Sffeet
Dream

In his sixth decade, Dick Sweet chants Hebrew from the Torah
... for the first time.

LYNNE MEREDITH COHN
Staff Writer

along fine [just] being a member."
. Reform because we haven't changed. I
But when the shul moved to West
have found personally that the beauty
Bloomfield, the Sweets went shul-
of the services compensated for the
shopping. They ended up, shyly, at
fact that they're not Conservative.
Shir Tikvah, worried about its
But really what makes the difference
Reform affiliation. But "there
is involvement."
was something about it," he
Sweet has led summer services
Dick Sweet: in the absence of Rabbi Arnie
says. "Everybody was singing,
Reading the
the services were very beautiful Torah,
Sleutelberg and thanks to the
and spiritually uplifting. I was finally.
rabbi's tutelage, he has helped
mystified."
lead davening during shivah
Nowadays, the Sweets may
visits.
have moved to a less traditional
When he's not involved with the
denomination but they are more
congregation, Sweet spends time with
Jewishly involved, he says.
his family. Shirley works in a dentist's
"At first, it bothered us to say we're office and also teaches youngsters
about computer skills
through Computer Tots.
Between his two sons, ages
33 and 35, there are four
grandchildren between the
t ages of 4 and 9.
"Shirley is largely respon-
sible [for my yiddishkeit] —
I come from a nonpracticing
family. Shirley comes from a
practicing Jewish family,
brought Judaism into our
home, largely enforced my
reaching the point that I
did," Sweet says.
On Yom Kippur, he kissed
the fringes on his tallit, then
chanted in Hebrew. It would
have been enough simply to
finish the portion, which
Sweet did. But afterwards, a
surprise awaited him.
Rabbi Sleutelberg
announced before the entire
congregation that the day
marked Sweet's first reading
from the Torah; he asked the
members to sing a
Shehecheyanu of congratula-
tions.
When the congregation
again fell quiet, Sweet turned
to his 9-year-old grandson,
Jeremy. "You did great,
Zayda!" Jeremy exclaimed. 11]

.

e never thought he'd do
it.
Back when Dick Sweet,
62, became a bar mitzvah,
it was standard in his Conservative
synagogue to read the Haftorah, not
the weekly Torah portion. So it really
was a "dream come true" when he
finally read from the Torah on Yom
Kippur at Congregation Shir Tikvah.
"I wanted to read from the Torah,
but I never really believed that I
would be able to," says Sweet, a
Huntington Woods resident,
father of two and grandfather
of four. "It really comes
down to commitment."
The General Motors elec-
trical engineer says it took
him about three months to
learn the portion — even a
month before Yom Kippur,
he wasn't sure he could pull
it off.
Admittedly, Sweet was
scared. "I was afraid ... llft
there, shaking, praying not
to make a fool of myself, but
the joy of doing — I don't
know how to put it into
words. I guess what it taught
me was you can learn to do
these things if you commit
yourself to doing it."
Sweet grew up in Toledo,
Ohio, a member of a
Conservatively-affiliated, sec-
ularly-practicing Jewish fami-
ly. He graduated high school
in 1953 and later came to
Detroit because of work. He
and his wife of 40 years,
Shirley, first belonged to
B'nai Moshe.
"Many Jews who affiliate
with temples or synagogues
are not necessarily very ritu
alistic," he says. "I Went

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11/21
1997

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