Saturday, February 7, 2009

Home Place

Kol Tzeddek Reconstructionist Services 5/7/09

Perhaps it is an omen; I have just checked my horoscope online (a fiendish little habit) and discovered that my Tarot card for the day is the star: “You are consciously on the way home in a spiritual sense.” Sometimes these things are right, sometimes they’re just loopy. Today, it is uncanny. I have just returned from attending for the first time services at Kol Tzeddek, an egalitarian reconstructionist congregation in West Philadelphia, lead by a woman rabbi and woman cantor. This monthly service is called “Tot Shabbat” and it is aimed at families with young children because it consists mostly of participatory singing, dancing, and storytelling rather than traditional lead and response prayers. Despite the non-traditional nature of this service, it contained many elements I consider intrinsic to a Jewish service: the reading of the Torah, the recitation of the Sh’mah and the Mourner’s Kaddish. What made me feel at home was the mixture of these things in what I consider a uniquely feminist recipe.
It is not just that the rabbi and cantor were both women, though that helped. It was not just that the focus was on children, though that helped. It was the larger sense of open-ness that made me feel at home. My husband, a convert to Judaism, and I, raised Conservadox, have been on a pilgrimage for as long as I can remember to find a spiritual home. I can remember discussing with him the feeling of community his sister had been able to find a home in her Catholic parish, just as his parents, who had helped to build a new parish in West Chester, Pennsylvania, had found theirs. My brother and his wife seemed to be finding their home place in a forward looking but very Orthodox shul in Boston. Others of our siblings were not as settled, but neither did they seem to be searching. We felt all alone in our quest not just for religion, but for the kind of religion that resonated with our souls and our hearts. We are interested in social justice, but that’s not a religion on its own. We are interested in meditation on the spiritual, but we do not want to sit alone with our legs crossed and our fingers in mudras – we want to share that journey with others. And we are interested in finding a place which is fundamentally welcoming: to women, to converts, to people who question, to people who want to challenge and try doing things differently. This is what I feel I may have found at Kol Tzeddek.
I often see the difference between the Catholicism that my husband grew up with and the Judaism that I grew up with as a difference between prioritizing faith or practice. Practice without faith is hollow and faith without practice is unanchored to the world. Neither my husband nor I conceive of god as a sentient entity, but as some kind of life force. Similarly, neither of us is willing to embrace ritual without examining it, without imbuing it with meaning that resonates with us. We are looking for a home place that both rejects the universalism of Christianity, in its broadest cultural, moral, religious, and social senses, and rejects the elitism and exoticism of Judaism. We want to be part of the cultural and spiritual worlds of the Jewish people, but we don’t wish to fetishize it. This, I feel is a fundamentally feminist and critical quest as well as a spiritual one. Perhaps it is too idealistic a quest. Perhaps there is no perfect home place, but I feel at home among the doubters, the questioners, the let’s-try-it-this-way-and-see-what-happens folks.