Note from Jane: this was written in May 2011, soon after Passover. It’s a holiday centered in the home, not in synagogue services.  This year was a particularly strange Passover for me.

I am walking up the steps outside of my old synagogue. This is how I know I’m somewhere between dreaming and awake: I haven’t been back here in over a decade. I haven’t seen this place since the inevitable repair and reconstruction that has taken place. I imagine freshly painted wrought iron gates, repaired and refreshed doors and new windows. I open the heavy wooden doors, at once nostalgically hurried and hesitant. Wondering, is the white marble plaque with my great grandfather’s name (building committee and former president, if it matters) still on the wall? 

Ahead would be the social hall, through more solid wooden doors.  Kitchen to the right.  Upstairs, is the sanctuary.  It was truly my sanctuary, for a short time. Wide, curving stairs to the left, and to the right. Up the right staircase I go. Substantial, smooth, polished wooden banisters; my hand fits right into the memory/grooove it used to trail up, on so many Saturday mornings. I linger on these stairs, not certain I am ready to walk into the sanctuary. I want the faded old red carpeting on the stairs, so there it is my dream.  I square my shoulders, take a quick breath, and look past the open door into the sanctuary. 

I can imagine the newer, brighter, cleaner and finally restored sanctuary – I know the renovations have remained true to the more than century-old sanctuary – but I choose to remember the lovely shabbiness of that red carpet, the scuffed, dusty floor. The worn, softly squared tops of dark wooden, straight-backed pews. They are smooth with age and wear – the deeply burnished, unassuming kind of wear that old wood furniture grows into over a long, long time. All that sanding and polishing never made them smooth enough along the bottom of the seat, that you wouldn’t snag your tights if you weren’t careful.  I think of the hours a few people spent moving buckets to catch rain; trying to keep the ancient boiler chugging along with gum and paper clips; patching holes; polishing the pews; lovingly changing out the velvet bima covers, the curtains on the Ark, the Torah dressings… it was a labor of love, struggling to keep an old, broken building from looking as falling apart as it really was. We knew how beautiful it was, and could be again. Painted. Roof fixed. Boiler functional.  

The sun shines through the rose window, which in my mind is still covered by a not quite translucent plastic shield, protecting what could still be protected and saved. One congregant, an artist, made it her mission to lovingly restore that stained glass. Each completed piece was (and still is) a celebration. Caught in the sun beams are a gazillion tiny dust particles, hanging in the air. This air is palpable: the dust, the silence, the familiar feeling of over a hundred years of tangible prayers residing in the space in this building, in this space in my heart. 

The very first time I walked into this sanctuary I felt it, a concentrated feeling of holiness. Without really knowing what it was: kavannah – consciously intentional and mindful prayer. Old whispers of meditation and devotion hang in the air, fused with the dust particles. Over a hundred years of Shabbat, holidays, simcha and loss. (I was recently in Israel, where anything that is slightly more than a hundred years old is not so old. Perspective. We lack historical perspective here, sometimes)  

Right after I was born, my grandfather gave me my Hebrew name here. I felt my grands and unknown great-grands encouraging me, pushing me forward when I returned as an adult. Are they still here, quietly wondering where I’ve been? Right away, I was someplace I knew intimately, where my family had been. I belonged, from the first moment. I didn’t yet realize what I’d come to find. It quickly became a part of my weekly, sometimes daily life. This place wasn’t memory, back then. It was a regular, consistent, unquestioned presence. There was a rhythm and order infused into my sense of time, by the cyclical Jewish calendar.  

I walk towards the bima and the Holy Ark. I see the plain, unrestored windows that you had to shove really hard to open and close. I know there are new stained glass windows, with familiar and new names on them. It’s sad, my father and I never donated a window to honor and memorialize my family. Also sad, because the cheese stands alone: I am the last Jew in my birth family. Not so many years ago, I was here every Shabbat morning, taking an aliyah, walking around chatting, learning the service by rote because I didn’t really read Hebrew so well (that’s still coming along, tortuously slowly). How did I move away from that routine – a pretty big, important piece of myself – to a rare Saturday morning appearance at my (will it always be?) new shul?  

If I look up now, there will be more tears. It will be new and fixed and shiny. I am breathing, inhaling this space into my lungs, into the memory of my cells.  I look for the tiny brass plaque on the left front-facing pew, the one that let the world know this was where my father’s grandfather had sat. (Really? Who wants to sit up front? Facing the congregation, no less? The pressure to behave, to sit with import and gravity… this was always too great an imaginative task for me. I take my Judaism, Shabbat, holidays and prayer, with a large side of socializing, thank you very much).  I hope it’s still here, I vaguely remember a donation my father made before he died, ensuring the little brass plaque would still be here. Which is silliness, really. I am so not a plaque person – give because you love or because it means something, because it will create or serve or save. Who cares if your name is there forever? A name on a wall, window or pew… Why do I find myself caring about that pew, about the absence of a family window?   It’s my own diminishing connection.?  I turn around to face the empty sanctuary.  Look way up at the seats in the "women’s balcony".  I know these paintings on the walls and ceilings. They are finally brightened, restored from the faded, peeling images. I remember this view, looking up and back at the ghosts of congregants from the early 1900s, and my own ghosts from the last years of that century. Convergence and a little synchronicity. 

I open my eyes, awake now. My face is wet, and my breath is rapid. I’m lying in my bed, in my small rural town, an hour away from my old synagogue. I have a synagogue here that I also love. It plays an important part in my weekly, occasionally daily, life. It is my now-shul, but it exists for me in a different way that I am still figuring out. My old shul is where I (re)discovered my Judaism. Where I learned more than I ever knew there was to know, more than I ever guessed would become meaningful and relevant to me.  My then Shabbat observance: candles on Friday night, gently placed into the sink when I headed out (on a date? with friends?) but never blown out. Getting up Saturday morning, sometimes hung over.  Who cared back then, the headache would wear off before the Torah service began, ha!  Then the the walk to shul, my father’s blue velvet tallit bag in hand. An integral part of my Shabbat ritual. I loved that walk, especially in the warm sunshine, but also in the rain and snow. I loved being there, at services each Saturday morning. With friends, with prayer, with nosh afterward… We’d linger and it would be 1 or 2 pm before anyone headed out. Some would head home to observe more Shabbat, to take a peaceful and luxuriously delicious nap, or enjoy another meal. Some were off to various, decidedly not Shabbat-observant activities. I would walk out through the heavy synagogue doors, into the rest of my weekend.  Those hours were mine, they were part of the rhythm of my week, each month, all year. 

All of this has woken me up. How did I get here, from that place – to this place? I am so removed from the rhythm of those Saturdays; even Shabbat candles are infrequent.  Kabbalat Shabbat services are lovely but sometimes lonely, fraught with the tension of my children’s behavior and my husband’s absence. How do I have kids who did not grow up being at shul each Saturday? (OK, I know how. I didn’t bring them). In my house, we are cognizant of this huge hole that exists. This dream of my old shul… remembering an alternate future: a family heading out from our funky old brownstone, walking through the park to shul on a sunny Saturday morning. I chose a different walk, from a different house, to different destinations. What we hold onto, and what we let go, shapes who we become. There are always new choices to make. Should you, can you, how can you not, honor what is left behind when making choices?  

Too many things have become tenuous. One is the lack of any consistent Jewish ritual in my life.  It’s not about God so much, not really. (I think? Probably? Maybe?) But there is a pull towards something larger, something substantial and ancient, part of so much history and countless people through time. It doesn’t touch the others in my family. That aches. Sometimes, like this morning (and it is now truly morning, the sky is lightening and the alarm went off, it’s 6, I’ve got to go make the day begin) missing all of this is intense. The tenuousness is acute.  This hole gets bigger, and is wearing smooth at the edges, like the polished tops of the pews. The edges are not quite as pointed and sharp as they had been. Except… at these times: when I miss what was, what I was. I love my family, with all my heart, to the ends of the universe. If I let it, that hole would turn jagged, and sharp. I tread with care, so as not to scrape up against those edges. There is only moving forward, which is fragile and tricky. Time to get up and start my day. It’s Friday.