Why I Go to Shul

My Dear Daughter,

It is early in the morning, the day after my Yom Kippur fast.  I am thinking about our conversation of several days ago about going to shul on the High Holy Days, specifically, my stated dislike for it.  I believe my exact words may have been at bit more robust.  Our conversation gave me something to think about during those long hours of the Yom Kippur service.  Why do I go?  Like all of your queries, it was a difficult and challenging question.

The truth is that I don’t broadly dislike going to shul, rather, I find parts of it objectionable and other parts boring.  To begin, I find the commercialization of spirituality through the selling of tickets, and use of the High Holy Days as spiritual extortion (no admittance unless you’ve paid your dues) exasperating.  As someone who has spent a good portion of his life seeking to advance and enhance Jewish identity, it seems so counter-productive.  In an era when synagogue and Jewish institutional involvement is shrinking, why are we creating barriers at the one time of the year when families are drawn to connect and participate?  We had to display our tickets at two checkpoints before being permitted entry to the sanctuary for High Holy Day services. Really? We’re trying to go to Kol Nidre not the NSA. While I understand the economics of the situation, if Jews are motivated to come to synagogue once or twice a year, why create literal and metaphorical blockades, and degrade the experience by monetizing it? 

For me, few parts of the service speak to me on a personal level or enhance my sense of spirituality or connection to the Divine.  Among the prayers that do resonate with me is Kol Nidre.  Each year, I am reminded of our responsibility to engage in a personal moral accounting. Unfortunately, any sense of spirituality that the prayer evokes is immediately shattered by the droning of the ensuing annual Kol Nidre appeal. 

Thus, I am reflecting on why do I go to shul. Being Jewish, it is hard to omit guilt from the equation.  In this context, being in synagogue on the High Holy Days becomes something akin to an episode of religious “Survivor”, with the sole objective being to endure on as long as possible.  Perhaps, there is an unstated equation involved, what is the earliest I can leave shul without feeling guilty?

Thus, beyond guilt, what are the reasons I go to shul?  To begin, it is where my community is. There is a sweetness that comes in seeing my friends and members of my community.  We are all together in one room, we all sing the same prayers.  We share updates on our families and, perhaps, furtively share photos of our kids and grandkids on our I-phones.  We sit, laugh, talk politics and provide updates on our families.  It is a wonderful affirmation of community and reminder that I am part of a community.  I still have such vivid childhood memories of the High Holidays at the Jewish Center of  Bayside Oaks. That community sustained and nurtured my family for over twenty years – including painful, difficult times.

There are parts of the service that link me to Jews around the world and across the generations. There is something deep and satisfying in uttering the same words, singing the same cantillations that are being recited in synagogues around the world and that have been sung for centuries.  That connection links me to the millennia of our Jewish history and heritage.  It is about the Holocaust and my responsibility to, not simply to recall it as history but embrace it as memory. But it is also about the golden age of Spanish Jewry, the rich traditions of the Shtetl and the rebirth of the State of Israel. I am linked to the passion of Moses and David Ben Gurion, the brilliance of Maimonides and Albert Einstein, the wisdom of Hillel and Nachman of Breslov and the kindness of Ruth and Rebecca Gratz.

The service links me to the pride I feel about our Jewish values and our Jewish consciousness. On Yom Kippur we read from Isaiah:

This is the fast I desire:

To unlock the fetters of wickedness,

And untie the cords of the yoke

To let the oppressed go free;

To break off every yoke.

It is to share your bread with the hungry,

And to take the wretched poor into your home;

When you see the naked, to clothe him,

And not to ignore your own kin.

How core these words are to my values. As my daughter, I hope you have seen this, and I hope that you have observed as I’ve sought to live it. 

There is a pure and mystical quality to Kol Nidre that, through its words and its haunting melody, causes me to reflect on who I am, who I have been, where I have gone wrong and what I can do better.  And, surrounded by my friends and community, I recognized that I am not alone in my flaws and failures. We all chant the words together and I am comforted by the thought that we all are flawed, we all have erred and that those around me, and those Jews around the world are also reciting the words, reflecting on their deeds and will also seek to address their limits and do better in the year ahead.

On Yom Kippur I say Yizkor for my parents. But I also say a memorial prayer for my cousin Jonathan who passed away too young and my friend from high school Bobby Bauer, who was the best of us and who killed in a car accident at age 18.  I think your grandfather, “Pop-Pop” and Uncle Stewart. There is melancholy but there is also a quiet sweetness. I have been so lucky to have known and to have learned from remarkable people.  As I age, I think of my own mortality. And in those moments, I think of all of my blessings; on the top of that list is my family.

Perhaps it is those boring moments, where the prayers seem to drone on, where I don’t understand what is being said and where time seems to go backward that going to synagogue can become most meaningful. The meaning of the service isn’t given to us, it is up to each of us to find meaning within it.  It is the same with life.

Later today, I will begin the annual process of schlepping the aluminum frame, canvas walls, and bamboo poles from the garage to the back porch.  Tools in hand I will begin to assemble an odd structure with flimsy walls and a questionable roof.  We will eat in it for seven days – at times in sweltering heat at other times donning multiple sweaters. Mosquitoes, moths and ants will join us. Eight days later we will reverse the entire process and return the components to the garage.  Like many of our Jewish customs, building a Sukkah also makes very little sense.  But each year we do it again with joy and with thankfulness. 

© David Raphael, 2017