The Shape and Size of a Prayer

Is a Prayer round or square?

Is a prayer more like an email or a phone call?

Is a Prayer very loud or more like a whisper?

Does a prayer make a sound? What sound would a Prayer make?

If a Prayer could take a particular shape, what would a Prayer look like?

Is a Prayer hot or cold?

What does a Prayer feel like, very soft like a pillow or very hard like the sidewalk?

Does a Prayer smell like a flower or like cinnamon?

Is the light that a Prayer gives off more like that of a candle or more like that of the sun?

Does a Prayer taste more like hot chocolate or honey?

Is a Prayer more like the sun or the North Star?
Is a Prayer more like the sun or the moon?

Does a Prayer weigh a lot or just a little?

Does a Prayer fill a whole room or just a small part of the room?

Must a Prayer always be very serious or can a Prayer just be very joyful?

Does one Prayer weigh more than another Prayer?

Is a Prayer smooth like a piece of glass or rough like a piece of sand paper?

Can you hear the answer to your prayer?

If a Prayer fell into your hand, would it land softly?

Sentinals in the Night

The freeway was mostly empty of cars last night as I drove home from work. By midnight, most people have enough sense to be off the roads and at home in bed. As I proceeded home, I had driven past that stretch of the parkway with a lot of businesses on either side of the road and the only illumination came from my headlights and from the freeway lighting mounted on the towering poles in the center of the road. The lights were mounted in pairs, each light facing out toward either side of the road. The pairs of lights stood like sentinels, one pair after another stretching out ahead of me. The yellowish points of light snaked out into the night, sometimes rising, sometimes falling. These sentinels lit my way ahead, undulating to the left and right and then straightening out for a stretch of road. The road would dogleg to the left again or to the right perhaps. I had a sure sense of where the road would go just ahead and I could mentally note that I would need to turn just a bit to the left or right in about a minute. These sentinels were my unwavering guides to what lay just ahead and they marked the way home through the darkness that covered the land on either side of the road.

As kids, you are so very fortunate to have parents who love you and who want only the best for you. At least for awhile, they will be there for you, like those streetlights were for me on the freeway. Your mom and dad will be there to guide you and offer you advice as you get older and prepare for the time when you will be expected to live on your own and to make your own decisons independently.

As you have probably already figured out, the world can be a pretty confusing and complicated place. Everything is not necessarily what it seems to be. In some situations, you will have a difficult time deciding which of two possible choices you should select. So many things are just so unclear or just a complete mystery. However, for the moment, your parents can help you to make good choices and good decisions. They will be there for you when you need them. And if you make a mistake or screw up, they will love you just the same. When they were young like you, they made mistakes too. But they learned from their mistakes, just as you will learn from your own mistakes.

They are the sentinals who will help you to see the path ahead into the future. Your mom and dad are the sentinals who will enable you to one day be able to leave home and to go out into the world, living on your own... living independently. For now, they will light your way to that day.

Questions to Answer:

1. What does the word, sentinal, mean?

2. In exploring the role your parents play in your lives, what is the main idea of this passage.

3. How are the streetlights on the freeway like sentinals?

4. Do you think that comparing your parents to sentinals helps you to understand the main idea of this passage? Why or why not?

Prayer in Our Lives: A Way of Connecting

This year, Town Meeting HCRJ will focus on helping us to understand the place of prayer in our lives.

We will explore what it means to pray. We will explore how we psych ourselves up so that we are able to pray. We will will talk about the reasons that we sometimes need to pray. In our sessions we will think about how we are supposed to be feeling at the time.

What exactly is prayer? Consider the following definition. "Prayer, like plugging in an electrical appliance or logging on to the internet, is a way of connecting. We may not understand how electricity or the World Wide Web work, but we still benefit from using them. Likewise, when we pray we may not at first understand to whom we are praying, nor how we might be answered, but by daring to make that connection..." we can begin to make some sense of the things that are happening to us in our lives. We can begin to figure out who we are and where we fit into the world. Prayer enables us to find strength that we did not know we had, to find hope when life gets a little bumpy and to learn how to forgive ourselves and others when things get screwed up.

We will also learn something about how we can use time, as well. These days we live very busy lives, with too much to do and not enough time to do it. Being so busy, it is easy for us to sometimes neglect the things that are most important in our lives, like spending time with our family, being considerate of the feelings of other people or setting aside time for the things that make us feel good about ourselves.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel called the Sabbath "...an island in time." Why do we need an island in time? We set aside a part of the Sabbath to find a quiet place and time where we can just think clearly. We have a lot of issues and problems we have to deal with every day. Setting aside a block of time away from the television set or the computer gives us the opportunity to sort things out. When we have these conversations with ourselves, it isn't a lot different from praying. We are connecting with ourselves and in the process keeping things real.
Learning how to make prayer a part of our lives will enable us to connect to ourselves as well.

This may all seem a lot to be taking in. Even adults have a problem fully understanding the idea of prayer and how praying works. So let's just take this adventure in learning one step at a time and see where it takes us. Come with good questions and your own take on things and share those thoughts with us.

Once again, welcome to Town Meeting this year. Hopefully this will be a very interesting and rich experience for all of us.

Kindest regards,

Howard Fireman

"Putting It Together, Bit by Bit"

Each of us is a work in progress, throughout the journey of our life. We evolve and grow over time. We change course many times, never really sure if we are actually taking the right road. The day we die, we are still a work in progress, incomplete and unfinished.

Somehow, this very idea is not an entirely satisfactory notion. We live our entire lives never fully certain of who we are or what we should be doing with our lives. When we are younger, we dream of the wonderful things we will accomplish. Over time our dreams change and our realities may be very far from the one's we saw for ourselves when we were young. We experience many moments which are pleasant and empowering. We also experience in the course of our life not a few disappointments. And during the entire journey, we are never fully certain where we are going to end up, or even when we will get there, wherever that is. With all these uncertainties, how are we to make any sense of all this?

Consider what we do when we solve a jigsaw puzzle. First, we find the pieces with straight sides and the corner pieces. We then proceed to construct the outer border of the puzzle, creating a space which did not exist before we put all the pieces in place. Then we match pieces by color or a line in one piece that merges with a line in one of the pieces already in place. And we find the pieces that fit together. One by one, we build the image in the jigsaw puzzle, the image that the pieces that were separated hid from us. And we continue on, doing this, until we find the last piece remaining and put it into the puzzle.

The only difference between the way a person builds a life and the way we solve a jigsaw puzzle, is that people are never completed. We never live long enough to put in that last piece because there is always a new last piece, every day that we are alive. Our lives are always changing and we are always changing, so there never is a last piece. But otherwise, the two ideas are pretty much alike. In both cases, we are constantly looking for the right piece that fits into the puzzle, at the place and time that we are in the process.

Our lives develop one step at a time, right before our eyes. Even if we don't know what is coming next, we can always look ahead with the hope that good and wonderful things lay ahead for us. Of course, that isn't always the case. But with the coming of each new day, we learn something new, we meet new people who come into our lives and we have new experiences that broaden our understanding of who we are and what our world is all about. Somehow we manage to integrate these ideas, our new acquaintances and new experiences into our lives, figuring out what is a good fit for us and what isn't a good fit. In the process, we change, evolve and grow as a person.

In this life, there are no guarantees for any of us about how things are going to turn out for us. Every day,we have to fit new people, new information and new experiences constantly into our lives, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This is a really random process. However random it is, though, it still seems to work well enough for most of us. Most of us are able to make the journey without too many serious incidents. The uncertainty factor is just part of the equation. We just have to understand that with each coming day there are going be new puzzle parts that we are going to have to somehow fit into the jigsaw puzzle that is our life. And that pretty much is just the way it is.

Welcome to the Town Meeting HCRJ

I want to welcome each of you who is becoming a new incoming member of the Town Meeting HCRJ for the 5767 academic year. You will find that this will be unlike most classes at Sunday School of which you will be a part. TM-HCRJ began as an experiment last year to create a learning enviroment in which our students could become more active participants in the process of learning.

We have tried to create a learning community in which each participant could explore the rich ideas and values of Judaism in a way that they could relate those ideas to their own lives today. And we have tried to create a community in which each of us receives the respect for our ideas and perceptions that we are due. And each of us is expected to afford our fellow members of our community the same level of respect and consideration.

We are each making a journey through our lives and we will be travelling together for the next nine months. Let us help each other to better understand what is happening to us in our lives and our world. Hopefully, over the next year we will begin to learn what it really takes to make a community a success.

In Judaism, the idea of community is one of the most important considerations that affect how we carry ourselves from day to day and year to year. Each of us is a part of a community at every phase of our lives. This year we will all be part of a very exciting community in which we will get to know and value each other and in which we will learn and hopefully have a lot of fun in the process.

Again, welcome to Town Meeting HCRJ. Each of you will undoubtedly play your own important role in making the coming year a great success.

Kindest Regards,

Howard Fireman
Teacher/Moderator