blogs/rabbi-huberman

This week I want to share a story, about one of the most exquisite synagogues I've ever prayed in.

It was built in a day.

That day was January 5, 1991. At the Sheraton Sawridge Hotel in Fort McMurray, right at the top of Canada, materials began to arrive. It was forty below zero.

Fahrenheit or Celsius? When it's that cold, it's forty below no matter how you measure it. But it didn't matter. No one was paying any attention to the weather.

Indoors, in the main ballroom, Chris-a carpenter and a dear family friend-was tearing the guts out of a portable clothes closet. This would serve as our holy ark. As we entered the ballroom, we could hear Chris's saw buzzing as he hollowed out the core.

Under the direction of my brother, the hotel staff was hard at work positioning three hundred chairs to face eastward, towards Jerusalem.

When Chris's wife Jody finished inflating scores of balloons, she conscripted our daughters to help her place prayer books and photocopies of the weekly Torah portion on each of the chairs.

The hotel manager was signing for three hundred kosher chicken dinners and challahs that had arrived moments earlier from the Fort McMurray Greyhound station.

Hotel staff wielded a blowtorch through the main kitchen under the supervision of our rabbi, who koshered it as hundreds of new dishes were carefully removed from boxes.

The Torah, borrowed from a synagogue three hundred miles away, stood propped on a cushioned chair, covered by my father's tallit.

Hours later, Patte and I were wed in what is still recognized as the northern-most Orthodox Jewish wedding ever held in Canada.

Our little synagogue was built from the