The Secret Ingredient for Jewish Community

I’ll give you a hint – the secret ingredient isn’t young people. Photo by Olya Kobruseva from Pexels

I am going to write this post without actual location names, making this post more vague and harder to follow. Sorry not sorry.

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Hometown Rabbi z”l was famous for saying “All roads lead to [our deeply boring, small, unremarkable municipality]”.  It proved to be a true statement on many occasions.  There would be many random people meeting in far off places discovering odd mutual connections to Deeply Boring, Small, Unremarkable Municipality, aka Hometown. Hometown didn’t even have a large Jewish community and yet the Rabbi’s quip still proved often true.

That said, my hometown was and still is Deeply Boring, Small, and Unremarkable. So when I got a job that was a 10 minute commute from a larger, more active Jewish community, I moved there. That larger more active Jewish community has been my Current Location ever since (although I don’t work at that job anymore).

Current Location vs. Hometown, Part 1

Why did Current Location have a larger, more active Jewish community? Current Location had an eruv, effectively concentrating the Jewish community into a smaller, walkable space.

The eruv, which may look like a rope or wire, creates an area considered a private domain in which one can carry objects on Shabbat. Photo by Daniel Romero on Unsplash

[In contrast, in Hometown, the walk from my parents’ home to the synagogue is just under 3 miles each way – and yes, I did walk it when I became Shomer Shabbat and visited for Shabbat/holidays].

Current Location also had a lot more synagogues and minyanim (small independent congregations/prayer communities), more kosher restaurants, more Shabbat-observant people into the practice of hosting guests for Shabbat. Current Location also had more young people. (Not that I ever loved young people generally as a collective, but I couldn’t deny the advantage of having them.)

Current Location was Home…

At one point, I might have described my decision to move to Current Location as the best life decision I had ever made. The community was a perfect fit. I found congregations with lively melodic egalitarian services. Plenty of Shabbat hospitality invites. I felt inspired to become Shabbat observant, which brought a lot of joy to my life for a long time.  I met the man I would later marry, and for a long time, we had a relationship that was beautiful, fun, and not significantly flawed. Also, Current Location was located such that I was able to go back to school part-time while working full-time, which was helpful for career advancement. I had a ton of friends.

…Until it wasn’t…

It’s hard to remember exactly when and why things changed and in what order, but needless to say, they did. Fewer friends (they moved away and/or had kids). Fewer invites (we were no longer cool enough to receive them). The robust community seemed less robust.

Then COVID was the final nail.  It felt like the best aspects of the community were gone overnight.

To be fair, COVID affected every community.  No matter how kind, warm, and well-intentioned the community, Shabbat hospitality in pretty much every community is basically a crapshoot now between COVID restrictions, new cases, people’s comfort levels, and the constant changing of all of this.

Current Location vs. Hometown, Part 2

But Hometown, Deeply Boring, Small Unremarkable Hometown without a large Jewish community, seemed to recover better from the pandemic.

I mean, things didn’t go 100% back to normal. There were capacity restrictions, sign up sheets, vaccination policies, mask policies at different points in the pandemic and some of this is still in place. The laptop on the bimah (podium) is still in place for hybrid Zoom/in-person services. But even with all of that, services at Hometown Synagogue feel so much more normal than services in Current Location.

Which seemed odd. Shouldn’t Current Location, with its more robust Jewish population and communal infrastructure, have gone back to normal first?

Then I figured out the secret ingredient.

The Secret Ingredient

Pre-COVID times, I would have guessed that the secret ingredient to Jewish community was the eruv, which effectively creates and concentrates a Jewish community in a particular walkable area.

Now I know better. The secret ingredient is the communal food. By “communal food”, I mean the kiddush (light luncheon) served after Saturday morning services. I am also part of a congregation that did a potluck lunch after Saturday morning services. This is what I mean by communal food.

The secret ingredient. Photo by Lucie Liz from Pexels

Why?

Because it’s not really about the food itself. (Although yes, having a nice lunch after services is great.) The communal food gives congregants the opportunity to talk leisurely and linger. To build connections in a way that just praying together doesn’t quite do.  (I mean, it’s not exactly proper etiquette to have sidebar conversations in the middle of religious services.)

Due to a variety of factors (COVID case rate in geographic area, building/space set-up, staff, and mainly, priorities) Hometown, Boring Unremarkable Little Hometown, went back to having a communal light kiddush luncheon after services. No synagogue/congregation (that I would be willing to attend) in Current Location did this.

I acknowledge that having food after services is not simple logistical matter. Someone needs to cover the cost. Someone needs to shop for, store, prepare, set up, and clean up the food and utensils. In COVID times, pre-portioning into individual portions must also be considered. Delegating the work to paid staff/volunteers/even congregants themselves via potluck still requires coordination. I have performed some of these tasks before and can confirm they are more annoying and thankless than they initially appear.

Getting these bagels to the kiddush luncheon table takes more coordination than one might expect. Photo by Lucie Liz from Pexels

But it makes such a difference in the community experience.

Now what?

While I didn’t hate growing up in Deeply Boring, Small, Unremarkable Hometown (actually, I had a lovely and fortunate childhood and upbringing), I didn’t think I would ever choose to move back. Also, rationally, I know it is extremely stupid to make big life decisions based on who is serving lunch in this supposedly temporary pandemic (which I stopped believing was going to be temporary two weeks in).

Then again, I do know someone who picked which university to attend based on which one served the best apple juice; he wound up marrying his college sweetheart, making enough money to live somewhere with a high cost of living, having a beautiful baby, and still being happily married to said college sweetheart, so I guess it worked out well for him. But anyway, I digress.

The secret to making life decisions? Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

But the fact that Hometown Synagogue managed to return to normalcy makes Hometown a much more attractive place to live than Current Location. Well to me at least. Husband thinks this is a stupid idea. But then again, he also thinks COVID is temporary, that Current Location will go back to the way it was ~6 years ago, that we still have local friends, and that the eruv actually matters in the COVID world – none of those things are true so I question his judgement, to be honest.