This week is a special Shabbat. It is our Shabbat that falls between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Our tradition calls it "Shabbat Shuva," "The Shabbat of Repentance," as it occurs during the Aseret Y'mei T'Shuva, theTen Days of Repentance. In the liturgy of the High Holy Days, we read that there are three actions that bring us to a resolution of our overall process of repentance and introspection during this Holy Day season: T'shuva/Repentance (making apologies and resolving not to repeat our previous missteps), T'filah/Prayer, and Tz'dakah/Charitable giving. I would like to draw special attention to the third of these in my message this week.

Having grown up in Vancouver, I have many strong memories that bubble to the surface of my consciousness whenever the Jewish festivals, especially the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, roll around. In the years after my Bar Mitzvah, I remember leaving my house across the street from Douglas Park early in the morning on Yom Kippur to make the trek uphill to the JCC, where my family always davened. It was the old building back then, still with an entrance off of 41st Avenue. Looking down into the gym through the glass windows, I can still see the baskets of plants sitting as decoration in the basketball rims and the red carpeting adorning the gym floor. To enter the gym, we even got to walk down the set of stairs that could not be used as an entry on normal business days. I would look out at the hundreds of people who were there with me, amazed at the size of the crowd in my younger years. Perhaps the most vivid memory that has stayed with me, however, is what the community had placed at the top of the stairs from before Kol Nidre until the end of Yom Kippur: a metallic shopping cart to be filled with non-perishable food items for the Jewish Food Bank.  

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