Welcominq a secular Sabbath
By Yair Sheleg
Fri., January 21, 2005

Secular Israelis are gathering at special congregations and synagogues to greet the Sabbath with a mix of traditional prayer and modern Hebrew poetry

Rani Jaeger, a lecturer in history and Jewish thought at Alma College in Tel Aviv, is one of the founders of Beit Tefillah Yisraeli (Israeli House of Prayer) - a secular congregation that meets at the college every two weeks to greet the Sabbath. They began about seven months ago with 15 people and today, he says, about 80 people participate in the service and “the hall is full.” The idea arose after the initiators visited the Bnai Yeshurun Synagogue in Manhattan, which has become a hit among the Jewish elite there, thanks to its combination of prayers, music, dancing and sermons on current events.

“We visited there,” says Jaeger, “in the context of a project that was organized by the Jewish Federation of San Francisco, aimed at making Israelis familiar with the variety of Jewish life in the United States. This was a meaningful experience for all the people who went on the trip, including the Orthodox. Mainly it was clear to us that this didn’t resemble any synagogue we know in Israel. Now, I’m a Jerusalemite, but I grew up in the heart of Tel Aviv and it seems to me that, in fact the secular city is more comfortable ground for new religious experiments than Jerusalem. We also thought we would find there the audience we want to address.”

Jeager stresses that this is prayer - and “not just a secular greeting of the Sabbath,” as he puts it. “We come to pray, with all the problematics of this concept for a secular person.” The service mixes traditional Sabbath hymns with new Hebrew poetry - Leah Goldberg, for example. “We have a 'book’ made out of plastic sleeves with texts inside them, and each time we select what to put in and what to take out, but there are also some permanent elements, like the ‘lecha dodi’ hymn and the ‘Shema’ (Hear 0 Israel’) prayer, and many people actually express a need for this stability,” says Jaeger.

What need does the secular service fill? “First of all, people have a big need for a feeling of community, particularly within the alienation of the city,” he explains. “There are those who come to talk with God, there are those who come to talk with other Jews, and there are those who simply need a way to sum up the week and don’t want time to be homogenous. But beyond that, there is a deep spiritual need - a need for a feeling of uplifting beyond spending Friday night in front of the television. At an Orthodox synagogue there is something too stilted and standardized as far as we are concerned, and for me personally it was important to begin to build the sanctity from within us, not as something external to which we submit. I also wanted a place where it is not necessarily obligatory to be committed to the traditional text. As far as I am concerned, in a week when there is a serious terror attack, it’s hard to begin a service with (Hasidic Rabbi Shlomo) Carlebach’s melodies for greeting the Sabbath, as if nothing had happened.

“For us, every day of the week also gets a time in which we respond to it.  After each of the Sabbath greeting hymns, we ask people what this day was for them that week [according to the tradition, each of the six hymns before 'Lecha Dodi’ is parallel to one of the six weekdays. - 'Lecha Dodi’ represents the Sabbath -Y.S.]. In this way the service also connects to the congregation members’ week. However, we didn’t want to establish another Reform congregation. Not because I have anything against them, but because we didn’t want to be connected to any specific ideology or movement with a political agenda.”

Besides the bookshell

Beit Hatefillah is one of the congregations presented last week at a large conference at Kibbutz Yifat in the Jezreel Valley, which was devoted to the status of the Sabbath in Israeli society. The conference was organized by the Hamidrasha Center for Study and Fellowship at the Oranim School of Education of the Kibbutz Movement an institution that for many years has been nurturing the study of the Jewish bookshelf among the secular public. In recent years Hamidrasha has been involved more with shaping Jewish rituals that are suited to a secular public.

One of the sessions at the conference dealt with the status of the Sabbath and the secular services welcoming it - a phenomenon that has gained momentum in recent years. The director of Hamidrasha, Dr. Motti Ze’ira, is personally acquainted with 12 congregations around the country that hold such services: in Tel Aviv, Yavneh, Upper Nazareth, Afula, Tivon and elsewhere, some more established and some less. According to him, in each of the congregations. 2O to 100 people are active. “There is also a congregation of several hundred people in the communal settlement of Shimshit in the Lower Galilee. the leader of which is Itamar Lapid, the son of the 'releaser of prisoners,’ Herut Lapid.”

Shai Zarchi, a teacher at Hamidrasha who initiated the secular Sabbath greeting ritual at Nahalal, believes that “the demand could give rise to many more congregations. There are lots of people who work hard all week and are looking for spiritual content at least once a week. but feel they lack the knowledge to advance this. Therefore, the bottleneck is knowledgeable people who will lead the congregations.” To solve this problem. staff from Hamidrasha got together with people at Kolot. a mixed religious-secular study house in Jerusalem, to train secular congregational leaders (an alternative to rabbis).

Many of the people who have started the congregations are extremely well acquainted with the Jewish bookshelf and came to the conclusion that theoretical study alone is no longer enough. One of them is Chen Ben-Or Tsafoni, one of the initiators of the prayer congregation in Nahalal (the first in the wave of such congregations, which was established more than four years ago. Tsafoni. who is also associated with Hamidrasha at Oranim, says that at a certain stage, she felt that “all my journeys into study and the renewal of rituals were no longer enough. All the time you 'talk about,’ or you do. ceremonies for other people. We also wanted something for ourselves.”

However, as Jaeger notes, “the public coming to us is not necessarily comprised of graduates’ of studies of the Jewish bookshelf, but rather of people who connected directly with prayer.” Moreover, people knowledgeable about the Jewish bookshelf needed a visit to the U.S. and an encounter with Jewish life there to realize that prayer can also be relevant for the secular person. Most of the speakers at the conference mentioned the Bnai Yeshurun Synagogue specifically as having led them to that conclusion.

One of the participants in the conference, Ofek Meir, who had attended Sabbath services at the Leo Baeck Reform congregation in Haifa, said that even for him the encounter with synagogues in Manhattan was meaningful. He learned there about the importance of music in the ritual. Meir. himself a musician. says: “For years we held a modest service greeting the Sabbath at Leo Baeck. with 30 people. but following the visit in Manhattan we brought a flute, a guitar and a piano, and every Sabbath between 200 and 250 people come.”  He, too, speaks about the kinds of need that such rituals fill - “from community singing to the intellectual need for a sermon,” but also in his opinion. “the main need is nevertheless for prayer itself.”

'Beyond these questions’

The philosophical dilemma of prayer for the secular does exist but the need for prayer is so great that Tsafoni said at the conference: “People aren’t dealing with this dilemma. but simply praying.”

Jaeger adds: “Certainly the question of what the meaning of prayer is for a secular person - to whom does one pray, is he really listening - is in the air all the time. But this does not interfere with the act itself. We have here a magnitude of experience that is beyond these questions.”

The dilemma is manifested in the selection of the texts. “Coming closer to the traditional text is a gradual process,” explains Tsafoni. “At first, 'Hear 0 Israel’ sounded very Orthodox to us, very connected to the concept of God, and we didn’t include it. Later we included it in our prayer book without reciting it. Today we read the verse 'Hear 0 Israel’ aloud, but the material thereafter, we read silently. The 'Amidah’ prayer is also difficult for people with the divine presence. There is always a dialogue in the congregation between those who are put off by an excess of traditional text,. especially people who came from religious homes and left that way of life, and those who very much want it.”

What do the texts include? In all of the congregations there is a mixture of traditional texts with Hebrew poetry. In the Nahalal congregation, naturally, there is a special emphasis on the Sabbath songs of the kibbutz movement. such as “The Sabbath Descended on the Ginossar Valley,” a song that was composed in the Jezreel Valley (by Yehoshua Rabinow from Kibbutz Gvat).

Zarchi has already gone one step further. In an era when in the national-religious community there are increasing trends stressing spirituality rather than halakha (religious law), he, a secular individual, talks about the need for “a secular halakha.” At the conference he cited Haim Nahman Bialik in this context. Seventy-five years ago, in reply to a member of Kibbutz Ginnegar. who asked his advice about the celebration of the Passover seder, the poet wrote:
“Observe the festivals of your ancestors and add to them something of your own in accordance with your abilities and in accordance with your tastes and in accordance with your celebration. The main thing is that you do everything in faith and out of a living feeling and an emotional need, and don’t get over-sophisticated about it.”

Says Zarchi: “As I see it, not only the Sabbath, but also any cultural renewal in Israel - if it doesn’t have a normative aspect of a commitment to observe things in a practical and regular way and not to just talk about them, we won’t have a culture.” However, he adds immediately. “In the land of Israel, as Bialik already understood, because the sense of belonging to the Jewish people exists in any case,. even the halakha can be less broad than it was in the Diaspora. But it is clear that the Sabbath must be such a practical anchor.”

 

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