Tag: Synagogue

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Rabbis Reform Judaism

I Didn’t Build It

Showing visitors or newcomers around the synagogue, I hear the compliment, “What a beautiful temple!” I respond: “Yes, and I can brag about it, because it was all here, just like this, when I got here a couple years ago.”

Congregation B’nai Israel was founded in 1866. I was called to Little Rock as rabbi in 2013. I am responsible for none of the congregation’s many blessings, the edifice being only one. Whether marveling at the congregation’s outstanding youth engagement, magnificent worship music, or extraordinary level of volunteer commitment, I am constantly reminded that I have very little to do with what makes this synagogue terrific. No, nobody else says, “You didn’t build it.” Those words come from a voice inside my head, in contrast to how I regarded my role at my previous congregation.

That other synagogue had been serving its community for 118 years before I came on the scene. Still, by the time I left, 21 years later, I wrongly viewed the congregation as largely my creation. I could even cite examples: By 2013, even the historic edifice had been altered substantially since 1992. I had been significantly involved in the building’s development, and certainly in dramatic changes that ranged from worship style to youth engagement.

But I didn’t build that other congregation, either. Its magnificent Sanctuary was constructed before even my parents were born. Its worship style would surely have evolved with a different rabbi in my place during those two decades.

We rabbis regularly refer to the synagogues we serve as “my congregation.” If challenged, we would defend ourselves: After all, members refer to the place as “my temple.” Why shouldn’t we? The possessive pronoun doesn’t really designate possession in this case. Or does it?

Because of what I’ve learned from my study of Mussar with Alan Morinis, I recoil from referring to Congregation B’nai Israel as “my congregation.” Yes, I feel at home here, perhaps even more than I did in my previous congregation, a development I couldn’t have imagined in 2013. I hope to be here until retirement. Still, I reflect on the daily affirmation we recite when practicing the middah (soul-trait) of anavah (humility) in programs of The Mussar Institute: “No more than my place, no less than my space.” I don’t call B’nai Israel “my congregation,” because I have come to believe that it denotes an unhealthy level of rabbinic ownership, taking up “more than my space.”

This past summer, Congregation B’nai Israel remodeled its offices. Now, one corner of the building looks different than it did when I came. I had something to do with that: The rabbi’s study wasn’t sufficiently private – not so much for me, as for those who come to meet with me. Still, I am acutely aware that two volunteers did not execute my vision, but rather turned a problem I articulated into a solution that addresses issues I hadn’t even noticed. The result is both beautiful and functional in ways I couldn’t have imagined. The same is true of positive developments that range from worship style to youth culture. (Sound familiar?)

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Rabbi Barry Block serves Congregation B’nai Israel in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Categories
Rabbis Reform Judaism Social Justice

An Introduction to the Jews of the South: A Good First Impression

The president of the congregation met me at the airport. It was late summer, 2000, my first visit to Hebrew Union Congregation, my new biweekly student pulpit in Greenville, Mississippi. No sooner had we pulled away from the tiny terminal, past the defunct air force base, onto the access road, than we were pulling off again, into a cotton field in full bloom. I had never seen anything like it. Next thing I knew, I stood waist-deep among gently bobbing plants, an undulating field of white stretching to the horizon, the green leaves beneath like a sea obscured by bright foam.

“Have you ever picked cotton?” he asked.

“No.”

He urged me to pull one soft boll for myself. I asked if this was his field. He laughed, knowing from a lifetime of Mississippi autumns that soon, during the harvest, the roads would be paved in white, stray cotton blowing along the lane markers, fields still generously tipped with snowy fibers, as if awaiting gleaners.

“It’s okay to pick one,” he assured me. I hoped he at least knew the field’s owner, and followed his instruction.

How do you make a good first impression? Or a powerful one? I’ll never forget my introduction to the Deep South, to the Jews of the south. I got the message loud and clear that cotton was—historically, and still in large part to that day—the lifeblood of the region (and if our “field” trip weren’t enough, my congregational president, a history major in college, had plenty of tales of times past to finish the job). The blood wasn’t pumping as strongly as it once had, and the town was in decline. The synagogue had just said goodbye to their last full-time rabbi. I was their first student rabbi. Nevertheless, in the hearts of many in the Mississippi Delta, cotton was . . . if no longer king, at least a true royal.

Of course, the legacy of cotton is inextricable from the legacy of slavery, which is one of the factors that set the region up, 100 years after abolition, for its troubled relationship with the African-American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

We continued on to the synagogue, a gorgeous domed 1906 structure with enormous stained-glass windows and a full-sized pipe organ. The congregation had once claimed the largest synagogue membership in the state, and the sanctuary seated hundreds of worshipers. The synagogue building had all the amenities you might expect: assembly hall, kitchen, classrooms, board room, and a sizable library. The library had recently seen the installation of an impressive historical exhibit, curated by two congregants.

The president led me to a glass-sided display case, filled with some of the more physically vulnerable artifacts: old snapshots and siddurim, yellowing posters, manuscripts. He opened the case, and pulled out two items.

The first was a pamphlet, published by the Association of Citizens’ Councils of Mississippi, titled “A Jewish View on Segregation.” The anonymous author self-identified only as a “Jewish Southerner,” but was presumed by Jewish locals, based on personal details disclosed in the essay, to be a resident of the Delta.

The second was a letter, dated November 1963, from the president of Greenville’s Hebrew Union Congregation to the Board of Trustees of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, protesting the arrangements for the banquet speaker at the upcoming Biennial Convention. The letter did not report the details, already well-known by the parties involved, and my guide filled them in for me: The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been invited to speak at the gathering later that month in Detroit. The record shows that he spoke, Greenville’s protest notwithstanding. The letter, however, received a thoughtful, two-page reply from Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, also on display  in the library; and the congregational board secretary, a Detroit native, in defiance of her board colleagues, attended.

“Why are  you showing me this?” I ventured, hesitantly. The current president did not strike me as the sort who would be proud of this chapter in his congregation’s history. But I wasn’t sure what to expect.

“Can you believe this?” he chortled. “Some folks in the North think this is still who we are. But we’ve changed. It’s pretty amazing how much the South has changed.”

It’s pretty amazing, I thought, that this near-total stranger trusted me to see through the stereotype that the documents present, to perceive whatever reality I might encounter in my own experience here, just now beginning. It reminded me of how we’ve preserved the shame of the golden calf in the Torah, for all to see, like an inoculation, a warning or reminder of what we’ve been, against what we might, but mustn’t, become.

I’m reminded of this now, as we prepare to observe the fiftieth anniversary of Freedom Summer, when hundreds of young people, disproportionately Jewish, traveled south to register African-American voters. I’m back in Mississippi, where I have lived full-time for seven of the last fourteen years. The cotton still flourishes in the Delta, and the South is still changing.

"Shabbat Cotton." Photo by Bill Aron. Courtesy Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life. Do not reprint without permission.
“Shabbat Cotton.” Photo by Bill Aron. Courtesy Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life. Do not reprint without permission.

Rabbi Kassoff serves Hebrew Union Congregation in Greenville, Mississippi, as rabbi, and Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Mississippi as Director of Youth Education.

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News Rabbis Reform Judaism

Perspectives on the Pew

And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: Tradition!

—Fiddler on the Roof 

Is Judaism a religion? Is Jewishness a matter of culture? Are the Jews a nation? These are modern questions….

—Leorah Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion

October 1st was a funny day.  I woke up to a stuffed e-mail inbox filled with messages from family, friends and colleagues, who all sent me a link to the same article in that morning’s New York Times.  The Pew Research Foundation had just published the results of a major population study entitled, “A Portrait of Jewish Americans”, and it seemed everyone wanted to talk about it.  An hour later, when I walked into a meeting at the offices of UJA in White Plains, everyone in a room filled with Jewish professionals either had their nose in the newspaper, or was waving around the front page as we wondered what it all meant.

I imagine the Jewish community will be responding to the data from this survey for quite some time, just as we did following the Jewish Population Studies undertaken by the United Jewish Communities in 1990 and 2000.  But there is one major headline from this survey that I think is more interesting and complex than even the people at Pew realize: the discovery, which represents a significant increase, that 22% of American Jews describe themselves as “having no religion”.  This revelation, as you might imagine, is the source of great consternation in the organized Jewish community.

But this number is not surprising to me, and, in some ways, not even troubling.  I will tell you why.  Often, people come into my office—especially when they are joining the synagogue—so we can begin building a meaningful relationship.  We talk of families, upbringings, relationships with synagogues and much more.  And a line I hear more often than not—importantly, from people who are about to join a temple!—is something along the lines of the following: “Being Jewish is really important to me, but I’m not religious.”  To me, this is the same phenomenon of someone replying, “no” to the Pew poll’s question, “Are you Jewish by religion?”  And to me, for years, this is a fascinating phenomenon.

I have long wondered what it means for a Jew to claim that being Jewish was vitally important at the same time they downplayed the role of religion.  I used to think these people were ceding the definition of “religious” to the Orthodox, and were basically distinguishing themselves from Jews who wear black hats and earlocks, or wigs and long skirts.  But soon I came to realize that something deeper was happening.  As I became more and more comfortable probing the statement “I’m Jewish but not religious” with people, I began to discover (in my very unscientific sampling) that people were expressing either an ambivalence about belief in God or a disconnect from the power of prayer.  Sometimes, “I’m not religious” was code for saying, “Judaism is incredibly important to me, even though I’m not sure I believe in God and don’t really feel anything significant is happening when I sit in the sanctuary for services.”  To my ears, that statement translates as follows: I’m a committed Jew, but no synagogue or individual has ever helped me understand how I can consider myself fully Jewish if I have doubts or reservations about faith and prayer.  And if that’s what people really mean when they say “I’m Jewish but not religious,” then it’s a miracle that only 22% of American Jews feel this way!

jew-overview-2For as long as there has been a Jewish people, Jews have had serious questions and conflicts about faith and prayer.  Pharaoh in Egypt was the first one to call us a people; the same generation he enslaved, once they were free and found themselves at Mt. Sinai meeting God, fell into such a quandary of faith forty days later that they built the Golden Calf.  Before this generation, Abraham—the first Jew—questioned whether God would deliver on the divine promise for a large family, considering Abraham was 100 years old and had no son.  His daughter-in-law Rebekkah, and her daughter-in-law Rachel also confronted God with fundamental, existential anguish.  Our Prophets castigated our ancestors for roughly 200 years of questioning God; our biblical books of Job and Ecclesiastes wonder aloud how anyone can believe in God, given the state of the world.  As much as Jews have been a people of The Book for millennia, so too have we been a people of questioning and doubt, especially regarding the God we call Adonai.

But this lack of faith, or evolving faith of every individual, has done little to stem centuries of Jewish commitment to a Jewish way of life.  Generations of Jews have embraced Torah—literally and figuratively—even though they didn’t necessarily embrace God or prayer at the same time.  Judaism has long been much more about living a certain way of life, following a certain path, halakha, a way of walking through our world, than it has been about subscription to any sort of creed of belief or fidelity.   We are obligated to mitzvot, commandments, even if we have our doubts about Who issued those commands.  Agnostics and athiests light Shabbat candles, lead Passover Seders, and engage in the work of Tikkun Olam as much as do the fully faithful.  Our tradition considers all these people Jews, with no distinction.  They are all part of the Jewish people, regardless of belief.

Importantly, the Hebrew language has no word for “religion”.  The word dat, which is Modern Hebrew for “religion” is in fact a loan word from ancient Persian that snuck itself into the book of Daniel in the mouth of a Persian politician describing our people.  The Hebrew way—and thus authentically Jewish way—to talk about Judaism has nothing to do with religion: we are a people.  We are called Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, or B’nai Yisrael, the children of Israel.  We are a conglomeration of ethics, morals, rituals and practices accumulated by people willing (sometimes in the least friendly of environments) to call themselves Jews.  Princeton Professor Leora Batnitzky rightly teaches us that Jews only began to consider themselves a religion (which is a European, Christian way of understanding faith) when Jews began to live in closer emancipated quarters with non-Jews in the modern age.  Going back through history to Abraham, fewer than 22% of Jews in history would even know what the word religion (in any language) meant, let alone consider themselves “religious”.  Instead, we would likely define ourselves as Tevye did so aptly in the great Broadway musical: we Jews are a tradition.

So I am one Rabbi, and perhaps the only Rabbi, who is not terribly concerned that many modern Jews do not define themselves by a term neither Jewish nor particularly descriptive of Jewish practice: religious.  Instead, I am encouraged that so many Jews (69%) express that leading an ethical life is essential to their Jewishness, that an equal number (70%) attended or hosted a Seder last year, and that more than half (56%) say that working for justice (what we call tzedakah) is core to their Jewish identity.  These Jews are all maintaining Jewish tradition and building their Jewish identity, which has been the real work of our people since the days of Abraham and Sarah.

  Rabbi Seth M. Limmer is rabbi of 
Congregation B’nai Yisrael of Armonk, New York.