Finding a Spiritual Home : How a New Generation of Jews Can Transform the American Synagogue

by Schwarz, Rabbi Sidney

• ISBN13: 9781580231855
• ISBN10: 1580231853
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-09-01
• Publisher: Jewish Lights Pub

Summary

Like countless others of their generation, many contemporary American Jews have abandoned the religion of their birth to search for a spiritual home in other traditions.

Table of Contents

Preface: My Path	ix
Acknowledgments	xxi
PART ONE Can a Spiritually Homeless Generation Revitalize the American Synagogue?
Debbie's Path	3	(8)
Synagogues and the New American Jew	11	(19)
The Emerging Synagogue-Community	30	(23)
PART TWO A Reform Congregation Wrestling with God
Nate's Path	53	(7)
Congregation Beth El, Sudbury, Massachusetts	60	(23)
Joan's Path	83	(12)
PART THREE An Orthodox Community That Welcomes a Plurality of Voices
Carole's Path	95	(8)
The Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, Bronx, New York	103	(24)
Philip's Path	127	(10)
PART FOUR Building Community Through Empowerment in a Reconstructionist Congregation
Elaine's Path	137	(6)
Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation, Bethesda, Maryland	143	(25)
Nancy's Path	168	(13)
PART FIVE Dancing in the Aisles at a Conservative Synagogue
Mark's Path	181	(7)
Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, New York	188	(22)
Tova's Path	210	(11)
PART SIX The Spiritual Possibilities of the American Synagogue
Aviva's Path	221	(5)
Creating the Synagogue-Community	226	(25)
The Challenge of Transformation	251	(12)
Epilogue. If You Can't Find It, Create It: Ten Strategies to Transform Your Congregation	263	(6)
Afterword	269	(4)
Discussion Guide	273	(2)
Notes	275	(6)
Glossary	281	(4)
Bibliography	285	(8)
The Author	293	(2)
Index	295

Excerpts

Chapter One

DEBBIE'S PATH

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, my mother taught me to say a nightly prayer. She would remind us: it had to start with "Dear God" and end with "Amen," and we had to be grateful and not ask for too much.

    I would lay on my bed, face the ceiling, and clasp my hands with fingers interlaced. My mother warned me not to place my palms and fingers together, flat, Christian-style. I figured that was how God knew which religion you were from.

    I developed a formula prayer, which changed little, depending on what I longed for or feared on that given night. First there was a section of thanks. Then blessings. Then requests. Then random observations. Then self-blessing. Then "Amen." A typical night's prayer went something like this:

Dear God,

Thank you for my mommy and daddy, and our nice house and my room and all the food we get to eat. And thank you for the mouse trap game I got for my birthday.

Please bless my mom, my dad, my brother, Mama and Papa [my grandparents], Aunt Homa, Uncle Norman, ... [this part could get very long].

Please end the Vietnam War. My mom has been crying about Mrs. Elson's son, who died there. And please help find a cure for MS. Please.

The lake and the whole area around it at Jonathan Dickinson State Park are really beautiful. We went there on a field trip the other day. I went to that park a long time ago, when my father thought he could still drive. I sat in the back seat and my mother bit her lip and switched places with my father, letting him sit behind the wheel. He drove only a few minutes, swerving dangerously because of his tremor. My mother was scared, almost seemed angry. They switched again. That was the last time I remember him driving. I don't know why I got into that. I just wanted to thank you, I guess, for that beautiful part of the park.

Let myself be a good girl.

Amen.

    As I got older, the prayers would leave me crying, tears burning the back of my neck. This went on until college, where my roommate slept in a bed only three feet away from mine and I was too embarrassed to clasp my hands or mutter anything. I started praying silently, but I always fell asleep in the middle of the blessings section. And so, by the age of eighteen, the prayers ended.

    Despite the nightly appointments with God, I was not raised as a practicing Jew. My mother wouldn't have any part of it.

    Girdled by hardship, my mother found no solace in organized religion. My father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when her youngest child was four. My father's family in Tehran refused to dispatch the money he had invested in several business ventures. They disapproved of my mother and assumed she was lying about his disease merely to force the capital out of them. "You're a whore," his family said to her face. "You wear pants and go to work." Ultimately, she gave up on them.

    She was going to make a living with her God-given skill, sculpture. Her family said she was nuts. But she took fine care of her husband, raised us admirably, earned enough money, and became an internationally known artist.

    Instead of finding peace in religion, my mother turned to tolerance and love. She was a hippie without knowing it. While most Jewish mothers gently advised their daughters, "It's just as easy to fall in love with a Gentile as it is with a Jew, so don't put yourself in the situation where you might fall in love with a Gentile," my mother would say, "It's just as easy to fall in love with a Gentile as it is with a Jew." Period. Having lived in a Muslim country as a child and seen friends and relatives jailed or killed because of differences of religion, she clung to a wish that all people could believe in the same God, a God she believed existed. She worked to forgive her husband's family, she befriended African Americans, gay men, and people of all religions. She identified with diversity, with assimilation --and I did too.

    So I grew up knowing no Hebrew. I never read the Torah, sat through only a few services on the High Holydays because we were visiting extended family, and felt the only difference between the Christian religions and Judaism was that we had plain God and they had Jesus-God.

    But I kept saying my prayers. And my father, in his quiet, steadfast way, always reminded me that I was a Jew. In North Palm Beach, Florida, my brother and I were the only Jewish kids in the elementary school. Although my parents did not mind us singing "Jingle Bells," eating candy canes, or helping friends decorate their Christmas trees, my father had his limits.

    One Yom Kippur when I was eight, my best friend pounded on the door. "Can you play?" I looked beseechingly at my mother. My parents looked at each other. Mother turned and threw me a stern look. "No," I told my friend, "I can't. It's Yom Kippur. It's the Day of Atonement." "Of what? " "You're supposed to mope around and think about all the things you've done wrong," I said. And I shut the door. I can still remember standing at that door, shutting it on my very best friend, on a beautiful sunny day, perfect for playing kickball. I remember feeling different, maybe special, but more confused and left out.

    In college, I fell in love with a boy from a distance. He was playing soccer, and I didn't know that he was Jewish. Later, when we would talk late into the night about Machiavelli and Mill, when I was already in deep, I learned his family was observant, traditional, very Jewish. He became my first step toward discovering my own religious ancestry--and it was pure luck. But then again, some say there are no coincidences.

    This boy, now my husband, was groomed to be a rabbi. And yet he ate a big breakfast on Yom Kippur and took second helpings of ham at the dining hall. This he would never tell his parents. But he did tell them that he no longer believed in a Jewish God--or any God for that matter. So started my Jewish learning.

    Somehow my boyfriend still identified himself as a Jew and couldn't completely let his parents down. Let his parents down? Wasn't telling them that he didn't believe in God worse than eating on Yom Kippur? According to my mother, God was the center of everything. And religion was supposed to be a spiritual thing. Not just a cultural point of identification. Not an "I eat matzah, you eat matzah, isn't that great!" sort of affair. Praying was supposed to elicit cascades of meaning, revelation, humility, and graciousness. All those times I came as a visitor, tiptoeing into my friends' massive churches, I searched for people experiencing epiphanies. I was confused.

    At my husband's parents' shul, I surveyed the faces. Often they were mouthing the words to the songs while nodding to friends across the aisle. "What does that prayer mean?" I would ask, hoping for a translation of the Hebrew. But they didn't know. At Passover, I asked if God could really be so cruel, particularly with the killing-of-the-firstborn bit. Are we really so chosen? What about Mother Teresa? Isn't she chosen? Why do we pray to this God like a "king"? What's this servitude thing? Why can't religious women be considered part of a minyan? Why don't women really belong? They didn't have the answers I hoped for.

    In the San Francisco Bay Area, many of the Jews we met bought Christmas trees, stuck a piece of matzah into their child's lunchbox to show they remembered Passover, and might attend Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur services as long as their kid didn't have a soccer game. Identifying oneself as a Jew, in a Jewish community, which was graciously acknowledged by a larger, non-Jewish community was, at best, difficult. And I noticed that. For some reason, I felt a loss.

    Then the symptoms started to pile up. It was after ten or so years in California that I started to realize I had no home. We moved several times when I was a child. Three places in New York, two in Florida. After I left for college, my mother moved once more. The small house in Florida, where I lived during high school, had been leveled. An elaborate Spanish thing had been squeezed onto the tiny lot. My mother drove us past this empty memory, barely pausing when we came upon it, and I felt a dark ache in my gut. Soon after, my aunt, who also moved many times, informed me that her beautiful old colonial home in New York, where I had spent many childhood summers playing with my cousins, had also been demolished. During a visit, she invited me to drive by the site with her. "Maybe another time," I said.

    I was among the most fortunate, yet I was homeless, spiritually lost, a refugee from my past. In my "homes" and my religion, I didn't belong. I would gaze at the beautiful brown hills of Marin County, across the sparkling bay from San Francisco, and long for something else. As insane as it was, I needed those big deciduous trees, the humidity, the mosquitoes, the low sun, the snow, the politically incorrect lawns. I needed these parts of my past to reconnect, to feel that ecstasy I knew so well at a sniff of a freshly cut grass.

    My husband and his siblings would pile into their childhood home for Passover and remark, "Oh, Mom you changed the wallpaper in here!" or "Does Mr. Segal still have that vicious dog?" I would watch them and notice, in the casual way they loped up the familiar stairs or in their automatic knowledge of exactly where to put the chametzdic plates (the dishes that observant families put away during the Passover holiday). They remember who they were. I don't know who I am because I can't see who I was.

    What had become the most important thing in my early adulthood was not Judaism, as it was in my in-laws' lives. It wasn't security, as it was in much of my extended family. It was choices. It was designing a life that guaranteed as many choices as possible. As long as I could choose to live somewhere else, do something else, try another coffee shop, read another book, change my job, change my mind, I thought I had it made. It was kind of like picking out chocolates. Bite this one--nah, it's got that runny raspberry stuff inside. Maybe that one? No, too sweet. This one? No, pecans. My addiction cornered me into nowhere. And I came to see that it's not such a good thing for life to be like a box of chocolates.

    It was no small feat for me to admit that rules did not mean constraint and that commitment to a place did not produce a trap. The first step was in moving to Sudbury, Massachusetts, finally buying a house, telling our friends they could write our address in their books in pen, planting my herbs cultivated from seeds not in containers but in the ground, and joining a congregation. We had never done any of those things.

    The congregation was critical. My husband shopped around, visiting all the synagogues within a tolerable radius. I couldn't shop. I didn't know anything. I wouldn't know brisket from pork. "Beth El was different," he said. "They've got a gender-neutral prayer book. Some people wore jeans, some wore a tallit [prayer shawl], some davened [prayed] in the corner, some cried, you know. They all wrapped their arms around each other at the end. Beth El was interesting." We asked neighbors. "What about Beth El?" "Beth El?" one neighbor shook her head. "It's way too touchy-feely for me. But then again, coming from California, you may like it." Oy.

    And so I checked out Beth El. I sat silent during the High Holyday services. I didn't know any songs, any prayers, but no one seemed to mind. People seemed content, generous. They had come not because their parents dragged them or because they would feel too guilty if they hadn't. No moping around per se. Kids tripped over each other. Friends held one another's infants. The cantor smiled as she sang. And she was a she. Music was not an accompaniment to "more lofty" activity; it was the vehicle for getting there. The beauty of her melodies and the congregants' communal voice rivaled my best moments listening to a Bach cello suite, but with something very large hovering near it.

    The rabbi gave a sermon I still remember. And he was funny. He described scenes from the movie Groundhog Day to weave a message about responsibility and everyday presence. None of the rote seriousness that characterized the other services I'd seen. But at the end of his talk, all the congregants were breathing deep, biting their lip, thinking hard about how they would make the next day worth living. Rabbi Kushner stirred my emotions and my intellect. Without pomp or pretension, people listened, learned, and prayed honestly. I may have even noticed some epiphanies.

    I saw families, singles, aged, lesbians, gays, and even one African American couple. The congregation seemed to accept anyone who was sincere in his or her spiritual quest. The prayer book hadn't just substituted God for all the masculine pronouns referring to God but had also incorporated midrash [Talmudic stories] about the silent women of the Torah. Women belonged. They were considered part of a minyan , they read from the Torah on shabbat . The rabbi, I learned, had performed commitment ceremonies. He regularly participated in a council composed of clergy from other denominations. And he never talked in "we-they" language. My mother might have approved.

    The next week, I attended an informal class the rabbi taught on basic Jewish thought. He adjusted his polo shirt and jeans, waited for everyone to sit, and asked, "How many people here believe in God?" Only half the group raised a hand. "What's your conception of the divine?" I had come to the right place. Someone was going to ask my questions.

    What is God in the Torah anyway? God's not on the throne. God is out there and in here. At the same time. Forget the patriarchal duality between inside and outside. God can be a he/she force in and around us that elicits the power and love within ourselves. Who actually wrote the Torah? It's all God or it's this author, that author, this author. You decide. You two disagree? It's OK. Prayer block? Let's interpret. The Garden of Eden is a parent-child separation myth. Crossing over to Egypt is part of the "gaining awareness" myth. Tzedek [justice] and authentic spirituality are inseparable. Shabbat is a "be here now" proposition, not just a time to tape the refrigerator light off.

    The kindergarten religious classes had been asked, What is God? "God is parents." "God is fake." "God is the sky." "God is shapes (with pictures)." "God is a man with a white beard." And they put all these answers on the board. All of them. For all to see. All the choices.

    At a Friday night service, a friend nudged me, discreetly nodded toward a middle-aged man. "Only one who survived the Czech death camp," she said. Then the congregants started singing "L'cha Dodi." I watched him. He was very attractive. He wore a hint of a smile, or maybe it was a constant expression of revelation, perhaps appreciation, as he looked around for his wife, listened, and felt the warm comfort of the sanctuary on a cold January night. But he didn't sing. He kept looking, and I realized, he wasn't looking for his wife, or for anyone. He was looking at all of us Jews, singing together without the threat of being found, dragged away, tortured, or killed. He was looking, fully aware of how lucky we all were to be together. And he was probably aware like this every shabbat . Every shabbat . The song returned to the refrain, and the congregants sang joyfully, without restraint, reaching hypnotic intensity. I turned back to the survivor. His eyes were closed, his head down. After a few moments, he slowly rubbed his entire hand over his face, as though wiping a memory. He returned to looking. I started to sing.

    I had never done anything regularly. Routine had always tasted like death. But we started to light candles on Friday nights. We made a big dinner with a dessert. And we did it every Friday night. I did it. I was the one who bought the challah, made the meal, lit the candles, covered my eyes, sang. It felt odd at first--an add-on, a peripheral, an upgrade, designed to allow meaning. Soon there came to be a difference between routine and ritual. A routine ritual did not have to be routine at all. At first, just marking cycles of time enabled me to connect. To connect with who I was at the last ritual, with what I thought, with what I hoped for. And to remember. Like meter in poetry or structure in a story, I need those rhythms to make sense of the poem, the story. Rhythms define our lives. The narrowing of choices had already brought some meaning, had allowed me more than before.

    But why the Jewish rituals? Why not Catholic modes of spirituality, as my brother had embraced, or connecting through the Buddhist way, as one of my dear friends had? Well, for once, this answer was obvious. I already had a place here. Here in Judaism. And a history. It was the only home that hadn't been torn down.

    We were back at Saturday morning services at my in-laws'. I watched my husband's mother. What goes through her mind while she recites the Amidah? I wondered. At home, she has eight shelves full of Jewish literature, teachings, memoirs, and Holocaust history. She has read all the books. What goes through her mind indeed? If she didn't know what this prayer said, so what? She had found a connection, a guide for living a life of integrity. She felt something I longed for. We each have our own path.

    At the next service at Beth El, it was time for the Sh'ma . Through so many services I had watched people, many of them now friends, their hands over their faces, singing this powerful prayer, its musical phrases, the sounds of the words. I had watched and listened, not even contemplating the meaning. I had watched, but I didn't pray with them. Finally, I pressed my fingers to my face. And the emotion welled up. I had cautiously avoided even mouthing the words, somehow knowing their power, afraid. But here I was, chanting them aloud. Senselessly, I shielded my face and said the words, the words I did not understand but knew by heart. " Sh'ma ... " They filled me with comfort, intensity, groundedness, joy, connection--for "no good reason" and for many reasons. It had become the same with the Kaddish, at my stepfather's funeral. " yisrael ... " And the same with my father's yahrzeit [anniversary of death]. And the same with the lighting of the shabbat candles. There is a history, a belonging, a feeling of something larger than me. Even though there is much I don't believe, hook, line, and sinker. Maybe I will, when I learn more. Maybe I won't. " adonai eloheinu, ... " But I see the thousands of years of Jewish intelligence, inquiry, and teaching, glinting like a jewel not so far away. " adonai, echad. "

    The congregants continued to pray, chant, hum. I felt grateful for my healthy children, a loving partner and friend in my husband, and all the people in my life whom I loved and who loved me. Thanks. I marveled at the fact that I could live comfortably and wished that the indigent and war-stricken of the rest of the world would one day know my peace. Blessings. I hoped for comfort for my mother, peace for the Bosnians, and safety and good health for my children. Requests. And then my mind wandered to the pond behind our house, the blueberry bushes wild and heavy with tiny fruit. And I said, "Let myself be a good girl. Amen."

Copyright © 2000 Sidney Schwarz. All rights reserved.