The Shul-Book: A Field Guide

On a chilly Wednesday morning in October 1663, the English parliamentarian Samuel Pepys accompanied a friend to visit a synagogue service during the festival of Sukkot. The visit was not a resounding success. Recording the event in his famed diary, Pepys averred that witnessing “the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more”, remonstrating that he “never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this.” One hopes that synagogue decorum has improved a mite in the intervening centuries, although Heaven knows that services at an Orthodox synagogue—referred to as a Shul by its attendees—often remains a wearisome process.

This thought has been especially vivid for those of us emerging from Pesach (Passover), having spent an almost implausible amount of time within these sacred walls. All told, I have personally logged well over twenty-four hours of Shul-going over the past two weeks, which, allow me to assure you, takes quite the toll on a man’s physical and psychological equanimity. Granted, some of this time is well spent: Portions of the service involve deep, solitary prayer, rousing congregational singing, or quiet contemplation of the biblical texts being read aloud. Yet it must be conceded that not every moment of this formidable schedule is participative, or even especially edifying. Given the sheer length and complexity of the Passover festival services, each day inevitably includes significant stretches of stagnation or worse.

This is generally not the fault of the average congregant, but rather of those in positions of liturgical leadership. Most communities could likely do without the Hazzan (prayer leader) who vastly overestimates our collective desire to tolerate his self-indulgent caterwauling; the Gabbai (service coordinator) whose hapless mismanagement ensures protracted faffing about; and the rabbi whose circumlocutory sermonising swiftly exhausts its rhetorical force. To such egregious trespasses upon our time and patience, there is naturally a range of responses. Some, invoking the demands of conveniently aged children or parents, will make an Irish exit long before the fat lady sings Adon Olam. Others, bristling with frustration, simply decamp to the synagogue’s foyer to conduct their own bawdy symposia, in which the latest sports scores and real estate prospects are considered with the misdirected gravity of the devout.

Such behaviour is surely beneath the dignity of the august readership of these pages (and, one hopes, their author). Yet I also cannot quite bring myself to join those saintly souls who bear the length of these interminable services with placid equanimity. I am happy to serve, but not, I confess, among those who only stand and wait.

For myself and countless other mediocrities, one principal remedy presents itself. Enter: the Shul-book.

Every seasoned synagogue-goer knows that the long festival service requires, besides patience and piety, a judiciously selected Shul-book. Surreptitiously tucked away in the bag designed to hold the Tallit (prayer shawl), a good volume permits one to remain conscious and semi-participative, yet without feeling that one’s reservoir of life is being irreversibly drained. This being the case, on any given Shabbat or festival morning, the tables of many an Orthodox synagogue come to resemble a rather eccentric lending library. This Passover season, I decided to play amateur anthropologist, paying closer attention to this peculiar phenomenon as it manifested itself in the culturally benighted corner of the country in which I passed this festival.

What are the acceptable parameters of a Shul-book? Since reading during services is a semi-licit activity at best, the enterprise requires a certain amount of tact and forethought.

First, the matter of physical form. One wants to be able to read the thing, yet not draw undue attention to its presence. Elephantine journals, coffee-table books, and encyclopaedias are all therefore emphatically out, as are volumes sporting too extravagant a dust jacket or too eye-catching a title. The Shul-book must give at least the vaguest impression that it could be confused for a Bible or prayer book, which are required at your seat throughout. Simple, austere covers work best.

Second, the question of content. The Shul-book ought to remain at least within the realm of propriety—generously conceived—for synagogue usage. Obviously, heretical works are inadmissible, as are works manifestly too distant from, or inimical to, Jewish life and thought. It is safe to say that the entire oeuvre of Richard Dawkins—from his splendid scientific works to his rather ill-considered and flat-footed forays into theology—ought to remain at home. Books belonging to other religions, even if valuable in and of themselves, are similarly out of place. (I once learned this the hard way, having brought C. S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms with me one Friday evening. The looks I received were hardly encouraging.) Frivolous or irrelevant works, such as those emanating from the pens of a Malcolm Gladwell or a Yuval Noah Harari, are also manifestly unsuitable for sneaking into a House of God. A novel would be bizarre, and a comic book, at least for those with the intellectual capacity to tie their shoes, is inconceivable.

Academic books represent a borderline case, particularly within the confines of an Orthodox Shul. A splendid new biography of Nahmanides, or a lively account of women’s leadership in medieval Jewish communities, sits rather nicely beside the Siddur. But works of academic biblical scholarship, whose premises and conclusions would send the rabbi’s eyebrows rocketing into his hairline, must be verboten. While the synagogue may be an ideal location for the consumption of potato kugel, all derivatives of its less popular cousin James Kugel do not pass muster. So too are those works too heavy or convoluted. Technically formidable works of Jewish philosophy, such as the incandescent offerings of Lenn Goodman, require far more time and concentration than is typically available amid the rustling and roaming of a single morning service. The Shul-book must be digestible in stolen fragments of ten or fifteen minutes.

What, then, makes for the ideal specimen? Something closely related to Jewish ideas, concerns, or interests, yet accessible enough to be consumed in furtive intervals between the points of real action. Semi-popular religious works dressed up as serious scholarship are usually the right ticket, especially those excellent volumes produced by Koren Publishers. Many were the congregants I observed clutching their latest Haggadah commentary as a synagogal accompaniment. Recent decades have even witnessed top university presses enter this genre of semi-popular, widely digestible, and not-too-religiously-challenging books. Among the Shul-books I observed this holiday season were a work on ancient Jewish magic, a splendid new study of the afterlife of the Plagues of Egypt, and a recent biography of Meir Kahane, which I have had occasion to excoriate elsewhere in these pages.

For many of us, I suspect, the Shul-book is a largely performative affair. As with so many who read in public spaces, the volume resting upon one’s seat functions not solely as an object of private study but as a self-conscious declaration of the ostensible intelligence, sophistication, and interests of its bearer. It shines as a kind of intellectual status symbol, signalling to all around precisely the higher matter with which one’s mind is currently engaged. It is often the case, therefore, that considerably less time is spent reading the book itself than in exhibiting it to neighbours in the pews, stoking hushed conversations wherein the merits of the author and their thesis might be thrashed out by various wizened heads in the vicinity. Such posturing, quite aside from its unseemliness, unfortunately provokes precisely the boredom-fuelled conversations that the Shul-book was invented to circumvent.

This performative element, moreover, bears considerable hazard. It has occasionally been my misfortune to have my carefully selected Shul-book—my indispensable lifeline for the morning’s services—commandeered for lengthy periods of time by inquisitive neighbours who lacked the foresight to bring their own. There are few circles in Dante’s hell sufficiently punitive for those who deprive a man of his precious literary companion during the most arduous hours of the liturgical calendar. Such offenders deserve to have their phone batteries expire just as they have settled in for a long journey in the back of a stuffy Uber.

Having waxed at such length about the nature and uses of the Shul-book, I cannot forgo the opportunity to mention my own selection for this Passover season. I am especially enthusiastic about this one, for it is among the most subversive works I have seen published by a Jewish thinker in my lifetime. This semi-scholarly Hebrew tome bears a bracingly simple thesis: that Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, is not a genuine component of the Jewish religion at all, but rather resembles an unwelcome and thoroughly destructive matrix of ideas, heretical and absurd in equal measure, that have grievously undermined the true Jewish faith in recent centuries. The dispelling of this foreign accretion, claims the author, stands as a necessary precondition for restoring a more rational, consistent, and authentically traditional form of Judaism. The provocatively titled Kabbalah: The Disaster of Jewish Belief may well generate more heat than light, and its critics will be legion. Yet its thesis cannot be lightly dismissed.

This particularly incendiary tinder-box, however, will have to be ignited in some future edition of this newsletter. Some things, like a well-chosen Shul-book, are best savoured over time.

— J.J. Kimche