Celebrating a Quarter of a Century
Dear friends,
On April 19, 1999, about 30 people sat in a Greenwich Village living room and decided to form a shul. “Although we knew it wouldn’t be easy,” Holly Gewandter, the gathering’s host said, “the idea of creating a context for Jewish community in downtown Manhattan had broken through our shared skepticism and, like a weed pushing its way out of a crack in the sidewalk, stubbornly refused to yield to common sense.”
What amounted to common sense for synagogues at the time, was a temple with an elected board making decisions for the rest of the community, a rabbi and a cantor performing the stiff Hebraic traditions, and a congregation of spectators shushing their kids or their minds. As Ellen Gould summarized the American synagogue experience: “The idea is great, some of the songs truly affecting, but on the whole, it doesn’t work.”
As they began dreaming up a different type of synagogue, they started to understand how nonsensical the common sense of the time was for them. They were artists living in the Village, among other artist and writer friends. The last thing they needed was an institution. The last thing they wanted was to sit passively as some traditional authority figure upheld the patriarchy in front of them in the name of a God they didn’t believe in.
Instead of an institution, what they craved was a community. The moment I understood what community meant was one Rosh Hashanah, when after our service in Brooklyn Bridge Park I happened upon an entire sidewalk of a restaurant filled with people who were all there at that fateful meeting 25 years ago in Holly and Nancy’s living room (Well, a few of them were probably in their cribs in 99’, but would end up spending their entire childhood at the Shul!). The friendships that were made back in the early days are forever. That’s community.
One of the reasons these friendships are so tight is thanks to the theatrical framework of the New Shul, as a place where people are actively engaged on many different levels in the rituals and services we perform together. Ellen famously said: “The primary problem in modern worship is that the congregation thinks of itself as the audience. But we are not the audience — we are the actors!”
I gravitated toward The New Shul out of an instinct that this is a group of fellow actors: people who understand the commitment, the playfulness, the seriousness and the lunacy required to create the more than real reality of ritual. People who know they are imagining - even as they build new worlds in front of your eyes, that expand the heart and bring about love.
Ellen and Holly inspired thousands of people to co-create, and then create anew with them year after year our jewel of a Shul. What a joy it is for us to be able to gather around them tonight in Greenwich Village to eat, drink, sing, pray and thank them from the bottom of our hearts for the gift-that-keeps-giving they have given us.
Mazal Tov Holly and Ellen on carrying the Shul for a quarter of a century(!!!).
See you downtown tonight!
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha