Jacob Neusner
JACOB NEUSNER What are we to make of the endless rabbinical chattering, the interventions, the little stories rabbis throw into the high holy day liturgy between one masterpiece and another? Rosh...
...I suggest that chazzanim organize groups to whom they teach the melodies of the holy days...
...If you break up the whole, then the people are rightly not merely confused but tired and bored...
...Last Rosh Hashanah (1989/5750), the Rabbinic Assembly distributed to Conservative rabbis the proposed text of a sermon on why Jews should keep Shabbat...
...Simply opening them and intoning anything that pops into one's head is a travesty of Torah teaching and an insult to the integrity of the Torah...
...This brings me to the other principal part of the holy days—the liturgy...
...But change is what the rabbinical task is all about...
...Why tell them how to do their jobs...
...His most recent books includeThe Midrash: An Introduction (Jason Aronson, 1990) and The Ecology of Religion (Abingdon, 1989...
...In the end, an intervention that does not emphasize the point of a poem or underline the message of a prayer disrupts, annoys and destroys...
...There is no more complex and difficult liturgy than the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah, no more profound and fundamental liturgy to Jewish existence...
...8> Jacob Neusner is Graduate Research Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa...
...Therefore the address was simply not plausible...
...My book, The Enchantments of Judaism (Basic Books, 1987) offers such a field theory...
...It may not be right, and it may not be persuasive, but at least the question is addressed and a theory is offered...
...An interruption after the Torah service by a speech on mundane congregational matters is even more disruptive than rabbinical prattle in the middle of Musaf...
...But not for much else—not for the language, which was flat and unpoetic, but, more important, not for the argument, which was not compelling and was essentially irrelevant to the issue...
...I give this as an example of what I find disappointing in the intellectual life of the rabbinate...
...Rabbis do not have to preach about why the Jews should have seders, because, statistically, nearly all Jews do...
...What they need, in other words, is a field theory of contemporary Jewish life: why this, not that...
...Why, then, did I find the sermon ineffective...
...Congregations often like to have their lay officers speak to large audiences and deliver a congregational message, and they are right...
...Sustained study of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy's program of ideas and experiences, its poetic power and message, is required of the rabbi—only that study will enable a rabbi to present the liturgy in a way that people can grasp, hold together, confront and experience...
...But at what point...
...If they read more books, rabbis would not just open a passage of Scripture or Midrash or Talmud and free-associate, which, mostly, characterizes the Torah study rabbis feel they must do...
...On Rosh Hashanah the singing is musically unstructured, complex, expressive in a personal way...
...Any conception that American Jews are basically indifferent to Judaism is false...
...The rabbi also offered suggestions on how people might begin to keep Shabbat at home...
...It is not aimed at getting the congregation to sing under the leadership of the chazzan (cantor), which is done so well on Shabbat...
...Hence, after Kin Kelohenu, when people are relaxed, is the time for such speeches...
...Why do people do one thing but not do something else...
...Whether it is the Journal of Reform Judaism or Conservative Judaism, or even Tradition, they mostly review in-house authors—their own members' books or their seminary's faculty's books...
...Nearly everybody, for example, has a bar or bat mitzvah ceremony for their children...
...The goal of the rabbi should be to make the liturgical moment live, in that place, at that time—to create a moment of enchantment and transformation— what the liturgy means to do with its poetry...
...Otherwise, boredom and dreariness of the liturgical presentation find their match in the musical gibberish that passes for an expressive presentation...
...That means rabbis have to ask why not—and to answer that question in a persuasive way...
...Unfortunately, these interventions do not carry forward the rhythm or structure of the service...
...Rabbis need to address people where they are, not where rabbis want to take them...
...Why not Sukkot, but Yom Kippur...
...These people, sitting in various places in the congregation, can then form a musically informed cadre, so that the appallingly weak singing on the part of the congregation can be strengthened...
...The sermon set forth reasons to keep Shabbat drawn, of course, from the speaker's framework...
...The liturgy loses its structure when rabbis interrupt it with remarks that do not speak to the prayer at hand or underline its theme and message but deal in generalities...
...The holy books of Judaism require sustained work of description, analysis and interpretation if they are to speak to our day...
...In general, they do not read books...
...That, of course, is not true of the yesfa'wiA-Orthodox world, but their definition of the rabbi and his task bears no relationship to the 90 percent of the American Jewish community that regards Orthodox Judaism as simply irrelevant...
...Rabbinical association journals fail to reflect a keen interest in important books...
...How do I think cantors should sing on the high holy days...
...These suggestions struck me as constructive and, on the whole, realizable...
...But the rabbi never asked and answered the question, why don't people do so now...
...So why not Shabbat, but Passover...
...In an effective presentation—for instance, a sermon that has a goal—in order to persuade, you must ask not only why this, but also why not that— both why (which the sermon did well) but also why not, or why don't people now observe Shabbat...
...The issue the sermon meant to raise was "Jews...
...My impression is that, in general, on Shabbat the singing is far more congregationally oriented than on Rosh Hashanah...
...The result was that the sermon never addressed the negative...
...Its purpose was to persuade people who in no way observe Shabbat to do so in some way...
...Rosh Hashanah is coming soon, and it is time to offer suggestions for rabbis and cantors on how to turn the coming holy season into a moment of renewal and reconstruction...
...Keep Shabbat...
...People need a sense of the whole, an understanding of why the prayers are not just a dreary and endless line of words...
...A publisher-friend has discontinued publishing books that he thinks only rabbis will buy because, he says, there is simply no market for books for rabbis...
...I listened to one presentation of that sermon and admired it for being well organized and easy to follow...
...In this way, the cantor can compensate for the unfamiliarity of the melodies and the complexity of the received tradition of chazzanul (liturgical singing) for the holy days...
...Using that theory or forming another, a sermon could well address where people are, since, after all, the last thing on their mind is to change, that is, do what they are not now doing...
...What, then, are we to make of the endless rabbinical chattering, the interventions, the little stories rabbis throw into the liturgy between one masterpiece and another...
...Because, I have observed, American Judaism almost always misses the extraordinary opportunity to reach and change Jews that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur annually present...
...And the experience of that stunning and powerful liturgy really can change people and make them different...
...An essentially secular address belongs at a point in the service that leads people out but does not interrupt from within...
...But it is, by now, a rabbinical convention to disrupt Rosh Hashanah prayers, particularly Musaf (additional service), which is the most difficult...
Vol. 15 • October 1990 • No. 5
