USCJ Review - Fall 2006
Prayer for the People: Making the Machzor Work Today
It was a sight to behold!
This past Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur at the Marlboro Jewish Center in Marlboro, New Jersey, more than 800 congregants squeezed into a room that comfortably fits no more than 500. They put up with the physical discomfort for the spiritual fulfillment of the shul's contemporary High Holiday service.
I have had the pleasure of creating and officiating at this unique service since its inception; it has been offered at the synagogue every year since 1985. For 21 consecutive years, this service has given our members the opportunity to attain a spiritual experience that they could not find in a traditional High Holiday service.
Our contemporary service has never been viewed as a replacement for the traditional service. Instead, this service offers an alternative to that large segment of our membership that either has felt unfulfilled by the traditional services offered at most Conservative synagogues or has been made uncomfortable by the overwhelming amount of Hebrew that is used in the traditional High Holiday services.
I believe that our experiences in Marlboro can be shared by every congregation in our movement. Before I can get to that, though, it's important to explain the genesis of our journey, and how the leadership of the Marlboro Jewish Center came to realize that many members needed something they were not yet being given.
In August 1968, I was the youth director at Temple Israel in Great Neck, New York, when Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, the congregation's senior rabbi, presented me with a challenge. It was important, he said, that students at the Hebrew high school have a High Holiday service that spoke to their needs as adolescents in a modern integrated suburban community, especially given the tumultuous times in which they were growing up. I was given the job of creating that service. As I worked on the machzor, the High Holiday prayer book, cutting and pasting, taking out some sections and putting in others, I kept an eye on my television, watching the chaos and terror on view in Grant Park in Chicago during the Democratic convention there. As I worked on a contemporary explanation of Sim Shalom, the prayer for peace that is central to our traditional liturgy, I thought about how difficult it was to sing that prayer in the complicated reality of our lives.
At that moment - my spiritual epiphany - I began my journey.
As I began to create alternative prayer services for people who share the ambivalence I felt in that fall of 1968, I decided to maintain my concentration on the High Holidays. Those are the three days that attract the largest number of people to our synagogues; both the regulars who come almost every Shabbat and holiday and the people who come just three days a year are in shul then.
When I left Temple Israel, I decided that we needed a service that would reach out not only to young people but to everyone in the community. I also realized how important it was to me to take an idea created in the 1960s, a time when alternative life styles flourished, and bring it into the next century.
As I worked on the machzor, I realized how important it is to use different media in the exploration of spirituality. The world we live in is significantly different than our parents' and grandparents' world, and in some ways we are different too. Today we gather information through a variety of media, using not only print but the internet, photographs, motion pictures, television, and other, even newer forms.
It also is clear to me that we should use all available techniques in our prayer services to generate strong spiritual feelings. Our prayer books should not be strictly linear, with word following word, line after line for page after page. Many people, including many of synagogue members, gain most of their information from nonlinear media. Many synagogue members don't read Hebrew; certainly they don't benefit from pages filled with letters they cannot decipher.
If most of us get most of the information we need in our daily lives through more than one medium, why shouldn't our prayer books acknowledge that truth?
In 1985, I approached the leadership of my own synagogue to ask for the chance to create a looseleaf machzor using what was then the latest in high technology - a personal computer. I told the board of the nearly 1,000 family member synagogue that I would create a Rosh Hashanah, Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur service that they could offer as an alternative to the existing service. The leadership had no idea how the congregation would reaction, but they accepted my offer. Because of space constraints, the contemporary High Holiday service would begin at 1:30 in the afternoon, after the traditional service ended. All of us were surprised when nearly 600 congregants came to the new afternoon service. Our synagogue now has three simultaneous services - the Sanctuary service, which seats 1,400; an overflow traditional service, which seats 700, and the contemporary service.
The machzor we used in 1985 was strikingly different from the one used in the traditional service. The loooseleaf prayer book included hundreds of photographs illustrating the meaning of the High Holiday liturgy. These pictures came from magazines, newspapers, and personal collections. The machzor had modern interpretive readings and rabbinic ones, poetry and song lyrics, and of course translations. But it is also important to stress that the matbayah shel t'fillah - the traditional order of the service - did not change.
In 1996, a committee of congregants who had prayedat the alternative service the year before spent a full year to work on revising it, so that even more than before it truly reflected its users' needs. Committee member Ira Kirschner used software, clip art, and computer technology as he took the lead in transforming the machzor into the beautiful volume it has become. In 2002 the machzor was redone once again. Now it includes transliterations of the Hebrew prayers, so everyone who attends the service can "read" the Hebrew, even though they might not speak a word of the language. Once the transliteration was added the service truly became a fully participatory experience, and that added a level of spirituality that is hard to comprehend.
This Rosh Hashanah, the Marlboro Jewish Center will offer a completely revised fourth edition of the machzor. It will include, along with new contemporary readings and photos, material on such current events as the tragedy of 9/11 as part of the Martyrology service on Yom Kippur. And once again, as in 1968, the issues of war and peace are central in the service, as are the issues facing Israel in light of last year's geographical changes in the greater Middle East.
It always has been my belief that prayer must reflect where we are today as Jews and as citizens of the world. If the traditional approach toward prayer does not help us become better Jews, then we and our synagogues must create new ways to bring that about. Yes, it is true that almost everyone who belongs to a shul goes to services on the High Holidays. They come for many reasons - to hear the rabbi's message, to reflect on their lives, to see their friends. And some really do come to pray. But I believe that many sit through traditional services without reaching the level of kavannah, of deep spiritual intention and connection, that the leadership of the Conservative movement would like to reach, and that is well within our grasp.
The Marlboro Jewish Center's contemporary High Holiday service is just one approach, allowing congregants in one suburban community to reach deep into their souls. The approach we have taken during the High Holidays over the last 21 years could be used for the entire Jewish calendar. Alternative ways of approaching tefillot, prayer, could be implemented on Shabbat - both Friday evening and Saturday morning - and during the festivals, Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot.
There are many reasons why synagogue attendance falls so dramatically after the High Holidays. Simply blaming suburban Jews' secular lifestyles is unfair. That's only part of the problem. Perhaps the decline is also because the traditional form of prayer, used in sanctuaries all across the country, may no longer speak to the spiritual needs of synagogue's non-traditional members. The prayer book as we now know it was created with an updated version of the technology invented by Gutenberg 500 years ago. But today we are much more accustomed to multimedia presentation, and if our lives are so post-Gutenberg, why should our prayer services rely on such out-of-date technology?
It is worth repeating that I know that significant numbers of Conservative movement members love traditional services and gain much meaning from them. But I also know that many others do not find them fulfilling, and we must not make the judgment that anyone who does not find meaning in the traditional forms of worship is not a "good Jew." We must not say that anyone who does not find meaning in traditional prayer must take adult ed classes to learn to daven properly. That is bogus! In our own congregation, I have heard several members call other members who attend the contemporary High Holiday services "Reform Jews," or names they consider to be even worse. I have heard people who attend the traditional service call for the removal of the contemporary service from our shul, even though the service attracts a significant percent of our membership. And after all, the service has been a fixture in the synagogue for more than 20 years.
Conservative Judaism is a pluralistic movement. People who attend alternative Conservative prayer services should not be ostracized because they want an approach to prayer unlike the one they are expected to want. In his seminal work, Tradition and Change, Rabbi Mordecai Waxman describes the Conservative movement as a tent large enough to include people who hold a range of different perspectives. The early Chavurah movement of the late 60s, of which I was a member, also saw itself as offering one more authentic Jewish choice.
It seems to me that the only place where we usually do not get to make a choice is in the realm of prayer. The disconnect that divides many of our rabbis and their High-Holiday-only members is perplexing, especially because there are creative ways to persuade them to come into the synagogue during the rest of the year. What we began on the High Holidays can then move to Friday night services or Shabbat morning services. All it takes is dedication on the part of the congregants who desire change, a rabbi who supports change, and a roadmap helping to show how to get it done. I have had the pleasure of speaking with dozens of rabbis and congregation presidents from all across the country; I've described how we at the Marlboro Jewish Center have created this change. In return, leaders of every synagogue that has attempted such alternative Contemporary High Holiday services has told me about the remarkable feelings those services have evoked in their congregants.
This coming High Holiday season, we expect that our synagogue again will be packed with nearly 3,000 people, many of them disaffected youth. Of them, as every year, at least 800 of them will pray at the contemporary service; the other 2,200 will be at the traditional services. Most of the time the two services will run in parallel, both working with the traditional structure, but at times they will diverge, going in different directions. And at 1 p.m. all the services will end and all the shul's members will gather in the lobby of the Marlboro Jewish Center or on its front lawn, wishing each other a shanah tova, a good new year. All that matters is that our community will come together under the roof of our synagogue, and we will all pray together. We'll be in different rooms, using different books, singing different melodies - but we'll all be together.
If any synagogue leader is interested in seeing what we have accomplished in Marlboro, email the United Synagogue Review at info@uscj.org and we will share our volume with you via email attachment.
