Why Sit Through Services?

In an essay at this time last year in Mosaic, American Jewish historian Jack Wertheimer addressed what he called a “remarkable phenomenon” — the fact that American Jews who rarely, if ever, attend religious services throughout the year come to Jewish houses of worship in droves on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, with temples opening movable partitions to accommodate the overflow crowds and even renting other facilities for the thrice-yearly services.

That huge numbers of secular Jews religiously attend High Holy Day services has been a given for as long as anyone can remember, but it doesn’t really seem to make sense. According to the 2013 Pew survey, 39 percent of Conservative synagogue members attend only on the High Holy Days, and for members of Reform temples the number rises to 60 percent.

Thus, hundreds of thousands of Jews who never step into a synagogue year-round spend several hours over these three days listening to lengthy Hebrew prayers that are nearly incomprehensible to the large majority of them. And the theology underlying those prayers and the High Holy Days as a whole involves, as Wertheimer writes, “a conception of G-d alien and certainly discomfiting to many moderns.”

As an op-ed in a major Jewish newspaper entitled “Why You Shouldn’t Go to Synagogue on Rosh Hashanah This Year” put it, these services are “consumer Judaism at its worst: customers guilted into experiencing a mediocre product. It’s Judaism at its least interactive, least embodied, least kinesthetic, least engaging. It’s more show than service.” And that, says Wertheimer, makes it worth trying to understand why “several million intelligent, well-educated people with other options for how to spend their time bother to attend at all.”