The Jewish Observer

Segregation or Tradition

                This past Friday (January 11) I moderated a panel for the Village Square’s “Faith, Food, and Friday” series titled “The Most Segregated Hour of the Week?”  This phrase was how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to 11 AM on Sundays , at which Christian worship in this country has traditionally been segregated.  As the Jewish presence on the “Faith, Food, and Friday” panels, I volunteered to moderate this segment because I felt this was not really a Jewish issue and I could be an objective manager of the conversation.  After all, what segregation really occurs in Jewish congregations?  Yes, in Orthodox shuls women sit separate from men, but if you are Jewish you go to a synagogue regardless of denomination.  Yes there are separate Sephardic and Ashkenizic congregations and of course the minhag (customs) in each vary, but even that traditional demarcation is fading away, as I know many traditionally Sephardic congregations that have significant Ashkenazic membership and every synagogue (including my own) has Sephardic members.  As I said, if you are Jewish you go to shul, no matter what race or country of origin you might be.

                Prepping for the panel included a meeting with Dr. Richard Mashburn, the associate pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, the largest and most historic African American congregation in Tallahassee.  The hour plus we shared over lunch was one of the most instructive I have spent in a very long time.  Dr. Mashburn, who is 75, has a combination of incredible life experiences (including 20 years as a colonel in the military and first hand brushes with vehement racism), education, wonderful humor and an all-around beautiful soul.  He is also blunt.  When I asked him what historical forces shaped the development of the black churches, his one word answer was, “racism.” 

But he told me so much more.  For African Americans, the time spent on Sunday mornings in church, apart from white bosses, white prejudice, and white domination was like time spent in heaven.  For a population in the 19^th and much of the 20^th centuries faced with a work week of drudgery and hardship, Sunday church was a major respite.  Participants dressed in their very finest clothing (and still day – no jeans or informal clothing in these churches) and experienced a dignity denied to them in the white world.  The amazingly rich, soulful and joyful musical sounds are born of these emotions as well as the dynamic preaching style accompanied by vocal congregational feedback.  Suddenly I realized this was very much like a Jewish experience.  I remembered the Kabbalists of the 15^th and 16^th centuries, having been forced out of Spain, finding their way to Palestine, and eking out a miserable, difficult subsistence.  Shabbat was the time in Eden, a taste of the world to come.  Suddenly I felt connected to this discussion in a very profoundly Jewish way.  When people are in a time of struggle, when life itself is a constant battle just to survive;  escapes into a different reality are what not only keeps one sane, but human.

During the panel discussion we discussed the future.   So many barriers have now fallen, most significantly the barriers to interracial dating and marriage.  Dr. Mashburn pointed out that at all family gatherings assisted by the church (for example funerals), there are white members of the extended family present.  Further, African Americans are themselves moving into different, more integrated churches.   Dr. Mashburn pointed out to me that many of the younger, more financially successful, professional African Americans, do not like many of the aspects of worship in the traditional African American church. 

One of our regular panelists is the founding pastor of a church not even 10 years old, and hers is far more integrated than most main stream churches.  Everyone professes to have “open and welcoming” congregations, but the real integrated worship is in the younger congregations, because the generations behind mine care a lot less about the divisions that used to bother us. They care less about race, about homosexuality; about a host of other items that are “issues” for the older generations.  So their religious institutions are far more integrated.  People are coming together more and more. 

And this is a good thing, to a point.

I realize that the word “segregation” carries a lot of baggage.  We associate it with segregated schools, with separate public facilities for blacks and whites.  Yet, there is a disturbing aspect to the breaking down of segregated worship.  Do we really want a world in which all of us become more or less the same, that is part of a kind of amalgamated uniform group?  If the richness and emotional power of worship in the black church fades away, we will have lost something very precious.  As I thought about this, I realized the same problem faces the Jewish community as well.

This country has been fantastic for Jews.  Yet, because it is so welcoming, meaningful expressions to Jewish continuity are on the wane.  There are many dynamics at work here.   Some of them have to do with the graying of traditional religion in general.  Some of them have to do with the willingness of young generations to accept things we would not.  Some has to do with the availability of everything and anything on the internet.  Some has to do with the secularization of wider swaths of American society.  Some has to do with the increased focus on individual versus community fulfillment.  Some has to do with intermarriage.  All of these are topics worthy of their own conversations. 

But it would be a sad thing for the world to lose its Jews.  It would be a sad thing for Jewish thought, literature, spirituality and learning to gradually disappear.  It would be a sad thing for the only vestige of Judaism to be bagels and chicken soup.  It would also be a sad thing for the world to lose the institution of the African American church.  That institution has meant so much to the development of the African American community.  It is a source of inspiration spiritually and musically.  The question is, can we preserve ethnically based religious experience and still create a community in which we work together?

And that is the ideal.  There are issues facing our communities that go beyond the barriers of culture, religion and/or race.  At the program last Friday, Pastor Brant Copeland pointed out that the ideal would be for us to work on issues without barriers, yet continue to preserve the beauty and uniqueness of our  individual worship traditions.  I do not know the answer.  I just have this question; how much is segregation necessary to preserve our traditions? 

Here is the link to the program “The Most Segregated Hour of the Week?”

http://wiki.tothevillagesquare.org/download/attachments/20545743/Faith_Food_Friday_race.mp3