Alef: The NEXT Conversation

Cross to Bear

By Ari Averbach

I try to go to temple regularly. This is a good idea since I am studying to be a rabbi. Two weeks ago I went to the synagogue where I became a Bar Mitzvah and I saw a new sign as I walked in. It identified four different services happening at the same time. One in the main sanctuary, and the rest in other rooms scattered around the large property. I went to a wonderful service in a pre-school classroom.

Last week, I went to the largest synagogue west of the Mississippi and again was confronted with the choice of multiple services, only one of which was in a normal sanctuary. I joined a side service in the room that usually hosts the kiddush lunch. I was sitting behind the cantor and rabbi.

The more I thought about place and space, the more I realized that the modern synagogue is set up like a church. Have you noticed that? If all you added was a cross over the ark, then it would feel like we were at a church. The congregation sits in pews or rows of folding chairs stretching in one direction with the rabbi and cantor, typically, standing behind lecterns on a stage of some sort. Stained glass windows, choir section, organ, all of the necessary accoutrement for American-style worship.

If you’ve gone on the Taglit-Birthright Israel trip, you have probably been to the synagogue in Tsfat that the Ari (no relation) helped build four hundred forty years ago. It’s tiny, colorful, and looks like no American synagogue that I have ever seen. Somehow, over the last few hundred years, we have come to a religion-wide tacit agreement to build all of our places of worship in a way that, if we went bankrupt or lost too many members (a constant fear in every Jewish board meeting), we could easily sell it to our Protestant neighbors.

Growing up, our shul was the typical American major center of Judaism, and I thought that was normal. In Los Angeles there are several temples that look like that, able to hold a thousand people in the sanctuary while kids could hang out in the playgrounds, the youth areas, or one of the many classrooms around the ginormous building, so I assumed that was how traditional Judaism had always been. Then I started looking around and doing some reading.

So did many other people. Especially young rabbis fed up with same-old same-old invented tradition. In recent years, there has been a bucking of that tradition to get back to the roots of our original customs. Unaffiliated minyanim are popping up all across the country, playing with the rules. Seats are arranged in circles, there is no stage, there is no choir, no organ, no obvious place to hang a cross. They are portable and rearrange-able week-to-week, trying out new layouts. The rabbi and cantor, if they are employed by this minyan, are of the people, not over the people. They do not want to be cookie-cutter, or standard, or similar to the mega-shul down the road. They want to be unique and authentic and faithful to true tradition. They want to question our rituals the way the Ari did in the 1570s.

So much of modern Judaism is formed by the world around us, which is not a bad thing. Our service is fashioned on Islamic services, since Judaism was going through a re-birth thirteen hundred years ago, when ninety percent of world Jewry lived under Muslim rule. Then when we shifted into a Christian world, it transformed in some ways, mainly in Germany and Eastern Europe, to suit that world. After the Shoah, there was a thought that we needed to fit in and be the same as our neighbors so it would be harder to single us out.

Finally, for the first time in recent history (maybe ever) we can daven how we like, in buildings we erect. And maybe we can even create our own new traditions, pushing Judaism forward inch-by-inch.

Photo by Emmanuel Dyan, licensed under Creative Commons.

Read more from Issue #25: Changing Traditions.

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