February 18, 2024|ט' אדר א' ה' אלפים תשפ"ד V-asu li mikdash: Making a Case for the Synagogue Experience
Print ArticleAbout a month after the ground war against Hamas began, some religious soldiers decided that they needed a shul in Gaza. In early November they davened in a 6th century synagogue in Gaza that was unearthed in 1965. Later, they converted another Palestinian building into shul. They called that shul “Beit Ha-Knesset Heichal Avraham” and they had a sign in front of the shul with this name and a sign with the times for shacharit, mincha and maariv. I don’t know if they had week of learning sponsors, Sunday morning learning sponsors or a shul Super Bowl party. And, of course, just before Chanukah, IDF Chabad soldiers transformed a house in Beit Hanoun into the first Chabad house in Gaza. Truthfully, if need be, soldiers can daven in private. If they don’t have a synagogue, they can still have a minyan if they are davening with ten men. But many soldiers felt it was important to daven specifically in a synagogue, in a shul.
Of course, the notion that synagogue attendance is critical for vibrant Jewish life is being challenged by the younger community. Let me read to you the following passage from an article that I read:
“The synagogue nowadays is not the most popular institution in the Jewish community. When I say Jewish community, I have in mind not the secular but the religious community, the community which is concerned with man not only as a biological but as a transcendental being as well. However, even the religious or searching community, whose members logically should have flocked in droves to the synagogue, is not too much in love with it. The activities and interests of this community do not revolve around the synagogue. The members of this community sway from the synagogue.
There are a variety of reasons responsible for this paradoxical phenomenon and I wish to enumerate some of them.
First, the unpopularity of the synagogue is the result of the anti-establishment mood of our times. The rebellious frame of mind has precipitated, sometimes in a frightening way, an upsurge of shallow, amorphous emotionalism, which rejects religious institutionalism and objectivism.”
This article suggests that people don’t like institutions. They want to do their own things. They want to find their own path. Therefore, they are averse to the “institutionality” that the synagogue represents. A little later in the article, the author states:
“The young man today is a complex personality. There is no simplicity to him. With his critical, sophisticated approach, he feels alienated from a scrupulously well-organized synagogue. The young man of today is volatile, very excitable; his emotionalism is not deep-rooted. He would like to attend a service which is more fervent and less fixed. He would also like to see the synagogue become a house of study rather than just a house of prayer. ...”
According to this article, young people don’t like the formal aspect of the synagogue. They want less formalism and they are more interested in Torah study than prayer. The article continues:
“The unpopularity of the synagogue in the American Jewish community, the young community, expresses itself in a variety of ways. First young couples do not care to join the neighborhood congregation. Like nomads, they wander from synagogue to synagogue, displaying impatience with all and liking none.”
By now, I hope all the young people in shul now are squirming in their seats. Here we are attacking the young men and women of this generation who are fickle and don’t really care about community or institutions, but the truth is that this article was not written a few months ago or a few years ago. The author of this article was none other than Rav Soloveitchik who presented it at KJ (Kehillath Jeshurun) in 1972, over fifty years ago. Over fifty years ago, Rav Solovetchik was trying to address the following problem for the modern Jew. Do we need a mikdash, a synagogue, if we have a strong Jewish home? What is the value of the synagogue experience, especially for the younger generation, whether we are talking about the current younger generation, or the older generation when they were the younger generation. It’s the same issue. We need to make a case for the synagogue, for tefilla b’tzibbur, for the physical structure of the synagogue being a centerpiece in our Jewish lives.
In ancient times, for most religions, the experience of temple worship was critical, because there was a separation between religious life and real life. You did your religious stuff when you visited your temple and then you went about your regular life outside the temple. However, Judaism introduced the concept of the mitzvah outside the mikdash and the concept of kedusha, sanctity, outside the mikdash. So many rules govern our religious lives outside our mikdash, outside our synagogues and houses of study. So many communal religious activities take place outside shul. And many of us are familiar with the famous story about someone asking the Kotzker rebbe, “Where can God be found?” to which he replied, “Wherever you let Him in.” What, then, is the value of the synagogue, of the mikdash. Yes, we read in this week’s parsha, “v-asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham.” God instructs us to build a mikdash so that God could dwell within us. But why? Why do we need a structure, an edifice, called the mikdash, and by extension our mikdshei m’at – our miniature temples called synagogues? How critical are synagogue experiences to religious life?
I think about Amazon. I like to order from Amazon. Many of us like to order from Amazon. Some people still like the experience of shopping at the mall, but for many of us, the experience of shopping is not worth the time expended, so we just order on Amazon. Our family gets our food delivered once a week. If we are not organized, then we go to a grocery store to buy food, but we try to get food delivered if at all possible. But some people prefer the experience of food shopping. We all love the experience of going out to a restaurant, except, of course, if we have young children so it may be better to just order food from a restaurant and eat at home. And that’s really the question. V’asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham. We must build the mikdash for God to dwell amongst us. There is something about the existence or the experience of a mikdash, and by extension the shul that connects us to God. But what is it? Why do we need the synagogue experience? Why don’t we just Amazon it? Let me share with you two thoughts that hopefully will resonate with you.
First, Rav Soloveitchik explained that we are homeless. We think that we have homes, but in reality we are in exile. Jews have been in exile for thousands of years, but mankind has been homeless since the beginning of time, since we were exiled from Gan Eden. A home provides us with security, but we are really not secure. Rav Soloveitchik studied Shir Ha-shirim when he was a young boy and his rebbe taught a passage how Shlomo Ha-melech was surrounded by armed soldiers because of “pachad ba-lailot,” the dread of night. Rav Soloveitchik, then a young boy, wondered what was this fear that Shlomo Ha-melech felt. He came home and asked his mother about this mysterious dread at night. His mother didn’t answer him. She just said, “Read shema and go to bed.” Rav Soloveitchik thought about this and he realized that Shlomo ha-melech is modern man. With all our advancements in science and technology, we are still in fear. We are still insecure, because we are homeless. We are afraid. It is natural to the human condition. When is our fear alleviated? When we come home. When we come home to God.
The Seforno writes that the keilim of the mishkan are essentially furniture for God’s house. The aron is God’s throne, the Shulchan is God’s table and the menorah is lighting for God’s house. We build a home for God and then we come to His home and we feel rooted and secure with God at our side. If we are intentional about our synagogue experience, which is patterned after the mikdash, then it is a wonderful opportunity to come home to God, to feel nourished and cared for by God. This space is God’s space and we are invited to enter this space to pray and face the “pachad ba-lailot,” – the dread of the night knowing that we are home when we have faith in God. And we pray as a “tzibbur” with a community, connected not just with the Jews in our shul, but with Jews in shuls throughout the world and throughout the ages who use this opportunity to have a rendezvous with God.
I think that there is another critical benefit of the synagogue experience. The gemara in Menachot 97a states that when there was a beit ha-mikdash, the mizbai-ach would atone for the sins of man. Now that there is no beit ha-mikdash, the shulchan, the table of man atones for the sins of man. What is the connection between the mizbai’ach and the modern day shulchan?
In both instances, we sacrifice for something greater. When there is a beit ha-mikdash, we part with our possessions. We surrender something of value to be used, as it were, for God. When there’s no beit ha-mikdash, our table which we use to welcome the poor into our house and provide them with food is a tool for our sacrifice, as well, for something greater. The key to the mikdash and to our modern-day shuls is that they are opportunities for us to develop this middah of sacrificing for something greater.
Can our modern-day mikdash experience be impactful such that it creates stronger Jewish homes? Absolutely, if we do it right. If we come to shul for a spiritual experience willing to sacrifice for the greater good. If we come to shul to be part of a tzibbur willing to surrender our personal autonomy for the sake of others. What does that look like? It means that we come to shul to strengthen everyone else with our presence and our commitment to tefilla and tefilla b’tzibbur and we don’t get stressed if the davening is too long or too short or if it’s too cold or too hot in shul or if you get shushed or if it’s a little too noisy. Being part of a tzibbur means that we sacrifice something personally, even our personal spirituality, for the benefit of strengthening the whole. And if we practice this in our mikdash, then we open ourselves up to better understand our role outside our mikdash. We become people who are not only interested in what we want, but we are willing to sacrifice, to put others first, for the sake of community. How we treat our shul experience in our mikdash can directly impact our Jewish lives outside the mikdash.
Imagine if we felt so passionately about the synagogue experience like those IDF soldiers in Gaza who built Beit Knesset Heichal Avraham. Imagine if we fully appreciated the relationship between life in our mikdash and life outside our mikdash. Imagine if we utilized our mikdash to feel the warmth of God, walking into His home, and truly building that sense of emunah, of faith, to help us feel rooted in this homeless world in which we live. And imagine if we come to shul whenever we can, and for each person it’s different, not just to socialize, but as a spiritual experience, one when we develop the midah of sacrifice for the sake of others. God willing, if we work hard at this, then we will be successful and we will more fully realize, appreciate and experience the central pasuk in this week’s parsha of “v-asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham.”