The Faith Police

Judging the Absurd

Prayer, for the religious Jew, is often in a synagogue with at least ten men, and consists of reading words penned by people centuries ago, most of the time whispered, sometimes while seated, sometimes standing. It is imagined that you are speaking directly to god, who’s always, everywhere, listening, watching. The vast majority of prayer words praise god with various compliments, interspersed with communal or personal requests – not personal in the sense you’re asking in your own words, but prescribed words like, “grant us wisdom, forgive us, heal us, bless us…”

Three times a day, one is to go to synagogue for prayers. In each session there’s a prayer said standing, feet together. Many close their eyes, swaying back and forth in supposed rapture, concentration, devotion, and imagining themselves standing in front of king lord on his throne. All face eastwards (where if you travel long enough, you’ll reach Jerusalem, which is god’s reserved seat on earth). If you walk in any synagogue during this prayer, you’ll see all the congregants in a fixed standing position, many in front of the east wall, or a book stand or pedestal eastward, eyes either closed or fixed on their prayer book, mouths moving silently.

I was in a synagogue - the cavernous “770” synagogue, the main space of a Chassidic sect referred to as Chabad - in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on Saturday (Sabbath) afternoon at 1:30pm, two years after its grand rabbi “The Rebbe” died. Some young men were maneuvering and rearranging some of the long benches - which had been facing east for the prayers - to another direction, to create an arena style setting that was used when the Rebbe would in his lifetime generally hold court on Saturday at 1:30pm for a public address (called Farbrengen).

The Rebbe was not coming of course, but some folks maintained the Rebbe was still alive and could come and would come, even if unseen to mere mortals. So, the venue was set up, his red velvet chair placed where it was always placed, a silver cup prepared for his wine on his spread white tablecloth, as it always had been, ready for him.

As I watched this, I saw a man also watching the scene, who was dressed slightly differently than the standard Chabad dress code, indicating he was from a different Chassidic sect, hat and silk black coat styled slightly differently. His facial expression and head movement - tsk tsking with raised eyebrows - meant to clearly express disgust, being appalled and surprised at the scene unfolding in front of him: You’re setting up for a farbrengen by a dead Rebbe?

I laughed, thinking, “A short while ago you did, and in a short while you will, stand with fixed feet, eyes closed, whispering to yourself ancient words you consider holy and imagining you’re talking to an invisible superbeing who created and currently sustains the entire universe, who is listening to you, and who you genuinely hope accepts your effusive blessings and grants your wishes. And yet you think it’s ludicrous that these men imagine their Rebbe, a worshipper of the same god to which you shuckle and sway and pray, will grace them with his presence?

Godliness is everything meaningful and reasonable to you, but someone else’s version of it is a sad depiction of absurdity?”

I then considered the dissonance I was seeing, or at least the challenge of balancing conflicting perspectives.

What is life? Death? If someone is in my memory or I read something he wrote, or do something he asked me to do, is he alive or dead? Medically, someone who no longer breathes and whose body no longer functions and who is buried, is dead. But if someone, when he was alive, had a mission he consistently fulfilled, and that mission is continued by others, is he, meaning that which he stood for and represented, dead? No.

When people blur the frames – medical and passion – while using the terms life and death, you get people who say that someone who is buried is still alive, because to them the person was the passion, not the body. And for them, anyway, practically speaking, if there’s no aspect of their Rebbe alive, they’d consider their life meaningless. And what’s meaning if not self-conjured or arbitrarily accepted?

So, who’s to judge someone else’s meaningfulness?