Kehilla's Vision and Mission 
Kehilla Community Synagogue was started in 1984 by people who wanted a synagogue that would be a spiritual home for politically progressive people who felt no connection with traditional synagogues. As the synagogue has grown over the last quarter-century, it has retained its original vision as laid out by Rabbi Burt Jacobson, our Founding Rabbi. The core of this vision, and central to Judaism, is a spiritual mandate to heal and repair the world by increasing social justice, eschewing war and all forms of violence and aggression, caring for the planet, and exhibiting loving kindness to all. Rabbi Burt understood that this spiritual mandate is central to Jewish life, and thus should be central to the synagogue he founded. Rabbi Burt was also keenly aware of the sense of isolation many people experience in their day-to-day lives, and recognized that tikkun olam (healing the world) also requires creating and sustaining community. Thus, an essential part of Kehilla’s mission is community-building.
For this reason, the Kehilla community is not centered on any individual teacher, but is self-organized to enhance the goals, values and needs of its members. That is why we characterize ourselves as a “community synagogue.” Kehilla stands for the principle that the variety of joyous and also sad experiences that all of us go through in our life journeys – births, deaths, marriages, bar/bat mitzvah, illnesses – do not need to be experienced in isolation, but rather in community. With community support we enable each other to enhance our joyous events and our holy days, and we give each other support and consolation during our times of distress.
 Our liturgies partake of tradition, and also use newer prayer forms that reflect our feminism, our egalitarianism, our concerns for the health of the planet, our spiritual seeking, and our faith, as well as our healthy skepticism. Music, dancing, humor, joy, and meditation can all be found at Kehilla services; the cerebral, the visceral, as well as the transcendent, are all part of the Kehilla religious experience in our search for God or for our inner truths.
In our youth programming – especially in Kehilla School and our Bar/Bat Mitzvah program – our goal is for students to treasure becoming critical thinkers, empowered to develop their own perspectives, understanding the contributions of the Jewish past, while grappling with the values and challenges facing the human community in today’s world.
As Kehilla enters its second quarter century, we recognize that our diversity will increase further and that the character of the community will evolve as the experiences, visions, needs and leadership of a new generation guide us in the next decades. Other Links... |
