Kentucky Synagogue Offers Mystics’ Liturgy

Worshippers prayed, swayed, chanted and closed their eyes in earnest spiritual concentration. In a new series of once-a-month services at Congregation Anshei Sfard, worshippers are putting a modern name on a centuries-old practice.

In “Friday Night Live,” worshippers at Kentucky’s only Orthodox synagogue are using a “Kabbalat Shabbat” liturgy pioneered by mystics in the city of Safed in what is present-day Israel.

The rabbis, who lived about four centuries ago, went into the fields to greet the Sabbath as a queen and bride with poetry, song and ecstatic prayer.

“Enter, O bride!” the worshipers chant in Hebrew. “… The Sabbath presence, let us welcome.”

At the first such service this month, Rabbi Avrohom Litvin combined the tradition with a sort of Sabbath 101. As the service progressed, he described, step by step, what each ritual would be and what it symbolized.

It had more song and poetic imagery than a typical Friday night service, and it included the lighting of Sabbath candles by women and girls, a tradition typically observed in homes but less so in synagogues.

Litvin said he’s been concerned about reports of waning interest in religion among the population as a whole.

Putting it in marketing terms, he concluded that “we’re forgetting to sell or share our core product, which is God and holiness and connection, revelation, relevance of all these things to daily life.”

He said worship should bring a connection with awe and holiness.

“I’m afraid that we’ve become very good at all kinds of important but secondary issues — pastoral care, life-cycle events, helping those in need, fellowship and a number of other good things,” he said. “But the main, core purpose of synagogue, temple or church is to hook up with the divinity of God, the holiness of God. In our desire to do the other parts, it may be we lost sight of the forest for the trees.”

At the synagogue — on Dutchmans Lane near Bowman Field and the Jewish Community Center — the congregation of several dozen was larger than usual for a Friday night service.

The gathering consisted of a short series of afternoon or Mincha prayers, immediately followed by the lighting of the candles and a separate Sabbath service. At one point, the worshippers turned to the back to metaphorically greet the holy day as a processing bride.

“Periodically we need to redouble our efforts and reach out to people who want to connect to more of the spiritual life,” member Joshua Golding said.

Many people, he said, don’t know the layered depth of traditional Jewish prayer because they’ve grown up going to a synagogue and worshipped by rote without knowing the significance of the prayers and rituals. He said Jewish prayer has an elaborate texture of engaging the body, mind, emotions and spirit.

“My involvement in Jewish ritual prayer has deepened and grown,” said Golding, a Bellarmine University philosophy professor who will be teaching a summer class at the synagogue on the wisdom of Jewish prayer. “I feel I’ve grown closer to God as best I understand through prayer. I want to share that with people.”

Congregation member Natalie Polzer said she appreciates the spontaneity of a typical Sabbath service, but the Friday Night Live approach offers a good entry point to the rites and liturgies of the holy day, and also because the women’s and men’s sections are on either side of an aisle. In the smaller chapel, the women’s section is toward the back.

The new services show “what to do and why we’re doing the prayers we’re doing,” she said, while the traditional ones enable worshippers to “go with the flow and tune in to what other people are doing.”

Litvin said the synagogue would continue the program into the high holy days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in September.