WSJ: Unorthodox New Year

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Unorthodox New Year

Some Celebrate Judaism's High Holy Days
With Yoga, Hiking, Mountain Retreats
By SUZANNE SATALINE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 7, 2005; Page B1

FALLS VILLAGE, Conn. -- To celebrate the Jewish New Year, Nigel Savage gathered here on Monday with nine other men by a small, weedy lake. For the next three days, they and their friends and families created their own version of the holiday celebration with prayer, campfire singing, hiking, and yoga classes -- one of a growing number of alternative celebrations to traditional synagogue services.

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For many Jews, observing the 10-day holy period from Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur involves hours of reading and prayer at traditional religious services in a temple. Many Reform Judaism and other congregations have added more singing and music. But Mr. Savage and his friends are part of a growing number of Jews who say they don't identify with traditional Jewish denominations and get more spiritually stimulated outside of temple. Many of them want to revel in their ethnic and familial roots, but without religious doctrine.

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For some Jews, the activities personalize, recharge and deepen their faith. "It's not about rejecting the old. It's claiming what's new," says Mr. Savage, the executive director of Hazon, a nonprofit group that runs, among other activities, Shabbat bike rides. In congregations formed 50 or 75 years ago, "the rabbi and the cantor did it for you," he says. Now, "that's not the way people want to experience it. They want to do it themselves."

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In New York, Amichai Lau-Lavie and his company, Storahtelling, offer special High Holy Day performances infused with what his company calls a "radical fusion of storytelling, Torah, traditional ritual theater and contemporary performance art." Storahtelling performances might involve Hebrew chanting, nontraditional English translation, original and ethnic music and audience participation. Professors and practitioners say the various holiday interpretations are an outgrowth of Judaism's renewal movement, with its emphasis on spirituality and liberal social concerns. America's consumer culture provides a boost. "We have been taught from birth to pick and choose. When it comes to religion, we do almost the same thing," says Robert Wuthnow, director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.

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Some of the alternative Jewish groups don't offer any traditional religious services. Rosh Hashana service at the Isabella Freedman retreat was shortened, with parts of the traditional liturgy removed. Rather than recite a prayer, participants were asked to chant a single word or to meditate on themes explained in English. Some Orthodox rabbis say such services don't fulfill requirements for a sanctioned form of prayer. They bemoan alternative holidays that don't include traditional services. "I believe if people understood what Judaism really says or thinks, there wouldn't be a need for alternatives," says Rabbi Moshe D. Krupka, national executive director of the Orthodox Union, an educational and social services organization.

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Rabbi Korngold insists she isn't watering down Judaism or stripping it of its deepest meanings. "Our religion was created in the wilderness. God gave us the Torah on the mountain," she says. "Unless Judaism is willing to meet them out there, they are not coming home to Judaism." It worked for Noah Finkelstein, a 37-year-old physics professor who visited several temples and said traditional synagogues made him feel he had to fit into someone else's religion. The leaders of such events know their work can be seen as flaky and faddish. But they often attract divided Jewish families, in which spouses can't agree on which kind of synagogue to join, and families who have rejected the religion but want kin.

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Write to Suzanne Sataline at [e-mail]

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