Sitting in the Royal Circle

This year, I struck it very lucky with the synagogue seating for this year's high holydays. Synagogue seating, unlike church seating, is assigned with numbered tickets for the festivals. With its potential for promoting self-importance, rivalry and distinctly non-religious agendas, it's a good source of Jewish jokes. This one was one I first came across at least fifteen years ago, and also heard being told by one of our shul members to another on the first day of Rosh Hashona.

But P, the tireless, learned, modest and unfailingly kind and good hearted soul who does the arrangements actually came up to me some time in the summer and asked if I wanted a better seat this year than I'd had last year. So of course I said yes. Maybe it was in recognition of my very regular attendance. Some of the more prestigious people who usually get the front row seats for the festivals rarely turn up. So I got seat number 23. And that turns out to be almost the best seat in the house. Next to the Rebbitzen, the Rabbi's wife, and smack in the middle of the front row.

One of the main objections feminists have to Orthodox Judaism is the practice of separate seating which assigns women to an upstairs gallery. That's usually seen as a demonstration that Judaism views women as inferior. And it's true that I originally stopped going to synagogue when I passed the age of 12, counted as a woman, and lost the right, which I'd enjoyed as a child, to pass freely between the women's and the men's sections of the shul and sit next to my mother or my father as I wished.

Well, I acquired enough battle honours as a feminist not to feel the need to demonstrate my credentials in that line any further. But I've anyway rethought the significance of the gallery-- and especially its front row-- since I began to think a lot about the location of power in human relationships. For example, where the powerful are seated at theatrical events from the Roman games to the Bolshoi performances of the high point of the former Soviet Union.

One of the most riveting books I read over the last year was Simon Sebag-Montefiore's The Court of the Red Tsar. It describes the grotesquely entwined social and political intrigues of Stalin's circle. It is a revelation in the way it shows how millions of lives were crushed and sacrificed in pursuit of those phantoms of Stalin's paranoia. It's brilliantly told, and unputdownable.

It has a chilling picture of Polina Molotova, the beautiful Jewish wife of one of his closest henchmen, sitting alongside him and a bunch of the Stalin cronies who ran the country ,in the front row of what was the former Imperial circle of the Bolshoi Theatre. Soon, Polina would be hauled off to prison and a seven year spell in the Gulags, triggered from having spoken some friendly Yiddish words to Golda Meir, the then Israeli ambassador to Moscow, in which she identified herself as a yiddishe tochter, a daughter of the Jewish people.

In England, the front row of the circle stalls is usually called the Royal Circle. What strikes me about all this is that these seats are power positions, usually for autocratic rulers. To sit in them is to be lured into delusions of grandeur, of which the first is that one is there for one's merits, rather than by an accident of birth or proximity to arbitrary power.

So over Rosh Hashona, I enjoyed my seat of power. It is certainly the best place to listen to the beauty of the singing and see the drama of the ark being opened, with the Torah scrolls in their special white mantles and gleaming silver ornaments, at the high points of the service.

But I also kept thinking of Polina Molotova. A bit dramatic, you might say, for someone sitting in a small shul in Finchley. But nobody's ever going to be able to talk to me about women being relegated to the gallery again without that image popping into my mind.

I very much liked being able to sit next to our Rebbitzen, who has a formidable mind and personality, and with whom I could happily talk for hours. Though I would never dream of trying to talk to her during the service, there's always room for  a chat about her family and my daughter after it finishes. I always enjoy the times when I'm invited to eat with them after the service, because there's a walk of almost two miles to their house, and I always spend it talking to her. We have quite a similar sense of irony and particularly enjoy the ironies to be found in Jewish education in this country. She's a direct descendant of the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, which counts as great yiches [pride in your rabbinical lineage], though she never mentions it unless you ask her. I enjoy thinking that she must be quite closely related to Amos Oz' most influential teacher, the poetical and magical Zelda Schneersohn, of whom he writes so lovingly in A Tale of Love and Darkness. Life is full of the oddest connections, and surely one of mine must be that my closest link with Amos Oz is through a Lubavitcher Rebbitzen.

On my other side was A who is in the same nineteen year cycle of the Jewish calendar as my daughter, in that her Jewish and secular birthday happened on the same day this year. Only she's thirty-eight, and she's one of the very few people I've spoken about this to who immediately knew what I was talking about, and when her Hebrew birthday was. A and S were married only two years ago, and we take turns inviting each other from time to time for Erev Shabbos or festival meals at our respective homes. S is another family history enthusiast, but his researches make mine look utterly amateurish, as he has got as far as getting photocopies of entries from obscure nineteenth century birth records, and has tracked many family members from researching tombstones. Me, I just rely on web searches and databases like Jewishgen, Ellis Island and Yad Vashem.

I was due to have lunch with A and S on the second day of Rosh Hashona. When she arrived for the service, I commented that I was really looking forward to the part of the service we were just coming to where the chazan sings his meditation on his role as the pleader for the congregation. It begins, Here am I, horribly afraid. It speaks of his sense of inadequacy in being the one whose voice must carry the cause of the congregation before the Almighty who inscribes our fates in the books of judgement.

A wasn't impressed. I'm afraid I don't much like chazanut, she said. And anyway, at this time of day, I'm not too ready to be moved. The service is something to get through.

It doesn't work for everyone, I said, and I settled down to listen. The previous day, on the first day, we had a very competent and likeable chazan, but I have to say his singing did not quite match the majestic and awe-inspiring sentiments of the prayers he was singing.

For this second day, we had V. I am always impressed by his singing. He has a strong, clear baritone voice which he uses beautifully to convey the drama and pathos, the visions of grandeur and loss, mystery and collective joy which thread through the prayers of the long service.

And he was more than on form. He seemed inspired. When he sang of the chazan's fears about his inadequacy to plead successfully for his congregation, his voice was subdued, plaintive. Then he paused for a long silence, as if to underpin our awareness of how insignificant we are in comparison to the Creator of All Things. And the strength of his voice blazed out again as he invoked the angels of heaven to carry his prayers.

We stood for the central and most awe-inspiring part of the Rosh Hashona service; a vision of every soul in the world passing before the Almighty at the moment of judgement, as sheep before a shepherd, whilst the angels themselves feel awe and terror at what they witness.

As V sang the words

Unesaneh tokef kedushas hayom - and we will tell of the intense holiness of the day
ki hu nora ve’ayom - for it is awesome and terrifying.
Umalachim yeichafeizun vechil urada yochezon - and angels scurry, and fear and trembling grips them.
mi yichye umi yamus - who will live and who will die,
mi bekitzo umi lo bekitzo - who in his time, and who before his time,
mi yeashir umi yeani - who will become rich and who will become poor
mi yishafel umi yarum - who will be brought down, and who will be raised high.

I sensed the whole shul's tension. For all of us have memories of dear ones who are not with us, who were there last year. Of those who stand with us who mourn them. And so many of us cannot hear this prayer without being intensely conscious of those we love who hover between life and death. So many of us have very elderly parents whose frailness grows with each day. I remembered the time I stood at the end of a telephone line while the doctor at the other end asked me to choose between an operation on my mother which might kill her, or from which she might recover, and a course of terminal treatment, which would result in her death anyway. I hadn't realised I was going to be asked to make a life or death decision about her. I made the right decision. But the prayer always invokes that moment, and this year we had had another close call too, in August.

The strength and confidence of V's singing carried us through that vision and into the rest of the service without faltering. It didn't matter that a baby started screaming at one of the points when V's song needed to be quiet and subdued. He had brought the vision to life. I wasn't the only person who needed to use a handkerchief. Repeatedly.

As the service ended, A turned to me. You were right, she said. I was moved. I was carried with it.

The Rebbitzen and I talked of how V's singing invoked our memories of the services we heard as children. My feeling is that it is because V is a neurosurgeon in his day job that he sings with such strength of feeling and conviction, for he must know what it is to hold lives in his hand. And sometimes, to feel them slip away, in spite of his efforts. And sometimes, in spite of everything being against it, to redeem a life almost lost from the point of its departure.

That was the spirit of our service. I was so moved by it, I found moments in it recycling themselves through my mind for the rest of the day. And indeed, it was hours before I could even try to sleep that evening.

Comments

[Lisa]

This post brought memories flooding back - of listening to the cantor at the synagogue I attended as a child. He had a fantastic, powerful, operatic voice, and I can still hear it pleading during Hinneni, then stopping at the same point you mentioned, and then blasting powerfully as he invoked the angels. It was awe-inspiring.

[Judy]

I'm glad the post evoked such vivid memories for you.

[Kai Jones]

Wonderful stories. Thank you for sharing them. My Rosh Hashana experience was disturbed by repeated references to politics, which really challenged (and sometimes defeated) my kavanah.