When it comes to finding the right synagogue,
Michele Friedner can commiserate with U2 — she still hasn’t
found what she’s looking for.
But it’s not for lack of trying. The Queens-born, 25-year-old San Franciscan has sampled services at leftist Renewal synagogues, Orthodox shuls and every manner of temple in-between. And, if nothing else, she’s found out what she doesn’t like.
She attended High Holy Day services last year at a Bay Area Renewal synagogue, but described the experience as “appalling.”
“There was a total lack of any kind of solemnity. When I think of High Holy Day services, I think of festive but solemn. But there were people dancing up and down with tambourines and it was annoying but also frustrating in some ways. It didn’t seem very reflective,” said Friedner, an assistant director at Toolworks, a San Francisco nonprofit that aids the disabled.
Friedner was also put off by the Renewal synagogue’s blending of religion and politics. She considers herself both religions and political, but felt the synergy was inappropriate, especially at a High Holy Days service.
“It would be really nice to have an overtly political synagogue in the sense that outside of davening time, we did political things. When we’re done davening if they want to go out and raise money for the International Solidarity Movement, that’s great,” she said.
“But during davening times I want it to be Hebrew and I want to follow the book. I want it to be completely true. I want to be doing the same thing people were doing 500 years ago.”
Friedner attended local Reform and Conservative synagogues, but found them more geared toward families than young adults. She most enjoyed her experience at an East Bay Orthodox shul, which she described as “rightist politically, but pretty welcoming.”
She was far from willing to drop a wad of cash to attend services anywhere, however.
“It’s expensive. As someone who works for a nonprofit, I really can’t afford to pay the rate. And as someone from New York who never had to pay in her life, it really is problematic,” she said.
“I understand why they ask for money, but the way I was raised, it’s very hard for me to fork over money and see religion as a commodity that is so easily and not self-consciously bought and sold.”
At the Renewal synagogue last year, one had to buy “a little passbook with tickets and you rip them off and give them in — sort of like buying tickets to a baseball game.”
To top matters off, Friedner is deaf, and several synagogues have been unable to meet her request for a sign-language interpreter. Since most of those temples boast of their inclusiveness, she found this especially frustrating.
So with High Holy Days bearing down, Friedner has no plans.
“I don’t feel particularly drawn to any synagogue,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t feel compelled to go at all.”
Aliza Wasserman’s brothers came back from the Israeli
yeshiva even more fervently Orthodox than their parents, and everyone expected the same from her.
She returned an atheist, and, as such, shall not be attending High Holy Day services.
Wasserman, 24, grew up in central New Jersey attending Orthodox day schools, high school, camps and shuls before heading to the Holy Land for a year of deep study.
The rapid dissolution of Wasserman’s faith led to more than a few paradoxical situations. As a freshman at Rutgers she kept strictly kosher, even toting her own plastic utensils to the dining hall. Back in the dorms, however, she was constantly debating religious students, challenging them to disabuse her of her atheism. Old habits were simply hard to drop.
But dropped they have been. These days she just can’t see herself fitting into a temple community.
“It’s hard for me to connect to all the God language. It’s a big turnoff,” said Wasserman, a Berkeley resident who works at an East Bay homeless youth center.
“I try to think how I could translate it into some kind of inner power or inner dimension of truth I could believe in or relate to, but I haven’t quite figured out how to make it meaningful to me.”
There was no “Aha!” moment triggering Wasserman’s loss of faith; she did not catch her yeshiva instructors eating pork chops and crab salad on Shabbat. Instead she began asking herself difficult questions about her relationship with God. Questions she could not answer.
“What real reason did I have to know my religion was more true than any other religion? That seemed to me to be a necessary truth in order to believe in Judaism and Orthodoxy the way it was. So that was my first question,” she recalled.
“Why would God want us to go around believing in this religion over another just because we were born into it? That just didn’t seem fair to the people born into other religions.”
In the end, her belief in God rested solely on faith. And her faith rested solely on decades of cultural conditioning. And that wasn’t good enough.
Absent the God and Torah-centered belief that she grew up with, Wasserman is unsure of what sort of Jewish identity fits her, if any.
“You take out the religious meaning and it makes it a much less substantial identification. I hope to find something [Jewish] I can relate to, but it seems like it will have to be social or cultural.”
Wasserman’s family have not taken this turn in her life well. They deeply desire to see her back in temple, believing in God and participating with an unburdened heart. And that may one day happen.
“It is possible,” said Wasserman. “But I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“What makes me so Jewish?”
Hazi Goldman was arguing with a rabbi.
“I don’t practice the religion, I’m not kosher, I had a bar mitzvah but it was a transliteration; I can’t speak Hebrew. My mother is actually half-Jewish and her father is Catholic, so I’m only three-quarters Jewish, technically speaking. So how am I Jewish? What makes me Jewish?”
The rabbi’s response affected Goldman profoundly.
“He said, ‘You’ll know you’re Jewish when your grandchildren are Jewish.'”
Despite his aforementioned rant, Jewish children (and grandchildren) are something Goldman deeply desires. He had hoped the rabbi would marry him and his half-Filipina, half-European fianceé, who has considered the idea of conversion. That didn’t happen.
Instead, Goldman hired a “mercenary” rabbi off the Internet, and the disorganized and mechanical nature of the ceremony left a bitter taste in his mouth.
The 29-year-old San Mateo computer programmer wasn’t a likely candidate to attend High Holy Day services before. Now he doesn’t see how he can bring his wife into any of the several temples where the rabbis refused to marry them. He’s not even sure he can bring himself to ask her to convert.
“I don’t want her to change who she is to be with me. That’s not right,” he said.
And even if his wife, Christina Marie, did go through conversion, “I’m sure she would become more knowledgeable than myself in many ways, and it would be hypocritical of me to force that on her.”
The thought of his own Jewish grandchildren is a poignant one for Goldman, because it was a bond with his grandfather that made him a proud, if not observant, Jew.
“When I was 18, my grandfather died. He had two children, a boy and a girl. I am my grandfather’s son’s son,” he recalled.
With a name like Hazi Goldman, the second or third question anybody asks is “Are you Jewish?” Following his grandfather’s death, Goldman began to look forward to answering in the affirmative rather than dreading it.
“If I don’t keep our Jewish identity going, what will happen in 100 years? Will there be any Jews left? All the years of persecution will have finally achieved their desired goal of wiping us off the planet.”
Goldman wants his children to have a sense of their Jewish roots, but that’s a far cry from pining for the synagogue.
He’s left with a dilemma — how do you give your kids the chance to embrace organized Judaism when you have no desire to do so yourself?
“I told myself that when we have children, I’ll be religious for the children’s sake,” he said.
“But as we’re getting close to having children, I just don’t see how I’m supposed to embrace something I don’t really have a passion for.”
Regarding organized religion, Goldman concludes “I don’t know what I would get from it. I am a happy person and don’t feel like I’m missing something.”
On Oct. 6 Seth
Friedman will be taking his dog for a walk.
Or mowing the lawn. Or eating at Denny’s. Or anything under the sun but heading to synagogue for Yom Kippur services.
With the onset of High Holy Days, millions of “three-day Jews” worldwide will find themselves inevitably drawn to the unfamiliar setting of synagogue services. Friedman, however, is not one of them. Going to temple conjures up childhood nostalgia. But it’s not good nostalgia.
“I went to shul on High Holy Days and went to Hebrew school and, you know, going to shul was pretty boring. You go in and sit through long, boring experiences, and because of that I really have no interest in going” back, said Friedman, a San Francisco artist and graphic designer.
The 27-year-old grew up in Long Island, New York, attending Reform services, but spent the High Holy Days at the Conservative Old Westbury Hebrew Congregation, where his grandfather was the cantor. In fact, Friedman’s grandfather officiated his bar mitzvah.
With his cantorial pedigree, he occasionally feels pangs of guilt for steering clear of High Holy Day services. But they never last long.
When a religious, Israeli-born friend suggested going to shul together, Friedman couldn’t help but blurt out, “That sounds like a great idea, man!” Of course, that was toward the end of a party, and they’d both had a few too many.
He didn’t go.
“I can see myself going and being extremely bored,” he surmised. The only way he’ll ever find himself at High Holy Day services again is to keep a friend company.
“I really don’t get anything out of going. I feel like going would be some sort of duty, and that’s the wrong reason to go. That’s all the more reason not to go.”
Friedman’s fondest memories of the High Holy Days are family gatherings at his grandparents’ house, where his grandfather was something of a community patriarch. He can only hope his own grandchildren one day long for Passover seders at his table.
Yet Friedman’s desire to implement his own brand of Jewish continuity is simply not going to get him into synagogue.
There’s simply no reason to “go and listen to a rabbi I don’t know read from a book that has no meaning in my life.”