I'm so glad to be back, finally, from all my traveling this summer, but I want to wrap up my summer's worth of stories by telling you about the most remarkable experience I had last week on Shabbat.

Joan and I were in Vancouver, where I served a congregation for thirteen years before moving down to California. (We were in California for three years before coming to Shelter Rock.) We went back for the wedding of the daughter of very good friends and I was especially pleased that they invited me not only to attend, but actually to perform, the ceremony. And, in the end, it was great—the bride was beautiful, the groom was handsome, the meal, the dancing...all of it was just lovely. But that's not what I wanted to tell you about exactly.

On Saturday morning, I went to my old shul. It felt odd, a little, walking in after all these years, but also gratifying to see how well they are doing and how nice the sanctuary looked. I started there twenty-one years ago, so the boys and girls in my first bar- and bat-mitzvah class are all thirty-four years old now. I left eight years ago, so even those boys and girls are in their twenties now. Many of them are married—most, actually, are—and a lot of them have married other people who grew up in the community. Others married people from other places, and then settled in Vancouver. (Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, I believe...so it's not hard to imagine why people would want to settle there.) And then there were still other couples who don't live in British Columbia, but who were in town for the same wedding we were there xt week's Torah portion, the one that opens up with Moses looking out at the Israelites and noting that he can see those standing before him and also those not standing before him. The commentators wrestle with who those ones not standing there are...but Rashi's answer is the most widely accepted: that he looked out and saw the minions of Israel yet to be born, yet to come into existence, generations that would thrive centuries or millennia in the future...all gathered in some spiritual sense together on the edge of the Promised Land and all bound inextricably together as one people serving the one God. In the end, the eternal nature of the Jewish people doesn't depend on individuals living forever, but on the willingness of young people to step up, to marry, to produce children to take the place of those who are no longer present on the earth. I felt that so keenly in shul last Saturday, almost as though I could see the generation shifting before my very eyes. It sounds like it might have been a strange experience, but, at least mostly, it was thrilling.

I wonder about the boys and girls I meet at Shelter Rock as bar- and bat-mitzvah children preparing for their big days and excited about stepping across the line into Jewish adulthood. Will they be in shul in twenty-one year with their husbands and wives...and with their babies? Who knows? All we can do as a community is to work together to create a place that will draw them back, that will make them want to step up to that sacred plate and take their place among us not only as the children of parents, but also as the parents of children. None of my own kids is married yet...and who knows what the future will bring for any of us? But, especially as we prepare to hear those opening lines of this week's Torah portion in shul on Saturday, we can redouble our efforts to do what it takes to encourage our young people to understand that, in the end, there is no higher calling than taking one's place in the chain of tradition that links the generations of Israel one to the next.

Sincerely,

Rabbi Martin S. Cohen