TORONTO — Almost every Jew has a Hebrew name and so does almost every synagogue.
But up until recently, Toronto’s Village Shul was the exception.

At a gala event on Jan. 25, it received its Hebrew name, Kehillat Mishkan Noach.

The shul has been at its current location on Eglinton Avenue West for more than 10 years.

The name was chosen for Rabbi Noach Weinberg, founder of Aish International, with which the Village Shul is affiliated, on the first anniversary of Rabbi Weinberg’s death.

Speakers paid tribute to Rabbi Weinberg and offered his life of humility and dedication as an inspiration for the classes and programs at the synagogue over almost 20 years, as well as for the shul’s future.

 “Boy, do I miss Rabbi Noach,” the Village Shul’s Rabbi Ahron Hoch said in a brief talk. Yet he urged the congregation to use the first yahrzeit of this beloved leader to absorb a lesson in leadership and getting involved in the broader Jewish community.

“As the congregation of the sanctuary of Noah [a literal translation of the new name],” he said, “we can change the world.”

Changing the world – in small and large ways – was the topic of keynote speaker Rabbi Yaakov Salomon. So many of us avoid taking on leadership roles, thinking there’s little we can do, said Rabbi Salomon, a Brooklyn psychotherapist who co-authored with Rabbi Weinberg the book, What the Angel Taught You: Seven Keys to Life Fulfillment. “Rabbi Weinberg would say you can do a lot.”

An incident on a plane brought home the truth of this for Rabbi Salomon when he fell asleep briefly and his kippah fell off. After a frantic search, he spotted it in an unlikely location: on the face of the woman stretched out, asleep, across the seats behind him. Attempting to retain some dignity while reaching stealthily for the kippah, he suddenly realized she was wearing a sleep mask.

He found the real kippah wedged in the seat. The lesson? “Don’t let your kippah become a blindfold.”

A humorous thought, perhaps, but sobering as well for those in our community who might feel that wearing a kippah is involvement enough. “‘I pray, I keep Shabbat,’ they might say. Marvellous!” said Rabbi Salomon, “but you’re missing something.”

The danger, he suggested, is that observant Jews might be blinded to the need to reach out to their fellow Jews, thinking ritual observance is enough.

Jews comprise only one-fifth of one per cent of the world’s population – or, as Salomon said, “basically zero.” Basically zero, yet we account for 25 per cent of all Nobel Prizes and many more accomplishments. We are each so small, he said, yet we each have the ability, and responsibility, to change the world in our own unique way. Rabbi Weinberg, he said, called this the “power of one.”

Rabbi Salomon spoke of an elderly Chassid he met whose entire family was killed in Auschwitz; he arrived in the United States alone and penniless after the war. Sixty years later, the man has between 300 and 400 descendants. “That’s the power of one.”

Rabbi Salomon called Rabbi Weinberg the ultimate contradiction, “both a pragmatist and a visionary, a thinker and a doer, so opinionated, but so open-minded… a fighter and a lover.” Aish HaTorah, the little yeshiva Rabbi Weinberg started in an apartment in Jerusalem in 1974 – against the objections of rabbis who thought teaching unaffiliated Jews was foolish or impossible – now reaches more than a million people each year.

For Rabbi Salomon, Rabbi Weinberg’s life illustrates the contradiction and challenge before every Jew today: living at once with the talmudic thought, “For my sake, the world was created,” and its implications about our own importance, while putting aside any trace of ego – taking off the blindfold – to serve the Jewish people.

The Village Shul, a community Rabbi Weinberg loved and visited often, has been significant on the Toronto landscape. Rabbi Hoch called it an “unbelievable privilege,” watching the synagogue evolve over the years to serve, beyond its own needs, those of the broader Jewish community.

The gala dinner, catered by Eran Marom of nearby Marron Bistro, included a tribute book featuring the photography of Toronto artist Marni Grossman, which highlighted close-ups of objects in the synagogue: a fine detail of the menorah, a corner of the sanctuary’s Jerusalem-stone wall and the fringes on a folded tallit. In an essay in the tribute book, Rabbi Hoch wrote that the new name will “always inspire us to live up to Rav Noach’s ideals.”

Rabbi Weinberg “cared so much about this [Village Shul] community,” said Rabbi Salomon. “There’s no place I’d rather be on his yahrzeit.”