Glacier Jewish Community/B'nai Shalom is an independent, egalitarian synagogue-without-walls serving the Jewish community in northwest Montana’s Flathead Valley. We strive to create a kehillah kedoshah, or sacred community, that offers the opportunity to connect with other Jewish and Jewish-adjacent people through spiritual, educational and social experiences throughout the year.
Glacier Jewish Community offers a vibrant, supportive, and engaging environment for people to gather, celebrate, learn and grow our Jewish connections. We come from diverse backgrounds and share an appreciation for tradition and creativity. Our tent is open on all sides.
Our community provides opportunities for Jews, our partners, and allies, to celebrate the joys of Judaism. Our activities are designed around the sacred rhythms of Jewish time, and the sacred environment of our Northwest Montana home in the Flathead Valley. All are welcome.
Our gatherings offer both sacred and social connection. We honor Jewish tradition and innovation, in our communal worship and rituals. Diversity is a strength as we create sacred space, inviting curiosity, conversation, and new approaches to Jewish community building.
Here in the Flathead our connection to place guides us. Awe is a natural response to big sky, majestic mountains, clear water, dense forests, and abundant flora and fauna. This is our sanctuary. This place (ha'makom ha'zeh) informs our experience of Jewish time and values.
Join us on August 6 for our virtual book club. We will be reading Rebecca Clarren’s “The Cost of Free Land.”
We are beyond thrilled to announce that Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin will be joining the Glacier Jewish Community as our visiting spiritual leader for the High Holidays this fall. Rabbi Salkin is a rabbi with decades of experience leading services, teaching, writing and working with congregations from Poland to West Palm Beach.
Each year, we begin our seder with our own Jewish sacred story and we end our telling with the universal aspiration of freedom. May we move forward from the joys of Passover, to embrace our families, our community, and our world with the inspirations of sacred stories and a refreshed vision that grows our creativity, passion for justice, and capacity for different perspectives.
Over 50 different individuals showed up over the course of two days of GJC programming for Shabbat Shirah and Tu b’Shvat!
May we each grow our inner light as we display our Chanukah light to the world around us. With our inner light, may we all transmit and receive the blessings of the darkness and its generative nourishment, and may the light we shine outward by replenished, rededicated (Chanukah means dedication), and renewed as we celebrate the Festival of Light this year.
This week, some of us saw the full moon. Jewishly speaking, this was the full moon of Elul, the last moonth before we enter a new Jewish year. And whether we saw it or not, whether we heard about it or not, whether we thought about it or not, the moon was full and is now waning toward the dark fertility of the new moon of Tishrei, the day on which we will begin our Jewish New Year, 5785.
As we entered last Shabbat, our community welcomed three new Jews into our midst. The two adults are people who have been living Jewishly and as part of Jewish community for quite a while, and the distinction between them and those of us who were born Jewish had become as thin as a fingernail.
Last week, I mentioned the change in the Amidah that speaks of the descent of summer’s dew, and how extraordinary it is to see how the flora of the Flathead Valley manages in the dry heat of summer.
In the rhythms of Jewish time, and our biblically derived holy days and festivals, summer is a hot, dry span between the early harvests and abundance of Pesach/Passover and Shavuot (meaning weeks and arriving seven weeks after the second night of Passover), and the late harvest of Sukkot, preceded by our Yamim Nora’im (Days of Awe – Rosh HaShanah through Yom Kippur). So too, in the Flathead Valley.
I have started this Shabbat message several times already. I have been thinking about the confluence of our 4th of July holiday and Shabbat Korach (this week’s Torah portion is all about a populist leadership rebellion).
