Kehilla at the Beach

About 400 people gathered on the beach in Ventnor, NJ, on Friday night, pairing the sounds of crashing waves and screeching sea gulls with the music of Rick Recht and local cantors. Devotion by the Ocean, sponsored  by Congregation Beth Judah in cooperation with many other area synagogues, is a monthly summertime gift. Here's how it works: put on your sunglasses and flip flops, bring a folding chair or a beach towel to the Newport Avenue beach, and welcome Shabbat in a place where, as Hazzan Jeffrey Myers says, "It's easy to find east. Turn towards the ocean."

The Philadelphia area Jewish community fills the shore towns in South Jersey, particularly on Absecon Island, below Atlantic City, in the summer. It's possible to walk on the boardwalk in the morning and run into two or three Philly neighbors, shul friends or coworkers in a mile stretch. We joined the ranks of Ventnor vacation home owners in June 2010.

I found my way to Beth Judah when my mother died two months after buying our house. My happiest memories of my mom were from family vacations at the beach, so my siblings and I preferred to go there to remember her following her funeral. Rabbi Neil Cooper of my home congregation, Temple Beth Hillel/Beth El, contacted Rabbi Aaron Gaber at Beth Judah and let him know that I would be sitting shiva at the shore rather than in my community in Pennsylvania. I walked into the morning minyan at Beth Judah and was warmly welcomed, acknowledged, invited to lead a prayer, asked about my mother. People remembered my name whenever I went back. My husband and I became associate members the following summer.

Maybe there's something special about shore shuls. The ebb and flow of Jewish community, with new faces appearing in the summer months and disappearing in the fall, might make their members keenly aware of newcomers. Maybe the year-round residents get accustomed to communally sharing physical and psychic space with strangers. That translates to a different sense of who is inside the circle and who is outside.

What I found this weekend at Beth Judah was a pleasantly mysterious dose of being brought inside.

This week will mark the anniversary of the death of my brother, Richard, who passed away suddenly in 1998 at the age of 52. As I stood up to say kaddish at Devotion by the Ocean, I was grateful for the chance to remember him, bring him into my happy present moment, imagining him here with our brother and sister, the four of us enjoying the shore with our spouses, children and grandchildren together.

The next morning at services, Bruce, Beth Judah's vice president who was arranging for honors, came up to me and asked, "Since you're observing a yahrzeit today, would you like to take the fourth aliya?"

How did he know? I'm going to assume he had a list of the members who would be saying kaddish, and, as an associate member, I would be on that list. If so, he had to keep an eye out for us, even if we are not there every week or even every month.

It's one way to answer the question I posed in a previous post about how communities might show that they save a place for someone who isn't there. Like Shirley in my story, who moved away from her Iowa community and was given her old phone number when she moved back, this was an important moment for me. Bruce was prepared to bring me into the circle of the community, even if he couldn't be sure I would be there. Shirley thought the phone company saved her phone number, but maybe it was coincidence that it was still available. Maybe my experience was coincidence, too, and Bruce saw me stand up the night before to say kaddish at Devotion by the Ocean. Really, though, I don't have to know how it happened that Bruce approached me. I felt it as welcoming, embracing and an acknowledgment of my loss. Even though I'm a summer resident, they save my place even when I'm not there.

Does it matter if it was a formal policy or an attentive vice president? I don't think so. Bruce's action shows me that Beth Judah's leaders understand the importance of looking for opportunities to create connections. I think it's the intentionality of it that makes kehilla (sacred community) come alive.