If you were to envision someone at synagogue trying to get you to come to services more often, I doubt the picture would look appealing. Not that there is anything wrong with telling you why it is important to connect to God and community. (If there is, I am definitely in trouble!) But I wonder how often one might read or listen to an attendance appeal and infer a bit too much Jewish guilt. How often might one of us help you feel as though, by not coming to synagogue, that you are doing something just plain wrong?
What if I told you that your reasons for not showing up might be perfectly valid, even righteous?
No, I am not referring to health reasons, great difficulties, or a conflict with extraordinary life circumstances. I would hope we all know better than to feel guilty about something so obviously understandable. (Plus, our inner Jewish mothers, tissue boxes and chicken soups at the ready, would certainly insist on taking care of family and health first!)
Rather, I am talking about broader concerns that might prevent one from coming to services at all. How many of us wonder what we really get out of communal prayer? Or Jewish liturgy in any form? Are we supposed to pray because God hears our prayers, answers them, and makes the world a better place for our having shown up to services? And what do prayers even mean? Why center our prayers on Hebrew words when we mostly speak English, Spanish, or other languages? Even looking at a translation, do the ancient concepts in our siddurim, our prayer books, even have relevance to our lives today? Isn’t it disingenuous to call out in God’s name without really appreciating what you are saying?
I can address some of the above with the beauty of what our community already has. First, we are enormously blessed with a congregation as warm as any I could imagine. Multiple backgrounds and perspectives come together in a place where we spiritually and emotionally support each other and learn from each other. Many of those that show up for most services struggle with the meanings of the words. But they take comfort in engaging in sacred rituals because they provide connection to our legacies and to each other. The questions and discussions on Torah and other readings are rich and enlightening. And when (all too frequently) we are concerned for the ill of our community or for troubling events in the U.S., Israel, or elsewhere in the world, we have a respectful place to come together.
All that said, there are far more answers and many more reasons and ways to connect to our services and community. It is high time we explore them.
I will begin with the central piece that we’ve been talking about: The Miller Introduction to Judaism classes, in affiliation with the American Jewish University. All the most fundamental subjects of our religion are covered in this incredible learning, such as why we care about the Sabbath and holidays, how our legacy evolved from Biblical to Rabbinic to Modern understandings of our history and religious code, how we reckon with our faith in a post-Holocaust world, what the many Jewish approaches to prayer are (or can be), and so much more.
This is a high-quality, weekly, 18-session course the synagogue must pay an affiliate fee for and that normally costs several hundred dollars for each attendee. To make it accessible to everyone in the community, and to help others come to our synagogue, we are keeping costs down to $100 for each TBE member family and $175 for non-member families. That works out to be less than $10 per class. Classes will be held every Sunday at 9:00am, usually by Zoom for everyone’s convenience, but will include three or four sessions held in person so that we can connect more personally, and especially to facilitate learning of a physical, emotional, or liturgical nature.
We are offering these classes because we are interested not only in giving you more reasons to come to services, but also in helping you connect with Judaism in your home and throughout your life. If you have been sitting on the sidelines, spending money on dues and donations and reading these newsletters or emails, just knowing that there is something about our collective religious identity worth preserving, but not able to connect to it personally to your satisfaction, this is the perfect opportunity to bridge that divide. And for those of you that have been fully engaged, that may have much knowledge and Jewish learning, trust me, there is much more to appreciate. I attended this course in my twenties after growing up in Orthodox full time day schools from preschool to high school and it still opened my eyes as to what Judaism could be.
But we are not stopping there:
1) I will be recording a few video lessons to introduce some basic concepts of prayer. This will include a discussion on the Shema—our most ancient of prayers, and a foundational mantra for our beliefs. What does it really mean? Why do we say it so frequently and so centrally? How does reciting it actually give us benefit? In fact, I will not wait for the Miller classes to begin to launch this: if you are reading this article from a hard copy of the Clarion, the first lesson should hopefully already be up on the website. (A huge shoutout here to Sara Loaiza and Ara Najarian for their incredible work on that website! Check it out, please!)
2) I will also be giving lessons on how we handle the central prohibition against “taking God’s Name in vain.” What does that really mean? How do we approach prayer and our religious lives in general without fully knowing what we are saying or doing? Is that even okay? How do we balance respect for the Divine with our need to engage in our inherently imperfect (human) way? I will also invite thoughts from all of you about our various struggles with genuine religious connection.
3) In connection with the broad Jewish education supplied by the Miller classes, I plan to teach specific liturgy and conduct weekday (probably Sunday) prayer groups wherein we both pray and discuss what the prayers mean to us. This will likely be a multimedia endeavor, continuing the video format above as well as incorporating discussions and prayers over Zoom and some minyanim in person. As beautiful as Sabbath services can be, weekday services have the ultimate liturgical means of channeling our most burning worldly desires.
4) And we are looking to schedule Hebrew classes! Everything from the basics of the Hebrew alphabet to decoding and reading. Prayers can theoretically be in any language, but there are very good reasons why we prioritize the language of our ancestors. No translation is perfect, and the beauty of the Hebrew words (and the music that goes along with them) just cannot be captured the same way by English or Spanish. Don’t worry, nobody is expected to give up on translation entirely! But consider this your opportunity to connect more deeply with the basic building blocks of our liturgy and holiest texts.
And more to come, God-willing. Did you miss getting a chance to read from the Torah or lead prayer for your Bat or Bar Mitzvah? Then come to the liturgy and Hebrew learning and we will add classes for the musical and memory skills you need to celebrate in the best of ways! Do you want to learn more about Rabbinic scholarship and what all those super religious folk are fascinated about all day in Yeshiva? Then come to the Miller classes and we will thereafter select a tractate of Talmud to pour through! Do you want to get a religious debate rather than political partisanship on Israel or any number of “hot” topics? Come learn the basics with us and then we can really go deep, with all the warmth of our wonderful community.
Jewish learning will always feel potentially unlimited. And that’s a beautiful thing. But it doesn’t have to always feel emotionally overwhelming. The learning initiatives I outline above are designed to provide you with enough to feel connected, to help you find meaning in our prayers and our legacy, and to encourage you to ask for more. Wondering, “What’s in it for me?” is okay too. You should have opportunities for personal satisfaction, support, guidance, pleasure, and other means of enriching your life as a result of participating in religious endeavors.
To answer an earlier question with a bit of a non-answer: whether or how God answers prayer is heavily debated. But most Jewish liturgical scholars and philosophers (and myself) agree that even the act of prayer, especially informed by a serious attempt at understanding the richness of Jewish liturgy, has enormous potential for our mental and spiritual health, even practical direction for our daily tasks, all independent from direct Divine response.
And, yes, ultimately, these learning opportunities are not just for each of us as individuals, but also for the synagogue as a whole. It is no secret that TBE has struggled to have a minyan (quorum of ten for formal congregational prayer) for quite a while now. Yes, we need more people to come, including but not limited to more of the folk that receive this newsletter. But trying to get people to just show up, divorced from any personal sense of meaning or connection, is morally and spiritually bereft and is ultimately unsustainable.
So, I ask that you give real meaning a shot. Participate in as much learning as you can. Tell us more about what you need or about your own struggles. And I hope that you will then find reason, for your community and for yourself, to come to more services. If not, hey at least you learned, maybe questioned. It doesn’t get more Jewish than that.
Michael Feldman
