by Barbara Cohen
Kiddush is an important part of community and our community is what makes kiddush work. But it doesn’t just happen on its own – kiddush happens when members of the community step up and make it happen. There are three ways you can do a mitzvah: (1) you do the shopping and setting up and cleaning up without the expenditure of buying the food (Kehilla will reimburse you), (2) you can sponsor a kiddush which means you write a check to cover the cost of the kiddush and others will do the labor or, (3) you can Host a Kiddush! If at all possible, we encourage you to host one!
Host a Kiddush! It’s a mitzvah, it makes community, and you earn avodah hours all at once!
Who doesn’t want to do a mitzvah, create community for yourself and others, and earn avodah hours all at the same time? Sounds sweet, right? It’s easy: host a kiddush!
Here’s the deal: Kehilla has regular services roughly 7 times a month. Some of these services are b’nai mitzvah services with built in kiddush hosts but the rest are not. When we have no kiddush host the work falls on the staff and service leaders to buy the food and to organize the offerings, and then, after working so hard to bring us support and spiritual uplift, they have to do the cleanup too. That’s just not right!
What can I do, you ask? You can host a kiddush! It really isn’t hard and the benefits are many: you create a richer opportunity to interact with others (yay!), a greater selection of food (yum!), and our staff is relieved of one more thing that they are otherwise required to do (yay again!).
The Spiritual Life Practices Committee and the synagogue leadership encourages each member of the community to step up to the plate. Host a kiddush—- you will earn 5 hours of avodah credit, you will enrich the lives of many, you will have fun while you do it, and you will be a hero for a day!
You can host so many ways: do it alone! With a friend! With your chavaruh! We have easy to follow directions giving you all the detail you need in order to get the job done smoothly and easily while providing a great service to the community. Kiddush hosting can be great as a way to celebrate the birthday of yourself or a loved one or honor the memory of a relative who has died by hosting near that persons’ yahrzeit. Or for no reason at all other than to give to the community.
Remember that we are each required to perform avodah hours- a ten hour commitment of time. Host a kiddush once a year and half your hours will be spoken for.
Let us come together as a community and agree that a hosted kiddush is a more enjoyable kiddush than an unhosted one. But for us to have hosted kiddushim we have to step us and host a kiddush!!
Ready to jump in? To reserve your date for any service between now and the end of 2019, please contact our kiddush coordinator Jan Herzog at kiddushsponsor@kehillasynagogue.org. Whatever you can do, your participation is appreciated!