Context of Klezmer

When you can't understand what someone is saying, when you don't know their language or syntax, it's pretty much impossible to respond with any intelligence. Intelligence, you see, resides in understanding. At Temple Emmanuel on a gorgeous Friday evening, there was no understanding on my part, and only partly because of the Hebrew.

The service, "Shabbat Unplugged" they named it, was basically a three piece band--percussion, keyboard and guitar--instead of a cantor singing songs of a repetitious nature in Hebrew for a full hour and a half. Three times the rabbi got up from his seat in the congregation to face the audience and deliver a brief homily; I couldn't tell you what he said anymore than I can tell you what the singer sang even though the rabbi spoke in English.

Understanding, I'm beginning to see, is not at all the point of religious services. With the possible exception of the Buddhists and the Quakers among the religions we have visited so far, the point of religious services seems uniformly to be submission and acquiescence to a condition of mindless worship of an other, an abandonment of individual intelligence in favor of group conformity. I know that some of the members of this Jewish reform congregation remember enough of the Hebrew learned for youthful bar/bat mitzvahs that the refrains of the songs were comprehensible, but that does not mean the words were intelligent; the few lines that were translated on the media screen (oh shades of the Christian evangelical congregations) were singularly unmoving and uninformative, things like, "The bride is at the gate."

So perhaps it isn't really that surprising that the members of this congregation get up and do a little Middle Eastern circle dance around the temple while the band is singing on stage. What's to listen to? What's to learn? What's to think of? The Jewish Mother in me shrugs well-rounded shoulders. So what's wrong with a little dancing in the temple? Is it my fault God gave me two good feet and a set of hips that was built to sashay every bit as much as they were built to bear children, may God grant you many and may some of them be boys... Dance, as the Hasids and the Sufis know, takes you out of your intelligence and into your physical self. Ecstasy is a physical condition, as Pentecostal Christians know so well.

It seems the main point of the Friday service in this large, urban, reform temple was to stake a claim on legacy, to make sure no one in the congregation forgot at the end of the week that they are, first and foremost, not accountants or lawyers or medical receptionists wearing nice cardigan sets: they are Jewish. The Hebrew, the dancing, the long recitation of the names of the dearly departed, the constant reference to Israel evoking an alliance not only with the tribe of Israel, descendants all of King David, but the Land of Israel, may the one rest in peace, may the other somehow achieve peace. The service is done to solidify the group identity. The use of Hebrew, the failure to enter the Western mainstream with the adoption and use of English, makes the distinction between these Jews and the rest of the world clear. No one welcomed us; no one even smiled at us, except the little girl at the entrance to the synagogue who handed us a weekly bulletin of events.

At one point in the service, everyone rose to their feet and turned around to face the back of the temple. I don't know what the intention of this was, as the Hebrew that was being chanted was meaningless to my ears, but I got the feeling we were waiting for one of the prophets to enter the temple, like the place set for Elijah at Passover. But the facing backward seemed significant to me in another way, too. The whole service seemed to be looking backward, into the past. In both Christianity and Islam, there is an orientation toward the future, when judgment will be clear and the dead divided between the rewarded and the horrifyingly punished. In Judaism, there is only today, the moment to remember the past and who the Jews have been. Say Kaddish. It all makes the idea of the nation of Israel, the existence of a Jewish state, part of the unthinking acceptance that is the hallmark of religion.

Don't think about it. Just go along. Sing what's on the board. Read the words we set in front of you. Dance. Get away from that nasty bugger, Intellect. Move those feet, sway those hips, bear more children and make sure they go to temple with you. Is there safety in numbers? Will your daughters marry good Jewish boys and your sons good Jewish girls? When is that Messiah coming, anyway...

When I was a very young woman I wished I was Jewish. They all seemed so smart.