Kolot Chayeinu – Voices of our lives

Marcia Bodenstein, a 56 year-old entrepreneur from Brooklyn, was mesmerized by the sight: Hundreds of people lining up in front of a church and around the corner. People didn’t have tickets; everything was orderly and nice. ‘Are these people really waiting for Kol Nidre, (one of the services of the Jewish High Holy Days)?’ she asked herself. It was October 1^st, 2006.

Bodenstein, who grew up in an orthodox Jewish household, in which on Saturdays lights were not switched on and the kitchen was kosher, was used to synagogues where women and men were separated, and people were obliged to buy tickets for High Holy Days, feared God and were isolated. She was 15 when she discovered ham sandwiches and pizza. As an adult, she never went to her old synagogue, except with her widowed father, but kept searching for a more progressive congregation. After finding one that she liked in Manhattan, she realized that it was simply too far from her home in Brooklyn to attend regularly.

At this Kol Nidre service, Bodenstein was surprised to see a woman standing on the podium as a rabbi. Moreover, the cantor was a woman too and the rabbi spoke English. The church was filled with people of all colors and socio-economic backgrounds. There were families with children, singles, straight and gay couples, lesbians, gay men, young and old. As a widow, Bodenstein felt at ease.

About 700 people came for the service that day with Bodenstein, organized by the progressive Jewish congregation in the upscale Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn. The rabbi, Ellen Lippmann, a lesbian married to an Irish woman with whom she has a daughter, created the group Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives after she was ordained in 1991. “Friends kept calling and saying, ‘Why don’t you start something,’” she said.

Lippmann, who was then the East Coast director of the organization MAZON – A Jewish Response to Hunger, invited ten friends for dinner to talk about a possible congregation in early 1993. The discussion continued over the following weeks and by the summer months, a once a month Sabbath dinner and a Saturday morning Torah study group were established. The congregation hired a teacher for the children the same year and for High Holy Days, Kolot welcomed 75 people.

The group started out on folding chairs in Kensington, Brooklyn, later moved to Windsor Terrace, and ended up on 8^th Avenue and 10^th Street in Park Slope, where Kolot rents a meeting and storage space from a black church, which was originally created for former inmates. Its school for children meets once a week at the church and in a synagogue few blocks down on 8^th Avenue.

“I don’t believe in tickets for High Holy Days,” Rabbi Lippmann said. “When the issue comes up, and it does come up regularly as a way to raise money, I always say, ‘You can have tickets, but then you have to look for another rabbi.’ We do ask for contributions, though,” she added.

The other principle on which Kolot Chayeinu was built, is that the group eats first, and then prays. Rabbi Lippmann came up with this idea when she was, as a MAZON director, traveling and giving speeches in synagogues around the U.S. She noticed that people seemed bored and uninterested in the service, but they came alive later when coffee and cake were served. With a reversed order, maybe the energy from socializing would come through to the service, she thought. After months of discussion, the practice was accepted and is appreciated ever since.

“I joined with four other gay men and lesbians who’d been active in AIDS organizing in New York City, and who were interested in turning toward a more formal spiritual learning,” Daniel Wolfe, 45, Deputy Director of OSI’s Harm Reduction program wrote in a recent email. “We met with the Rabbi every week for two years as we worked toward our adult bnai mitzvah. We wanted a bar mitzvah – she wanted a commitment from us all for membership,” he added. He joined the congregation in 2001, became a board member and later chaired the Fundraising Committee.

For Wolfe, it was more important to be in a synagogue which welcomes all people than to be in a gay synagogue. “As a Jew, it was great to see a 70 year old woman from Borough Park who had a completely different experience of Judaism, but who understood through worship at Kolot Chayeinu that both of our lives could be filled with Godliness despite our vast differences,” Wolfe wrote.

Wolfe’s bar mitzvah ceremony was the first occasion when his parents met the parents of his lover of nine years, and his grandmother came to visit the home he shares with his lover.

Lisa Zbar, the 51 year old former Kolot Chayeinu President, a documentary film maker and a mother of two, grew up going to a reform synagogue, still felt left out of Judaism. She knew that she wanted a place where her husband, who is from the Caribbean and who thinks all religion is voodoo, as well as her bi-racial children, would be accepted and could grow.

When in 1995 a friend suggested Kolot, Zbar went to talk to the rabbi and immediately liked what she stood for. “I liked the idea that my children would know all kinds of adults – from single straight people to lesbian couples” she said. Even though Judaism had always spoken to her, Zbar never imagined that going to shul would mean so much to her. She wanted to be on the inside of “this Jewish thing,” she said, and wanted her children to be part of it too. Now she attends Shabbat services with her family. As the media is projecting fear and the country leans towards separatism, Zbar feels that Kolot and her home in which religious practices become cultural ones, are the right antidotes.

Kolot Chayeinu, which now has 230 due-paying members, is a progressive congregation not only because it welcomes all kinds of people, doesn’t charge for High Holy Day tickets and eats before prayer, but also because of what is stated in the group’s mission statement: doubt can be an act of faith.

“Kolot’s members have a wide range of opinions about Israel, God, and doubt can be an act of faith,” Rabbi Lippmann said. In her sermons, the rabbi talks about immigration, hunger, war, social injustice, racial and other discrimination and her own struggle with God. Before the 2006 Rosh Hashanah service began, Rabbi Lippmann made all people who had cell phones send a text message to President Bush with only one word: Darfur.

“A congregation like this lets people live their social agenda through their religion,” Professor Ari Goldman of Columbia School of Journalism and a former New York Times reporter covering religion, said. “It has been a Jewish tradition ever since the Enlightment to reject the constraints of the old and reinterpret them – being Jewish on ones own terms,” he added. This is especially true for those who came from a family where they were exposed to an orthodox variation of Judaism, Goldman said.

It is indeed true for Marcia Bodenstein, who, after the initial first service came back the next day to a service honoring the dead. “We all stood up and said the names of our dead. I said the name of my husband,” Bodenstein said. “Later, a man read the names of all countries that were at war. I felt that my heart was there too, not just my body. I did not look at my watch once. I felt that this is where I belong,” she added.