Divrei Torah - Guests/Members

In my late forties, I began making short visits to the city where my grandparents grew up: a city in Poland or Latvia. I’d only been there briefly as a child, so the smells, sounds, and look of the place felt familiar, but I had no idea where anything was or how to get around. All the street signs and the names on the bus routes were in a language I barely knew and could barely read. As I walked around the city, the sound of people speaking to one another felt familiar and soothing, like a murmuring from my past, and I even heard a song on the radio I could hum along to. But I was afraid to leave the apartment because I had no idea where I was, how to get anywhere, or how to make it back. Because every time I went to walk around, I found myself blindfolded, guided by relatives through the city, and then returned home without explanation. A cousin who came to this same city under similar circumstances explained to me that my experience was like that of a modern, assimilated Jew at a Saturday Shabbat service. 

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I always knew I was Jewish. Traces of Yiddish lingered in my family, I had relatives with names like Israel, Myriam, and Manny, and I got Bar Mitzvahed when I was thirteen. And yet, my family's Jewishness seemed little more than an ethnic heritage: we celebrated Chanukah and Passover, rather than Christmas and Easter. I didn’t know there was such a thing as Jewish community, because my father assiduously avoided it. I grew up in Acton, MA, where my parents moved after college in Massachusetts, abandoning their Jewish homeland of Brooklyn. My father, seeking to escape the family trauma of his Orthodox Jewish immigrant upbringing, dove into an assimilated, white, middle-class suburban life, and my mom, who’d been raised in a fairly secular Jewish family, went along with the plan. I don’t remember ever going to a synagogue until the year of my Bar Mitzvah and then, after that, a few, isolated times in my twenties and thirties.

In fall 2009, my spouse Marjorie and I enrolled in an Introduction to Judaism class at Temple Israel. That led us to attend Torah study for a while at TI. As someone who liked school, liked books, and liked talking about texts and ideas, Torah study came easy to me. But the Saturday Shabbat Service remained persistently opaque to me, like letters I’d found from my great-grandparents, written in a language I didn’t know and couldn’t read. I felt I had a “birthright” to be in this ritual space and to participate in this ritual. But what were the rules and how did one learn them? What was the mumble davening about and the silent meditation, punctuated by words and phrases spoken out loud by the rabbi? Why did we jump over whole sections of the prayer book, the Kol Haneshema, reading only a fraction of it? What is all the rest of the prayer book for? To demystify these many mysteries, I believed, would be to break whatever spell the Divine had over the proceedings. The Shabbat service must inherently be mysterious, I thought, except, perhaps, to the high priests and their modern descendants.

When I read the blurb in the newsletter announcing CDT’s the first Learner’s Minyan, led by our rabbinic intern, Akiva Nelson, it caught my eye. I could actually learn and ask questions about what was happening in the service? But when I showed up, I discovered that I was one of nearly twenty people: young and old; new members and those who had been at CDT for decades, people who had led services and those of us who knew little or no Hebrew. I sensed something bigger and deeper was going on than that we were simply “improving our understanding of the Shabbat morning service.” And when the class began and Akiva made it clear that everyone was welcome in this space, no matter what our relationship was to Judaism or to Jewish practice, knowledge, or experience, and that all our questions were welcome, he opened the floodgate. Although Akiva had a class plan, he spent most of the first few classes answering one question after another. There was a palpable hunger for understanding, knowledge, and explanation, but also for the space in which to ask these questions. I think that many of us longed to know that we weren’t the only ones who had these questions, the only ones who didn’t understand what was going on or why — in parts of the service or throughout. And perhaps I wasn’t alone either in feeling discomfort, embarrassment, or even shame that I, one of the People of the Book, couldn’t really even read the book, except in translation or — contentlessly — in transliteration. As we began to ask our questions together, my feelings of isolation, embarrassment, and shame for not understanding or knowing, began to dissolve.

My first two questions were: 1) We can ask questions?, and 2) There are answers? Then came many more: Isn’t it “sacrilegious” to treat the service as one more text to study, question, analyze, and discuss? Isn’t what we were doing tantamount to treating Jewish religious practice — my own people’s rituals and ritual space! — as an object of anthropological study, draining the Shabbat service of its mystery and the presence of the Divine, draining it of its power and purpose? (One answer to this question came when, during the course of the Learner’s Minyan, I watched “Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space,” the PBS documentary on the groundbreaking African American author and anthropologist. It showed how Hurston returned to study her own communities, while also participating in them and celebrating their genius.)

Akiva started us off by examining the structure of the Torah Service, which My People’s Prayer Book describes as its pinnacle, with four sections leading up to it and a final, sixth section afterward. As we got into the nitty gritty of these sequences, complete with page numbers, stage directions, and explanations of some of Rabbi Toba’s personal service leading tendencies, I thought to myself, “OMB, this is the tourist guide’s manual, the Duck Boat narrator’s script!” And while the mystery, or the Divine, remained as powerful as ever, I started to see that mystery and unknowability are not inherent to the Saturday Shabbat service or to Jewish ritual practice in general. Who knew?

Sharing our questions, doubts, and confusions with Akiva and the group was exciting and relieving and led to even more questions and musings: Is it okay that I often read the commentary at the bottom of the page rather than the prayers, even losing my place in the service altogether? Is this nusach, this tune, ancient, standard, Reconstructionist, or congregational? Why do people take off their tallit before the service is over and can you wear it outside the sanctuary? How do I participate in the service if I don’t believe in God? What do I do with my questions and my doubts?

All of us, I think, came to the Learner’s Minyan because we felt connected to and were participating in something we didn’t fully understand. We knew the praise-filled beginning of the service and its challah and grape-juice-filled end, but many of us were baffled by some, much, or almost all of what happens in between. And it often looked to us like everyone else knows exactly where we are, what we’re doing, where we’re going, how and why. 

As we began to examine the Shabbat Saturday Service, taking it apart and putting it back together, the service started to look to me like a microcosm of the human condition itself, and the structure of the service an ancient technology developed to help us navigate an enormously complex world. This, I think, is what the authors of Hamakom’s wonderful Shabbat & The World to Come: A Radical Shabbat Guide meant when they say that “Shabbat (like our other holidays) is a form of Jewish technology, it is an evolving tradition that can be used as a blueprint for navigating our world. Shabbat teaches us lessons about time, rest, and recuperation that were not only useful to our ancestors but continue to provide us with guidance in our modern context.” 

I’ve always thought of technology as being the design and use of physical objects to do things we want to do but that we can’t do on our own. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines “technology” as “the application of scientific knowledge to the practical aims of human life or, as it is sometimes phrased, to the change and manipulation of the human environment.” But before we invented science, and before we were able to change or manipulate our physical environment in significant ways, our scientific knowledge was our accumulated experience, stored in the containers like traditions and metaphors, skills and rules, stories and—eventually—texts. And our environment was our emotional and psychological experience of the world. Jewish technology was a collection of ways our ancestor developed to give meaning to our existence, to weave our self-aware selves back into the endless and outward-rippling fabric of the universe, and to hold both in an ultimate container of Love. 

I now see that the metaphor of being led blindfolded through the city of my great grandparents in a language that sounded familiar but which I didn’t understand, represented my experience of the Shabbat morning service, coming to it from a place of great religious assimilation. Though Jewish religious tradition and community is my ‘birthright’ — my last name, Schafer, is a translation of my paternal grandfather’s last name, Safir, meaning “Torah scribe” — my experience of confusion and disorientation in this space reflects my awareness of the extent to which my family assimilated into the white, Christian world of the United States in just two generations. 

What would it be like to be a “native” of this Jewish technology rather than a late, adoptive user? I’m guessing that I still might have similar questions, but without the pain of having grown up so far from my people and its accumulated knowledge and technology. In the Learner’s Minyan, I finally found a Jewish home for all my questions and not-knowing, a place where I could take off my blindfold and begin to recognize the street signs and learn the bus routes. And, in a kind of group translation supported by Akiva and the Learner’s Minyan, I’m learning to read those letters from my great grandparents. Or perhaps, to write back to them.