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Rabbi’s Message, from February 2007 Bulletin: TBY has been working on making our building into our home for quite some time. For many, it has always been a place of comfort, sanctity and worship. The space of TBY has been made sacred by the people of TBY doing sacred things together in our building. The memories housed in this space – holidays, Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrations, weddings, shared meals, and countless more – these are the memories that make a home. More than anything else though, a home becomes the way that we contribute to our community – a space that we share, and then pass on to those who come after us – TBY has spent many years deliberating how to improve our home, and preserve the memories housed in our space, and the Board has come up with a plan that I believe will make all of us proud. This is a plan that will attend to our current needs as an expanding community, and hopefully meet our needs many years into the future. The plan to expand our building is incredibly exciting – I truly hope that many of you have spent time looking at the plans in January, and if you haven’t, they will be around all through the coming months as well. Many people from TBY have worked hours and hours on trying to incorporate all of our communal values and hopes into this project. Your suggestions over the last few years have all been considered, and hopefully included. Even more than the practical needs for expansion, a number of other important ideas about our building have emerged that are worth sharing. A home should reflect our values, and so the Board wants to make our augmented space feel as welcoming and warm as we imagine ourselves to be – offering members, guests, and visitors a sense of both our community family’s friendliness, as well as a sense of the physical beauty of Tahoe. We hope to incorporate some of our highest values, like those of energy and environmental conservation into our new addition as well. I hope that our new addition will also enable us to continue to participate in serving our broader communities by being better able to host social action projects that address issues of poverty, homelessness, and hunger. By improving our Jewish community, we should be able to improve our larger community as well. Please feel free to contribute your suggestions to any of the people involved, all of whom deserve our most profound gratitude for their efforts. The project manager for the Board is Joel Brody, Alvaro Velasquez donated his time as architect, and the active members of our Building-Planning Committee are: Eileen Brody, Addie and Michael Chernus, Matt Levitt, Carol and Rich Matera, Bob Mueller, Michelle Sarnoff, Craig and Laura Schorr, and Naomi Zimbler. I hope that all of you anticipate the new possibilities for TBY with our expansion and get involved – there are many ways that each of us can contribute, and in true TBY fashion, we hope to do this all together. I look forward to seeing what the future brings to TBY and our home. All the best to all of you this month. |