CONGREGATION GATES OP PRAYER, 2001

by Rabbi Nicolas L. Behrmann

It is late Friday afternoon, time to communicate with the Temple computer. This ritual of interfacing with the Golem 5762 computer was established in the early 1980’s as a means of providing meaningful and relevant worship experiences for members of Congregation Gates of Prayer. Data fed to the Golan 5762 by each individual congregant is analyzed by the computer against the data bank of the computer about that individual and temporarily stored until the seven o’clock cutoff point.

At precisely seven o’clock, P.M., all of the specific check list data about the individuals planning to attend worship for this Shabbat evening is analyzed and a congregational profile is established. This congregational profile is then fed into the “traditional liturgical responses” information contained as part of the Golem 5762 computer. By 7:15 the Sabbath evening worship experience for this Shabbat is complete and ready to be printed by the rather high-speed printing equipment made available to the congregation by the temple “familyhood.”

At 7:30, the members of the Temple Ritual Committee will arrive to distribute the worship service to those congregants who start arriving around this time to take advantage of the quiet of the Sanctuary, and who wish to meditate or study the prayer service ahead of time. It should be noted that the service is printed on recyclable paper, a fact which grew out of the ecological concerns of the 1970’s.

By eight o’clock, all those planning to attend worship for this

Sabbath eve will be in their places in the sanctuary environment, which replaced the old-fashioned rows and rows of seats that were a product of the pre-1900’s industrial assembly lines. During the next half hour of real time, the individual congregant will experience an almost total sensory environment, taking him or her from the initial weekday tensions into the timeless and soothing Sabbath relaxation and refreshment only contemplated by our ancestors of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

While the high-speed printing presses will be operating, printing and collating the worship services, other machinery will start functioning, putting together a vast number of slides, films, and other visuals, along with appropriate music and background sound recordings. Thus, the congregant who will attend this evening will find himself or herself exposed to the full range of the Jewish historical experience.

At this point it should be recalled that the Golem 5762 computer was developed by the Israeli government during the 1970’s to assist the American Synagogues with what was then perhaps the most pressing need ever facing the Jewish People: co-ordination of car pools for their Religious and Hebrew Schools I The Israeli government developed this computer at the urging of the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, which found that its members were spending too much time in their automobiles and not enough time studying Torah.

From solving the car-pool problems of the Jewish suburbs, the Golem 5762 was then programmed to handle the Hebrew language, and was used by the Central Conference of American Rabbis to prepare the text for their then new High Holiday Prayerbook: Gates of Repentance, which was made available to the congregations in 1978. From computer prepared prayer books to the development of a data bank of liturgical responses was not too difficult, although it did require almost a year of work by professors of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Following the worship environments, which in real time take one half hour, the congregation as individuals, or in small groups, will move into one of several locations, which in the 1970’s were called classrooms. These locations, where the Oneg Shabbat takes place, are each designed to simulate an important historical time in our people’s past. There are two or three Bible locations, which are climate controlled to duplicate the Middle East atmosphere and are decorated with various scenes and artifacts of Biblical history.

One of the locations is constructed to simulate the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, while another is resplendent with artwork similar to that of Spain, during what was referred to as the Golden Age in Spain: prior to 1492.

Allowing for the appropriate passage of time, let us walk invisibly through these various physical locations and discover what the diverse groups are doing. Here in this first location are families sitting around several Torah scrolls, listening attentively to the congregation’s Assistant Rabbi read and explain this Sabbath’s Torah portion. Even as she is discussing the content of the sidra of the week, artwork depicting aspects of the sidra is flashed on the wall panels behind her, adding to the understanding of those studying Torah.,

The next location we come to is that in which the various stages life are presented in both sculpture and graphics, including photograph

and we note that there are about fifteen couples in the room, and that all of the women are obviously pregnant. Glancing at the book most of them are holding, we see the title: “On Being Jewish Parents”,

and gather that this seems to be a class for expectant parents. As we leave we notice that a doctor and her husband are entering the space to teach the class.

Walking into the next location, we see a mustached man in his middle fifties sitting on the floor with a large group of six, seven and eight-year-old children. As we listen to him, and the typical noises of children listening to stories, we hear the congregation’s Rabbi telling the students about the Wise Men of Chelm, who, after meeting for seven days and seven nights, decided on a plan of how to move a mountain.

Although wishing to remain to hear how the Wise Men of Chelm were going to move the mountain, we feel compelled to discover the source of the agitated shouting that we hear behind us. Moving on, we come to a large gathering of people that we begin to realize are parents and teenagers. Listening carefully, we note that the arguments and discussions concern the same types of issues that have divided and concerned parents and teenagers from time immemorial.

There is, however, somewhat of a difference, at least with this group: parents and teenagers are talking together, sometimes shouting, but at least talking.

Tearing ourselves away from the back and forth of parent- teenager discussion, we make one last stop. On the wall outside the last location we shall visit, we notice the words “Congregation Gates of Prayer – Temple Board Room”. Inside we see the faces of men and women whose expressions are the same: puzzlement. Having only recently read a history of Temple Boards from the 1970’s, we are sure that this group is concerned with finances, just as were such Boards in the 1970’s. Much to our surprise, we find that this group suffers from the exact opposite of that which the earlier groups suffered from:    The Temple treasury has no deficit, but an embarrassing abundance.

What is puzzling is that the budget of the Temple is enormous, what with all the expenses of the Rabbis, cantor, educator, psychiatrist, social workers, teachers, family and youth group advisors, computers and all the latest electronics. What is puzzling is that not only do the members pay their dues, but actually send in voluntary contributions. There are literally boxes of notes and letters sent in with the monthly dues and voluntary contributions: reading any one of them yields the same results: ”We    are so   pleased with the Temple and its abilities to meet our needs that we wish to donate beyond our required dues! keep up the good work!”