11th Annual Unity Shabbaton Draws a Diverse Crowd

August 21, 2008

by Daniel E. Levenson

The Massachusetts Synagogue Council held its 11th Annual Unity Shabbaton at the Holiday Inn in Peabody on the weekend of July 26, which drew Jews from a wide range of congregations in the Bay State to participate in a weekend of prayer, learning and community. The Shabbaton featured small group discussions, text study opportunities, insightful group learning with the Shabbaton faculty and a chance to experience different prayer services from Reconstructionist to Orthodox.

The opening session began with welcoming remarks from Director Allan Teperow, after which the group of 60 participants broke up into smaller groups to hold discussions on topics relating to Jewish identity, spirituality and community. In preparation for the small group discussions each person was handed a selection of quotes from major Jewish thinkers and sources, including Martin Buber, Ahad Ha’am, the Talmud and the Torah and asked to pick the quote that resonated the most with them.

The quotations then served as the catalyst for the conversations which followed, in which participants discussed not only the ways that the themes represented larger concerns for the Jewish people, but how the ideas contained in these quotes spoke to them on a personal level. In the group that came together to discuss the quotation “More than Israel has preserved the Sabbath, the Sabbath has preserved Israel,” by Ahad Ha’am, participants mentioned the way that celebrating Shabbat has helped them to find their own personal connection to the Jewish community in many different places around the world. Whether traveling or at home, many people mentioned how they had come to see Shabbat as a special time set aside for them to step back from their hectic work schedules to connect with the Jewish community and the important things in their lives.

That evening we all had a chance to experience a wonderful Shabbat dinner together and afterwards Rabbi David Paskin led a group learning session on the concept of the mitzvot and how we view them in a modern Jewish context.

Rabbi Paskin, a trained Reconstrucitonist Rabbi who now leads a Conservative congregation, brought his own experiences to the discussion as well as a number of different sources, including a selection from the writings of Rabbi David Wolpe in which the author considers the way that doing mitzvot connects us not only to god but to each other. In the passage that Rabbi Paskin made available, Wolpe calls for a new approach that sees mitzvot as a living part of Judaism, writing “Changes in Jewish law to include women, from bat mitzvah celebrations to rituals for miscarriage, as well as changes that enable people to drive to synagogue or use instruments in the service as our ancestors did, are elements in a covenantal understanding of the tradition. This is a tradition not rigid but responsive and alive, not repetitious but committed to dialogue with the past, each other and God.”

Rabbi Paskin raised some excellent questions about how we see the concept of a “mitzvah” in post-modern America and the most puzzling was also the most basic, which was to ask how exactly one can define a mitzvah – is it a good deed? A commandment? Is it something we do in order to make the world a better place or do we do it simply because God tells us as individuals and as a community that we must? Perhaps not surprisingly, a consensus was not reached, but the conversation certainly helped to set the tone for the weekend, one of inquiry and conversation that sought to explore modern Jewish life on multiple levels, from the historical to the spiritual.

On Sunday Rabbi Shira Joseph gave a fascinating presentation on a community of crypto-Jews living in Portugal that she visited along with a delegation of other rabbis. Rabbi Jospeh explained that although this community has lost many of their Jewish customs, they have maintained a collective sense of identity as “Jews.” She said that with a long history of persecution, this group has posed many challenges to rabbis and Jewish communal workers looking to help bring them back into the large Jewish community. They have, for example, been very reluctant to use the local synagogue or follow what we in the west (or east) might think of as “Jewish” practices.

One of the most interesting things to arise from the weekend is the new Massachusetts Synagogue Council blog, in which Alan Teperow has continued a discussion with Rabbi Paskin (and invited others to participate electronically) about kashrut, which started in an informal conversation the two had during the Shabbaton. This is an excellent example of the kind of discussion that the weekend fostered, one where Jews coming from perhaps very different backgrounds can find a place to discuss meaningful issues, not with the intent of convincing one another that one particular view is correct, but in a spirit of honest inquiry and exploration.