My Name In Lights

Temple First-Timer February 28, 2009

As I have said before, I have never been to temple or a bar mitzvah or anything. So attending synagogue at the Cuban Jewish-founded Temple Moses this morning with Ruth Behar and Josh was my first experience with the religion’s practices…

My point is that I was an outsider to begin with… but I was seriously an outsider today – not Jewish, not Cuban, not even a Spanish speaker ! Therefore, I will be forever gracious that Ruth accompanied us and that I had the pleasure of sitting next to her. Ruth introduced me to many lovely older women sitting towards the back of the room (her aunt, whom she hadn’t expected to run into, among them) as an “estudiante,” and so they all smiled at me and asked “Como estas?”…and then “Hello” when they realized that my Spanish vocabulary does not extend past “Muy bien, gracias. Y tu?” Ruth also kept me in the loop during the whole service, which was actually a bar mitzvah service for the son of the Rabbi. She explained that the older women sitting around us had all come from Cuba, and that all of their parents had immigrated to Cuba from Turkey in the 20s. (This is a crucial component in their Sephardic Jewish heritage as Sephardic Jews are the Jews of Spain, the Middle East, Portugal and North Africa. They are different from Ashkenazic Jews who are the Jews of France, Germany, Eastern Europe and their descendants.)

Josh, however, was not as lucky as I to have a translator and narrator (Ruth) sitting next to him. Temple Moses has men and women sit separately in the temple- women sat to the left of a beige lace and gold piped barrier that ran down the center of the room and was about 4 1/2 feet high; men sat on the right. But, this made me equally as unlucky because he actually got to see what was happening during the service. Since, it was a boy’s bar mitzvah, almost all of the recitation of the Torah and all of the men’s chanting happened on the other side of the fence-like separator. When we stayed seated, the women could see nothing. I actually stood with Ruth once or twice to try to catch a glimpse of what was going on, but most of the time I sat observing and listening to a variety of different Spanish conversations occurring around me. In fact, the women, who seemed unaffected by their lack of involvement and poor visibility, spent most of the time socializing with each other. Although I didn’t understand any of the women’s Spanish conversations, gossip is a universal language among women and by the end of the service I knew who was who, who was related to whom, whose granddaughter had just married, who the outspoken women were, who the pillars of the congregation were, etc. etc. Observation (and a little help from Ruth throughout the service) go a long way. Josh was impressed when I filled him in on everyone’s details just before we left.

But of course, just because I got some scoop and the ladies smiled at me, I was still recognized as the outsider I came in as. Just before Josh and I made a discreet exit from the temple, we noticed that our presence was the secretive topic of one group’s conversation! We’ll probably have to start getting used to that. And since we’re going to be on this beat all semester, everyone in the community is going to have to get used to us, too!