Allison - Cultural Immersion

A few weeks ago, I decided to go to a Jewish temple for the first time. Thankfully, my Jewish roommate Chelsea agreed to take me with her so that I did not have to go on my own. I would have been pretty lost without her assistance. For a while, she refused to bring me with her because she thought I had anti-Semitic tendencies. I would hardly consider that to be true. Although, I had been known to make the occasional joke about Hanukkah, I certainly did not think poorly of the religion or its followers.  I figured this would be considerably out of my comfort zone as a Catholic and boy, was I correct in this assumption. 

Although I had the added comfort of attending the Saturday morning Shabbat service with Chelsea, she had told me that there would be plenty of people at the ceremony and we could just slip in the back. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Instead, there was a very small group of about 12 people who were gathered in a small room across from the typical large meeting room. The rabbi later explained that their Friday night service generally has a bigger group of people. 

I was not really sure what to expect. I have never really had any close Jewish friends who actively practiced their faith so I didn’t really have any assumptions of what one might do during a Jewish service simply because I hadn’t taken the time to think about it. Perhaps one major difference that I noted between what I had thought it would be like and the reality was that there was much more Hebrew spoken than I would have imagined.

I’m not really sure how the service started because Chelsea and I were a little bit late in getting there. I can only assume that it was with a song though. For the first twenty minutes at least, they sang various hymns in Hebrew. There was a book to look at to follow along, but the pronunciation was not the easiest. After the first half an hour though, I started to be able to sing along with them though and say a good majority of the words correctly (or at least to sound the way they did).

After singing, we all read from a sort of Hebrew bible (or as I learned in my research the Tanakh). I'm pretty sure that the text that we read were scriptures from the Old Testament. I do know it was not the Torah because the rabbi read from that later on in the ceremony. Sidenote for non-Jews: the Torah meaning "Teachings" includes the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. When he read from the Torah, the whole mood changed and everyone was was so much more reverent. I remember that we had to kiss a book at some point. I think it was the Torah? I honestly don't remember. Too many books to keep track of. Different people in the circle were chosen to do various roles in getting out the Torah, carrying it, and dressing it. It was really neat.

At some point, the rabbi gave a short sermon about the importance of teachers and role models in our lives. He invited everyone to share their experiences about who might have shaped their past and who they might have taught. This particularly hit home for me because this was only about a week after Cullen, my friend and former Chinese tutor, passed away. Naturally, we discussed him as well as the CIES students who I was tutoring. Similar to the Catholic faith, there was a part where people could offer up intentions of people to pray for and the group prayed for Cullen. This was quite nice and moving for me.

After the service was over, the rabbi invited everyone into the main meeting room to have lunch. They had some sparkling grape juice and challah bread which was blessed before we all ate from it. We could not stay for long though because I had to get to a tutoring session and Chelsea had to go to work. Overall it was a very informative experience. Everyone was extremely welcoming and they invited us to return again. I would definitely be open to that possibility.