What I Want in a Synagogue

            I want a community of peers, not just congregants.  There is a great difference between the two.  In the first instance we stand shoulder-to-shoulder bearing Beth Shalom.  In the second instance, there is an imbalance when one person sings boisterously in a largely silent community or a cantor cants alone.  I want you to know that one of the primary reasons I wanted to join you is because I perceived this to be community of involved, interested people.  I liked what I saw heard when we first met. 

I do not like “singing” alone.  My first comment to the leadership of this community many months ago was that I liked to strongly encourage congregational participation.  For me, the ‘kiss of death’ of my professional life is when a congregational service is a performance.  It must never become that.

I read with interest a recent article in "Conservative Judaism," which told of a worshipper who was chastised for “singing to loudly,” (check it out on the Spring issue 2008).  Reading the story made me cringe.  How awful!

In an opera house it is impolite (to say the least) to cough, chat or make any kind of disturbance.  In some houses of worship, it is much the same. Members are supposed to sit with their hands clasped front of them, resting in their lap, silent and attentive.  That is not the Jewish ideal; it is not even Jewish.

The Jewish way is leading with the voice.  It is singing, full-throated and filled with zeal.  The aim of prayer is to touch the Almighty.  One does this by entering into a dialogue; singing praises, crying tears of hope and despair, reaching out of oneself to find a connection with the Holy One.  Go to any uplifting service and ask yourself why it was so meaningful.  The only consistent answer is participation.  Where the members sing out loud and put their soul into their prayers it becomes a spiritual and meaningful event.  I am no different from you: I seek the same experience.

I sometimes wonder if I became a rabbi not because of what I saw as a youngster but despite it.  Services were dull.  The only good part was sitting next to dad and playing with his tzitzit…and later on with mine.  I wondered then if there was a way to change that.

Nowadays when somebody sings too loudly I bless them.  When someone shouts out an “Amen!” I am buoyed.  When members yell, “yasher koach!” after someone receives an aliyah, I grin.  That is the way it is supposed to be.

God doesn’t like quiet.  Does that sound absurd?  The Talmud actually says that in different words.  The Talmud instructs us that when we pray, “Our ears must hear what our mouth is saying.”  In other words, there is no ‘silent prayer.’  Ever.

We pray with our mouths and bodies (traditionally, called ‘shuckling’).  We talk to God in much the same way that we speak with one another.  We express ourselves in voice that sometimes rises and falls, with our hands as we gesticulate and with expressiveness that marks our sincerity.

It is time to leave behind the traditional Protestant modality that we have absorbed a bit too well.  Jews don’t sit still.  We never did.

I hope you find your voice at your shul.