We met for the shabbat morning that begins our 18th year.

As I spent the week trying to wrestle too many ideas into a service, I kept letting that number swirl around in my mind. I find it hard to believe that 2007 was, in fact, that many years ago.

That we’re still here, both who we were and ever-renewing.

That, as a group that self-defined as non-Zionist, in some part because Gaza had already become an open-air prison, we are watching a genocide take place there, in real time, that all of our protesting seems to unable to stop.

How is THIS the world into which we enter our 18th – our Chai – year? As part of the service, we asked everyone to introduce themselves and say how old they were in 2007. That age ranged from 9 to 60. The range of life experiences everyone brings to our prayer services is one of the great strengths of our once-impossible-monster of a havurah.

Because of the cycles of violence in Palestine and Israel, and the terrifying politics in the US, and the realities of global warming crashing down on us, Fringes services have always balanced joy and grief – that’s one of the great strengths of our havurah, where sorrow and fear have always been welcome alongside joy and praise. Today was no different, as our liturgy praised the world and acknowledged our fragile balancing act between celebration and grief, always with our longing for wholeness running through all of our words. Read our liturgy here.

For our Torah Talk we’ll be taking stock of what is has meant to be a non-Zionist havurah, and what it means in the world now.  If you’ve never read our founding statement about why we chose to define as non-Zionist, now is a great time to discover it.

As part of liturgy, to try to find a metaphor our brains can grasp, we included this video of a demonstration by the group Led By Donkeys, which used children’s clothing, one item for each we know has been killed in Gaza and in Israel, and laid them along a beach in England, stretching for more than 3 miles.  Watch it here.