For two years, Jackson, Mississippi, was my home. It was the first place I lived after college, when I worked as an education fellow at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute for Southern Jewish Life. The city’s sole synagogue, Beth Israel, was the first synagogue I ever joined.
The first time I walked in the building for Friday night services, I had an invitation within 15 minutes to go with a crew of a dozen people to Jason’s Deli for dinner afterwards. It sent a message that was reaffirmed and reaffirmed, over and over — “community” is not a nonsense term at Beth Israel Congregation, thrown around carelessly. It is lived and embodied.
This community, when I lived there, had a small but very vibrant Talmud study every week. We took great joy in the fact that people probably would be surprised that, on a weekday during lunch, a bunch of nerds were arguing over Bava Kamma (a tractate of the Talmud) in a library in central Mississippi.
In fact, the library space — which was destroyed by arson on Saturday morning — was the heartbeat of my connection to the place.
I was usually in the library, specifically, twice a week — once for the weekly Talmud study and then once for services, bagels and Torah study on Saturday morning. The services were also held in the library and not the main sanctuary.
We never got through more than eight to 10 verses or so of the Torah portion because the back-and-forth questions and commentary among attendees — some professional Jewish educators, some folks just beginning their process of conversion to Judaism, and everyone in between — were so deep.
I called the custom of the service “Conservaform” or “Reformative” because it combined Reform and Conservative movement melodies and practices. The participants of it understood that, as the only prayer space in Jackson (or anywhere nearby) for Shabbat morning, it needed to be a mixture of things to meet a variety of people’s practices — its flow and structure was a testament to the care that people in this community took to make all in their community feel welcomed.
Still, the Saturday morning service utilized “Mishkan T’filah,” the Reform movement’s prayer book. And when I used the book to lead services in that space, I always had the community pause when we reached Psalm 150. I asked them to notice that the literal shape of the Hebrew text, on the page, was jarringly similar to the state of Mississippi in which we were davening.
This was without a doubt not some intentional choice by the creators of the prayer book, but it felt like an invitation to feel the text of our liturgy calling out specifically to the magic of our space, a congregation in Jackson, Mississippi. A space where we would often pack the library to its capacity, where we would, as the psalm suggests, connect to sacredness via many kinds of musical instruments and modalities of prayer.”
I haven’t lived in Jackson in just over 10 years. But I think about it every time I’m using “Mishkan T’filah” — and I regularly turn to that page of the prayer book even when it’s nowhere near the section we are praying from — just to smile and hold this incredible community in my heart.
I hold great hope that this beautiful sacred space, Beth Israel’s library, will be back and as beautiful as ever. It hurts very, very deeply that the books we studied from — always multiple translations of the Torah portion so we could argue over which one was best — are no longer. That Torah scrolls I chanted from are destroyed as well. But I have no doubt that this community, which inaugurated my adult life and taught me so much about how to be Jewish and human, will emerge stronger than ever.
