A Jewish Experience

Last Friday, Christian and I went to the first non-Christian house of worship on this noble quest and headed to B'nai Jeshurun, a large and rapidly growing Synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to experience a Friday night Shabbat service.

Most Synagogues are affiliated with one of the many movements within modern Judaism. However, B'nai Jeshurun, or BJ (they call it this, I didn't make it up), is independent of any movement and tries to meld parts of different movements and cultures within Judaism to create something unique. As is stated in a 2002 report BJ commissioned to examine the cause of its rapid growth:

[BJ] mix[es] traditional practice with non-traditional practice. They pull in the full range of the diasporic Jewish experience. As [one of the Rabbis at BJ] often jokes when asked "what kind" of a synagogue BJ is, "We are a synagogue with an Askenazic history and rabbis from South America that prays with a Conservative siddur, uses a Reform chumash and sings Middle Eastern and Hasidic melodies. What kind of synagogue are we? The Jewish kind!"

We chose BJ because, as I was doing research on religion in NYC, I kept seeing references to it as a center of Jewish life in NYC and to its success in bringing in large crowds of young and relatively non-religious Jews. In fact, it has been so successful in creating a buzz that since we started this project, every Jewish person that I have discussed Worship, Gotham! with has mentioned BJ as a place I should check out.

BJ holds its Friday night services at its main building, which is beautiful and thankfully didn't feel as if it was a Christian Church. There are two services every Friday night, one at 6:00 PM and the other at 7:30 PM. Everyone we spoke with suggested that the 7:30 service was the "good" service, so we went to that one.

By the time the service started the synagogue was packed with at least 500 people. The congregation at BJ seemed far more diverse than I was expecting. Virtually everyone was white, which is to be expected, but there were people there of all ages. Based on the everything that I had heard about the synagogue and its reputation for being a good place for younger adults, I was expecting the majority of people to be in their twenties and thirties, much like Redeemer. This was not the case.

The form of the service was a fairly standard Conservative Jewish Shabbat service. This was especially apparent because BJ uses Siddur Sim Shalom, the siddur used by many Conservative Synagogues in the U.S. The service was entirely in Hebrew, though at the start of each new prayer the Rabbi called out the page number for those of us who have limited Hebrew skills.

Rabbi Felicia Sol (BJ does have a female Rabbi, so even though it is independent it seems to lean towards Reform or more "progressive" Conservative Judaism) gave the sermon which, while good, wasn't that memorable. She spoke briefly on the situation in Israel, but otherwise I don't remember much of anything from her speech.

What really made the service at BJ different from any that I have ever been to was the music. Typically, most non-reform synagogues do not have musical instruments accompanying the Shabbat service. This is because of a rabbinical ruling that states that while music is not technically prohibited on Shabbat, it should not be allowed because fixing broken instruments on Shabbat is prohibited and if instruments are played on Shabbat this would lead to people fixing instruments (which to me sounds totally ridiculous, but if you are interested, check out these articles from Ask a Rabbi and Haaretz).

BJ has a small band that plays during the service, which is really good. The congregation also sounded enthusiastic about singing, which is rare. At the synagogue that I grew up going to, whenever the congregation was supposed to sing everyone would start off somewhat strong and then a line or two in would start trailing off and either stop singing entirely or start doing what I call the Hebrew school hum*. At BJ, it sounded as if only a handful of people were doing the hum and a good part of the congregation was singing and tapping and getting very into the spirit.

While it was an interesting experience, I was a little confused at why BJ has the reputation that it does. The service was probably more interesting than any I have ever been to, but it was relatively standard except for the music. What probably brings people to the Synagague and keeps them coming back is the large number of young people (even if it was less than Redeemer there were still a lot of cute girls in their 20s) and the hopes of finding a nice Jewish boy/girl. They also have a program dedicated to young adults that appears, from their website, to be fairly large and active and I'm sure has resulted in putting together more than a few couples.

Also, I noticed a few classes on the BJ website that seemed interesting and likely to draw some people back. In fact, I might be interesting in checking out one or two myself. In particular, the Learners Minyan on Sunday, January 25th seemed like something that would be worth attending. So even though I wasn't blown away by the service, I will likely be going back.

In all, it was a good start to branching out of Christianity on this quest, even though I didn't get any numbers from any cute Jewish girls. This coming Sunday we will be branching out of conventional religions entirely and going to the New York Society for Ethical Culture. I went to an info session on the religion/philosophy of the society on Wednesday and it seems like it will be an interesting experience. You should look forward to hearing our discussion.


*For those of you that don't know, the Hebrew school hum is something that is known to all Jews who had the misfortune of going to an after-school Hebrew school. It consists of singing the first one or two words of a prayer or song that you happened to memorize then humming the tune while moving your mouth so as to look like you are singing. This hum and mouth moving would be broken up every few lines when the rest of the group reached another part that you randomly had memorized and you felt the need to mumble somewhat loudly this memorized portion. This was done because none of us could read Hebrew fast enough to keep up with a song, no matter how slow it went, but if we stopped singing completely everyone would know that we were horrible Jews. Also, if enough of us stopped singing entirely, the teachers would get annoyed and make us start over, which was something to be avoided at all costs.