Points of entry
Joshua Avedon and I were guests at last week’s Synaplex Sneak Preview, covered here by The Jewish Journal. As Rabbi Hayim Herring (a member of the S3K Synagogue Studies Advisory Board) remarked,
“People have all kinds of yearnings…. Some are looking for God, some for prayer and meditation, some for community. I don’t want to impose my definition of spirituality on anyone else. We all go through different stages; what fits us today might not fit us tomorrow. If you think of Shabbat as the destination, Synaplex provides many paths to get there. Synagogues take what we have to offer and imbue it with their own creativity and energy.”
His comments were echoed by Rabbi Laura Geller of Temple Emanuel Beverly Hills:
“There are many different doors to Judaism. For some it’s spiritual, for some it’s cultural, for some it’s community, for some it’s learning, for some it’s social justice.”
The popularity of Synaplex programs at places like Temple Emanuel and elsewhere demonstrates that American Jews haven’t given up on the synagogue — they just want them to become more welcoming sacred communities. And it’s more evidence of the potential synagogues have to be true sacred centers for the Jewish people.
November 7th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
“Some are looking for God, some for prayer and meditation, some for community. I don’t want to impose my definition of spirituality on anyone else.”
For reasons I may not be able to articulate clearly, I am finding comments like these increasingly frustrating. If a synagogue offers Jewish services within a limited range it does not mean that one is “imposing” a definition of spirituality on anyone!
Are we so tribalistic that we are unable to say that if kundulini yoga works better for a given persons definition of spirituality, that they should go to the kundulini yoga center.
I am as much a post-modernist as the next post-modernist, but that doesn’t mean that Judaism has to provide an outlet for any given definition of spirituality. It means (as I understand it) that we accept that there are outlets” out there” and that people should take advantage of them.
Also, this talk about about “potential to be true sacred centers” is a little arrogant for my liking. If a shul has one, standard minyan - for those who go and like it, how is that any less sacred that a synaplex shul (in fact, if we take the princple of ‘b’rov am hadrat melech’ seriously, maybe the synaplex is less!).
December 1st, 2006 at 7:28 pm
What a great find your website is for this transplanted New Yorker now in Montana. Agree with above comment. It’s all different roads to the same G-d.
December 29th, 2006 at 5:16 am