Growing up I went to Roman Catholic services regularly until I was a teenager. My entire family was either Catholic or Lutheran, and many were relatively devout. Still, generational tradition and growing up in communities that were mostly, if not entirely, Christian were still not enough to keep me as part of the fold. Much of this was due to a gradual realization that I just didn’t believe a lot of what was taught, or at least not as much as I was supposed to. But then I moved to New York and realized something else had been missing: a strong sense of community.
On Saturday night, I was invited to a “latke luau.” The seeming incongruence of a Hawaiian-themed party (in a New York December) and a gathering to eat the traditional potato pancake of Chanukkah is nothing new for this particular group of friends. Social events and irreverent twists on the traditional occur regularly among an extended group of close friends and acquaintances. When I first spent time with this group, it was as the (gentile) girlfriend of a Jewish guy and I was astonished at how close this particular group of friends were. They all knew each other, regularly saw each other, had dinners at each other’s apartments, invited the same subgroups of the larger group to their birthday parties, friended each other online, and so on.
And how did they meet? All of them, excluding me and a couple of others, had connections to the Hillel group at NYU, where they had either attended college, or dated people who had and been drawn into the group. More remarkably, the network extended to hundreds of other young Jews in New York City. You couldn’t go somewhere and not know someone, or not know someone who knew someone you knew. The joke about “Jewish geography” (that you would always run into people you knew) wasn’t really a joke. After college, my group of friends stayed friends, even when some moved beyond New York City. They continued having gatherings, celebrating big moments (including when one became a rabbi) and attending each other’s weddings (I was in one of them). I don’t know of very many groups, religious or not, who have such cohesion and have remained so close.
I couldn’t help but contrast this with the experience I had as a Catholic growing up. The churches I went to had some youth groups, and family activities, but for the most part I ended up feeling more isolated than welcomed. It’s different when you perceive something as a child, it’s true, but even now if I walk into a Catholic church, I don’t get the sense that most of the people know each other, or go out of their way to have relationships with each other or the church leaders. Is this maybe because the church is so preoccupied with doctrine and scandals and politics (or so it seems to me) that it has little room for anything else?
This may be overstating the case a bit. Judaism in America and around the world has its own problems, such as a decline in observant members just like many other religious organizations (including Catholicism, whose numbers are declining more rapidly than most according to some polls). And the particularly close nature of the group of friends I happened to fall into (and remain part of, long after breaking up with that old boyfriend) might be some kind of anomaly. But I never felt like the social foundations of the churches I attended were ever quite as strong as what I’ve experienced at numerous synagogues around New York City. At the least, Catholic leaders increasingly concerned about attrition from the pews could take a few lessons from the close-knit Jewish community I stumbled into.
More than a social foundation, the Jewish social groups I found myself a part of are also a way to keep at least a nominal amount of faith alive. I don’t know many groups of twenty- and thirty-somethings (few of them particularly devout or Orthodox) that regularly gather to socialize and also manage to incorporate an ancient religion a lot of the time. In a way, it’s inspiring– even when so many people are losing faith in both religion and society, there’s still some hope.
Last night, as I fried shredded potatoes in 3 inches of oil, serving my shift in the kitchen at the latke party, the lights in the living room suddenly went down and a silence fell over the group. Steve, our rabbi friend, was leading a prayer and lighting the fourth candle of the menorah. Then the group broke into song. Everyone knew the song. And everyone sang along. I smiled as I flipped over another latke.
