After a long hiatus, I am starting the popular OC Pilgrimage series back up. In these posts, I reflect on my visits to religious meetings and spiritual sites in Southern California from my perspective as an atheist and someone who is genuinely curious about religion. In 2008, I am going to try to visit one locale each month.

Earlier this month, I had the singular honor of attending a young friend’s Bat Mitzvah at University Synagogue in Irvine. This young lady is a special Friend, as she and her parents move freely between the communities of the synagogue and the local meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (aka the Quakers). Quakers have a long history of shunning ritual, and so have little to mark the passage into adulthood. At this occasion, this girl became a Bat Mitzvah–literally, a “Daughter of the Law “and thereby taking the first big step into adulthood and full membership into the Jewish community.

I had attended a morning Shabbat service once before, so I had some idea of what to expect: a worship program led by a rabbi and a cantor, filled with Hebrew song, chanting and prayer, our attention focused on the Torah scrolls and the ark containing them. Many of the externals would be comfortable to those who have attended mainline Protestant services: religious services in a repurposed business structure (the University Synagogue was once a hockey rink), rows of seats with prayer books underneath in an elegant but spare space facing a central podium, a piano and drum set off to the side. A genial man in a conservative suit conducts the service and an energetic woman leads the music.

Much of the difference that I experienced was in the details. The program opened from left to right; men and women wore yarmulkes and colorful prayer shawls; the Hebrew chanting was beautiful but incomprehensible. To ease the strangeness for visitors like me, Rabbi Rachlis graciously explained the meaning of behind the rituals and the words. The program book was filled with additional background information and translations.

Some moments stood out from the others, and most of these involved the scrolls of the Torah. The scrolls were treated with extreme reverence–they were even capped, like roaylty, with silver crowns. After they were taken out of the ark, they were literally paraded around the worship hall and most of the congregation joined in the joyful procession, clapping and singing. After the Torah scrolls made it back to the podium, Rabbi Rachlis invited everyone in the audience to come up and take a closer look at the scrolls and the careful handwritten script.

Even the secularist in me was convinced that the scroll was worthy of respect and reverence. This one was saved from a small Czech town after the Shoah. The Rabbi described the careful process of creating the scrolls (each letter is scripted by hand, and the entire process takes a year or longer). He quizzed us on bits of trivia, asking us how many vowels were in the Torah (answer = 0) and how many punctuation marks (answer also = none).

After we filed back to our seats, our young lady friend read and chanted from the scrolls in her skullcap and prayer shawl, leading this part of the service. Finally this thirteen-year-old woman gave us her commentary on the selected passage from Exodus (6:2-14), speaking with authority and confidence. After explaining the story (God commands Moses to approach Pharaoh to free the Israelites) and its personal meaning to her (she said it was about trying), she then confronted the teachings of the venerable scroll in front of her: why couldn’t God have softened instead of hardening Pharaoh’s heart? She acknowledged that the Bible contains a mix of history, legend and myth and then asked why the writer chose to share the story in the way they did. She closed by suggesting that God didn’t harden Pharaoh’s heart, but that Pharaoh himself resisted the “God impulse.”

This short sermon, to me, was a distillation of Reconstructionist Judaism. As Rabbi Rachlis explained, it was their challenge to take what is handed down and then to “reconstruct it–to make it relevant to the present and the future.” It is no slave to the past, but uses tradition to serve its own purposes, both outward focused, such social activism (Tikkun Olam) and inward, including the strengthening of community identity. It has abandoned the rigid patriarchies of the past for gender egalitarianism (this was witnessed in the service not only by the Bat Mitvah and the female cantor, but also by gender neutral language used to refer to God and the inclusion of the Matriarchs along side the Patriarchs. It rejects supernaturalism, using God as a powerful metaphor. One of Reconstructionist Judaism’s principle founders, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, had this to say about the relationship between Judaism and the natural world:

Judaism is the result of natural human development. There is no such thing as divine intervention; Judaism is an evolving religious civilization…The Torah was not inspired by God; it only comes from the social and historical development of Jewish people; The classical view of God is rejected. God is redefined as the sum of natural powers or processes that allows mankind to gain self-fulfillment and moral improvement;

As an atheist and a secularist with one foot in the religious world, I realize that there are some things that religions are very good at. Religion serves many purposes, but one is to make each individual feel that they are part of a something transcendent, something greater than themselves. In this Bat Mitvah Shabbat service, I had the great honor to watch as one young Jewish girl inserted herself into an ancient, ever-evolving community and into a grand narrative and that spans from Exodus to the Shoah and into the future.