Posted on September 12, 2025 by Rabbi Noah Diamondstein
Dear Temple Beth-El,
This is an exciting Shabbat. We are prepped and ready for a festive and joyous Back-to-Shul Barbecue tonight, with tables and chairs set up out on our patio and grills ready to fire. We can’t wait to celebrate our Family Shabbat and welcome so many of our people to Temple Beth-El!
We are also excited to welcome our area congregational partners tomorrow night for a community observance of Selichot, our first ritual confession of the High Holy Day season and a chance to not only wrestle with the liturgy of those chagim for the first time this year, but also to hear the sound of the shofar.
Our Selichot service will look different than in years past! We are going to begin with a Havdalah around our campfire, and then hold the service outside on our patio so that we can welcome the season under the stars. You may want to bring a light jacket! The service will be musical, flowing, and feature teaching from each of our congregations’ rabbis. I highly encourage you to attend, and would also ask that, if you consider yourself a shofar blower, you please bring your shofar to the service! We want the shofar’s sound to really wake us up, and so we’re going to have a whole “shofar section,” if you will. To borrow the Cantor’s joke in our email threads… it should be a blast!
As a final note–one of the traditions around Selichot is that this is when we change the Torah scrolls’ mantles from their usual multi-colored dress to the pure white of the High Holy Day season. The white color implies purity and the fresh start the new year represents. Selichot is a chance for us to formally hit that reset button for our souls, and acknowledge that there are ways we hope to be better in the year ahead. We confess in the collective in part because we understand that this vulnerable act is difficult to do on one’s own. So join us tomorrow; begin to change the mantle of your soul from the splashy colors of a year gone by to the pure-white blank canvas the new year promises.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Noah Diamondstein
