A while back I visited a Progressive synagogue on a Shabbat morning. After the service I made my way to the kiddush hall where a smiling woman was waiting in the doorway with a tray of little glasses. I picked up a whisky, or so I thought.
My nose should have forewarned me for when I took a sip, instead of the warming rush of alcohol there came the sickly sweetness of pale grape juice. If sacrilege had a taste, this was it.
Not so long after, a similar thing might have happened on a visit to another Progressive shul but I had learned from my previous experience. Now it could have been a coincidence that I had just stumbled on the only two whisky-free synagogues in the country. Elsewhere across the Progressive landscape the malt might have been flowing - or not flowing exactly, for the wee-est of drams you are offered on a Saturday morning would hardly be enough to get a hamster shikur.
But it occurred to me that I might have discovered the real distinction between Orthodox and Progressives. Not for nothing is the current president of the United Synagogue a manufacturer of fine whiskies.
Of course, there might be a prosaic reason behind the abstinence. Progressive synagogues often serve a wider catchment area than Orthodox and have no problem with congregants arriving on four wheels. Perhaps they were just being responsible and not putting temptation in congregants’ way.
I am not sure quite when I made the transition from wine and biscuit at kiddush to whisky and herring but it felt as though I had finally ascended to Jewish adulthood when I did. The small regional community in which I grew up did not provide whisky as a rule, reserving it for special occasions such as Simchat Torah when a bottle stood at the foot of bimah for men to celebrate after they had finished their hakafah (circuit) with the Sefer Torah or their aliyah.
My whiskiest Jewish encounter was, not surprisingly, in Glasgow where I had joined students for their Rabbi Burns night one year: a bottle of Scotch had been allocated to every table in proud defiance of the idea that Jews can’t drink.
For me, that welcome shot on a Shabbat morning has come to be synonymous with Shabbat relaxation. But some men have elevated their whisky to greater ritual moment as members of a “kiddush club” when they slip away at some point during the service to savour the hallowed liquor. Usually some time between the start of the haftarah and the rabbi’s sermon.
I have never been invited into one of these elites, although I would hesitate to forsake the recitation of some of our loftiest prophetic readings - of swords being beaten into ploughshares and angelic choruses proclaiming “Holy, holy, holy” - to go for a tipple. But I can imagine there must be rabbis whose contributions from the pulpit would send congregants reaching for the bottle.
How many clubs still meet I don’t know because 20 years ago there was a concerted effort to discourage them, led by the Orthodox Union in the United States which believed they disrupted the sanctity of the service. They were accused of setting a bad example to teenagers by idealising alcohol.
Nevertheless one can make the case that spiritual satisfaction and alcoholic refreshment go hand in hand by turning to an episode in the Torah for support. The Ten Commandments have been given but Moses returns to the mountain, this time with a posse of Israelite elders. There they are vouchsafed a vision of the Divine presence, witnessing the sapphire-blue paving beneath the heavenly throne.
What happens next? The Torah does not report them frozen in awed contemplation at this wondrous spectacle or breaking out in rapturous Hallelujahs. No, our ancestors marked the occasion by doing that most Jewish thing: it says, “they ate and drank”.
Surely the text would not have bothered to mention them drinking if it had just been a swig of goat’s milk. It must mean that they rejoiced in the first mystical experience to be recorded in the Bible with a l’chaim of some suitable wilderness concoction.
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