Considering Sacred Spaces
R'eih 5778 / 11 August 2018
Parashat Re’eh begins with the conclusion of the long farewell that Moses addressed to the Israelites as he prepared to leave them and they prepared to cross the Jordan into the Land of Canaan. “I set before you today a blessing and a curse” Moses tells the people: “the blessing if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God, . . . and the curse if you abandon them.” The parasha then goes on to a review of the various laws that the Israelites will be expected to follow once they enter the Promised Land. This review begins with the issue of where the Israelites will be expected to offer their sacrifices and to perform their religious rites. The People of Israel are told that they are most definitely not to take over and use the many places where the Canaanites had worshiped their gods and, in fact, they are told that all Canaanite religious practices (including, perhaps most notably, child sacrifice) are to be spurned. Rather, the Israelites are to centralize their primary religious rituals, that is, their sacrifices, in one specific place, “ha-makom asher yivchar Adonai Elohaychem lasum shmo sham” — “the place where God will choose to establish his name there.”
This idea of creating a single place of worship was an extremely significant innovation. The contemporary Bible scholar Jeffrey Tigay has suggested that “the limitation of sacrificial worship to a single place is the most unique and far-reaching law in Deuteronomy,” pointing out that “it affected the religious life of individuals, the sacrificial system, the way festivals were celebrated, the economic status of the Levites, and even the judicial system [since the Temple is where difficult legal cases were to be adjudicated].” The Torah, it seems, recognized that where we conduct our most intensive spiritual activities, our most engaging interactions with the divine, is a serious matter, for the “sacred spaces” of any people have the potential both to reflect and to influence the nature of their religious experience. Thus, for example, the centralization of sacrifices in one place (eventually Jerusalem) served to reinforce the idea of one God at a time when that concept was relatively new.
I was drawn to the discussion of “sacred spaces” in this morning’s Torah portion because of my own scholarly interest in places of worship and, more specifically, in the history and development of American synagogue architecture, and so, prompted by the Torah reading’s concern with sacred spaces, it is to the topic of American synagogue buildings that I want to now turn our attention.
I begin with the observation that in considering the physical appearance of a synagogue building, it would be difficult to overemphasize the performative elements of worship and the many features that religious services have in common with theatrical productions. Both commonly involve ritualized and symbolic behavior, for example, as well as the performance of written texts and the use of props and costumes. This means that the spaces in which both worship services and theatrical plays are enacted help very much to “frame” these events, to send messages about what to expect as they unfold. Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, in a book called The Art of Public Prayer, has put it this way: “Worship is like drama [and] the principles of successful drama are applicable to public prayer as well.”
So let us consider for a few moments one specific element of a modern American synagogue’s interior architecture, its bimah, in order to explore how the appearance of this feature of a sanctuary and its orientation within the synagogue help to frame the theatrical experience that is a Jewish worship service.
People who are familiar with Jewish communal prayer are generally aware of the two most basic bimah arrangements in American synagogues, even if they have not thought about this matter consciously. The first of these arrangements, associated primarily with Orthodox Judaism, is one in which the bimah is a free-standing platform placed at or near the center of the worship space, oriented so that those who lead the service or who participate in the ritual of Torah reading face the aron kodesh in which the Torah scrolls are housed. In some Orthodox synagogues the bimah has been moved forward and merged with the platform before the aron kodesh, but even in this configuration the reader’s table still provides for the service to be led and for the Torah reading to be conducted facing toward the ark.
The second bimah arrangement common in American synagogues is one in which the bimah is consistently at the very front of the hall and is furnished with one or perhaps two lecterns facing toward the congregation. This configuration, in which the bimah may even take the form of a stage completely separated from the assembly hall, came into use gradually during the middle and late decades of the nineteenth century in Reform congregations.
Now, because the plan and orientation of a synagogue’s bimah is an extremely important element in conveying a message about the relationship between congregants and those who officiate at services, by adopting one basic bimah arrangement as opposed to another, Orthodoxy and Reform have historically embraced two quite different approaches to framing the worship service and setting the tone for the experience of prayer.
In Orthodox synagogues, by orienting the prayer leader, like others worshipers, toward the aron kodesh, and by often placing him literally in the midst of the congregation, the intention has been to engender an atmosphere of inclusion and participation. The message conveyed is that individuals are expected to involve themselves in the worship experience in much the same way as those leading the service. The leader of the service is seen as a shaliach tzibur, an “emissary of the community,” rather than as a clergyman in a position of special authority.
The framing message of the bimah arrangement in a typical Reform temple, by contrast, has been one of a certain separation between officiants and congregants. In adopting an auditorium-style synagogue plan with a bimah akin to a theater stage, the goal of the Reform movement in its late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century “classic era” was to highlight the role of the rabbi and to some extent of the choir, and thereby to introduce a sense of greater decorum in worship services. As one commentator on the history of Reform put it, many nineteenth-century Reform leaders viewed their congregants as “noisy, individualistic, and unappreciative of the higher artistry that characterized western aesthetics,” and they hoped that by changing the framing message conveyed by their synagogue floor plans they would encourage an attitude of greater deference and reverence on the part of worshipers.
In attempting to achieve the atmosphere they sought, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Reform congregations generally borrowed from mainstream Protestant models of ecclesiastical design and, where resources allowed, they built cavernous temples which would encourage those in attendance to sit in respectful awe. The psychological distance between those leading services and those in the pews was in some cases accentuated by imposing balustrades across the front of the bimah and in other cases by the great height of some bimot. I’m reminded of a typographical error that appeared in a 1994 article on synagogue architecture reporting that in some post-World War II synagogues, the bimah was “often 46 feet above the first row of pews.” What was intended, of course, was “4-6 feet.”
Clearly, Reform Judaism’s approach to synagogue design strayed very far from traditional models. So out of step with the proper atmosphere for Jewish prayer did some Orthodox leaders consider church-like synagogues that when auditorium-style sanctuaries first began to be constructed, one group of Orthodox rabbis in Europe actually banned worship in a synagogue that did not have a central bimah.
Nor have Orthodox commentators been the only ones to declare the auditorium arrangement out of place in a Jewish house of worship. Ismar Schorsch, when he was chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, encouraged Conservative congregations constructing new synagogues to “consider a design that would restore the reading of the services and the Torah to the center of the sanctuary and underscore the role of the cantor as agent and facilitator. For the cantor to face the congregation,” he affirmed, “violates the concept and integrity of the role.”
As Chancellor Schorsch’s comments suggest, for many congregations the form that the bimah of a synagogue should take has remained an open question. Not surprisingly, it is those congregations affiliated with the Conservative movement that have most often been uncomfortable with both of the standard bimah configurations, those of Orthodoxy and Reform. Most Conservative congregations have shunned the central-bimah arrangement, perhaps associating it with a lack of decorum and considering it too alien in an American environment, but they have also been unhappy with the straightforward auditorium configuration introduced by Reform. Accordingly, congregations dissatisfied with both Orthodox and Reform bimah plans have struggled to find alternative arrangements.
One solution adopted by congregations searching for an arrangement to suit their needs has been to install two reader’s desks on the pulpit, one oriented toward the congregation and one facing the ark. The bimah solution adopted at the Conservative Beth El synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois, was to install a lectern with a table top that swivels like a Lazy Susan so that Torah reading can be conducted facing the congregation but the cantor can lead the service facing the aron kodesh. At Cleveland’s B’nai Jeshurun, again a Conservative congregation, the ambivalence over the proper orientation of the reader’s desk is manifested in the fact that in the synagogue’s main sanctuary both of the lecterns on the bimah face the congregation but in its auxiliary chapel the reader’s desk faces the ark. Perhaps nothing symbolizes the tension over framing in many a synagogue better than the specially designed cantor’s podium at the Conservative Beth Shalom synagogue in Pittsburgh. This podium incorporates two lecterns that allow the cantor either to face the congregation or to pivot 180 degrees to face the aron kodesh.
Not only have Conservative congregations long grappled with the issue of a proper bimah plan, but by the late twentieth century, even many congregations in the Reform camp had become quite uncomfortable with the sanctuary arrangements developed in the context of classical Reform and with the way these arrangements have influenced the experience of worship. As a result, in recent years synagogue architects designing buildings for Reform congregations, like those designing for more traditional assemblies, have taken steps to bring officiants and congregants closer together, both spatially and psychologically. In this sense, the architects of synagogues are very much in tune with many contemporary designers of playhouses who have sought to draw audiences into the action of the dramas produced in their theaters by experimenting with lowered performance areas, with thrust stages, and with theater-in-the-round.
I’m sure that those who attend services regularly here at BZBI realize that we, like many other congregations, are struggling with the question of the proper position of our prayer leaders within the sanctuary. In recent months, the bimah has been abandoned completely during parts of the service and the person leading prayers has taken up a position in the shul’s central aisle in order to build a stronger connection between the prayer leader and the congregation, between the liturgy and the daveners. Indeed, following a suggestion made by music educator Joey Weisenberg when he was a guest here, members of the congregation have been encouraged to cluster around our shaliach or shlicha tzibur in order to strengthen this connection.
I am aware that there have been ongoing discussions of how our sanctuary might be reconfigured permanently in order to frame our services in a manner more to our liking as a community. I know that to do so will involve not only reaching a consensus about what exactly should be done, but also finding the funds necessary to do it. I don’t have any grand solution to propose here, but, since I have been invited to take this positon of authority here on the bimah, high above you, I will use this opportunity to urge our leaders not to abandon the search for a bimah arrangement that will frame our services in a more felicitous way than the current arrangement does now.
