Our Sixth Birthday!
Newsletter Aug 17th, 2026 Together, we're #keepingitsacred... "525,600 minutes…how do you measure, measure a year?”
As we know, these are famous lyrics from the Rent song, Seasons of Love. And the song encourages us each to count our time carefully, even cherishing every minute we have on this planet.
This week (on Shabbat!) our community turns 6 years old officially! And that’s a lot of minutes— over 3 million! And in all of that time we have been showing up for one another to make a positive difference. Our time together counts— and it counts for something big and good!
We have had minutes mourning together, celebrating together, doing acts of justice together, and learning together. Minutes dedicating our time, our lives, to this sacred task of building a community of deep personal meaning. And I feel so lucky to get to be there for them.
Each anniversary of our founding, each year on August 21, I love to take time to reflect with you about what engagement in this community has meant to you. And to reflect what it has meant to me. Because the truth is, we each live in the modern era and we don’t HAVE to engage in Jewish community. We can just go about our lives without one another. It’s not the Middle Ages where we are forced to live in ghettos. That’s what makes this extra special. We each opt in and we know we want to be here.
And what a gift it is. To ourselves and to one another. In community, we can share one another’s joys, magnifying them, and one another’s sorrows, diminishing them. We can delight in one another’s observations and perspectives and be valued for sharing our own. The rabbis say that the day you were born was the day that the Divine decided that no longer could the world continue to exist without you. And, so too is it with our community. We each could no longer continue to exist without this special place. And what’s extra special is that our Hebrew calendar birthday falls on the first of Elul! The holy day that requires reflection. It is the first day of the month of Elul. (To calculate your Hebrew birthday, go to: hebcal.com, or email me to ask me). Our ceremony each year on our birthday is to gather, and then to reflect on how our connection to this community or Judaism in general has been meaningful. We do this as a confirmation ceremony— a special time to confirm that this is a place of meaning in our lives.
And this year, we will do this on Shabbat. A time when our community naturally gathers for reflection. Please join us! This Friday at 5pm PT on Friday (if in person) or 5:30pm PT (for those online).
And, those who join or even if you can’t join but would like to be recognized, please let us know, and I’ll happily mail a commemorative confirmation certificate to you. Each year is not a given. Each year participation in community is not guaranteed. So, each year, join us as we celebrate the great pleasure of engaging in community— and that is the best birthday gift ever!
Celebrating each minute of each communal gathering is how we’re keeping it sacred. Together, we’re #keepingitsacred…
Rabbi Heather Miller Founder, Keeping It Sacred |
The above is an excerpt from a Keeping It Sacred newsletter. If you want to read the entire newsletter or any from our archives, please head over to: keepingitsacred.com/news And if you'd like the newsletter delivered to your inbox every week, please share your name and email address in the fields at the bottom of the page in the purple boxes. Thanks for your interest, and thanks for #keepingitsacred… |