In the March 16, 2014, home delivery edition for Washington, DC, this article has the title "A 'God-Optional' Group Seeking Relevance in Worship". What intrigues me is the notion that 'God-Optional' is unique. I think in fact in many denominations there many attendees who less than sure about G-d. I know that in the Reform movement in Judaism, belief in G-d is not a prerequisite for participation. I have heard numerous rabbis say so.
Synagogue, Rebooted
Lab/Shul Is an Experimental Jewish Gathering Still in Its Beta Phase
At
a rock club on the edge of SoHo on a recent Saturday, Amichai Lau-Lavie
stood in front of two musicians and a set of video screens, bringing a
message about counterculture. Mr. Lau-Lavie, 44, descends from at least
37 generations of Orthodox Jewish rabbis. He is also a gay man who lives
in the East Village — a fan of the Smiths and Emily Dickinson, a father
of three, the creator of a drag character named Hadassah Gross. On the
screens was an image of a sacrificial lamb, taken from a Dutch painting.
“Some of you are synagogue veterans or synagogue survivors,” he said to the congregation before him.
Starting
a loose dialogue with the audience, he asked them to name something
they were thankful for. A smattering of answers came back.
If
they felt guilt that they wanted to expiate, as ancient people did
through ritual sacrifice, what did they feel guilty about?
“Where is sacrifice in our lives today?” he asked.
Audience
members shouted answers without raising their hands. Mr. Lau-Lavie, a
rabbinical student, walked into the crowd to share the microphone. What
act in today’s society, he asked, was painful enough, messy enough, to
approximate ancient sacrifice? Finally he offered an answer: unplugging
from the Internet for one full day a week. It would hurt, sure, but it
could also be cleansing, he said. Then he confessed: “Giving up digital
for 24 hours is so healthy, but I don’t do it, because I’m addicted.”
The gathering was the monthly Sabbath service of Lab/Shul,
an experimental pop-up synagogue that is still in what Mr. Lau-Lavie
calls its beta phase. Mr. Lau-Lavie was gearing up for Purim this
weekend and the confluence of Passover and Easter in April, when the congregation will mix traditions in a Last Seder.
“One of the ways to describe what this is about is creating sanctuary,” Mr. Lau-Lavie told the roughly 60 people who came to City Winery
for the more-than-two-hour service, Lab/Shul’s fifth. Some were
non-Jews or atheists; some were observant men and women comfortable in
skullcaps. The conversational style and claim to counterculture, the
texts and videos projected on screens, the emphasis on arts and music,
resembled nothing so much as a modern evangelical Christian church. Mr.
Lau-Lavie invited congregants into a big tent: “It’s a god-optional,
bring-your-own-god, do-it-yourself-god, everybody-friendly community.”
These are precarious times for non-Orthodox synagogues in New York. According to a 2013 survey by the Pew Research Religion and Life Project,
fewer than one-third of American Jews belong to a synagogue, and barely
one-quarter say religion is very important in their lives, compared
with 56 percent of the general public. The share of Jews living in a
household where anyone belonged to a synagogue fell to 39 percent. In a
2001 survey, it was 46 percent. The decline has been especially acute in
Reform and Conservative congregations, many of which have closed or
merged to stay afloat, even as the Orthodox community expands.
The wreckage, in turn, has created opportunities to improvise.
“We’re in a veritable explosion of experimentation,” said Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, executive director of Mechon Hadar,
a nonprofit group that teaches and supports Jews in communities of
learning, prayer and service. “It used to be that there were three or
four major flavors of Jewish life, and you belonged to one of them. Now
you see things grow up in the spaces between those more institutional
expressions of Jewish life, and they’re really taking off.”
Mr.
Lau-Lavie finds himself part of a coterie of religious leaders,
Christian as well as Jewish, asking a nearly impossible question: In an
increasingly secular, technological, consumer-driven culture, how can
they revise worship in a way that is relevant to people who have
unlimited demands on their time and weak ties to institutions?
In New York, these leaders include Joy Levitt, executive director of the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, whose Jewish Journey Project restructures Hebrew school to group students by interest rather than synagogue. At the nondenominational Romemu synagogue, which meets at a Presbyterian church on the Upper West Side, Rabbi David Ingber has built a growing congregation and an Internet audience he says is close to one million with services that incorporate yoga, Buddhist meditation and New Age spirituality along with extensive Hebrew prayers.
“The
Pew study tells us, if synagogue life won’t innovate, then we’re going
to continue to lose people,” Rabbi Ingber said. “I’m convinced we’re
blessed to live in a marketplace that forces us to hone what we’re
doing.”
He
added: “The hierarchical model of the rabbi speaking to a flock is
obsolete. Experience is paramount. And information alone is not
transformative, so people are not coming to synagogue to learn new
things. If you have everything you want to know at your fingertips and
you’re still unhappy, it’s clear that information isn’t enough. People
ask how come their services aren’t as transformative as their yoga
class. And they could be.”
At
a Chinese restaurant near his office in the financial district, Mr.
Lau-Lavie described the mixture of skepticism and family destiny that
brought him to his current position, partly against his will, he said.
It was a bitterly cold January day, and he was in New York on a visit
from Jerusalem, where he is spending a semester-long sabbatical from the
Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary. He is in his third year of a five-year rabbinical program; it had been his plan to start Lab/Shul after he finished.
The
genesis of Lab/Shul dates to 1998, when Mr. Lau-Lavie came to the
United States from Israel to develop an arts education program at B’nai Jeshurun,
an Upper West Side congregation known for its innovative services. “It
was the ‘it girl’ of the ’90s,” he said of the synagogue.
But
while he was there he noticed a disconnect. The heart of the service
was given to a scriptural reading that felt lifeless compared to the
competing forces in New Yorkers’ lives, he said.
“It’s
really long, all in Hebrew, people go up, down, up, down, sermon,
whatever,” he said. “It’s an hour. Whoever is there has either their
nose in the text, trying to follow along, or they just check out, go in
the back, go outside. The kids are whisked out. It was December and it
was the Joseph saga, and I’m thinking, You guys, this is a good story.
Down the road, on Broadway, there’s folks lined up around the block for a
matinee of ‘Joseph.’ It’s the same story. Why is it so badly
presented?”
Mr.
Lau-Lavie’s eyes light up when he speaks, his tone alternating between
genial pedagogy and — in a slightly higher register — punky mischief. He
has spent enough time pitching his ideas that the words come in long
paragraphs.
“That
was my big light bulb,” he said. “What if we changed the unit of the
worship? The storytelling? This is theater. There’s a guy standing on a
stage; they are transmitting a story. It happens to be the world’s best
seller. There’s an audience. It’s a performance. It’s just a bad
performance. It’s really bad theater. What if it was actually theater?”
Mr.
Lau-Lavie started a theater company called Storahtelling to present
scriptural narratives the way he imagined them, in English, with music
and dramatized. He also created a character named Hadassah Gross,
hostess of a show called “The Sabbath Queen,” to assume the role of
translator and M.C., or maven, from the Hebrew “mavin,” which means to
understand.
For
Mr. Lau-Lavie, it was a liberating experience. “There was something
about publicly doing drag that was more shamanic than anything else,” he
said. “Hadassah gave me a lot of blessings to be who I am, unabashed.”
Naomi
Less, a musician and teacher, was an early member of Storahtelling. She
had attended a Conservative synagogue as a child, but was looking for
something more engaging as an adult. When she met Mr. Lau-Lavie, he
handed her a postcard for his Rosh Hashana program, with an image of a
toilet and an invitation to “flush away your sins.” She knew then that
she wanted to work with him, she said.
“It
almost felt deviant,” she said of Storahtelling. “We weren’t sitting in
pews listening to a sermon that told you how to behave. We weren’t
attached to cantorial modes. Everything I’d grown up with gave me roots
and a foundation, but I could veer off and saunter. O.K., so now I’m in a
new place.”
As
Storahtelling grew, with holiday performances that drew several hundred
people, Mr. Lau-Lavie began to develop new ways of thinking about his
faith and his family legacy. Being gay had made him comfortable with
challenging orthodoxies; either Scriptures were wrong, or he was an
abomination, which he rejected. He was getting restless to push further,
to “interrupt” people’s lives.
Michael
Dorf, the owner of City Winery, joined the group’s board of directors.
Mr. Dorf, who describes himself as a “cultural Jew,” mainly interested
in observing the holidays, felt that Mr. Lau-Lavie was a charismatic
leader who could provide more.
“As
a music producer, when I see talent, I want to get it in front of
people,” Mr. Dorf said. “Amichai is a rock star in the Jewish world. My
role is to be the talent manager and ringleader producer of the show.”
At
a 2012 board meeting, he said the group should evolve into a synagogue,
with Mr. Lau-Lavie as its rabbi. He offered his club for services.
Mr.
Lau-Lavie had resisted such entreaties before, feeling that “artists
were the new rabbis.” This time, though, he felt he and the congregation
were ready.
“What
matured in me is the sense that Judaism, like all religion, is not the
bottom line,” he said. “That it is a tool in our toolbox for human
well-being and being helpful beings, and that there is a difference
between many people who really view Judaism or religion as the end goal:
In other words, keep the Sabbath or marry a Jew so the Jewish story
continues. That’s of course how I grew up. I realized that that’s
missing the point.
“I’m
not flying Delta because I’m interested in Delta. I’m flying Delta
because it’s convenient or I got the miles on it. The idea is to get
somewhere. I’m practicing Judaism because that’s my airline, because I
was born into it and I think it’s got a deeply profound, ancient and
relevant toolbox for a good life, but the end goal is a good life, not
to be Jewish. To be human. To be there for myself and others. And that’s
a totally different proposition.”
Besides, Mr. Dorf said: “It was the family job — he couldn’t say no.”
Mr.
Lau-Lavie is also a father, after a lesbian couple he knew asked him to
donate sperm and help raise their children. They now have a son and two
daughters, ages 3 to 7. Mr. Lau-Lavie sleeps over on weekends and one
night during the week.
“My
mother said it’s a very biblical model,” he said. “To my family’s
credit, they took it very well. I’m very lucky. And the kids are
lovely.”
Mr.
Lau-Lavie’s vision is attractive to Jews disaffected from their
tradition. Jennifer Lee and her husband, Scott Klein, discovered
Storahtelling three years ago, when their daughter was approaching the
age for bat mitzvah training. Though they had grown up going to
synagogue at the High Holy Days, they had drifted away, returning only
for the sake of their daughter.
“Amichai
explained, ‘This is what I imagine B mitzvah training looks like,’ ”
Ms. Lee said, using the gender-neutral term favored by Mr. Lau-Lavie.
“It was interactive, with music, and we got to create our own service.
We said, ‘I’m in.’ At the synagogue we were in, I said, ‘I’m out.’ ”
On
a Friday night in January, Ms. Lee, Mr. Klein and their daughter were
attending another Lab/Shul experiment: Instead of holding weekly
services, what if the congregation broke up into Friday night dinners at
various members’ homes, with general discussion suggestions from Mr.
Lau-Lavie, but no top-down leadership? The wine flowed, the candles were
lighted, the conversation moved in and out of topics suggested on a
printed place mat called the “DIY Shabbat Handout.”
“We’re
experimenting with the frequency and ways we get together,” Mr.
Lau-Lavie said. “I’m not sure that in the 21st century it has to be
every week. Sabbath every week, yes. Communal gathering? Public worship?
I don’t know. Is once a month something that the oversaturated and
urban lifestyle can support? I don’t know.”
Whether
any of this can slow the decline in synagogue participation remains to
be seen. Shawn Landres, who runs a Jewish innovation lab called Jumpstart,
compared the experimentation in places like Lab/Shul to the “emergent”
Christian churches, which have reached out to people turned off by
religion.
“Emergent
churches and synagogues are both moving away from traditional
institutional forms, to reflect a broader cultural shift,” he said.
“People coming to synagogues or churches now want to be in a
relationship, not a contract. They want to be in a network, not an
institution.”
The level of experimentation among synagogues, Mr. Landres said, recalled that of the 1950s and 1960s, when rabbis like Shlomo Carlebach and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, immigrants to the United States, created lasting movements.
Yet
for all the current efforts to innovate and adapt, the synagogues that
are growing in New York are ultra-Orthodox, which benefit from high
birthrates and higher rates of retention than they have enjoyed in the
past. Mr. Lau-Lavie concedes the appeal of their message.
“The
pews are filling with people who just want some structure,” he said.
“ ‘Just tell me what to do. Give me order in the chaos.’ In an age in
which we have more and more privileges and choices, the allure of a
system that tells you what to do and what not to do, and what to wear
and what to eat, and the consequences and limits of your choices, for
some mental types, is essential. I get it. It’s a suspension of
disbelief in its deepest sense. I’m judgmental of it and I have a lot of
respect for it.”
Next
up for Lab/Shul are holiday events and a fund-raising gala called
Mezooza Makeover, to be followed by High Holy Days services that now
draw more than 1,000 people. Maybe they will continue to meet at City
Winery, Mr. Lau-Lavie said; maybe they will move around — change dates,
frequency, venue.
Mr.
Lau-Lavie seemed pleased but wary of his own success. If he continued
on this course, would he become the thing he rebelled against? And if he
did, could he still be a critic of the establishment? It was a paradox
he turned over in his mind.
“I
was counterculture, outside the box,” he said. “Now we’re going to do a
shul and I’m going to be the rabbi?” He paused. “Is that giving up? Am I
giving in? Now I’m the system?”
A version of this article appears in print on March 16, 2014, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Synagogue, Rebooted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/nyregion/lab-shul-is-an-experimental-jewish-gathering-still-in-a-beta-phase.html?_r=0
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