On Friday 26th and Saturday 27th July we will celebrate the memory or Rabbi Friedlander z'l, who served our community for many years.  Join us after the Shabbat Morning Service, to learn some of Rabbi Friedlander's teachings with Rabbi Benji, as we enjoy Shabbat lunch together.

“Immediately Compassion was stirred up,”
(Lamentations Rabba, Proem 24)
- finding an emotional appeal in Rabbi Friedlander’s teachings
and a Rabbinic short story.

We will find guidance in what to look for in literature from some of Rabbi Albert Friedlander’s teachings, woven into his groundbreaking 1968 Out of the Whirlwind: A reader of Holocaust Literature. We will then apply such an approach to a Rabbinic short story in which our Rabbis explore who and what can move God to give us hope. In the creative Rabbinic commentaries of Lamentations Rabba (Proem 24) our Biblical ancestors testify one after the other in order to move God to relent and bring us from suffering to redemption. As God is eventually moved, we hope that we will be too. This Oneg will also introduce us to the annual Three Weeks of Mourning in our calender, that bring us from recalling the breach of Jerusalem’s walls to its destruction, and which will have just begun. This year sadly has further poignant resonances of destruction, and we hope our learning will help us feel these, and feel for hope beyond them.