Celebrating the Jewish holidays
- Succot (Feast of Tabernacles) -- visits to members' succot
- Simchat Torah--completion of one year of Torah study and beginning of the next year, with joyous singing and dancing to the accompaniment of the Shir Hadash Klezmer band, Shir Madness
- Tu B'Shvat--seder celebrating the new year of the trees, the flowering of the Land of Israel, and related spiritual insights from our tradition
- Purim--reading of the Book of Esther, merrymaking, and original Purim dramatic production
- Shevuot--an evening of short study topics presented by Shir Hadash members
Annual Cape Cod Retreat
A full weekend of elective activities in a beautiful and informal setting, located amid historic cottages on a bluff overlooking Nantucket Sound.
From our retreat coordinator: “Shir Hadash members enjoyed a wonderful Retreat on June 23-25 at the Craigville Conference Center in Cape Cod. The weekend started with our annual bike ride on Friday along the famous Cape bike path to Chatham. The perfect June weather enabled us to hold Shabbat services outside at the lovely pond. We schmoozed, noshed, sang, and walked on beautiful Craigville Beach. Save the weekend of June 20-22 for the 2008 Retreat!”
Tzedakah Night
Once a year, on a Friday night we gather as a community to discuss how to distribute the designated Havurah funds to social change and charitable organizations in the US, Israel, and other places around the world. The process is open, lively, highly participatory, and a lot of fun.
Klezmer Band
Shir Madness, our own eight-piece klezmer band, joins us for Simchat Torah and other holidays to give a blast of high-energy Yiddishkeit, and also plays at weddings, b'nei mitzvot, dances, block parties and other community celebrations, and especially in nursing homes for people who can sing along in Yiddish. The band's repertoire is a mix of Yiddish show tunes and ballads, transcriptions of recordings from the masters of the golden age (Dave Tarras, German Goldenshteyn, Naftule Brandwein and many others), music unearthed while scouring libraries, Balkan and Israeli tunes, and some pieces written by band members.
Chorus
Our chorus, consisting entirely of members and led by a member of the havurah, enhances services, particularly at holidays, with four-part a cappella singing. Our goal is to enrich the experience by making music a central focus, and we have included settings by Louis Lewandowski, Isaac Heymann, Benedetto Marcello, Salamone Rossi and others, as well as new arrangements of traditional hymns and many new settings of the liturgy, written specifically for this chorus by one of its members.
Outings
A number of Shir Hadash members frequently take off together on outings. We do moderate hiking and biking on day trips locally and as far afield as the mountains of New Hampshire. We are always open to suggestions about new places to explore and new activities to try.
Note: the next outing is a hike in the Middlesex Fells on Oct. 8.