Thrive [ Persona ] This Is my God too! December 2006

by Mindi Newman
Images by R. Byrne

Mindi is a member of our East County’s tiny Jewish minority. They are small in number, but with big hearts for one another, and aware of their enormous weight of tradition.

Four decades ago the great novelist, Herman Wouk, wrote a highly personal and compelling introduction to Judaism called This is My God. The book spoke to the hearts of many people, both gentile and Jewish. In the book Wouk described the content of his faith. His description of the impact of Sabbath observance upon the quality of his life and family rang a particularly clear note in the minds and imaginations of many non-Jews and in my mind as a Jewish woman.

My Roots
My great grandfather was killed by a Cossack in a Russian pogrom just like in Fiddler on the Roof, but with much more bloodshed. All four of my Russian grandparents immigrated to America in 1917 through diverse routes just before the shadow of communism fell across that benighted country.

I was raised as a Conservative Jew in Philadelphia and as a member of a sprawling Jewish community. We lived in an enclave that was one in a collection of ethnic communities that spread themselves across Philadelphia and included neighborhoods filled with Irish, Italians, Polish, etcetera. Each ethnic group confined itself to a separate region of the city with  invisible boundaries  that were perfectly clear in every resident’s mind. Religion, of course, was one of the defining characteristics of each community but only became a focus during very infrequent conflicts.

I had a happy childhood and was reared by two people with excellent parenting skills. I was surrounded by a mixture of conservative and reformed Jews when I was growing up in my Philadelphia neighborhood. Within easy walking distance all manner of Jews from atheistic Jewish intellectuals with their bookstores to the black hat and side curl adorned Hasidic communities, and all shades of Jewish culture in between lived, loved, and prospered in a relatively happy mixture of religious and philosophical styles.

My family includes some Hasidic Jews. Here in East County local Hasidim maintain chabad houses in Walnut Creek, Berkeley, Santa Rosa, and Pleasanton. The word “chabad” is an acrostic for the first letters of the Hebrew words for wisdom, insight, and knowledge. The culture of the chabad houses is thoroughly Hasidic, but they welcome all kinds of people as guests. The purpose of the chabad houses is to preserve the spirit of Judaism. One of the avowed goals of Hasidic Jews is to rear enormous families. They intend to replenish the earth by replacing the six million of us who were murdered in the holocaust, which is a number that by now would have grown to 20 million.

I’m certainly not Hassidic but have no argument with people from that part of our faith and they, in turn, welcome us. My son, for example, was bar mitzvah’d in a chabad house that observed the normal arrangement of people on such occasions, with men gathered on one side and women on the other.

Jewish people have a different view of truth from the dominant culture. We love to argue about philosophy. An old joke that we love is that left to ourselves in a world of peace the worst Jews would ever do to people is to debate them to death.

Stranger in a Strange Land
Six years ago we moved to California, a state I had only been to once before in my life. My husband works at Lockheed in Sunnyvale. I had only been to California once before in my life. The relocation team hired by Lockheed gave me five days to find a home. It was a shocking experience since you can buy a beautiful house in Philadelphia for $100,000. I felt like I had been dumped off a turnip truck and experienced serious feelings of dislocation.

When we moved into our new house on September 30, 2000, I told one of my neighbors, “I’m very pleased with my house and with the people who sold it to me.”

“Yes,” she said, “they are good Christians!”

I was speechless. If those people were Christians, then I was grateful that they were good ones, of course, but the experience seemed shocking to me in kind of a Dorothy in Oz fashion because the comment was so not-Philadelphia.

I felt increasingly isolated by the absence of Jews in my new surroundings. Albertsons and Safeway stores, for example, would carry an inch worth of kosher food.

We live in Brentwood, and I drove over the hill to the chabad houses in Walnut Creek and Berkeley but that seemed too far to travel for Sabbath services. So I looked in the phone book and located Antioch’s Temple B’nai Torah, and we began attending services with them.

The congregation meets every week in Antioch’s First Congregational Church. It seemed odd at first to worship hashem (God) in a Christian church, but we’re a tiny eddy in East County of the world wide Jewish Diaspora. We’re the only temple in the entire area, and are almost unnoticed by the teeming throngs of gentiles that surround us.

There’s a Place for Us
Our goal as a congregation is to continue to provide a safe and welcoming refuge for East County Jews and their families — a place where we can socialize, worship, and pray together. Our rabbi, Ira Book, can be brilliant, spiritual, and funny all at once. He has a heart for marginalized people and serves as a chaplain in local prisons.

The fact is, our B’nai Torah congregation itself isn’t pure Jewish. My husband and I stand out as a Jewish couple because most members are participating in mixed marriages. In almost each case the non-Jewish spouse has made a commitment to raise the children in our faith. Our lay leaders, David & Josette Mata, are, themselves, Jews by choice.

The 51 families in our congregation include members from Asia, and from all parts of Europe, South America, and the U.S. The mixture of these ethnicities and religious backgrounds produces an absolutely magnificent spirit during our times of worship, study, and celebration.

As devout Jews, we pray the Shema and Veahafta:

Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

And these words that I command you today shall be in your heart.

And you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall speak of them

when you sit at home, and when you walk along the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up.

And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes.

And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

We pray the Shema when we wake up and when we go to sleep. We’ll often pray it before driving the car. There are other prayers for everything in life, it seems. There’s a prayer for washing, for following mealtimes, and for leaving the home.

We have a specific set of prayers that we pray through every week. We pray in Hebrew when we can and pray in English when we must.

In Temple worship we sing our prayers — every temple using its own tune as they sing these. This means that we get confused when we’re visiting another temple than our own and can’t help but believe that they’re not worshipping correctly because they’re singing the prayers in a tune that we aren’t familiar with.

The second and fourth Saturdays are Torah services. The word “Torah” refers to the first five books of the Old Testament that Christians call the Pentateuch or The Books of Moses. During this time we read from the Torah and discuss the parsha (chapter) for that particular service.

The Temple B’nai Torah recently received a grant from URJ (Union for Reformed Judaism). They are providing an education module called “A Taste of Judaism,” which will consist of three classes that will help people from the larger community to learn the basics of Judaism. Following that, Rabbi Book will conduct a class for people interested in being bar and bat mitzvah’d and joining the community.

My God
I practice Judaism in general and observe Sabbath in particular much as Herman Wouk described in his book. I don’t keep Sabbath as strictly as some who observe restrictions upon driving, using a computer, and changing money — since those things are all “work,” of course.

The most rigid Sabbath restrictions seem strange to the uninitiated. For example, we’re not supposed to put on eye makeup since that is considered an act of building or creating. We’re allowed to shower but not to dry. When visiting with my Hasidic relatives I cheat with the shower thing. They are perfectly tolerant of my non-conformist behaviors since they know I’m not orthodox. They all love me to death, and vice versa.

Rabbi Book was born Orthodox. He tells us that the Sabbath is a day of rest. We die if we don’t rest sometimes. Perhaps we will not die right away. Perhaps not physically, but Rabbi Book says that unceasing work has the power to put to death the spirit and will eventually slay even the body in which the spirit lives.

We have services of worship on the first and third Friday nights of the month. The third Friday night includes a potluck dinner with an accompanying period devoted to education. Matt & Kris Cordova, our education leaders, plan out curricula for both the children and the adult education programs. Adult classes include such things as learning Israeli dances, singing, prayers, and Sabbath practice.

Many of us around the world share some version of my faith as the center point of life, though not many of us reside in East County. B’nai Torah, however, is more than a synagogue; we are a large extended family. We grieve with each other at times of death and loss, and celebrate together in times of birth and joy. We care for each other and take care of one another. Our Temple is a magnificent illustration of a community in which individuals living the Torah bond together in love and help each other up the path towards our Creator.

One Saturday night last year my husband and I were on vacation in Palm Desert with my Orthodox family. We had to walk to shul (synagogue). That evening my husband and I offered a ride to an old man walking along the highway. The first three stars had appeared in the sky signifying that Sabbath had ended so he was able to accept a ride.

“What’s your name?” my husband asked.

“Wouk.” He answered.

It turned out that the old man was Herman Wouk himself. The next day he was planning to attend prayers for his deceased mother. These prayers are done yearly on the anniversary of a person’s death. If ten or more people assemble on that day, then the prayers will help the soul (neshuma) rise up to heaven.

Forty-seven years after publishing his book, This is My God, Herman Wouk is still following his faith and his God with unrelenting devotion.

And I’m with him. This is my God too. °