the table.

Sadly, however, the need for food only keeps rising. A 2024 report indicated that over 1 in 8 families in Waterloo region were using the food bank. Many of these families were using the Food Bank for the first time.

We can help those suffering from food insecurity by donating generously to the
Waterloo Region Food Bank. Help us make this year’s fast a feast for those whose daily fast is neither symbolic nor voluntary. Please click on the link below to make your donation, or leave money or a cheque in the donation box that will be at the Temple during the High Holidays. Like last year, this year donations will be matched – making your donation go twice as far!

Donate now

Please note that when asked whether you want to “donate as an organization” or “donate anonymously”, you should choose “donate anonymously”. This ensures that the receipt for taxes goes directly to you, the donor.

Mark Pancer & Norm Finkelberg
Co-Chairs
Temple Shalom Social and Environmental Action Committee (SEAC)

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Jeff once told me that what he could remember of high holidays services from his youth was that he understood none of it, except the one part that was done in English – the part when they asked for money. 

As a board member with a tenure over a decade and service leader, I would be mortified if I ever learned that this was someone’s impression of the High Holidays at Temple Shalom. I hope that illustrates the gravity with which I step onto the bimah to ask for your support. We’re working hard to build and maintain a community here, and while the need for that community has grown so much in the past two years, so have the challenges in maintaining it. 

Though I could paint you a very detailed picture of those challenges and Patrick, our treasurer has provided me with all the data I need to draw up enough charts and spreadsheets and projections to cross your eyes, let’s take this discussion in a different direction. Not the what of your support, but the why. 

Why should you support temple Shalom (other than to provide me with a vehicle by which to force people to listen to me speak)?

I could remind you that you need to be a member here for your son to have his Bar Mitzvah here. While true, that leaves thirteen years from bris to bar Mitzvah and then ten or twenty or, god forbid, thirty years from bar Mitzvah to wedding during which you don’t need us, so that’s not a very good argument. 

I could tell that Temple Shalom is a great place to meet people, and that I met my best friend and countless others here. I could tell you that I met the love of my life because of a friend from Temple Shalom. But you don’t have to be a member to come and meet people at Temple Shalom, so that’s not it, either. 

I could tell you the story of a young mother who moved here and whose husband had to be hospitalized and how members of the Temple helped her in her time of need. I could tell you that being a member means that other temple members would help you out if you were in a similar crisis. But there are a lot of kind people here, and they would do that for someone in the community, regardless of whether they were a member.

If the point of membership isn’t to get all of those things and high holidays tickets, then what is it?

The point, my friends, is not to get those things for yourself, but to secure them for the community. Don’t be a member this year because your daughter will have her bat Mitzvah in February. Be a member every year because you want there to be a place in Waterloo for daughters to have bat mitzvahs.

Don’t join so you can make friends. Join because Jews need a place to be friends. 

Don’t join just to get the support of our community, join to help ensure that there is a supportive community for all who need it. 

That is what your membership does here. And by having helped to build and maintain this community, you can take pride in your contribution, you can take solace that it is here for all who need it and you can take pleasure in all of our enjoyment of what we have wrought.

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As I mentioned, Vayikra was the portion I read for my bar mitzvah way back in 1960. Instead of discussing the portion itself, I’d like to talk about some of the developments that have taken place in the Jewish community in North America in the intervening 65 years. A few caveats to start with. First of all, while I think the developments I will mention have been widely felt, they also reflect my own experience, and other people’s experience will be different. Also, I’m not going to talk about Israel or Israel-diaspora relations. Not that these topics aren’t important — they are. But they represent a whole subject area in themselves, and there is much else to chew on. And finally, this morning we read the same Torah portion, from a more or less identical Torah scroll and using a very similar chant, as I did on this Shabbat in 1960, and as Jews would have done in 1860 or 1760. The continuity of our tradition is truly awesome, in the original sense of that word, and nothing I say about change is meant to negate that continuity. But continuity doesn’t have to mean being static.

Soon after my bar mitzvah, there was a lot of buzz in the Montreal Jewish community, including in my high school class at Adath Israel Academy, around a dynamic — and, it must be said, hot — young rabbi named David Hartman. Some of my classmates and I went to hear Rabbi Hartman speak at his modern Orthodox congregation in the then-new suburb of Côte Saint-Luc, and we hung on every word. Around the same time we went to a show at Her Majesty’s Theatre, then the leading venue for English-language live performance in Montreal. The headliner was the comedian Jackie Mason, but we were more interested in the opening act, a liturgical singer-composer named Shlomo Carlebach, some of whose songs we had learned in school.

A few years later, when I was an undergraduate at McGill, my friend Harry Fox told me that a rabbi from Winnipeg who combined the best of Hasidism with the spirit of the sixties would be speaking on campus, and urged me to go hear him. I did, and Zalman Schachter, whom Harry called the Vinnipegger Rebbe, lived up to his advance billing.

Well, David Hartman became one of the leading Jewish thinkers of the late twentieth century and founded the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, whose research and educational work has continued after his death in 2013. Shlomo Carlebach’s melodies continue to be sung in synagogues around the world. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi — or, as he became known to his myriad of friends and followers, simply Reb Zalman — started the Jewish Renewal movement, embodying the union of Hasidic spirituality with the pursuit of social justice. So in the 1960s, I was privileged to have advance notice of some of the significant directions in which Jewish life was heading.

But the most consequential date in this whole 65-year period was June 3, 1972. That was the day on which Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati ordained Sally Priesand as a rabbi, the first woman formally ordained by an institution. She was the first of many women rabbis in North America, Europe and Israel, in the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative movements and even, down the road, in pockets of Orthodoxy.

Women in the rabbinate and other positions of leadership and influence have transformed Jewish life and vastly enriched our understanding of Jewish texts and traditions. Many women have contributed to these developments; I will mention just four who have especially influenced me. Rabbi Elyse Goldstein brought feminist Jewish studies to a wide audience as head of Kolel in Toronto in the 1990s and 2000s and has written and edited some pioneering books on the subject. Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg created a whole new genre of biblical commentary, putting the traditional commentators and Hasidic masters in dialogue with modern psychologists, anthropologists and literary scholars, with stunning results. Rabbi Jill Hammer, through her books and courses and the Kohenet — Hebrew priestess — movement, has drawn attention to the mystical and earth-based dimensions of the Jewish tradition and their connection to women’s experience. And I’ve recently been introduced to the work of Rabbi Dalia Marx and her brilliant insights into the Jewish calendar.

The year after Rabbi Priesand’s ordination, a book was published that crystallized another important development. Family celebrations aside, Jewish observance in the 1950s and early 1960s was very institutional. The large synagogue with a professional staff was the dominant model. In reaction to this, people, and especially young people, formed small groups — chavurot — where they got together to observe Shabbat and holidays. The Jewish Catalog, which came out in 1973, was intended as a kind of manual for the chavurah movement, but it soon spread to a broader audience the notion that Judaism was something you could do on your own. The second and third Jewish Catalogs followed over the next few years, and resourceful, self-reliant communities became an important part of the Jewish world.

Another book that represented a changing perspective on Jewish tradition came out in 1982. Seasons of Our Joy is a guide to the Jewish holidays written by Arthur Waskow, a 1960s activist who became a rabbi and a leader in the Jewish Renewal movement founded by Reb Zalman. What made Seasons of Our Joy special was its emphasis on the origins of the Jewish holidays in nature. In an afterword to a new edition of the book published in 2012, Reb Arthur noted that “the first review of Seasons condemned the book as pagan because it was so Earth-oriented … One important measure of change in the generation since is that today it would be very unlikely for any Jewish commentator to condemn the book that way. All, or almost all, of the Jewish community has come to celebrate, not fear or deny, the earthy aspect of Judaism and the festivals.”

Seasons of Our Joy also highlighted some of the mystical traditions surrounding the festivals. Growing up, I had never experienced or even heard of a Tu BiShvat seder, which is a ritual created by the kabbalists of Tzfat in the sixteenth century. Seasons of Our Joy contains a brief description of the ritual, and in the years since it has become an important part of how people observe Tu BiShvat.

There have been many other changes, but I would like to mention just one additional one: the increasing diversity of the Jewish community. The face of North American Jewry in the 1950s was Ashkenazi, White and straight. There are still many Jews who fit that description, but there are also an increasing number who don’t. Since the 1990s, many Jewish spaces have welcomed LGBTQ+ Jews and recognized same-sex couples as families. People coming into Judaism by choice from a variety of backgrounds — and not only to marry Jews — have made the whole idea of “looking Jewish” or “having a Jewish name” obsolete. Jews with disabilities are another group that have made their presence felt — and I certainly did appreciate our ramp when I came to Shabbat services in a wheelchair for a few months last year.

There was much that was beautiful and warm about the Jewish life that I grew up with. But I sometimes wonder whether that Jewish life, if it had remained static, would have engaged me as an adult. Etz chayim hi lamachazikim ba, we just sang — she is a tree of life for those who grasp onto her. In becoming more feminist, more participatory, more diverse, more inclusive of elements of Judaism that had been undervalued, the Jewish tradition has offered new ways of grasping on for people who might not have otherwise found one. And I’ve been especially fortunate in having, for the last 40 of those 65 years, a spiritual home that has been open to, and sometimes even in the vanguard of, all of these developments: Temple Shalom.

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