2 min read
ByStudent Views, Student Views
In 2014, a bunch of friends and I sat around on camp and discussed organising our own kehilah which would meet over Shabbat to daven, eat and hang out. The arguments were that larger communities aren’t good at empowering young people, don’t allow room for changing values and aren’t exciting social spaces where we want to spend a large chunk of the weekend.
So we started meeting that summer, organising our own services, borrowing a torah generously lent by one of our rabbis, singing our own tunes carried over from our Noam days and spending long hours after lunch wandering around North West London between people’s houses. On a fairly regular basis we were still sitting round someone’s kitchen table when it was time for Havdallah.
But on the other hand, I missed my shul. I may not always get to sing the tunes I like, hear drashot from friends or lead my favourite parts of Mussaf, but it’s still my shul – my community, the place where I grew up, where I know everyone and everyone knows me. Our new kehilah was fun and exciting, but I couldn’t sit next to my mum or hear my rabbi say something amazing, or join in the singing filling the Beit Knesset. Twenty voices just don’t have the same effect as two hundred. I couldn’t even complain about the bar mitzvah boy singing Anim Zemirot, because we didn’t have any bar mitzvah boys and we didn’t sing Anim Zemirot (because we all hate it).
By separating ourselves off, in a way we gained a wonderful, close intensity – my friendships with individuals in that group grew, and I spent more time, overall, thinking about Judaism and my place in it. But we also lost something: the culture that you engage with by going to a historic synagogue with older people who know more, the quirks that you remember from childhood, and the hellos to and from those you’d rarely sit down to lunch with, but are fond of all the same.
I wonder how, when I get home from university for the last time, I can find a balance between these two ideals: having good moments with close friends and enjoying our own kind of religion, where we’re in charge of our own kind of prayer and can make it into what we need it to be for it to make sense; and the religion that we grew up in, which emphasises the importance of community more than almost anything else, and where we find our families, and the education that we need to know anything about Judaism at all. In a larger, more impersonal group, it’s easy to get lost and forget what the point of it is at all – but on our own there doesn’t seem to be much point in it, either.
I’ve hardly had any Jewish community at all in the time that I’ve been at uni. Friday nights were for going out, Saturday mornings were for lying in and kashrut became vegetarianism. I wonder if I’ll be able to shake that all off when I get home, and I wonder where, if I do, I’ll end up – davening in people’s front rooms? Shul hopping until I find a place that suits me? Being endlessly dissatisfied with this kehilah and that, because none of them are perfect? I’ll keep you posted.
Noa Gendler is a final-year student at the University of Cambridge, studying English Literature. Before that she attended North London Collegiate School. She is a seasoned Limmudnik and is involved in Marom, the Masorti young adult community.