I made a startling anthropological discovery the other day. At the El Cerrito Plaza BART station, I noticed passengers form two lines when boarding the train. Yet over at North Berkeley station, just one stop south, riders form a single line.
And woe unto he or she who tries to form a second line at North Berkeley station. Outraged commuters just might throw momma from the train.
What could account for this variation? Perhaps it’s because one station is open air, the other underground. Maybe it’s because people in El Cerrito are into pair bonding while North Berkeleyites are more linear and regimented.
Whatever the reason, the North Berkeley BART single line is as rigidly defined a cultural norm as eating pizza on Super Bowl Sunday.
Little cultural differences flourish in Judaism, too. Not just from movement to movement but also from congregation to congregation, each a cosmos unto itself.
Consider someone who grew up in Temple “A” and later joined Temple “B” as an adult. There is usually a period of adjustment (especially regarding liturgy and music) sometimes accompanied by a sense of “that’s not how it’s done.”
Rabbi Yossi Marcus of Chabad of San Mateo, devout though he may be, tends to minimize differences. “A less observant Jew, or one who observes in an untraditional way, is no less a Jew and no less your brother than the chief rabbi of Israel,” he says. “Also, do not assume that the observant one looks down on you. You might be projecting.”
Yet how often have we heard that Jews would turn on each other if they no longer had external enemies to fight off (radical Islam, anti-Semitism)? Once no longer distracted, internal contradictions among Judaism’s factions, secular and religious, would tear us apart.
We’ve never had a chance to find out. We’re still too beset by those external enemies.
Which brings up one of the dialectics of Jewish life: As much as we want to experience klal, a sense of belonging and Jewish peoplehood, we are too often mired in our individual mishegoss to feel it all the way, at least most of the time.
It’s our own fault. Part of the genius of the sages of Judaism was to invent the notion that God hears our individual prayers, and that each of us — mere specks on a dust mote of a planet — actually matters to God.
And if I matter to God, then what I want matters, too. So if I dig tribal drums and rock band accompaniment on Shabbat, well, then that’s what I want. If you don’t like it, take your siddur and go home.
Marcus the peacemaker has his own take on holding the Jewish line. “We do not have to accept everyone’s opinion in order to have peace,” he says. “What does that mean: ‘I respect your opinion?’ No you don’t; you think it’s false. You respect me even though I hold an opinion you consider mistaken. That’s much more honest. I’ll take that over the former any day of the week, and twice on Shabbos.”
I doubt we Jews will ever work out all our mini-differences, let alone the big stuff. That’s just the way human beings seem to disorganize themselves.
But I like to think my late father was on to something with one of the prime lessons he taught me years ago.
He was a screenwriter and liked to teach what he knew about the art of writing. It was his way of passing the torch. This is what he taught me:
When creating a character for a play, the first task is to figure out how he or she is like all other people. Only then do you narrow down how the character is like some other people (Hispanic, Hindu, Republican). Finally, to make the character uniquely original, figure out how he or she is like no other people.
For my dad, the Jewish atheist socialist, the first step was always most important: that we are far more alike than unalike. He believed devoutly that if we could remember that, then the world would be a better place.
I think he was right, and certainly when it comes to the unity of the Jewish people, we would be wise to get in line and remember the lesson.
Dan Pine lives and kvetches in Albany. He can be reached at [email protected].