Going to a Shabbaton

A lot of what’s going on in the world right now is troubling.

Sometimes it seems like the world as we know it is crumbling. Often we wonder what we can do to hold it together, to reglue bits of it back on; usually we give up.

And it’s cold out! Out on the streets in other parts of the country, there’s ICE; that hasn’t come here yet, but we do have to worry about ice on the sidewalks. It feels like it’s been years since the temperature’s gone this low; the numbers seem like jokes. Feels like 7 above zero? Really? And there’s snow, which seems to have read the forecast and scheduled itself to come at entirely different times, when it’s not expected, just for fun. Which really is not much fun.

It’s not that some people aren’t trying. Most Christmas lights are down by now — I admit to loving them, although inflatable Santas and sleighs and reindeer, which usually end up lying flat and dead mid-lawn, don’t do much for me. But I saw a Valentine’s Day display that sticks with me.

A very tall skeleton — the kind of skeleton that first started showing up as a Halloween display, ugly, creepy, but at least logically tied to the season, and then morphed occasionally and inexplicably into Christmas scenes — showed up in the middle of a small Teaneck lawn. It wore a well-crafted hot pink hat on its bony head, framing its toothy grimace and empty eye and nose sockets. The hat was paired with a caftan of exactly the same color, with the words “BE MINE” in red on the chest.

Why? I have no idea. But it certainly is memorable.

But then there are some unequivocably good things in the world — other than babies and puppies and kittens, which of course bring infinite joy.

There is the Beth Sholom Shabbaton.

Yes, this whole long prelude was to get to the pure happiness of the annual Shabbaton that Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck conducts.

No other shul could do exactly what Beth Sholom does, because each shul is different. No two communities are exactly the same. But each one could offer some variation on the theme.

Beth Sholom’s Shabbaton includes davening, dinner, lunch, seudah shlishit, and snacks. It includes time to talk, and to meet new people. And it includes classes — 25 of them this year — each taught by a shul member.

Beth Sholom is unusual in the number of rabbis — somewhere in the mid-40s — and other Jewish professionals who belong to it. Much of that is because it’s a Conservative shul almost directly across the Hudson from the Conservative movement’s central institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary. It’s a convenient place for JTS teachers to live, and smart, serious people attract other smart, serious people. Most of the rabbis are Conservative, but there are Orthodox and Reform clergy as well. The classes are engaging and cover a wide range of topics. It’s warm, stimulating, and a model for what shuls can be if they try.

The last session, just before Shabbat ended, was for everyone; instead of picking our own classes we were divided into tables, given texts and questions, and asked to talk about them. It was about community — how wide is the tent? Is it infinitely expandable? Most basically, how and why does it work?

One of the texts was by Ethan Tucker, one of the founders of Hadar. He posited that there are three values that we value in our organizations — community, integrity, and pluralism. But, he said, it’s very difficult to have all three, because they can’t all go together. You can, for example, maintain a deep personal integrity in your beliefs, but you might have to compromise them for pluralism’s sake, because in their pure form they’re offensive to others. You might have to compromise pluralism for community, because some people are outside whatever boundaries you’ve set, and to give them up would be to water down what you have.

It was a fascinating, provocative end to a warm, loving, exciting Shabbat. It’s a synagogue at its best. And we need more of that.

—JP

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