The pandemic put a wrench in a lot of things, and one of those things for us was finding a new synagogue. When we lived in San Francisco, Sherith Israel was our home, but it’s simply too far away to visit regularly, and our life with kids in the east bay means we have less in common with congregants in the city than we’d like. We settled on Congregation Beth Emek in Pleasanton, which also isn’t that close (a 25 minute drive without traffic) but is the closest synagogue with family programs that we find valuable at this stage in our lives, and we’ve been made to feel quite welcome each time we visited.
This year for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we also finally got to attend services in-person! With chaotic young kids, and then last year with some colds sweeping through the house, we were glad to finally take advantage of this opportunity. We started small, by just attending the afternoon family services for both holidays, but it was nice to be back in-person for the holidays, and to start meeting people. We’ve also started on our path to get the boys to weekly religious school there, which we’re all looking forward to.
We also enjoyed apples and honey around Rosh Hashanah, and Aaron helped me make a round challah, which actually came out quite lovely this year!
Celebrations continued when I returned from a work trip as we went over to the synagogue for a young children event for Sukkot. They had a big sukkah set up, and in collaboration with PJ library had a bunch of activities arranged, from a story time to crafts and coloring, followed by lunch.
Kids also got to wave the lulav and etrog with our Rabbi, which Aaron took part in.
The kids were pretty excited about Sukkot and are really interested in building our own sukkah. Timing of my work travel this year made it impossible, but maybe we’ll see what we can do next year.
And unrelated to the holidays but related to family, MJ’s Uncle Dick and his wife were visiting San Francisco recently while on a cruise. Squeezed right between my work trip and one MJ had to leave for, we met them for a lovely dinner on the Embarcadero. I had only met MJ’s uncle once, and he’d never met the boys, so it was nice to get together, even if the boys were on the tired side and were mostly glued to TV on their phones.
Afterwards, we dropped them back at the cruise terminal where the boys were jealous that they got to sleep on a boat, but they did perk up a bit post-meal and were able to be a little social. I’m glad we were able to conclude the evening on that note.