Empty pews imperil our community
We've gone back to school, but not back to shule.
After two very long years, we are beginning to “live with COVID”. It remains a serious and potentially lethal disease, and the numbers of daily infections are on a scale that was unimaginable a few weeks ago, but our governments and public health experts tell us that we can go about our normal lives, just with extra care.
This week children came back to school. They will be having twice-weekly rapid tests; some school activities are changed or postponed, but, barring exceptional circumstances, we are assured that closed schools and students struggling to learn remotely belong in the past.
This is wonderful news. School-age children belong in school. It is there that they learn, socialise and grow. Even with some adjustments, staff and students are delighted to be back in the classroom and to have the confidence that that is where they will stay.
We are already seeing an absentee rate that is higher than usual, as students who test positive for the virus, or their family members, are obliged to isolate. But it is gratifying and empowering to see that despite the possible attractions of lockdown, such as having to commute no further than from one’s bed to computer, our students have willingly embraced the return to school.
Sadly, the same cannot be said for our synagogues. Evidence, albeit anecdotal, suggests that congregants have not returned to prayer services with anything like the same quantity or enthusiasm as was the norm in the distant pre-pandemic world. On a spiritual level we are losing the benefits of praying with a minyan, or quorum, or, in other cases, of prayer altogether.
Yet the real danger is to the community itself.
From one perspective, smaller attendance at daily or weekly services should not be a crisis. Prayer, which is a challenging task on many levels, should not be the gateway to Jewish connection. We are blessed with a plethora of educational, social and cultural organisations that offer alternative pathways to Jewish involvement. And schools themselves are increasingly serving as networks that link families to each other and to Jewish life.
Yet we cannot deny that synagogues still provide the most obvious and most easily recognisable point of contact with the community, and a weakening of that contact imperils us all. Those who have dropped the habit of a regular visit – whether once a day, a week, or a year – may find another entry point for their Jewish connection, but the strong possibility remains that they will not. Nor will their children.
Indeed there is no reported increase in non-synagogue-based Jewish activities in the wake of the pandemic. Although we have benefitted from new modes of communication and involvement, and it has been a delight to hear speakers from all over the world via Zoom, this does not appear to have filled the void that declining synagogue attendance has created.
And while online events have offered new opportunities, they also bring their own dangers. As the mishna says, “according to the labour is the reward”.
The act of logging on to a Zoom meeting, without the need to either rise from one’s armchair or give one’s full attention to whatever is on the screen, is unlikely to generate the same degree of engagement as an in-person gathering, which one has to make more effort to attend. More crucially, a virtual event affords no opportunity for socialising, for mixing and catching up – the glue that most effectively binds people to their friends and hence their community.
And so we must not be complacent, and assume that the vacuum in our synagogues is being compensated for in other ways. We must suspect that it is not.
Now is the time for the leaders of the synagogues – rabbis, board members and everyone who cares for the future of the community – to reach out and bring in. To offer a wider range of activities and a broader offering of services (in both senses). Our places of worship are led by people of passion, dedication and vision. They must use these qualities to meet the challenge of the hour.
As for the Jews who are not in the pews, there are times to ask not what the community can do for them, but what they can do for the community.
Let us hope that, despite the case numbers and the dangers of COVID, we are leaving the darkness of the last two years and emerging into the sunlight of re-creation. In every sphere of our lives, there is much work to be done to repair and to re-build in order to bring back what we have lost. And our Jewish engagement, and that of our families, whether through coming back to synagogue or finding another type of connection, must not be far from the top of the list.
Rabbi James Kennard is principal of Mount Scopus Memorial College.
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