The Synagogue Center

The Synagogue where I have worked is called Congregation B’nai Emunah. I still feel connected at the most visceral level. I teach four times a week and attend services fairly regularly. It’s a satisfying balance of belonging and not belonging, with plenty of room to experiment with other things.

But I still think about our congregation—and synagogues in general—with the same focus I tried to bring to my career. Forty years of hard labor will do that to a person. You step down from the helm, but the issues are still interesting.

Take the matter of nomenclature. B’nai Emunah means Children (Sons) of Faith. Many American synagogues have exactly the same name, albeit spelled out differently depending on the founding rabbi or organizers. Our counterpart in St. Louis is called B’nai Amoona, a transliteration I have always found clunky and agricultural (“moo”). No offense to our co-religionists in Missouri. As I’ve said, everything depends on who laid the cornerstone.

But for a long time, our congregation was called the B’nai Emunah Center. That was a very bold move for a synagogue of traditionalists. It meant that the Jews of Tulsa aspired to be somehow more than a synagogue, with its conventional associations with prayer and Jewish study. One of the first gathering spaces built in 1941 was a combined social hall, kitchen, and gymnasium. Basketball hoops, demarcated floor, raised stage—the works. The community wanted a space that affirmed the need to congregate in ways that went beyond the demands of prayer. Like the nascent Jewish community centers of the day, it realized that the future was tied to a multiplicity of offerings, especially when it came to attracting young people, their American-born parents, and the unaffiliated.

That vision was expressed in every possible way. The signage that announced the Synagogue to its neighbors spelled out the words B’nai Emunah Center in enormous aluminum letters that are now tucked away in the basement of the building.

But hidden or not, they articulate a valid, relevant version of Jewish life. A synagogue should capture and valorize the whole of our civilization, its interests, pastimes, preoccupations and folkways. It should care about Jewish literature and politics, our high and low cultures, our complex need for association. It should educate and entertain, with real zest and enthusiasm, with nothing that is Jewish alien or off limits. It should always be a center of celebration, an ongoing demonstration of joy and exuberance. Every Purim should be “better” than the one before it, richer, more imaginative, innovative, and flavorful. And it should serve the needs of the community in which it is set, as a leader in the cause of justice and activism.

I have enormous faith in Tulsa’s Children of Faith, that we will do our part for decades to come. The job of shaping our corner of the World Jewish Community belongs to Congregation B’nai Emunah, reflected and enlarged by Jews in every land.