Clergy Blog

Shanah Tovah,

One of my favorite traditions over the high holidays at B’nai Abraham is to sit in the sanctuary, where all of you sit, for the last hour of the upstairs service. Once the family service and the subsequent schmoozing has concluded, I wander upstairs, sometimes with Evie, sometimes with my parents, sometimes with my in-laws, and take a seat at the back of the sanctuary. It’s nice every now and then to be a Jew in the pew and to take in the holidays seated next to my family, as so many of you do.  

Looking out into the community from the bimah is the bird’s eye view. I can see almost everything - I know the exact seats some of you have sat in for decades; I can tell when any one person is particularly moved by a part of the service, and I can tell when you are, well, less moved. I see the choir, the organ, the sound tech roaming with his iPad, the kids in the back eating their apples, and the ushers coordinating the flow in and out of the doors. It’s a privilege to have that vista.

But one of the reasons I enjoy sitting in the pews, is that it reminds me how the experience of coming to shul is also highly localized. There are things that I just can’t see or experience from the bimah. Things like who is sitting in front and behind you. The voices of your neighbors that you can hear singing along. The person who takes out a crinkly candy right when mourner’s kaddish starts. The parent and child who have an inside joke during the same prayer every year, nudging and smiling at each other. A ringtone going off and sitting still to make sure everyone knows it’s not me.  

It’s important for me not to lose that connection to the pews, because everyone else except me experiences the holidays from that perspective. I like this experience because the holidays allow me to both zoom out from the bimah and zoom in to the seats. We need both of those perspectives to live a full Jewish life. Beyond the seats and the bimah, the holidays are a time for us to zoom in, to be with our families, in our pews, at our meals, celebrating community together, but they are also a time to zoom out: to reconnect to our purpose here on earth and ask of ourselves: What am I doing with the sacred time I’ve been given? Perhaps it’s a piece of our liturgy, a line you hear in a sermon, or the experience of taking a few hours just to breathe in the music around you. Whatever allows you to get there, the holidays are meant for this twofold experience: to dive into our surroundings and to dive into ourselves.  

I hope each and every one of you find those sparks of meaning over the next week and into Yom Kippur. 

Welcome to 5786,

Max