At the beginning of November, Amy and I were fortunate to take a trip to London. We did a lot of sightseeing and visited our son, Jacob, who is studying abroad this semester. The trip was a fascinating amalgam of familiar and unfamiliar.
There were the familiar city and region names, echoes of colonial connections between "new" England and the motherland.
There were many encounters with familiar but sometimes vaguely remembered details of British history and culture – William the Conqueror and 1066, Magna Carta, Henry the Eighth, the struggle between Catholics and Protestants, Guy Fawkes, Oliver Cromwell, Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre, Sherlock Holmes, Watson and Baker Street, Winston Churchill and World War II, the Battle for the Falkland Islands and, of course, Tower Bridge, Parliament and Big Ben – familiar sights from so many James Bond and Harry Potter movies!
And then, there was an amazing collage of the unfamiliar, starting with a dizzying array of languages and skin tones. There were new menu items, clothing styles and political stories on the BBC. There were cars with steering wheels on the right side, double-decker buses driving on the left side, palaces built for royalty, fascinating details about coronations, and, of course, the strange feeling that English is a language at once familiar and quite foreign.
But among the most wonderful memories I brought back from the trip was a beautiful Shabbat that Amy, Jacob and I spent at Finchley Reform Synagogue in North London. At FRS, we met Cantor Zoe Jacobs, with whom we have a number of beloved friends in common. Cantor Jacobs is a very gifted, British-born, American-trained cantor and song leader. The lovely Shabbat service was conducted in their sanctuary, sitting in the round on moveable chairs, with guitars and bass guitar for accompaniment. I had the rare but delightful experience of sitting next to members of my family during services. There were melodies that were familiar as well as some new ones to learn. We were surrounded by people singing our familiar, beloved Hebrew prayers but from the siddur of the British Reform movement and with a British accent! There was a Bar Mitzvah boy, whose family was from Israel, helping to lead the service. There was a service folder listing upcoming Temple events, announcements given by a Temple leader and, in a display case, a Torah scroll rescued from the Shoah. Again, there was a powerful combination of the familiar and unfamiliar.
After services, Zoe was kind enough to invite us to share a delightful Shabbat dinner with her parents and family. The accents and some of the topics of conversation were new and unfamiliar. But the singing and the feeling of warmth and family love around that Shabbat dinner table, that was wonderfully familiar. Shabbat at the Jacobs' house felt like suddenly being home in a foreign country.
For me, traveling to other countries is always about this paradox of exploring the unfamiliar while discovering connections. We are not all the same around the world. There are important and often fascinating differences to explore, learn and respect. At the same time, we absolutely are the same all around the world – human beings, created in the image of God, struggling to love each other, to find meaning in our lives and to do what's right. But when our exploring includes visits with the many, diverse Jewish communities around the world, these journeys abroad (and our Jewish lives) become even richer.
-Rabbi Jonathan Kraus
