Worship With Us

Worship at the Village Temple is participatory and joyful. Friday evening and Saturday morning Shabbat services are held weekly, throughout the year. We celebrate two different types of Shabbat services that alternate weekly  - Kabbalat  Shabbat and Classical Shabbat. Evening services are held at 7:30, except on the first Friday of each month when services begin at 6:30, followed by a community Shabbat dinner. Morning services begin at 10:30. We invite you to join us.

Kabbalat Erev Shabbat is a music-filled Friday night service for "tuning the soul." It incorporates an alternative siddur created by Rabbi Koster, with music and readings from all over the Jewish world to welcome in the Sabbath Bride with joy and dance. We begin with niggun -- melodies without words. The prayers and readings are in Hebrew accompanied by transliterations, and in English. The following morning, is our Oneg Shabbat service. Continuing in the same prayer book, we participate in the morning service, with music designed to wake us up, physically and spiritually in stages, as we approach the Torah service and closing prayers.

Classical Erev Shabbat service uses the traditional Reform siddur, Gates of Prayer.  Our prayers are music, new and old, are familiar within the Reform movement liturgy. By tradition in our Congregation, there is usually a Torah reading on these Friday nights, harkening back to the days when the Reform movement did not have Saturday morning Shabbat services. Our Classical Shabbat morning service follows the Reform siddur and musical style, including the Torah service and closing prayers.

Ours is the task to pray with mouths, hearts, hands and feet. Israel is the tree, we are the leaves. It is the clinging to the stem that keeps us alive. Judaism is a theology of the common deed, dealing not so much with the training for the exceptional, but rather with the management of the trivial. By focusing on the world around us, by defending those in lesser positions, the trivial itself acquires a measure of holiness.
(Based on Abraham Joshua Heschel)