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“Jewish Identity in Wal-Mart Country–and Elsewhere” It was a blazing hot day, and we had had enough. There we were, exploring one ancient ruin after another, and it was time for a break. I had stopped with my family in Rome for a few days on our way to Israel. On this particular day, we were exploring the restored Roman town of Ostia Antica, about twenty miles outside the city. Two thousand years ago, Ostia (which means “mouth” in Italian) was situated at the mouth of the Tiber River; it was the port city through which all cargo headed for Rome would pass. In the intervening centuries, mud and silt built up and the town eventually became land-locked. That’s probably why it was abandoned—but also why so much of it is still intact today. Ostia is a kind of Everyman’s Pompeii: it was a hard-working, working-class port city. There are well-restored public baths and an amphitheater; there are apartment buildings, a forum, and a commercial square. But it was hot, and after several hours of wandering around, viewing restored shops, residences and taverns, it was time for a break. So we headed for the twenty-first century snack bar. On the way, we went down a street we hadn’t seen before, and purely by chance, we passed one more ruined building. As we did, something caught our eye. It was building that, at first, looked just like all the others. We saw the remains of a room with an arch over the entrance, and a broken staircase. Nothing exceptional. But the sign in front of it made us stop. It said, “Synagogue.” “How do they know it’s a synagogue?” I thought. We looked at the structure, and at first we couldn’t see anything unique about it. But then we looked closely at the stones at the top of the entrance-way, at the base of the arch. And then, suddenly, we knew, for on that stone were carved three decorations that are unmistakable Jewish symbols: a menorah (a seven-branched candelabrum), a shofar and an etrog. I can’t say that I forgot about wanting to take a break, but that sight took my breath away. There, in the midst of that very Roman town, within sight of the forum and the business district, right down the street from the pagan temple, there was a synagogue—a synagogue which, according to the sign, was built sometime during the last two decades of the first century. If you were a Jew growing up in Jerusalem—or anywhere else in the Land of Israel—during the early part of the first century, you might not ever have imagined that you’d end up in Ostia. But the Jewish revolt in the year 70 failed. The Temple was destroyed, the country was devastated, and many Jews were thrown into exile, and ended up in places like Ostia. And the ones who settled there—what did they do? They built a shul. And Jews are still doing that today. One of our country’s newest shuls is located in Bentonville, Arkansas. You may have heard of Bentonville; you may not have. Bentonville is in the Ozarks; it’s in Benton Country, in the northwest corner of Arkansas, in the heart of the Bible Belt. It’s the kind of place where people will ask you, “What church do you belong to?”—and they’ll expect a good answer. After all, in the county, there are 39 Baptist Churches, 27 Methodist ones and 20 Assembly of God churches. But as of about a year ago, there is a new congregation in town that’s a bit different from the others. It’s a synagogue. [See: “In the Hometown of Wal-Mart, Synagogue Is a Sign of Growth, by Michael Barbaro, The New York Times, Tuesday, June 20, 2006, p.A-1] “Why a synagogue,” you may ask, “in the heart of the Bible Belt?” “Why a synagogue in a part of the country where the Jewish population has been declining for decades?” The Jewish population in all of Arkansas, after all, was only 1,700 in 2001, down from 6,500 in 1937. What’s going on? The answer is that Bentonville is the home of Wal-Mart. That’s where Wal-Mart started, and that’s where its corporate headquarters can still be found. With the growth of Wal-Mart have come Wal-Mart Jews. Recruited from around the country to work for Wal-Mart or one of its suppliers—hundreds of which have opened offices in the county—a growing number of Jews have settled in the heart of this previously intensely Christian environment. But why a synagogue? Why did these Jews who had been living in New York, or Boston, or Chicago, who somehow found themselves in northwestern Arkansas, why did they decide to create a shul? At first, as Jews began to arrive in Benton County, there were Jews, but no Jewish community. Marc and Betsy Rosen are two of them. They moved to Benton County from Chicago in 2000 after Marc had been offered a job in Wal-Mart’s technology department. In Chicago, they had not been members of a synagogue. As Betsy put it, “[In Chicago, we] didn’t need a synagogue to have a Jewish identity.” There were Jewish family, Jewish friends, Jewish neighbors. But then they moved to Bentonville. One day, Betsy’s daughter brought home from day care a picture to color in. It was a picture of Jesus. Suddenly, in her words, “a synagogue did not seem like a luxury anymore, but a necessity to preserve [her] family’s Jewish heritage.” And so the Jews coalesced. As one observer put it, “Tired of being asked which church they attended, they decided to build the answer.” Within a year, they had a shul, housed in a chapel that had once been an Assembly of God church. What’s the shul like? What did these twenty-first century exiles or pioneers create? Well, I haven’t been there, but I did the next best thing: I checked out their website. (http://www.etzchaimnwa.org). You see there what you’d expect to see on any shul’s website. Sure enough, service times are listed. We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that High Holiday services are taking place there right now. The shul provides social action opportunities. In fact, just as we do here, the congregation asks people coming to services on the night of Kol Nidre to bring non-perishable items to donate to a local charitable organization. The shul has a religious school. And they sponsor social activities as well. The shul serves as a portal for its members to connect to other Jewish activities elsewhere. For example, last week, they were promoting “an interesting event relatively close to NWA [which stands for Northwest Arkansas]. Note that phrase, “relatively close.” The event was a “Shalom Fest,” a “Celebration of Jewish Food, Music and Arts for Everyone!” at a “relatively” nearby synagogue, Temple Israel, in Tulsa, OK. (I checked it out: Tulsa’s only about 125 miles or two hours by car from Bentonville. Not bad.) Finally, in case you were curious, it’s very easy to make a contribution to the congregation right on the website. What this group of Jews has done is truly extraordinary: There’s now a restaurant owned by a congregant called “Eat This”—whose tag-line is “The Taste of New York without the Attitude”—whose menu comes with a guide, so folks can figure out how to pronounce “LOT-kuz” or “MOT-suh” ball soup—both of which are on the menu. And the town has become much more sensitive to the presence in its midst of non-Christians. PTA meetings are no longer scheduled on the eve of Jewish holidays—at least not the major ones—and the high school choir has begun to incorporate Jewish songs into its largely Christian repertoire. Why did those Bentonville Jews form a shul? They could have just started a Jewish Community Center. But they didn’t. They could have just started a school for their kids. But they didn’t. Why? Because somehow they understood that, as worthy as those other institutions are, they needed something more. They needed not only to connect with their fellow Jews, they needed not only to educate their young, but they needed a place to nourish their souls, a place to connect with the Jewish tradition and with God. They needed a shul. A couple of days ago, I got a mailing from Barry Shrage, the president of CJP. It included an article by Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer that had recently been published in Commentary magazine, and Barry’s letter to the editor in response. The article was a lament. Jewish community isn’t what it used to be, the authors said. Jews are focusing too much on their own inner, spiritual needs and not enough on Jewish communal concerns. Yes, observance is holding steady, maybe even going up, but where’s the commitment to Jewish community, to Jewish peoplehood? Barry Shrage, in his letter, suggested that this was a false dichotomy. A commitment to Jewish life and observance is the first step in rebuilding a strong sense of peoplehood. Mouthing the slogans of Jewish communal commitment is never enough; Jews who create and support and maintain synagogues, Jews who go there and do there what synagogues are created to foster, they can lead the way toward greater communal cohesion. That shul in Bentonville is modeling for us exactly what a shul is supposed to be. On the one hand, it says on their website: “Our mission is to serve as the home for our members’ spiritual, education[al], and social needs." It goes on to say, "We are committed to building a strong community together and working to strengthen the future of the Jewish people.” The former leads to the latter. How different is Benton County, really, from a place like metropolitan Boston? Betsy Rosen hadn’t felt the need to join a shul in Chicago. She is not alone! Half of the Jews in our area feel the same way. It is estimated that fifty percent of Jews in the Western suburbs are unaffiliated. Why might this be? Well, we are not lonely in the same way that Bentonville Jews might have been. There are plenty of Jews around. And we're physically secure here. Sure, there are occasional acts of anti-Semitic vandalism, but very few. This is a very liberal community in which ethnic and religious differences tend to be celebrated rather than decried. Moreover, this is culturally a very rich place to be a Jew. We have our own local rabbinical school; we have Hebrew College with its multiple community offerings; there are plenty of fine Jewish institutions around. This might—it probably does—lead some to believe that, unlike in Bentonville, one doesn’t need to belong to a shul to have a Jewish identity up here. But is that true? I don’t think so. Sure, it’s easier to be identified as a Jew. That part’s real easy here. But is that enough for us? For some of us, just walking down Harvard Street and inhaling the smell of the brisket at Rubin’s or the falafel at Rami’s may seem sufficient—but is it? Is that the reason we form shuls, is that the reason we support them—in order to feel better being Jewish in a very non-Jewish country? I don’t think so. As I believe the Jews in Ostia understood and the Jews in Bentonville understand deep down inside, we Jews form shuls not only to survive as Jews, but to preserve and enhance Judaism. We form shuls to create communal cocoons to nurture Judaism, to teach Judaism to ourselves and to the next generation, to worship together in the Jewish tradition, and to model Judaism to our neighbors. Ultimately it’s the furtherance of Judaism, not just the furtherance of Jews that synagogues are all about. Call it what you will: we're here to fulfill our religious obligations; we're here to serve God, not the other way around. Being identified as a Jew is one thing; having and strengthening one's Jewish identity, grounded in and reinforced by Jewish knowledge and practice, and expressed through the Jewish community, is another. And it’s as essential to do that in the Greater Boston area as it is in Northwest Arkansas. How do we, as a shul, help people strengthen and fulfill their Jewish identities? How should we measure our effectiveness? How good are we? It’s really rather simple to state, yet perhaps not so simple to implement. First, a shul has to be a kehillah, a community, a group of people who care for one another. As the Bentonville shul’s website puts it, “Together we are building a Jewish community.” If the Ostia shul had had a website, I’ll bet they’d have put that slogan on it as well. That’s what we try to do, here. That’s why we are constantly trying to create community-forming and community-sustaining programs. While respecting people's privacy, their space, we have to draw people in. And we have to continue to sustain them, once they are in. We have to provide them with support and with fellowship, during happy and sad times—and all those times in-between as well. It’s easy enough to measure our effectiveness in this area: just see whether people feel drawn in. We must constantly ask ourselves, what can we be doing to inspire more Betsy Rosens to join us? Second, we should be a religious community. Our shul should be a place where all of us can explore Jewish worship, embrace Jewish practice, engage in Jewish thinking, and expand our Jewish sensitivity. This is no easier here than in Bentonville. Even though there is a strong yearning out there—even in this very room—even though there is a strong yearning for religious meaning, for most of us the prayer book is an opaque work. Not necessarily closed, but as good as closed. It’s full of words and concepts that just don’t make sense. We therefore have to re-contextualize the experience of prayer. We have to prepare people for the experience, provide guideposts and explain what it’s all about. We have to bridge the gap and help people unlock the sources of meaning that lie locked within the liturgy. We have to create real, authentic, meaningful worship experiences. Finally, we have an educational mission. We have to be an academy of Jewish learning. But not just for the young. In fact, not all of our youngsters are educated here. Many kids, for example, attend Jewish pre-schools that meet elsewhere. And even during the primary or secondary grades, there are lots of kids who attend one or another of our local Jewish day schools. And those of our high schoolers who attend Prozdor: some of them come here; some of them go to class at Hebrew College or elsewhere. But our responsibility as an educational institution is actually much broader than it might appear. Once upon a time, one might have assumed that members of shuls such as ours were Jewish adults who knew what Judaism was all about. They knew what it was that they wanted to teach the young. They knew what davenning was. They knew what it meant to put on tefillin. They knew what it meant to keep kosher, what it meant to “keep Shabbes.” They may not have fulfilled all of them faithfully, but they knew what the demands of Judaism were all about. If that was ever true, it isn’t true today. Most of us are too many generations away from Jews who knew, who understood what it was all about. And we know it. There is an incredible thirst for adult learning these days—witness the hundreds and hundreds of Boston-area Jews who’ve taken Me’ah. Rather than understanding our role to be educating the 160 or so kids in our Religious School, who move through the school in an orderly way, year after year, our goal has to be to educate everyone who walks in the door—all 1,500 or so people who are already members, and those who aren’t yet members as well. All ages. All backgrounds. Basic Hebrew. Davening skills. Jewish history. Kabbalah. How to kasher a kitchen. How to have an aliyah. The significance of the State of Israel. All of these are—or should be—part of our curriculum. All of these have to be provided. So we certainly have our work cut out for us. Every shul does, wherever it’s located, whatever its movement affiliation. But so long as there are people out there who feel that they don’t need a synagogue, so long as some people feel that they can get by without that connection to their fellow Jews, or the Jewish tradition, so long as there are Jews out there hesitant to come in, we have our work cut out for us. * * * * * At the same time that that shul in Ostia was being built, another, larger and more monumental structure was being built: the Arch of Titus, which can be seen today in the Forum in Rome. Built after Titus’ death in the year 81, probably by his brother and successor, Emperor Domitianus, it commemorates and celebrates the Roman conquest of Judea. Just like the shul in Ostia, that arch also has a menorah carved into its side. A large menorah. It’s one of several objects from the Temple that Roman soldiers are depicted carrying off. Think how amazing that is: Ten or twenty years after the great catastrophe of ancient Jewish life, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans; ten or twenty years after the Romans brought Jewish slaves and Jewish treasure back to Rome, a group of Jews in Ostia were building for themselves a shul. A grand arch with a menorah on its side is being built in Rome to celebrate the Roman victory over the Jews—and at the same time, practically in its shadow, Jews are matter-of-factly carving a menorah of their own into the arch of their own shul on the outskirts of Rome, as if to say: you may have destroyed our Temple, you may have carted off all of the treasures of the Temple, you may have conquered our Holy Land, but it’s not going to stop us from creating a Jewish community and practicing our Judaism right here. Those symbols that the Jews of Ostia carved into the arch of their synagogue: the menorah, the shofar and the etrog, are symbols of Jewish continuity, and there is much we can learn from them. First, each of them is portable. We Jews can create community wherever we go. Neither political upheaval nor economic necessity can prevent us from continuing to practice our way of life. Second, they are distinctly Jewish symbols. If you want to further Jewish life, don't be parveh: be willing to promote Judaism for what it is: a unique religious civilization. Finally, the menorah, the shofar and the etrog are joyful symbols with strong sensory appeal. The menorah illuminates. The shofar awakens us. The fragrance of the etrog is uplifting. Those Jews in Ostia understood that for Judaism to continue, what happens in shul must engage the senses, the emotions, the heart and the soul—as well as the head. Let that be our challenge. Let’s try to remember those Jews of Ostia, and those Jews in Bentonville—indeed, the perseverance and joyful commitment of Jews all over the world. We have so many resources at our disposal. Let’s make use of them to continue to build a welcoming home in which we, and many others as well, can create community, educate ourselves and our children, and serve God in an emotionally and spiritually stimulating, fulfilling and joyful way. Amen. |
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