PRAYING WITH YOUR CONGREGATION,

SERVICE EXPERIMENTS

March, 2008

Why do Jews pray? Why do our regulars gather during the Sabbath for communal worship? We come to add meaning to our lives, to connect to fundamental and significant entities beyond ourselves - God, community, and our wonderful Jewish heritage. We pray to find comfort, perspective, and rootedness in the midst of the frenetic swirl of contemporary life. We celebrate life’s wonders and sense the sacred.

My teacher, Rabbi Larry Hoffman, wrote ( The Way Into Jewish Prayer): Perhaps first and foremost, prayer is a delivery system for committing us to the great ideas that make life worth living, because ideas that are ritually construed empower us to do what we would otherwise never have the courage to do. Prayer moves us to see our lives more clearly against the backdrop of eternity, concentrating our attention on verities that we would otherwise forget. It imparts Judaism's canon of great concepts and moves us to live our lives by them.

Some regulars may tell you that we pray from a sense of obligation, some to God and some to the community of worshipers. Some days we just do not feel like coming to services and the responsibility for doing mitzvot , including the mitzvah of communal pray, motivates us to reach beyond ourselves. We gather our energy and come to temple; we find that the our energy grows as we join with others. We are rewarded even as we respond to God by doing the mitzvah .

The expression the more, the merrier is not always true; with respect to communal worship, it is more true than not. Sharing is an interesting phenomenon. When we share a bar of fine chocolate, we break it into pieces for each person to taste. The more people, the smaller the taste. When we share the joy of communal prayer we are not dividing that energy, but increasing it. The more people, the greater our rejoicing.

So how do we encourage more people to participate in communal worship on a regular basis? We keep trying new approaches; we try to create entry points for folks who are not regular worshipers; we try to welcome everyone warmly into our communal embrace. With these thoughts in mind we are trying an experiment regarding our Shabbat evening service. We are hoping that a shorter service that maintains the core of our service will provide a gateway experience for people who want to sample the benefits of communal worship in a convenient format. Cantor Naimark and I will work hard to create this service. I will not offer a sermon, nor a d’var Torah, just a Torah insight. We will keep the service to forty minutes. We will place no limit on the intensity of prayer or expressions of joy.

We will offer this service, beginning this month, on each of the shabbatot when we have a Y Dine Alone dinner. We hope that many congregants who not attend services now will attend, including the people who share a shabbat dinner but leave before the service. We hope that families will attend worship and that this service can be the beginning of regular inter-generational worship at Central Synagogue of NassauCounty. The service will be followed by an oneg shabbat and the fellowship of our community. The dates for these experimental services are March 14, April 11, May 16, and June 20. We will judge its desirability by your attendance.

We are also instituting a change in our Shabbat morning worship service. Currently we have a service every shabbat morning. On the mornings when we have a bar or bat mitzvah , we enjoy Torah study from 9-10:00 a.m. and then a worship service with the bar or bat mitzvah at 10:30. When we are not celebrating a bar or bat mitzvah , we gather at 9:30 (9:00 a.m.in the summer months) for worship and study. As we are currently studying the Psalms, we have decided to institute a regular monthly Torah reading on the fourth shabbat of each month. If we are celebrating a bar or bat mitzvah , we read the Torah at this service. If we are celebrating a festival, this is our monthly Torah reading. On the mornings, when we have no bar or bat mitzvah or festival, we will discuss the section of Torah we read from the scroll. This section will be listed in the Central Times service directory. To illustrate, the dates for this spring are as follows: March 22, April 26 (festival service to conclude Passover), May 24 ( bat mitzvah of Laura Stern), and June 28 (yes, I know that this is summer).

I hope these changes will mean that I see more of you more frequently, in our sanctuary and chapel on shabbat, and together we deepen our worship experience and increase our delight and good cheer.

With blessing,
Rabbi Marc Gruber