Last Monday, I used my day off to travel to New York City. As I walked up the stairs out of the subway and enjoyed my first glimpse of the New York skyline against the gray winter sky I was reminded of the old joke: One man stops another on the streets of New York and asks, “Excuse me, sir, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?”
As we all know, the surprised New Yorker pauses for a moment, claps his interrogator on the back and exclaims “Practice, my boy, practice!”
“Practice.” As with most jokes (even jokes that are much funnier and much more current than this one) the humor comes from a combination of surprise and the absurdity of the suggestion that, instead of walking several blocks to reach the renowned concert hall, the hapless tourist would consider returning home and embarking upon a lifetime of discipline and hard work to achieve the level of musical proficiency that could lead to an invitation to play the famous stage of Carnegie Hall.
Here’s the strange way that the rabbinic mind works, though. As I walked through Central Park, I realized that, given the right circumstances, I might have offered the same response and I would have been completely serious.
Over the last several years, our synagogue has been steadfastly working to achieve a range of institutional goals. We hope to make our community more warm and more welcoming. We work to invite more congregants into active engagement with our religious school, our auxiliaries and our Tikkun Olam or social justice projects. And, in order to become the community that we aspire to be, we strive to enable a greater percentage of our membership find meaning within our communal prayer life.
All of these goals are worthy and we’re making headway in achieving each of them. Nevertheless, deepening the ritual life of our community remains the most elusive. As I ambled across the Upper West Side, it occurred to me that maybe we think about our ritual life too much like a show at Carnegie Hall and not enough as a practice.
Over my years here, we have invited a capella groups to lead services and we have added instrumental music. We have followed services with speakers and we have preceded services with wine and cheese. We have staged plays and we have played games. Attendance has increased as a result of all of this programming. Nevertheless, after each program has run its course, our numbers return to our regular service-goers plus a few people who come (usually) to observe a life cycle event like a Bar or Bat Mitzvah or to say a prayer in memory of a loved one.
And this makes sense. Attracting people with programming is not the same as deepening our relationship with prayer. It trains us to come to the synagogue to sit in an audience and to be entertained or educated. When the programming stops or loses its novelty, the “audience” dwindles. There’s a reason why Carnegie Hall hosts such a wide array of different performers and types of performances. The people who run a concert hall know that once the entertainment grows stale, the crowds diminish.
Practice is different. Practice has kept our tradition relevant for thousands of years, even though the words of our prayer service repeat themselves every day, every week and every year. Practice isn’t about being entertained; it’s about creating a structure for ourselves and our community that enables us to transform ourselves and the way that we see the world around us.
Different people experience practice differently. For instance the practice of observing the Sabbath is shaped for some by the insights that are inspired by the words of our liturgy. For others, it is time out of the week set aside to pause and to think about life in a broader context. And there are those for whom it is time when they enjoy divine permission to deepen their relationships with their family and with other members of the community whom they love. But in each case, practice means making the decision to act in ways that differentiate the seventh day of each week from the six days which preceded it.
After my afternoon in New York, I know exactly how I will respond when a congregant, a synagogue officer or another member of a focus group ask me, “Rabbi, we all want more people to attend services, but how can we get from where we are now to where we want to be?”
“Practice,” I will respond, “practice.”
About Rabbi Eric M. Rosin
Rabbi Eric Rosin began his professional career as an attorney in Los Angeles serving the entertainment industry, but discovered he needed to be doing something he was passionate about. He left the practice of law and began studying for ordination at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles. After ordination, Rabbi Rosin served for two years as the assistant rabbi of Temple Beth-El in Richmond, Va., then assumed the pulpit at Kesher Israel Congregation in West Chester, Pa. in 2004.
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