From the Rabbi

It is with gratitude for the opportunity of what will be 36 years of service to the Jewish people that I announce to the congregation that I will retire at the end of June, 2009. Life’s transitions always provide us moments for reflection, and I, indeed, will spend much of the next two years in such public reflection.

I was the youngest rabbi ordained by the Hebrew Union College in 25 prior years and, as is the trend in so many endeavors today, I will retire young. But all cannot be reflections, reminiscences, and past memories. Just as I seek new avenues for serving the Jewish people creatively and in different modes, so do I work together with the membership and leadership of Congregation Beth Shalom to help plan the future direction of the synagogue.

Who we are as Beth Shalom members is a reflection of American Jewish life today. "Labels" of a prior generation of "Conservative" and "Reform" are meaningless at best, or reflect such individualized self-definitions as to confound any commonly understood objective criteria. We are in so many ways what contemporary Jewish thinkers call "post denominational". We are in that wonderful creative tension of how extensively halacha and tradition influence our lives versus the personal autonomy that liberal Jewish thinking allows. In the area of "reflections on three decades", the greatest change I have observed, in fact, is a movement from a statement "we are Reform Jews and we do not keep kashrut, do not wear those things on our heads, do not wear those boxes on our arms, etc.", to "we have over 3,000 years of Jewish tradition from which to preserve, adapt, and apply to our lives".

It is most positive that Beth Shalom already has in place a feasibility study to assess the effects of changing demographics, aging facilities (it will be a contest to see who retires first - another compressor or me), and fiscal challenges. These next two years promise to be times of great energy guided by committed and creative leadership. As much as I look forward to the new "autonomy" (to use that theological term in another sense) retirement from the full-time congregational component of my career brings, so do I also look forward to helping shape the future aspirations and facilitate the many complex decisions which await the congregation.

I express my deepest appreciation to all of you - members and leadership -for six wonderful years of partnership so far, even as we anticipate two years of stronger bonding through common Jewish values and goals. With warmest wishes for a Happy Purim.
– Rabbi Ned J. Soltz