Assignment # 1
Since we did not have a siyur this week, I would like each of you to write a reflection either on your experience in the Old City last Friday night or about a visit to a neighborhood, supermarket, or Jerusalem eating establishment this Friday morning/afternoon. Good Luck.
posted by Marc Rosenberg at 11:11 AM
1 Comments:
The entire Year Course 2006-7 spent Erev Shabbat September 8th together just south of the walls of the Temple Mount and then split into several groups for Kabbalat Shabbat. One of the groups, naturally, was to go bring in Shabbat in front of the Kotel. I have done this before; most everyone on Year Course has as well, I imagine. But even my internal egalitarian self was not strong enough to convince me to stay with the conservative service, being held away from the Kotel. The wall--for Kotel means "wall"--simply has a draw that brings in everyone who comes near to it.
This summer I spent Shabbat at the Kotel with another group of Jewish teenagers. But we had only 15 of each gender and were not strong enough to carve our own minyan in the crowded plaza in front of the Kotel. It felt almost cliché to welcome Shabbat in the place considered holiest to Judaism because of its proximity to the Holy of Holies of the Temples that stood near the spot. There were too many people; the dances were constricted because of the numbers of daveners. It felt impersonal because no minyan had any regard for any other. And to top it all off, there was a man praying on his own shouting, shouting up to God. The experience simply was not one of excitement.
I hoped that this time would be different. Our group was probably 200-strong and, maybe more importantly, was the first one to begin Kabbalat Shabbat services at the Kotel. The excitement was increased because of the size and the songs. We danced and sang for each of the introductory psalms. If the male side of the minyan began to lose excitement, the female side was just over the mechitzah to kick singing back into gear. Six short paragraphs; six long Carlebach songs: the beginning of Shabbat. We had hora circles, conga lines, line dances, jumping, lifting, circling over and over. The feeling is one very difficult to put into words, possibly because the Chasidic melodies, or niggunim, have no words to them. It seems to be that the emotional side of prayer is brought out much better with this sort of experience than when one sits in shul and mumbles the psalms quickly, trying to catch up to the leader in order to race home to eat dinner. Our going home was to be after a two-hour walk after two hours of davening and eating. We knew it was a long way away and therefore did not think about it at all; we focused on the dancing.
The circles slowed, the chazan's "sh"s quieted our minyan. We entered a normal Shabbat evening service until the end, when I flipped my siddur to the page with Yigdal on it. That's the closing song for Shabbat Ma'ariv. But Adon Olam started to a tune with which I was not even familiar. A bummer if I ever heard of one...until, that is, I realized what an amazing tune it was. Hoarse voice and all, I ran up the octave to try to save my vocal chords. Everyone else did the same and by the third crescendoing chorus I had tears in my eyes. I looked around and saw I was not alone. This was the moment that raised davening at the Kotel from cliché to amazing communal experience.
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