The High Holiday appeal

What you are paying for

• A seat for anybody who walks in. No ticket, no membership, no question at the door — on the two days of the year when almost every other place asks.
• A table every Friday night at the Rabbi and Mussi’s home. Free, every week of the year. Anyone can ask for a place.
• The children. Hebrew School, CTeen, Camp Gan Israel — and the scholarships that mean no family is turned away over money, which nobody hears about because they are given quietly.
• The things nobody sees. A hospital visit. A funeral for somebody with no one to arrange it. A meal delivered to a family in the week after a birth or a burial.

Why now, and not in March

Because this is when everybody is here. A shul that asked its community in March would be asking the forty families who are always here anyway — and the point of these weeks is that everybody comes, including people who have not been inside a shul since last year.

And because the year is decided now in a real sense: what we commit to in Tishrei is what there is to give out over the twelve months after it.

Any amount

That is not a politeness. A shul funded by forty large gifts is a shul that belongs to forty families. Eighteen dollars from somebody who came twice is worth more to this place than the arithmetic says it is.

• $36 — Double chai. A real gift from a family finding its feet.
• $180 — Chai ×10. Where a lot of families land.
• $540 — Chai ×30. A month of the school, or a family who could not otherwise take part.
• $1800 — Chai ×100. Underwrites the whole of one of the things below.

If this is not the year

Then it is not the year, and you are as welcome on Rosh Hashanah as anybody who gave. That sentence has to be here, because an appeal that does not say it is an appeal that quietly charges for a seat. If money is the reason you were thinking of staying away, ring 408-910-2034 and ask for the Rabbi.