Rabbi
	Amy R. Bernstein
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As we begin the secular year there are several learning opportunities that I want to let you know about. As you may recall, I will be teaching an Adult Education class one Wednesday night a month (the week I don’t teach in Religious School) and the third Friday of every month has been designated as a teaching sermon. I am pleased to announce that the first set of Wednesday evening classes will be about early Jewish philosophy / philosophers. We will begin on Wednesday night March 29th and will study the great Torah commentator, Rashi (which stands for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchak) and the environment of Medeival Provence in which he lived. On the May 24th we will discuss Maimonides or Rambam who is among the greatest of Jewish thinkers and the world of Neo-Platonic and Neo-Aristotelean philosophy which so shaped his understanding of Torah and Jewish tradition. At some later time we will study the Modern philosophers including Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Franz Rosenzweig, and the founders of Hasidism.

I will be traveling again with the Rabbinic Council of ARZA to Israel and Egypt where we will meet with diplomats to learn about the current relationship between Israel and Egypt as well as the issues facing each country. There are important discussions taking place since the withdrawal from Gaza and on Friday night, February 17th I will give a talk on what I learned on that trip.

May and June will be the months we study for our own Israel trip and I am planning a six week orientation course for those of you going on that adventure with us. The dates for the Israel Trip Orientation classes are 5/30, 6/6, 6/13, 6/20, 6/27, and 7/5. Some of these dates may change but these are the weeks that we will learn together in preparation for traveling to Israel.

We are exploring the option of a Shabbaton to be held at a location close to Duluth for March and need to know how many people are interested before going ahead with serious planning. The Shabbaton would begin after work on Friday the 17th with a Kabbalat Shabbat service after which we would eat Shabbat dinner together. Shabbat morning we would hold services and then would learn together into the afternoon. We could do either a program or a creative project based on the interests of those attending. Saturday night we would make Havdallah and then have social time together and possibly a program. We would conclude on Sunday, March 19. Please call Kathy if you would be interested in attending such a weekend.

I look forward to rich and rewarding experiences in our learning together in the coming months.

All Adult Education Classes will be held from 6:30 to 8:00 pm

Updated September 13, 2006