For 2013. We present our book in serial format on our blog - God's Favorite Prayers
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Spiritual Textures
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Spiritual Textures
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ven with my varied background, like most Orthodox Jews
I spent a whole lot of time in synagogues when I was growing up. As a son of a
rabbi, I’m sure that I sat for more time in a house of worship than the average
Jewish kid. As a child, my mother schlepped me to shul
every Shabbos
(the Yiddish word for Sabbath), and I sat mostly quietly and listened to the
cantors chant the formal services, leading the members in prayer. I followed
along as the expert readers chanted from the Torah scroll. I heard as the shammoses
(i.e., ritual directors, also called sextons or beadles) recited the Kaddishes,
as they led the mourners in their obligatory recitations of a prayer for their
deceased loved ones.
I was mainly a well-behaved kid who sat attentively
through the weekly Sabbath Torah readings and the haftorah,
the chantings from the Prophets. I heard the Rosh
Hashanah shofar
blowings, taking all of this quite seriously, in accord with what I was taught
at home and in school. I marched in the Simchat Torah Hakafot,
those
parades when the adult worshippers joyously carried the scrolls as they marched
and danced around the synagogue. We children were allowed to carry and wave
paper Israeli, American and holiday Simchat Torah flags that were pasted to
thin wooden sticks. As we pranced around the synagogue with our flags,
sometimes we fenced with them and looked for trouble.
During the summers, we went to our Long Island summer
home in Atlantic Beach. The sleepy Jewish community in that village boasted a
single centrally located and nicely maintained rectangular brick synagogue. By
design, it was kept Orthodox in its ritual and services so that one inclusive
house of worship could serve the whole community, from the more liberal Reform
and Conservative to its few ardently religious Jews. Men and women sat
separately. But, unlike in other Orthodox shuls,
there was no physical wall divider between the sexes. Most of the villagers in
fact were not Orthodox in their practices. They’d go home after prayers on
Saturday morning and head off quite openly to the beach or to golf, tennis,
biking on the boardwalk, shopping or other ordinary weekend activities not
normally practiced by Orthodox Jews on the Sabbath.
During those summers out in Atlantic Beach, we happily
attended the weekly Sabbath services at the Jewish Center. Back then, it was a
well-to-do community, without too much ostentation. To attract worshippers, the
shul
offered a Kiddush collation after the Saturday morning services, and I made
sure to fill up a wax paper cup with sarsaparilla soda to go along with my
little rectangle of sponge cake and my handful of salty, dry, octagonal
Manischewitz Tam Tam crackers. I never touched the creamed herring and did not
care much for the little gefilte fish balls that they put out on platters to
the delight of the hungry congregants after their lengthy prayers.
While I sat in these
sundry synagogues as a child, yes, I became familiar with the services and
fluent in the liturgy. That turned out later to be both an advantage and a
disadvantage to my spiritual growth. Indeed, I could participate, perform and
lead the synagogue worship in Hebrew. I knew the tunes, the words, and the
cadences. But as I grew older and wanted to find more substance, I learned that
adult meaning does not flow easily out of what you learn as a child. Later on,
it turned out to be quite complex and daunting to open the book of devotion
that I knew nearly by heart, that represented what the Jewish tradition calls
the “worship of the heart” and try to turn my mind on it, to study it in a
mature manner. And I found that it was harder yet for me to extract an adult’s
spiritual experience from the services of these synagogues that I had gotten to
know when I was a kid.
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