We met for our usual July service theme – the brilliant joy of berries coming ripe in the summer – during a time of worry and grief. Our liturgy moved back and forth between praises for the world as it is, grief for the world as it is, and worry about the world to come.

You can read our full liturgy here.

A note for when the history of these times is written – only a few hours after we finished, someone shot at Donald Trump at a rally in PA. Writing this the next morning the story is far from fixed, but when we say we are praying together in a perilous time, this is exactly what we mean.

We brought back three songs we hadn’t used in quite some time:

Melanie DeMore’s “Lead with Love/Morning After Election Song,” first written in November, 2016

Jennifer Berezan’s “Praises for the World” note – we’ve changed the first two lines of the third stanza, as the original are based in a culturally Christian world view:

Original: Some predict the rapture where we all will leave this place
The chosen ones will pack their bags for somewhere out in space
Fringes: Some have always preached about a world beyond this place
dismissed this life as mortal, only sorrow, only waste

And, searching for the just right song to fit the summer theme and also the powerful resistance of truth-telling, Malvina Reynold’s “God Bless the Grass.” (Don’t know who Malvina Reynolds is? You should!).

For Torah study, Elliott taught the story of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai escaping from the besieged Jerusalem to re-invent Judaism in Yavne in 70 CE, then we discussed, at this time of peril, what we want to save and how we might do that. It was a powerful discussion that still only scraped the surface of this urgent question. We’ll circle back to this again in the fall.