When It Comes Time To Leave A Shul

Recent events in New Square, in which a squabble over shul-going has turned bizarre and violent (intimidation, arson, 3^rd degree burns, attempted murder), has left many of us  — Jew, Chassid, Gentile – stunned, our jaws hung slack in stupefaction and shame.

Thinking men and women stammer in the street: A man wants to leave his Rebbe’s shul and pray in a different one, and that is grounds for arson and near-murder?  The uninitiated and the unknowing may imagine that a shul is simply a place for like-minded believers to gather and worship – a place for brotherhood and community, a place to come, enjoy, and leave. Of course it is those things, but those of us in-the-know are aware of how much more the shul is. And while we are certainly shocked and ashamed over the New Square episode, many of us are not entirely surprised.

The complicated, emotion-laden relationship that an ultra-Orthodox man has with his shul is a rich element of religious life all over the world. Long after services end, the shul, the rabbi, and a man’s fellow worshipers pervade his thoughts and influence his behavior for good and for ill.  They are a kind of internalized, portable superego he carries everywhere: What will the people at my table think if they saw me doing X? Or on the good side:  I resisted temptation. My shul-mates, or my Rebbe, would be proud of me.

Time was not too long ago when a shul was the marketplace for social negotiations of all kinds, especially for kavod and social ranking.  My grandfather, may he rest in peace, told me that in the alte heim there was a shul for every profession and social standing.  In Warsaw, Lublin, and Lodz there was the schneiders’ shul, the schusters’ shul, and the schoikhet’s minyan.  There was even a minyan, it was said, for amei haaretz, the boorish and ignorant folk.  Within these small houses of prayer and study, members jockeyed for positions of honor and fretted over minor humiliations. Didn’t Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof pine for a seat by the eastern wall? (One can assume that Layzer Wolf, the butcher, had one by virtue of his wealth.)

According to one old joke, a respected merchant from Warsaw was visiting a small shtetl for Shabbos. He had anticipated receiving the third aliyah or at worst the sixth, but when he received maftir he could no longer contain himself.  “Bei unz git m’en  maftir a hunt,” he said to the gabbai angrily. Without missing a beat the gabbai replied: “By unz oich.”

Nowadays, the ultra-Orthodox or Chasidic shul is less a center stage for gaudy displays of manhood or the solicitation of kavod, instead it exerts a significant — albeit voluntary — social force on its members. It creates a culture and a reigning ideology into which a man wants to fit in.

But within this conformity there can be restlessness.  After all, a man doesn’t die with the same ideas he was born with.  He changes, the shul changes, the rabbi changes, the community as a whole sometimes moves in a different direction.  Frictions develop. A man may realize that he disagrees fundamentally with community beliefs of various kinds: the role of women, or secular education, or relationships with Gentiles. Maybe he no longer believes in the Rebbe or Chassidic principles. Maybe he even feels at bottom that he is no longer a believer in God, or only an intermittent one. Things may reach a point where he must decide: will he become estranged from himself or from his shul?

One type of man will sidestep this question altogether. The pious may decide that a shul is a place to say Kaddish and make kiddush, to reflect, to pray and occupy himself with good works.  He is careful to avoid conflict. He walks humbly with his God. He shuts out everything that distracts him from his mission.

Another type of man will be loyal to the shul with a powerful but negative attachment. Like a man devoted to the pub he hates, sitting at his table, railing that the beer is stale and terrible, the corned beef raw and un-flavorful, the clientele annoying. But a difficult attachment is still an attachment.

Over the years this man sits in shul, lost to himself and to what’s really bothering him. Despite his negativity, he will never leave. He is “working things out.” Sometimes, with the passage of time and age, his pickled quality becomes sweet. Psychoanalysts have long known that there is an enormous curative power in a repetitive experience in which a man can be left alone with his own miserable and sometimes happy thoughts. He is left alone in the presence of others. This is a potent cure for the fevers that cook the minds of many. Shul becomes a holding experience, a womb that encourages the forgiving, better part of him win out. He accepts others and himself too.  This also is an achievement.

For many men it is practically a rite to get ornery and disagreeable in shul.  This rancorousness or crabbiness is often a sign of mid-life as sure as the comb-over, the sports car, and the ponytail are in other cultures.  One man, perhaps, might be tired of the leadership, another irritated with the rabbi, yet another with the rabbi’s wife.  He can’t take it anymore.  He won’t take it anymore.  He begins to wander.

This is not always a bad thing.  I remember from when I was a boy, men of my age now, sitting at the table on Shabbos would say: Why do we have to put up with the Rov? He is cheap and obtuse and long-winded. Others would complain about the chazzan, or the Baal Koreh. A movement is started to break away, and it often succeeds. These movements need not necessarily be feared. In fact, they are natural and should be welcomed, but most of the time, they are not. Why is this so?

This is because even groups of people who are moral and love each other, at times will unconsciously drift toward an obsession with “fealty” as a substitute for morality when confronted with dissent. In the face of a challenge, long-cherished concepts of decency are hurriedly discarded in this quest for “purity” and “fidelity”. Loyalty — usually to some authority figure — now becomes the ultimate morality.

In my profession, psychoanalytic institutes too, are famous for their quarrels and rebellions. No sooner does one institute form then someone gets upset and there is a breakaway movement, a splinter group.  Cries of perfidy are raised. Sides are taken, passions aroused. One group becomes “pure”, the other “diluted.”

Despite all the heat generated in the psychoanalytic community by these splits, the late famous psychoanalyst Hyman Spotnitz reassured his students that this rebellious tumult is as it should be.  If no one ever got angry we would all stay with our fathers and mothers (and Rebbes) forever.  We would never leave the house to marry and make families and have new ideas of our own.  And that would be a terrible shame.  In fact, that would be a shanda far de goyim — and the yidden too.