Shalom Bayit means literally, peace at home. And, while the Talmudic scholars may tell us that it refers to marital harmony, the Scolnic scholars will all tell us that it refers to Temple harmony. For the past 28 years, Rabbi Scolnic has been counseling us in the importance of keeping the peace, maintaining positive relationships, and releasing personal grudges. While this advice has not always been popular, it works. I know it is not always easy to hear someone tell you to “let it go” when you feel slighted or wronged; but keeping the peace can be more important than personal pride.

In our drive to squeeze maximum efficiency out of every aspect of our modern lives, we have inadvertently developed a new level of laziness. I am referring to, of course, the ever prevalent “app” (short for applications because we can’t be bothered to waste time speaking whole words anymore) that many of us use on our smart phones or tablets. We have apps for games so we do not have to interact with other people, apps to find our way to places so we do not have to get out a real paper map or plan ahead, apps for picking restaurants, apps for condensed news, and of course apps to manage our apps. One of my favorites is a conversion app that I use for work. Now I never have to remember how many BTU’s in a gallon of oil (I am sure everyone has this number on the tip of their tongues) or how many liters in a gallon.

Adapted from the Installation remarks on June 24, 2011

After the July 2010 Board of Directors Meeting, there was an internal workshop to help focus the Board and set some priorities for the year. We divided into two groups and spent an hour discussing our vision for the Temple. A series of questions was used to generate the discussion, the first of which was very basic and broad: What is the purpose of the Temple? Why are we here? After some structured idea generation and discussion, we voted and ranked the thoughts presented to develop some numerical analysis and the results were not surprising.