By Myra Lurie (4-29-09)

Today is twenty days, which is two weeks and six days of the Omer.

 

It is a tradition to count the days between Passover and Shavuot, as we mark our freedom from slavery and celebrate our freedom to accept Torah. This is called "counting the omer." This year we will observe the tradition of "counting the omer" by sharing stories about the many different ways that we have been turned on to Jewish learning, and through Jewish learning to Torah.

Although I attended Hebrew School and Confirmation classes in my youth, some of my most profound lessons about what it means to be Jewish have come to me as an adult.  

My husband David and I love foreign travel and always try to visit a synagogue on our trips. 

In 1984, we managed to locate a shul in Delhi, India, when our cab driver finally understood our request and took us to "The New York Times Church."  Serving a small Jewish population and doubling as the New Delhi Philharmonic's rehearsal hall, the shul's tranquil interior felt strangely familiar, even though it was situated on a noisy street teeming with pedaled rickshaws and wandering animals.  

Some years later, Greek locals directed us through a village, seeking the one elderly woman who kept the key to a threadbare, but still beautiful shuttered synagogue in Rhodes. As the afternoon sunlight streamed onto the worn wooden seats, I could envision Jewish families like my own praying and celebrating together through the generations.

I will also always remember the time that I begged my way into a heavily secured temple that was off limits to visitors in Sydney, Australia following terrorist threats.  When I explained my need to recite Kaddish for my father's Yahrtzeit; the rabbi warmly greeted us into the ornate, gilded, 100-year-old sanctuary as though we were long lost cousins and davened with me. 
 
These experiences and others have taught me and my children that, wherever we are in the world, our Jewish identity binds us together as a community and offers us an oasis of comfort, familiarity and welcome. 

By Myra Lurie

These stories are brought to you by the Temple Emanuel RE-IMAGINE project, an 18-month initiative sponsored by Hebrew Union College, devoted to re-thinking and re-structuring our religious school.