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 - Kabbalat Shabbat and Classical Shabbat. The Classical service is currently celebrated once per month. Please check the claendar or call the office for the exact schedule. Evening services are held at 7:30 pm, except on the first Friday of the month or for  Synaplex, when services begin at 6:30 pm, followed by a community dinner or Oneg and other special programming. Morning services begin at 10:30 am. We invite you to join us.

Kabbalat Erev Shabbat is a music-filled Friday night service for tuning the soul. It draws upon an alternative siddur created by Rabbi Chava Koster, with music and readings from all over the Jewish world to welcome in the Sabbath Bride with joy and dance. We begin with niggunim -- melodies without words. The prayers and readings are in Hebrew, accompanied by transliterations, and in English. The following morning we join together in 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 and music, new and old, are familiar within the Reform movement liturgy. By tradition in our Congregation, there is usually a reading on these Friday nights, harkening back to the days when the Reform movement did not hold 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)