This morning, the board had its 8th meeting of the year, and we are well on our way to establishing better structures to support the growth and vibrancy our community is experiencing with more transparency. One part of our meeting was spent planning a major component of next weekend’s community retreat- a series of workshops on Sunday morning to build the entire community’s capacity to be a more effective organization. Retreat participants will be receiving more information about these capacity-building workshops shortly. In the meantime, we wanted to let community members know about a draft proposal we are considering, which will be fleshed out further at one of Sunday’s workshops.

If you are interested in the issue of establishing more clear guidelines for how our community relates to scheduling meetings and events on Shabbat and Jewish Holidays, please consider the following draft proposal and bring ideas for fleshing it out to Sunday’s workshop. We would specifically like to develop more clarity around the question of how we deal with whether community members can plan events (not meetings)  that fall on Shabbat or Yom Tov (Jewish holidays) that may be in keeping with some members’ Shabbat practice, but are not specifically connected to a halachic Shabbat practice.

Here’s what we are proposing be established as official Moishe/Kavod policy:

• We list Shabbat and holidays on the Moishe/Kavod calendar

• We publish the following statement on our website. “Moishe/Kavod House is committed to being inclusive and welcoming. While we do cosponsor some public events on Shabbat and holidays, we are committed to avoid organizing our own meetings on Shabbat or yom tovim (holy days). We ask our leaders to check the calendar and plan meetings on non-Shabbat/yom tov days.”
• We alert our leaders to this statement, and ask them to honor it moving forward. And, when we are posting events on the calendar, we double check that we are not scheduling on Shabbat/yom tov, and if we are, we double check with our leaders to make sure they have checked with their teams.