summer shabbat shalom!

Our attendance at temple this summer has been spotty at best, and every single backyard shabbat we have scheduled has been cancelled. But we manage to keep celebrating. We agree that we look forward to going back to services, and even as we all miss it, I'm not worried at all.

We all miss the lovely feeling of sitting together and reflecting during a service, and singing together, and being surrounded by community, sharing sweets and bits of our lives with cups of decaf coffee. But we have had lots of other wonderful things to do on Friday nights lately!

We do try to gather together weekly (religiously) in the kitchen, we light shabbat candles, we chant blessings for the special time we take to pause and be together, for the wine (or grape juice) and bread, but then we are swept away again as if carried off by the wild summer breezes.

One Friday night this summer found us in NYC with my sister and her children, two days after meeting Max's flight from Tel Aviv, where he spent a month. That night there were no candles lit, no challah torn and shared. The boys had begun an excursion on the Staten Island ferry just after 5pm, and didn't reach Susan's apartment on the Upper West Side until after 8pm, by which time my sister had already served dinner to our aunt and to her own two children. Oops!

The following Friday night I was sitting in the front of a Cincinnati church, performing Vaughan William's The Pilgrim's Progress, an opera about a search for faith. There were some Jews in the audience, whom I had invited to attend, but if there were any other M.O.T.'s among either the 30 singers or the 38 instrumentalists in the pit, I am not aware of it. Anyway, I found the experience very satisying, quite moving, if not spiritual, and well worth the sacrifice of many evenings of family time all month long, as well as yet another Friday night's attendance at services.

Tonight, our family finished an early shabbat dinner of chicken, broccoli, tomatoes and challah and then dashed down to Oakley to celebrate our friend Gina's exhibit of Street Portraits, photographs she and her friend Steve took in December of some of the people who live on the banks of the Ohio river, near downtown Cincinnati. We had missed the previous opening of this exhibit many Fridays ago, when Isaac's hip- hop dance recital (also held in a church) ran too late to allow us to do anything afterwards.

This time, there was s smaller crowd than previously, when I'm told Gina was swarmed by admirers, so, lucky us: we got to visit to our heart's content with Gina, her husband and the youngest of their three daughters. Last Friday, Max and I were with Gina's whole family as we prepared to entertain at their eldest daughter's wedding the following evening.

On the way home, just now, Sam sat in the back of my minivan (Paul and Isaac were in another car, long story) and lined his face up in the center of my rear view mirror so that we could have a chat. I paused first to leave a (relatively) brief message for my friend Jennifer, itemizing my latest ideas about how we are going to go about promoting our cello violin duo to wedding and event planners, and then hung up to resume my conversation with Sam. He asked me to turn the music off so that we could talk more easily, and a moment later we were laughing together.

Just as I pressed the power button on the minivan sound system, a mysterious new tune began to play, startling us both. It was a ringtone coming from my Iphone, the one reserved for unknown callers. Sam listened to me answer and then describe and explain reiki energy healing to a woman in the white VW bug which had just been stopped next to us at a red light, who had noticed the reiki sign on the side of my van.

Sam and I then proceeded to have a great little chat about the infinite source of energy available to us all, that should flow into us naturally and effortlessly through our breath, but doesn't always do so in an optimal way because of the many things that get in the way, that tend to obstruct.

Our flow is good. Shabbat observance may be a bit obstructed, but our family is connected, and we are celebrating. Many signs (back to school shopping, brown patches on the front lawn and empty tubes of sunscreen all over the house) remind us that it's late in the summer, and as much as I savor many things the season has to offer, it's just about time for us to move on, to resume our rest-of-the-year schedule patterns, with Friday night temple services and Saturday morning snuggle time, and hopefully, one or two backyard shabbats before it suddenly gets too cold.