2099 Shabbos Celebration
UUs for Jewish Awareness

Speaker: Rev. Elizabeth Lerner and Rev. Rebecca Cohen

At sundown, Rev. Elizabeth Lerner welcomed worshippers of all faiths to the celebration of the Sabbath with a wealth of readings, reflections, meditation, prayer, and song in both English and Hebrew. While many of the celebrants were familiar with Jewish liturgy, a former Catholic seated next to me found joy, enrichment, and peace in the similarity of the liturgy to parts of the Catholic Mass. Peace entered us as Rev. Lee Bluemel led us through a traditional song (or chant) and Rev. Rebecca Cohen read words of wisdom from a modern-day "scroll": an iMac computer.

In a scholarly rabbinic discourse, Lerner introduced us to a monastic community of Hellenistic Jews who lived in Alexandria at about the time of Jesus. This community's philosophy held much in common with modern UU (or Jew-U) philosophy, including equality of the sexes. Then she taught her own arrangement of the traditional song-prayer "Dodi Li" and with her encouragement we sang it in a repetitive meditation of two-part harmony, letting the song infuse us with the holiness of the occasion, before closing with the sunset prayer.

A collection of readings, essays, and liturgy is being collected on the web-site of the Unitarian Universalists for Jewish Awareness, UUJA, http://www.uuja.org/ .

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