As some of you know by this point, I’ve become strongly interested in Judaism over the last year, in particular the Reconstructionist branch originated by R. Mordecai Kaplan, to the point where I’m seriously considering conversion in the near future. I’ve been in an online Intro To Judaism class since last September, chaired by the rabbi of the Reconstructionist temple here in Olympia that I’d like to join. A few weeks ago, I built up the courage to attend the Purim festitivies at said temple. My work schedule, unfortunately, doesn’t typically align with Jewish observances, but I had a doctor’s appointment today which allowed me to take the day off of work, and the temple was holding an Erev Shabbat service in the evening, so I decided to make the leap and attend.
This was the first time I’ve attended ANY kind of weekly religious service for nearly 30 years. I grew up in an irreligious household, and the only time I ever attended services as a child was when my sister and I would spend the weekend with my maternal grandma, a Sunday school teacher, and she’d take us along with her to services at the Salvation Army. As a kid, I found those services to be some combination of boring, confusing, and horrifying.
The temple here in downtown Olympia is a building that used to be a Christian Science church. They don’t use the front door of the building anymore. The perimeter is barricaded with a heavy iron fence, which one of the congregants informed me was paid for by a grant from Homeland Security. You enter through a side door in the parking lot. There’s one greeter who opens the fence gate for you, and another who opens the door of the building itself. It’s sad that this kind of security is necessary for Jewish houses of worship these days, but I get it. I was telling my mother about it after my first visit, and she said “they must be worried about homeless people sneaking in”. I had the unfortunate duty of informing her that that’s probably the LEAST of their worries.
The sanctuary is on the second floor of the building and you can DEFINITELY tell it used to be a Christian space. Aside from the Torah ark in the front and some Hebrew inscriptions over the stained-glass windows, it looks like any typical Protestant church. The altar is on the south end of the building, so for the portions of the service which require the audience to face Jerusalem, we had to stand up and turn to the left-hand side of the altar. It was a small audience; besides myself, the rabbi, and the cantor, there were a grand total of eleven people in attendance, one of whom was also a prospective convert like myself, so barely enough to form a minyan. The temple also broadcasts the service on Zoom, and I got the impression that there were more people watching online than attending in person. I took a seat in the back and grabbed a siddur from the pocket of the seat in front of me. Shortly after 6:30, the rabbi and the cantor took the stage, donned their tallises, and began the service.
The first 45 minutes or so, after the rabbi lit the two candles at the front of the stage, were a series of psalms and traditional prayers dedicated to welcoming the Sabbath and praising God. The rabbi would introduce the prayer and state which page it was on, after which the cantor would sing the prayer in Hebrew. The siddur provided a transliteration for people such as I who are completely incapable of reading Hebrew (and at my age I doubt I’ll ever learn to grasp it, as much as I’d like to). Hearing the psalms sung in their original language is an amazing experience. Even though I don’t understand the language, I can grasp how significant and important they are, and I get a sense of how much is lost in translating them to English prose. There were points where the cantor would repeat a line or a pair of lines two or three or four times in a row. The attendees seemed to be very familiar with this and were often singing along. I tried to do so as well. I don’t necessarily understand the words, but the rhythm of the cant is easy to follow. We made it through an entire 110 pages of the siddur during that time. There was a portion set aside for silent prayer, and a portion where the rabbi encouraged us to get up and talk to the people around us.
After that part of the service, the rabbi recited the Mi Shebeirach, the prayer for healing for the sick. He read off a list of several dozen names of people who the congregation had asked him to mention, and then asked anyone present to call out the names of anyone close to them in need of healing. I called out the name of one of my nephews, who is severely intellectually disabled and requires 24-hour attention. This was followed by the yahrzeits - recollections for the dead who have died on or near this day. I called out the name of my maternal grandma. I don’t know exactly the date when she died, but it was about four years ago this week that we scattered her ashes, and as it happens I was wearing the same shirt that I did on that day. She was devoutly Christian and taught Sunday school. I’m not sure how she’d feel about her grandson deciding to become Jewish, but I’d like to think that she’d be happy that I’ve found something that gives me direction.
After that, the rabbi gave a sermon on this week’s Torah portion, which is the beginning of the book of Leviticus. He mentioned that when many Jews bake challah in anticipation of Shabbat, they salt it before serving, and tied this into Leviticus 2:13; “Season all your grain offerings with salt. Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offerings; add salt to all your offerings.”
Why is salt so important? He left that as an open question to the audience, to which a few people shouted responses. There are a few answers. For one, it flavors food and makes it more appetizing. For two, it was much harder to come by in ancient times than it is today, so giving it up as an offering was sacrificing something of real value. The third, and most important property, according to the rabbi, was that it was a preservative, and also a pollutant.
Salt, when applied judiciously, stops meat from spoiling, pickles vegetables, and is essential to man’s well-being. But in excess, it poisons the ground to where nothing can grow in it, and causes high blood pressure which induces all kinds of ailments. In this way, the rabbi said, it is similar to yetzer hatov and yetzer hara - the natural inclinations in the human spirit to do good or evil, respectively. Just as one must apply just the right amount of salt to season food without rendering it inedible, so must we balance the good and evil within ourselves.
I didn’t think I’d ever hear such a meaningful discussion of salt.
To conclude the service, the rabbi asked us all to join him up on the stage, where he sliced up a loaf of challah and invited us to have a piece and drink from the kiddush cup. (I’m pretty sure it was just Welch’s grape juice.) I wound up hanging out for about half an hour after the service ended. I struck up a conversation with the other prospective convert in attendance, who as it turned out had the same first name as myself and was about the same age as myself, and we commiserated over how we both had secular but vaguely Christian upbringings, got into a lot of online arguments with Christian fundies when we were teenagers, and subsequently found ourselves drawn to Judaism after discovering the idea of a culture based around educating yourself and learning how ancient traditions can have value even if the stories they’re based on aren’t literally true. We also got to talking with an elderly woman who was very interested in encouraging us to come back and telling us that nobody would judge us for not being born Jewish, while slyly mentioning that “we’ve got a direct line to God and we don’t need to talk to anyone else to get the message to Him”.
It was an amazing experience and I want to experience it again. I still don’t believe in God as being an actual existing entity that actively watches over mankind, but I think that as I’m growing older I’ve developed an appreciation for ritual and devotion that I didn’t have when I was an angsty atheist teenager, and I appreciate the idea of God as an ideal that can guide me to be a better version of myself.
Again - just wanted to share. Shabbat shalom.