6.04.2008

Paper for World Religions

This is the paper I wrote for my World Religions Class, in which one assignment was to visit another faith's worship center. Jaimie and I visited a Synagogue. Enjoy!

In the beginning, there was Judaism. Before Guatama Buddha sat under his tree, before Jesus of Nazareth walked the shores of Galilee, and before Mohammed gathered a new community around him, there was Judaism. The historical and ancient nature of Judaism has always appealed to me. Far from being monolithic, Judaism has existed in many forms since Abraham first listened to the whisper of a monotheistic G-d; however, the consistency and continuity of this great world religion reaches further than any other faith tradition that I am aware of. It was with this in mind that I chose to focus my project on Judaism rather than the other world religions we have studied.

Over the past few years, I have studied the Jewish roots of Christianity, the Hebrew Bible, and even mystical trends in the history of the Jewish tradition. Although I have not studied the Hebrew language, I still felt reasonably comfortable talking about Judaism and its constituents. I felt as if a trip to a Synagogue would be a relatively comfortable experience, enriching me while furthering what I thought I already knew. Fortunately, in the process of a weekend worship experience, I found myself challenged to reconfigure my own interpretations of Judaism and my relationship with it.

When I chose Judaism as my study, I first looked at what services were offered. The typical Shabbat (Sabbath) service is the Saturday morning service held in most synagogues. This service is held weekly for the community to gather on Shabbat and celebrate and remember G-d on that the weekly day of rest. There was also the Friday evening service, in which the community gathers to welcome the Shabbat as one would welcome a bride or a queen – this service is driven by the idea that one must set apart the Shabbat day (having a lunar calendar, the Jewish day begins at sundown, and lasts until the Sun sets again). This Shabbat service contains a song written by medieval Kabbalists, and although Kabbalah is not always orthodox within Judaism, this song is a sign of the tremendous influence Kabbalistic practice had on later Judaic practices. It was due to my exposure to Kabbalah through my Monotheistic Mysticism class that I decided to attend the Friday evening service as opposed to the Saturday morning service, as several of my readings regarding the Shabbat queen were profoundly beautiful.

Although the assignment only called for us to visit a worship center one evening, due to my previous study of Judaism, I did not feel that visiting a gathering in the Synagogue would be an adequate experience of Jewish worship. Therefore, I sat down with my wife and we decided to engage the Shabbat experience as fully as possible. We decided to set apart our Friday evening through Saturday evening and to fulfill as many mitzvot as we were able. I believe that the Jews worship G-d through their entire structure and rhythm of living, so we set out to join them in worshipping G-d through our lives as well.

Interestingly, when I began looking at a potential weekend for our Shabbat experience, I noticed a rare occurrence in the Jewish calendar. This year, on the weekend of April 18th, the day before Pesach (Passover) fell on a Shabbat. While this may not seem to be a problem at first glance, one must actually follow extra special rules in order to properly fulfill all of the halakah regarding both Shabbat and Erev Pesach (Passover Eve). With this in mind, my wife and I decided to fully engage this conundrum by having our own Seder family meal on Saturday night. This would entail extra preparation, as the Shabbat proscribes cooking, among other things.

I had high hopes for this experience. I did not know exactly how things would turn out, but I hoped to see my wife and I find elements of the Jewish tradition that we could identify with, bring into our own faith journeys, and use them to better articulate our understanding of religion and the role it plays in our lives. While these were my vocalized – if selfish – plans, my overarching goals for the weekend were to join together with the ancient-modern Jewish community, connect to the deepest religious roots the world has to offer, and to share in their remembrance and observation of their storied and difficult past.

After learning as much as I could about the context of the religion that we were about to encounter, my wife and I set about preparing for our Shabbat and Seder. It is tradition that on Erev Pesach, the firstborns in the family fast. The fast of the firstborn is usually ended at the Seder meal; however, due to the restriction against fasting on the Shabbat, on this occasion the Fast of the Firstborn was moved to the Thursday before Erev Pesach, rather than on Friday, in order to be able to obey the restrictions regarding both Shabbat and Erev Pesach. Also moved to Thursday because of this rare situation was the cleaning of the Chametz (yeast) from the house. Every year on Erev Pesach, the family cleans their entire household of all chametz in order to be kosher for the week of Pesach. This entails even sweeping the kitchen for crumbs, collecting all chametz, and burning it in a ceremony. Here is where we ran into our first stumbling block. My wife and I don’t have a lot of bread in the first place, but we do have many items that contain chametz. With this in mind, we decided to clean our house in a symbolic gesture (pointing to the ritual nature of the cleaning of the chametz). We straightened up and cleaned, swept and wiped the floors and counters, and vacuumed. We did not burn the chametz, sadly.

However, that was only one component of our Thursday night activities. Since my wife works on Friday, and since we were entering Shabbat on Friday evening, we had to cook three meals on Thursday evening in order to avoid cooking on Shabbat. We prepared fire-roasted tortilla soup for our Seder dinner, homemade chicken salad for our Shabbat lunch and a special fish recipe for our Shabbat dinner. After an exhausting night of cooking and cleaning, we went to bed ready to engage our first Jewish weekend.

Obviously, our joining with the Jewish community in worship began when I began my fast on Thursday and when we cleaned the house on Thursday night. By engaging in these practices we felt somewhat plugged in by the time I picked up my wife on Friday evening to drive to the Synagogue. When we arrived at Anshai Torah in Plano a few minutes before the time the service was to start, we both felt a little anxious. I had contacted the Rabbi of this synagogue several weeks prior, but hadn’t heard back from him as he apparently was on vacation the week leading up to this particular Shabbat. As we walked in, we felt immediately unsure of ourselves. I found the bin of loaner yarmulkes for visitors and placed one lightly on my head. We wandered into the gathering place for worship, grabbed a worship book from a large bookshelf on our left, and found our seat in a pew. The pews were laid out in a semi-ovular shape, with the Rabbi’s pulpit in the middle of the pews, creating an effect wherein all of the worshippers were both facing each other, the Rabbi, and slightly facing the beautiful art and windows on the main wall of the synagogue. My wife suggested we sit in the mid-back and left section, close enough to the door that we could make a run for it if necessary.

The congregation seemed sparse as the Rabbi began the service. The service was primarily in Hebrew, with the Rabbi intoning and singing the ancient language. Sometimes he would sing a complicated and quick melody; at other times, the congregation would join him as though they knew the melody. There were no markings in the book to indicate when we were to sing, and when we were to listen quietly. So we mainly just listened quietly. I spent most of my energy trying to follow along with my spare knowledge of Hebrew, attempting to translate in my mind what it was that the haunting and beautiful lines of Hebrew were pointing towards. My wife was more focused on the sounds, as she stutteringly joined in with the congregation by mouthing and muttering whatever words she could identify. At one point, the Rabbi gave a short homily which consisted of a funny story about Jewish identity at holiday times. The Rabbi would also direct the congregation from time to time, and the transitions from instruction to liturgy were at times jarring, as though the fact that we were in Dallas rather than Israel would break through inconsiderately.

The service was long, running for over one and a half hours, and by the end the synagogue was filled with congregants and families. The lady behind us was a visitor in town from Sugar Land (our hometown), so we made small talk about how things were back home. The Rabbi had told a funny story about the process of “Bagel-ing,” wherein Jews “out” each other with clever comments and questions. My wife and I were “de-bageled” several times during the evening. We met several families, most introducing themselves and asking if we were just visiting or had recently moved to town. Inevitably, we spoke of how we were visiting to fulfill requirements for a seminary class. Our awkward position was made slightly more awkward by the fact that neither I nor my wife appear particularly Jewish. We stood out. We felt out of place in the rituals, we did not know the language, and we clearly did not belong. Despite our best efforts to “be Jewish,” we had missed the most important aspect. I know now that in order to more fully engage in the community of Jewish worship, we should have connected with a practicing Jewish family, and participated alongside of them. The unique nature of the Jewish religion is the deep-seeded connection to the Jewish community itself. Nevertheless, as we left the synagogue, neither of us felt bitter or put off by our experience of Kol Shabbat.

As we drove home, my wife and I unpacked what we had just gone through. We both felt that we were outsiders, but we also both felt respect and not a little awe at the strength of the bonds holding the community together. We spoke of Jewish history, and how these bonds are what allowed the Jewish tradition to survive despite vicious and consistent persecution and oppression. Our experience at the synagogue and our conversation after convinced us to take our Shabbat experience even more seriously, and to honor this beautiful and ancient community of faith with our words and actions over the weekend.

Our Saturday morning was restful. We woke up to the sun, and walked a small distance to some shops in our area. We followed certain restrictions, such as not driving or cooking, but did shop a little, disobeying the halakah regarding making others work. Mainly, we ceased from doing on Shabbat. As the evening drew near, we did not feel that we had wasted our day, but instead felt a deep sense of rest. To prepare for the Seder, we both took showers and got dressed up. We set the table, and got out the food. After performing the Havdalah – the ceremony that ends the Shabbat (separating it from the rest of the week) – we began the Seder Haggadah. Having bought the “Concise Family Seder” earlier in the week, my wife and I read through the ceremony, taking turns reading the passages in English that were there and sounding out the Hebrew when it was transliterated for us.

As we tasted the sweet wine, the bitter parsley dipped in salt water, the dry and unleavened matzah, the bitter and sweet charoset (a mixture of apples, cinnamon, nuts, and wine mixed to look and feel like mortar), and the sharp bite of the horseradish, we attempted to remember the past along with the Jewish community. We tried to conjure up both the pain of past injustice and the hope for future peace. We opened our door for Elijah and left a seat open for him. We sang (with an improvised and childish melody) Daseynu, that it would have been enough if G-d had only done a little. We joined together in words and actions with countless generations of Jewish people, these people who experienced the destruction of their homeland, were turned away wherever they tried to make their home, who experienced countless pogroms, and suffered the worst injustices and inhumanity mankind has ever witnessed in the bleak time of the Holocaust. While knowing that our efforts to understand would fall woefully short, our little family began to open the door to a fuller knowledge of and connection with the Jewish tradition to which we all owe so much.

There was no shining moment of recognition, no glorious revelation during our weekend experience. What was left after our experience was instead a residue, a lasting impact that has echoed forward from day to day. Affecting our relationships with each other, our understanding of what real rest looks like, and giving us a deeper appreciation of the difficulties of fully living out such a complicated set of rules, the Shabbat-Seder experience taught my wife and I how to better understand one another as well as the religious other. My wife comes from an unchurched background. I had never empathized with her discomfort in the Christian church setting until I sat discomfited in the Kol Shabbat service. Beyond that, by stretching ourselves and our boundaries, we learned that reaching out to another tradition is not easy, but is utterly worth our energy and time. The worldview shifting experience of living out another culture is a practice that we hope to continue in the future.

In conclusion, the Jewish faith tradition is not for the individual, but for the community. One cannot simply go to Synagogue, say a prayer, and become a Jew. The intricacies of the life lived in Torah-awareness, the deep connections to the historical past of Judaism, and the tight knit community of the Jewish people are not to be found in doctrine or abstract thought, but in practicalities and relationships.
During the Friday evening Shabbat service, when the section of the text called for those in mourning to read along with the Rabbi, our newly met friend from Sugar Land stood along with the congregation to whom she was “only” a visitor. As she read the mourner’s Kaddish, her voice broke, and I could hear the deep emotion coming through her prayer. Despite the fact that she was over 250 miles from her home, among strangers, and speaking in a language not her own, something eternal and beautiful resonated in her prayer. I do not know who she was mourning, nor do I know much else about her. What I am sure of is that her experience is quintessential to the Jewish faith. No matter where one is, how far one has gone, or how much one has suffered and lost, a Jew is always connected to a community that has been, is, and will be an expression of G-d’s mysterious faithfulness through all eternity.

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