As I complete a year as president of the congregation, I think of the adage that there is no ending without a simultaneous beginning.  It reminds me of the math class where Mr. Williams scrawled the formula for infinity on the chalkboard (in the days when teachers used such materials). Suddenly, I quit passing notes around the room and staring at the sun-filled courtyard outside. Infinity? How do you imagine space that begins beyond the point where space, as you know it, ends? To this day, I can’t. My brain is just too small. But from time to time, to remind myself of how it feels to know you’re a speck on a speck in a cosmos you can’t envision, I return to that moment in seventh-grade math class. It’s what the wise folk call “perspective.”

From that perspective, I can tell you that this hasn’t been a smooth year in our synagogue. But I can also tell you that stormy weather precedes sunny skies. Projects for our future abound.  Interest groups in art and literature remain deeply engaged.  Plans are being laid to revamp our audio-visual system so it will accommodate the 21st-century screen, not just for cinema, broadcast lectures and events, but also for including far off congregants in regular committee and congregational meetings, and for joining conversations and study groups around the country and the world on issues of interest to our growing Jewish community. The Sisterhood is reinventing itself. The Long-Range Planning Committee is ready to make concrete plans for our future. The annual “Catch a Star Luncheon” promises an afternoon with great literature and, of course, the Journal Dinner-Dance on September 8 will give us a chance to get away from it all with an evening of dining and dancing.

These projects are ambitious and varied, to be sure, but they share the goal of building our sense that Tifereth Israel is not just a congregation. It is a community in progress. We don’t all have to do the same thing in this community, but each of us can do something to build it.  Perhaps you have felt, as I often have, that you have given what you can, that you’ve reached the end of the road, and the story is over. But the road to community at Tifereth Israel has no end. In a way, Mr. Williams’ messy scrawl sent the same message as Yogi Berra did with his sage advice: when you come to a fork in the road, take it. That seventh grade infinity formula tells us that, if you think you’ve come to the end of the road, your perspective is wacky. Look again.  That’s not the end of the road you’re looking at. It’s the beginning of the road ahead.

—Susan Rosenstreich