Elul 2025: Getting Ready for the High Holidays
In the month of Elul, we have 29 days before Rosh Hashanah to start reconnecting with our inner life and realigning with God and with those around us. FTJC offers multiple ways in to this fertile period of time. Let's really use Elul to enter the atmosphere of the High Holidays, to do our spiritual work, and to set ourselves up for a powerful experience of this year's Days of Awe.
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Singing Circle for Elul and Erev Selichot
Saturday September 13
5:30 PM to 6:30 PM
Atrium
Ease toward the holidays with our new student clergy intern Ruth Engel, a cantorial student at JTS. Ruth will offer a gathering to sit together, learn and sing melodies for Elul, in the mood of Selichot and the High Holidays. No talent or experience needed, just a willingness start opening the heart.
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Selichot: Late Night Service
Saturday September 13
11:30 PM to 12:30 AM
Fellowship Hall (Enter through Garden Gate)
Time once again for this powerful late-night intensification of our preparations for the Days of Awe: a singing, swaying service that brings us closer to the poetry and passion of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
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The Piaseczner Rebbe on Rosh Hashanah
Monday September 15
8:00 PM to 9:15 PM
Zoom
A new online learning series this year with Rabbi Guy. Before attaining posthumous fame as the martyred "Warsaw Ghetto Rabbi" and author of Eish Kodesh, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889-1943) built a Hasidic yeshiva in Piaseczno, Poland and taught innovative Torah that prefigured our own era's Jewish interest in mindfulness, meditation, and contemplative practice. His sermons on the parashah and holidays from 1925-1938, collected as Derech Hamelech, draw on biblical and rabbinic source texts to give insight into topics such as what we do when we pray, how to be a conduit for God's presence in the world, and the deep themes of the holidays. Ahead of each major holiday, R. Guy offers a guided walk through one sermon, using original and translation, and group discussion. Register here to get access to the text ahead of time; impromptu arrivals also welcome!
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Whose Cry Counts: Entering the New Year and the Ethics of Empathy
Tuesday September 16
7:30 PM to 9:00 PM
Arts Room (enter at 729 W 181st Street)
In partnership with the Y and the Pardes Institute, we are delighted to host Rabbi Deborah Anstandig for this class session. As we welcome the new year, how can we approach others—and ourselves—with greater understanding and compassion? This shiur explores excerpts from the Torah readings of Rosh Hashanah, contemporary midrash, and Hasidut as anchors for building our capacity for empathy. Rabbi Deborah Anstandig is the Educational Director of Engagement at Pardes. Before moving to Jerusalem, she spent many years teaching and learning in Boston and NYC--including several years in Washington Heights!
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Wed, September 17 2025 24 Elul 5785
