It didn't take me long to learn one of the top ten lessons for surthriving residency: to "find a tribe." Participation in a tribe, or community, though a meaningful part of any healthy lifestyle, becomes an absolute necessity when your better half is absent. The relative value of that tribe increases with every compounded variable, whether it's a cross-country move, moving to a place with few existing connections, a spouse in one of the more demanding residences (they're all demanding, but some are more arduous than others), or, you know, all of the above. In New York, community serves a secondary function: to make the city a little smaller and more manageable. As we prepared for our move someone told me that even though New York is a huge city, it begins to shrink the moment you settle into your neighborhood and your routines. Finding your routes and your haunts, your favorite coffee shops and 99-cent stores, that bar you go to with one friend and the restaurant you go to with another, these are the things that turn The Big Apple into something more bite-sized. Even in How I Met Your Mother, the characters agreed New York City was The Best Place On Earth™ while sitting at the same booth in the same bar night after night. The truth is that Manhattan or Brooklyn or the Bronx might be where you live, but your neighborhood is your home. It should come as no surprise, then, that upon arriving in Brooklyn I had one very singular goal: to find a community. As you know if you've read an earlier post, "My Year as an Undercover Shiksa," the neighborhood we initially moved into in the summer of 2013 did not have the community either of us needed. Since there were no cute little coffee shops or bars around, I did what I could to find an innocuous corner of Borough Park that might have a synagogue with people like me - religious but not chassidic, for whom Breaking Bad was about a meth-making ex-high school teacher and not a scandalous neighbor who read Harry Potter. And so I searched. I managed to find a small handful of synagogues that predated Chassidic Borough Park, whose congregants were leftovers from the old days of religious Judaism before it became so black and white. In today's parlance they might be called "Modern Orthodox" to distinguish them from the more right-wing branches of Orthodoxy, but in practice there was nothing modern about them. True, they were not chassidic, but they were still not for me. After an unbearably disappointing Rosh Hashanah service at the largest of the non-Chassidic orthodox synagogues in Borough Park, I decided to expand the radius of my search. First I went to a small traditional egalitarian congregation that met twice-monthly. The services were filled with melodies both traditional and contemporary sung by young singles, couples, and families. It was a dramatic departure from the dusty shuls (Yiddish for "synagogue") and it was really quite lovely, but their particular approach to the Shabbat service would have been uncomfortable for J, and so I didn't return, confident that at least I was getting warmer. A little further away I found a more standard modern orthodox synagogue - old and well-established with a broad but sparse demographic, whose services felt much more like the ones J and I were raised with. Tired from my search and wanting so desperately to find a home, I decided "this is it!" and started regularly attending services there. I celebrated the fall holiday of Sukkot with them, and they even celebrated our marriage on the first Shabbat after our wedding when J and I were able to attend together. But by the end of January it was clear this shul lacked what I needed, so I dragged my feet to move on. Five months had passed since my arrival in New York and I still hadn't found what I was looking for. The next shul on my list was the Prospect Heights Shul - a young, burgeoning community who referred to itself as a "warm and diverse modern Orthodox shul." It was the beginning of February 2014, Pete Seeger had just passed away earlier that week, and my primary instincts were to stay inside and console myself with "We Shall Overcome" and "The Hammer Song." But J was working and I was lonely, so I went. I stepped into a small, newly-constructed Jewish Montessori school. One woman smiled (smiled!), welcomed me, and pointed me toward the back where the tiny gym had been converted into a sanctuary. A makeshift mechitza separated the neat rows of folding chairs into men's and women's sides, and a young man led the service at the front where the necessary trappings of a Jewish sanctuary - the ark holding a single Torah scroll and a table from which to lead the service. There weren't many people at that early point in the 2.5-hour service, but there were just enough, which made me feel right at home after growing up in a small-town shul with a regular attendance of about 12 people. There wasn't a rabbi, but that didn't stop this community. Indeed, a Jewish congregation does not need to have a rabbi to exist since the service can be led by any competent individual with or without a decent voice. Lucky for me, the couple of men who stepped up to the front throughout the service to lead various portions of it all had lovely voices who, at points in the service where the text is predetermined but the tune is not, chose flowing and lilting melodies that just begged for harmony and counter-melodies. Personally, I was more than happy to oblige. More people arrived throughout the service as is common in Jewish communities where Jewish Standard Time (i.e. late) is the norm, and by the last 45 minutes there was a sizeable group of young 20- and 30-somethings singing together. I was feeling quite comfortable and thought maybe I had found a place worth returning to when my mind was made up for me. The gentleman now at the front began his repetition of the Amidah, a solemn pages-long collection of prayers and reflections that is first said silently by the congregants then repeated aloud by the prayer leader. This is often where the prayer leader proves him- or herself: there is a great deal of flexibility in how it is recited, what melodies are used, and with what pacing. The melodies are never written in our books, but sprout from the collective musical consciousness of the community. Some leaders rely on more tried and true melodies, others are more daring, but the best choices are those that are familiar and apply themselves easily to the text. Not sure what I expected, I was shocked when that morning's prayer leader sang the ancient text to the tune of "This Land is Your Land." I smiled despite myself. That he chose a contemporary tune was lovely; that he paid homage to Pete Seeger was divine. Finally, my shul shopping was over. Fast-forward four and a half years, and I'm now fully entrenched in the Prospect Heights Shul. Within a few months of finding it J and I moved out of our first apartment to a place within walking distance of the synagogue so that we could more fully participate in the community on Shabbat and holidays. I jumped onto committees with vigor and found ways to serve the nascent community who, with its rapidly growing membership, needed a lot of volunteer hands on deck. Despite the work and the occasional headaches (which coincidentally happened to get more frequent once I joined the Board. . . hmm. . .), I find that being an active part of the community brings meaning, joy, and relationships into my life in ways that simply showing up for prayer services on Shabbat would not accomplish. These relationships have proven to be crucial to my mental, emotional, and spiritual health in the last four years. I am no longer lonely; since J's schedule rarely plays well with the Jewish calendar, being part of this community has meant always having people to talk, celebrate, and eat with on Shabbat and holidays. It has meant building friendships that exist beyond the walls of the synagogue itself. And perhaps coolest of all, it has meant randomly bumping into friends and community members around my neighborhood, making an otherwise crowded and impersonal corner of Brooklyn feel like home.
1 Comment
Amy
6/19/2018 02:16:48 am
Such a nice story, especially for those who read your earlier blog on the joys and trials of "shul shopping". I'm so glad you found a community where you feel at home, even in the big city,and I'm sure the community benefits from your many gifts. A win win!
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AuthorNashira is a music teacher and proud Small-Town Jew who, after surthriving six years in Brooklyn for her husband's surgical residency, is finally back in Wisconsin where she belongs! At least until the end of the two-year surgical fellowship, that is. It's a wild ride, and she's ready to tell you all about it! Archives
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