One year I was hired to lead a prayer group on Rosh HaShana that was decidedly not up to the challenge of prayer. This group - a collection of people from all over were by and large as unfamiliar with each other as they were with the prayers. They gathered together in a small room in a converted mansion in a leafy suburb every year for reasons that were unclear even as they did it.
Here a Russian émigré, there an Argentine, here a former prize fighter, there an opera singer. I myself had always felt comfortable among the lost or at least the restless - a man of a bit of faith here, some haphazard scholarship there. I hold an inheritance of deep Jewish knowledge, sections of Talmud, verses, an intermittently tuneful voice and a practiced, nearly rabbinic eye and so, in my younger years, this was not an unreasonable assignment for me.
Nevertheless, this group was a particular challenge. Aside from a skeletal core group of worshipers, throughout the day, assorted people came in and out as though paying their respects. It had a wake feel, but it was missing a body and there was certainly no casket.
What made these people come to shul? I wondered, even as some of them may not even like each other or God?
Ostensibly, they came to talk to the Creator, but still, all men, believers and non-believers, must find their own way. The problem was that in this shul, there seemed no rush to do so. They were emotionally paralyzed and they did not want to be cured too quickly if at all.
As we took took turns opening and closing the ark, I wondered, did everyone's hearts have to be so closed? Wasn't there a simple, natural connection between God and people? In the elongated memories of my grandparents' world - the world of Fiddler on the Roof -- it seemed to exist as a given, like water and air. What did they have that we didn't? They were poor to be sure, but so were these people. This was a group of broken men in body and soul. Neither money nor spirit here. Not a millionaire among them. Not even close.
But one thing was different: in the old world there was persecution. The unspeakable persecution of the Czar and his hordes horrible as it was, strange as it may be to say, might have served a function. Not that we needed it, but being reliably oppressed may have put some in an interesting mindset. "Happiness" is what the British psychoanalyst DW Winnicott called having a "reliable persecutor." The reliable persecution of old relieved doubts and even made some to feel impervious to the forces of History. History, with its rises and falls and conquests of Kings, Queens and foreign lands was for the gentiles, almost entirely irrelevant. The past was a straight line with bookends at each side beginning with the destruction of the Temple and our painful banishment from the Land of Israel by a vengeful, but compassionate Gd and at the other side, our imminent redemption at the end of days by the Messiah, a descendant of the Davidic dynasty. Citizenship in the meanwhile was in not in any country, but rather, in a republic of discourse, a Republic of the Talmud, forever, guests as it were, among the gentile nations. It was this very persecution that made some certain of Gd's love and our imminent redemption by His hand.
The day ambled along. The sun climbed to great heights, peaked, then started to move lower and the shadows got longer. I could take it no longer.
With the ark open, I invited anyone who had something to say to man or to God, to say it now. There were no takers. "This is a chance to tell your story...to say something, anything at all - even to tell a joke," I emphasized. Still, there was nary a murmur from the crowd.
What had become revealed at that moment, in plain old English, was a lack of connection either to God or man. There was neither the thickness of what the African writer, Chinua Achebe, calls congregational memory nor the social connection between people. I could sense that what people deeply wanted was to have a better past and the hope was that this could be accomplished in some kind of parallel process, a group ceremony, like a mass wedding. The future and the present were too overwhelming, too anxiety provoking. Like in a long dysfunctional marriage, why start talking now? Why stir things up? Talking to each other was not a value. We needed a better past and now!
From where I stood, talking, and connection to each other were ultimate values, but that was not the way here. Connection is not for everyone -- and for some with deep trauma or early deprivation, too much of it or not the right kind can be experienced as toxic even dangerous,
Finally, just as we were about to continue, one man with an accent tinged with the old Bronx shrugged and said, "Everyone has a story. I guess, maybe next year, everyone will hear mine. I pray everyone should have a good year in the meantime." It was a promise for the future and a meager one at that, but that would be all. The shofar blasts blew and shortly after, the men shuffled into the next room where they had gefilte fish, a shot of whiskey and a few pieces of honey cake. A New Year had begun.
