Adult Study Groups Contemplate Prayer Book, Anti-Semitism, Religion and Modernity

Three adult study groups coordinated by Rabbi Zemel will tackle disparate topics: making the most of Mishkan Tefilah, the new prayer book; dealing with the re-emergence of anti-Semitism, and navigating modern life through the lens of three 20th-century Jewish philosophers.

Common threads connect these diverse issues, Rabbi Zemel said. All are intended to help members understand and engage different aspects of 21st-century Judaism. All are centered on a single text. And each group, while not limited or restricted, is expected to be relatively small to enable free-flowing discussion and interaction. The groups begin in early November.

Exploration of Mishkan Tefilah will take place at the temple during four Saturday afternoon sessions--Nov. 1, 8 and 22, and Dec. 6--which will conclude with a Havdalah service. Anti-Semitism will be the focus of a year-long study by the long-running Monday Morning Group that meets every other Monday from 10:30 a.m. to noon at the temple, beginning Nov. 3. And the ongoing Downtown Discussion Group will spend the year on the philosophers. That group also meets every other Monday beginning Nov. 3, from 12:15-1:30 p.m., at the Venable Law Offices, 575 7th St., NW. Participants bring their own lunch, but beverages are supplied.

All three groups are open to the entire Micah community; there are no prerequisites nor is prior attendance required.

Rabbi Zemel said he hopes the Mishkan Tefilah series will give congregants the opportunity to explore parts of the sprawling new prayer book, which was introduced at Temple Micah in February, that have not normally been read during Shabbat services. Similarly, it will enable participants to engage the siddur in ways that are usually difficult because of the structure and schedule on Friday nights or Saturday mornings.

"We can stop and pause and talk about individual prayers," the rabbi said. The sessions will allow for reciting the poetry and other readings on the left hand page opposite the liturgy, for example. They will enable the reading and singing of more of the z'merot (the songs and psalms) in the traditional Kabbalat Shabbat service and the birchot hashachar (the morning blessings) traditionally recited on Shabbat mornings.

"I also have a selfish reason for doing this series," Rabbi Zemel said. He is looking to the group to help him better understand ways to use the new book and discover opportunities to deepen the religious experience.

The text for the Monday Morning Group--Ron Rosenbaum's 2004 volume, Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism--affords the opportunity to consider a subject that, Rabbi Zemel said, "I don't like to think about but that needs to be confronted--the reappearance of anti-Semitism."

The book is a compilation of nearly 50 essays by different authors who offer a wide variety of perspectives. "It is a very impressive book that leads to a new understanding of anti-Semitism," Rabbi Zemel said.

The Downtown Discussion Group will tackle a new book by Harvard philosophy professor Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy As a Guide To Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein. "I fell in love with this book," Rabbi Zemel confessed. "It leads us through a path (and shows us) how to embrace religion when we are so drawn to secularism, how to nurture faith in a world when secular science makes so much sense."

In a slim volume with only 108 pages of text, Putnam, who is a practicing Jew, confronts the writings of what he calls "3-1/4" major 20th-century Jewish philosophers: Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas and Ludwig Wittgenstein (who was not Jewish--thus the 1/4 designation-- but whose philosophy Putnam considered relevant). In his introduction, Putnam writes, "...I believe that all of us who feel attached to religion (and, perhaps, to the Jewish tradition in particular), but are unwilling to see that attachment as requiring us to turn our backs on modernity can find spiritual inspiration in the different ways in which these three writers, who were simultaneously exemplary human beings and exemplary thinkers, resolved the conflicts that go with our predicament."