Photoessay #2900 - Singing with the Jews

I last left real organized Judaism in 1970.  My family belonged to Temple B;nai Israel, a reform temple in Sacramento.  I had gone through the religious school, sctive with the youth group along with the 'experimental' services with the guitars and heart-felt poetry.  Services done by the New Union Prayer Book.  I knew many of the members, my parents had many friends there, all familiar to me.  The cantor from Germany, he had an accent, a Holocaust survitvor?  He had a booming operatic voice. I thought I knew the community.

So I go off to UCSC.  It's the time of upheaval in the California aerospace community.  My parents moved, rather abruptly to Southern California.  Many of their peers lost their jobs; my father was transferred.  So when I went 'home', it wasn't 'home' at all.

I graduated from UCSC in 1974, moved back to Sacramento; I had a job (sort of, a whole other story) at the State of California.  I felt a little lost.  So, at the high holidays, I called the temple office and asked for a ticket which they gave me.  I figured I could use a little familiarity.  My family didn't live there but the Jewish congregation was.  I went to Rosh Hashnonah services.  I didn't know anybody!  I was baffled, I couldn't find a single person I knew in the crowd.  What?  I had only been gone four years, it wasn't THAT long.  Where was everybody? No kids I knew, no adults.  I felt like maybe I had entered another dimension. So so weird, I could not figure it out.

Turns out that I had re-entered iunawares n the middle of a larger drama.

From a history of Temple B'nai Israel:

Another serious split occurred in the 1970s, when the congregation's well-loved cantor, Eli Cohen, was alleged to have engaged in serious misconduct, and the board asked him to leave. He took many families with him when he formed his own synagogue, Congregation Beth Shalom in Carmichael, which was also attacked by arsonists last year.

Longtime member Helen Meret recalls the 1970s incident as "a great sadness."

So I came in the middle of all that.  I didn't realize it until years later.  Certainly that experience did not encourage me much to try to keep up my Jewish affiliation.

So I've been in and out these last almost 40 years.  About that time they were introducing a new prayer book.  But now they're starting with a new new prayer book.  So I lost a generation, I never have gotten back in synch.

But I have enjoyed the new singing and chanting when I got to Temple Beth Am nearby.

I especially like the new way of singing the Sh'ma, a central prayer.  In my childhood, everybody rose, the organ thundered the opening chord and Cantor Cohen sang in his most commanding operatic voice...SH'MA YISROEL ADONAY ELOHEYNU!  It rather felt to me as a child that we were all on Mount Sinai receiving the ten commandments.  You couldn't miss it.

Now it's done in a completely different tone.  I never can figure out if you should stand up or not, I go with the flow.  Now it's done  in a soft way kind of a chanting mesmerizing tune.  You repeat each part three times with the catchy repeating tune.  You can't hardly sing it without swaying.  To me, it's an internal personal experience.

Even as an occasional visitor.

I like it.

I had a hard time finding an appropriate picture.  I did find this line drawing on a site by Joey Weisenberg.  Used without permission.