Why Shul?

The following was delivered as a speech at Temple Beth Am’s annual gala on May 18.

How does one sum up the essence of two very strange years?

We started it at home.  We learned something new called “Zoom.” We struggled with technology in every aspect of our lives.  

There were elements of this pivot that were unquestionably positive, especially at first.  Many of us had never spent so much time at home.  We could stay in our pajamas all day. We wore sweats 24/7.  We baked bread. We watched Netflix. In the quest to stay isolated and therefore healthy, we discovered a new calm — never leaving our houses.

At Temple Beth Am, we made a very quick transition to remote access for services.  The job of synagogue president, pretty much from Sinai to the beginning of the pandemic, requires physical presence each week in services, to do announcements and give the B’nai Mitzvah gifts.

It was pretty darn seductive to do none of that, to wander vaguely from my bed to my couch on a Saturday morning, and passively watch the clergy lead and chant services for us, online.  And do nothing.  

But like most things seductive, or passive, it was also unsatisfying.  And, over time, increasingly unsettling.  

What does it mean to interact with community solely online?  In times of crisis, it is necessary, of course.  But over time, it’s lacking.  Missing something. And increasingly dystopian.

Early on, we understood that the unavoidable shift to remote access meant so much more to the course of our lives than a short-term solution to a pandemic emergency.  It raised fundamental questions not only about the role of synagogue in our life, but its intersection with the nature of home itself.  

Our synagogue leadership was deeply aware of the transformative nature of the moment.  So last August, at about the halfway mark of my term, we convened a one-day retreat to explore that question.  What is our essence — who are we?

It wasn’t a surprise what we came up with.  

Community. But what is that?  What does that mean?  In fact, across the synagogue world, that seems to be the $64,000 question.

These are days of generally declining synagogue membership, merging communities and lots of hand wringing in the Jewish press over the future of synagogues.  So at this, the end of my two-year term as president, I’ll offer my own observation in response to the big question: What does “community” mean? What does it mean to us, at Temple Beth Am?  What is the value of a traditional synagogue to a 21st century life?  

First, I’ll suggest to you what community isn’t. We’re told sometimes that what we really need to do to make synagogues thrive is to make them more fun.  Look — Las Vegas is fun. Baseball is fun.  Galas are fun.  But if fun is what we’re looking for, and we certainly do need lots of that, synagogues will rarely compete — no matter how many poker nights, movie nights or concerts we try to put on.  

We all — children and adults alike — need something far more fundamental and grounding than a simple good time.  We call that community. And synagogue life, at its best, provides it.  

Synagogues provide identity: We learn (no, we feel) how we, personally, fit vertically into a 2,000-year narrative that has brought us all the way from the Land of Israel right up to this day.  We learn how we fit horizontally into a people that spans the globe, belonging to a people that will welcome us into any similar synagogue tucked into every corner of the globe.  

That’s identity.

Synagogue life provides inspiration.  Through the repetitive practice of synagogue attendance, we cannot help but absorb the moral and ethical lessons that form the core of the Jewish story.  There are moments — whether as a child, a teen, or an adult — where something that the rabbi says in a sermon, or a passage from a book, or something a teacher says, strikes us in just the right way, and makes us feel something close to inspiration.

That’s worth the price of admission any Shabbat morning.

Synagogue life provides a break.  A pause.  We all say we crave a couple hours off the spinning wheel of life, every now and then.  Our tradition, somehow, fully anticipated that 21st century need two millennia ago. At 8 am on a Saturday I am never — ever — motivated to roll out of bed and pop on over for Shacharit.  But by 1 pm, I am almost always happy I did — and feeling spiritually refreshed as well.  Sometimes from a moment in the service, but also almost always from an interaction with a fellow congregant.

Synagogue life provides a break.  A pause.  We all say we crave a couple hours off the spinning wheel of life, every now and then.  Our tradition, somehow, fully anticipated that 21st century need two millennia ago. 

There’s more. Synagogue involvement elevates us to be our better selves. It supports us when we falter. As the parents of twins, we emblazoned on the benchers that we provided at Maya’s and Jonah’s B’nai Mitzvah: “Tovim Ha’Shnaim Min Ha’Echad. Ki im yi-folu haechad, yakim et ha-chaver.”  “Two are better than one. If they should fall, one can raise the other.” 

That, in a nutshell, is the tagline, if you will, that we tried to instill in our children about the wisdom of Jewish communal life.

Synagogue life is comfortably repetitive. It’s not flashy, and it’s decidedly unsexy in a Tik Toc digital age way.  And, to be totally honest, it takes work. For each member. It takes effort to build community, and the best way I found to do it was to get involved.  To serve on committees.  To lend expertise, whatever that might be.  

And we all need to be way, way better at welcoming all who wish to live this life, to find a meaningful way into it.  And to continue to do so across that increasingly divisive political line.

That’s all hard to market.  Sacrifice always is.

But if all goes right, and if you embrace that culture of service, you find a cocooning sense of belonging that is as fundamental to human satisfaction as food or drink.  It’s the opposite of the fun of Las Vegas. It’s about giving, not taking. What happens at shul doesn’t stay at shul.  In fact, if you’re lucky, it travels with you forever.  It becomes part of who you are, and defines you.  Shul attachment lends us a quiet contentment and satisfaction that stays with us, always.   

What happens at shul doesn’t stay at shul.  In fact, if you’re lucky, it travels with you forever.

And that, at the end of the day, was what felt so jarring, so unsettling, so dystopian about the atomized “homes” that we were forced to use as remote sanctuaries beginning in March 2020.  They provided comfort, but were devoid of the social color that community lends to our lives.  They ensured safety, but lacked the almost equally important unpredictable vagaries of human interaction.  This is the essence of the human experience and, for me, it gets me through the week.

There’s a reason that we all devote endless hours to the maintenance of our homes — doing the laundry, hassling with the finances, renovating rooms, and hosting guests.  Because it’s worth it.  It’s inconceivable not to have the refuge of a house.  It’s what it means to have a home.  

I think that’s the same reason that synagogue leaders spend the time they do on the maintenance of their communal home.  Because that’s what it is.  It’s fundamental to who we are. 

It’s home.

Stuart Tochner concluded his two-year term as president of Temple Beth Am on July 1.