Tifereth Israel Congregation

There Will Be a Retreat this Year!  And a Big Read!

By Susan Catler

Tifereth Israel’s annual retreat will be held January 15-17, 2009.  It will be an in-town retreat.  We are planning a full weekend of activities at Tifereth Israel, beginning with a Carlebach dinner and Friday night service and ending with the "Big  Read" and social action projects on Sunday morning, including ones appropriate for families.  We hope you will spend the entire weekend at TI!

This weekend is our Social Action Shabbaton.  The programs planned by the Social Action Committee will be the core of our retreat program.  It is also the weekend that Kol Nashim will lead much of the Saturday morning service.  The Social Action Committee has invited Professor John Dittmer, Bancroft Prize winning author for the weekend.  He will speak at Saturday morning services and after lunch will chair a panel discussion about health care, the civil rights movement, and the results of that struggle today.  After that, there will be additional presentations and activities throughout the afternoon.  Dinner will be served and will be followed by skits!

Professor Dittmer’s latest book is The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care.  We have chosen this book for our “Big Read”.  It is a book we encourage the entire congregation to read and discuss.  That discussion will occur on Sunday morning after morning Minyan and will be led by Professor Dittmer.  Copies of the book are available for purchase at the TI office.

Why an in-town retreat?  We normally have the retreat in October or November. This year we were unable to schedule it from the High Holidays through the end of December because we had a Bar or Bat Mitzvah every week.  The dates that Pearlstone was available and the other groups we would have had to share with, made another location necessary.  Other sites were more expensive and less pleasant than Pearlstone.  The Board decided that an in-town retreat was preferable to skipping a year and waiting until next November for a retreat.