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Mishkon Comes to Max On a California picture-postcard day, the big blue synagogue on Main Street in Venice overflows with Yom Kippur worshippers. But something truly extraordinary is about to happen. |
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On a California picture-postcard day, the big blue synagogue on Main Street in Venice overflows with Yom Kippur worshippers. This day of penitence and prayer is a time to contemplate failings and omissions, one of only two occasions when Jews neither eat nor drink. And before noon, the sun burnishing the rooftop and the body heat of a standing-room-only crowd turns the sanctuary into an oven. The heat and discomfort are a familiar story to members of the tight-knit community that with prayer and volunteer hours and effort have maintained Mishkon Tephilo -- literally, House of Prayer -- for almost eighty years. These are not the most affluent in Southern California. Couples with small children, elderly Holocaust survivors getting by on pensions, young professionals, artists, craftsmen, writers, actors, teachers, local tradesmen, a few attorneys, engineers and physicians, they all love this synagogue. For years they have endured the summer's heat, hoping that someday, funds will be found for air conditioning. But there are always more urgent priorities, most recently patching the worn roof and installing wheelchair ramps to make the building more accessible. And so on this Day of Atonement, as on others before it, they put bodily needs aside and concentrate on prayer. It is long past midday when Rabbi Naomi Levy delivers her sermon. Looking around the room she recognizes many of the congregants. Notably absent are Mishkon's oldest member, Max Polsky, and his wife, Ethyl. Max is 99, a regular for longer than anyone remembers. But in his tenth decade, his eyes dimmed, his conversations sometimes drifted. If Max had problems with the present, however, he had none with the past. He has memorized the entire prayer book, as well as special prayers for holidays and festivals. Somewhere in the depths of his memory, clear as a mountain stream, run melodies and chants and the wordless prayers called niggunim that no one else at Mishkon had ever heard: Max is a living encyclopedia of prayer. But as he and Ethyl grew feeble, it became more difficult for them to attend services. Now he is in a wheelchair, and it is nearly impossible. Seven years earlier, when Rabbi Levy first came to Mishkon, just 26 years old, a year out of seminary and, with deep personal reservations, dared to accept a role that no woman had ever before taken -- the pulpit of a Conservative Jewish congregation -- Max had gone out of his way to welcome her. He had even made a point of asking her to officiate at his funeral, when the time came. Rabbi Levy puts aside a sermon written and rewritten over weeks. She speaks instead in the moment and from her heart. She tells of the power of prayer to heal, to restore hope, to bring people together. She describes something even more vital than prayer: The imperative to perform mitzvot, the Divine Commandments that provide guideposts on the path to a righteous life. And she relates an ancient midrash, a Rabbinical lesson, that among the most essential of these Commandments is the obligation to visit the sick. "The rabbis of old tell us that a single visit to a sickbed alleviates one sixtieth of an illness," she says, explaining how isolations breeds despair, and that despite their infirmities, people need to feel that they are part of a community, loved and valued. She recalls the story of Joseph going up from Egypt to visit his dying father, Jacob, and how Jacob was strengthened by it. She tells of seeing such a transformation: A cancer patient groaning with pain, invigorated by a visit. In minutes he was sitting up, taking nourishment, cracking jokes, enjoying life, if only for a while. Then, looking around the stifling room packed with worshippers hoarse from hours of chanting, weary from standing to pray, suffering the torment of thirst, bellies growling with hunger, clothing heavy with perspiration and faces flushed from the nearly unbearable heat, Rabbi Levy decides that on this Day of Atonement she must ask something from her congregation that no one had ever asked before. "We'll take a break about three," she says. "Services will resume at 4:30. But if you would like to perform a great mitzvah, I invite you to go to Max Polsky's house. Max hasn't missed a Yom Kippur service in over 90 years. He and Ethyl can't come to Mishkon -- but maybe we can bring Mishkon to them." About thirty people tramp more than a mile on sweltering streets to the Polsky home. They bring prayer books and a shofar, the ram's horn that recalls God's covenant with Abraham. With Max joining in, the exhausted Mishkonites repeat all the Yom Kippur prayers, from beginning to end. As cooling darkness descends on Venice, blasts from the shofar conclude the service. Bread and wine appear, blessings are quickly chanted, the fast is broken. Max seems reborn: Clapping his hands in time to his solo renditions of long-forgotten Yiddish folk songs, his blind eyes do not see the joyous tears of his visitors, the community that will not allow him to go alone into darkness. Copyright © 2000 Marvin J. Wolf Mishkon Comes To Max |
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