When the shofar is blown Monday at Congregation Ahavath Torah to commemorate the conclusion of Yom Kippur, the Jewish calendar’s holiest day of the year, its end will be covered with a mask affixed by a rubber band, a peculiar visual to accompany a ritual meant to command awe.
“The feeling is that a shofar, like a trumpet or something else, is a super spreader (of the coronavirus),” Chaim Poupko, rabbi of the Englewood synagogue, told NJ Advance Media.
Along with masked shofars, New Jersey’s Orthodox Jewish community will be forced to make a series of drastic changes to worship so that they can still gather in-person despite the ongoing threat of the coronavirus. Unlike Reform and Conservative Jews, less devout denominations who were able to turn to digital alternatives for services, Orthodox Jews will file into spaced-out synagogue sanctuaries, outdoor tents and lay-led backyard services when the holiday begins Sunday evening.
The slew of accommodations and alterations denote a dramatic change for a movement so grounded in tradition.
For Modern Orthodox Jews especially, who hold fast to Jewish law while participating in secular American society, the High Holidays represent an opportunity to showcase a synthesis between tradition and modernity.
“It’s the fact that we are so engaged in the world around us, even with regards to science and technology, that we’ve been able to find that right balance between adhering to our traditions and being safe and respecting the science,” Poupko said.
But even for ultra-Orthodox communities like Lakewood, hit especially hard by the coronavirus due in part to large religious gatherings, there exists an overwhelming attitude among religious leaders that High Holiday services must be carried out safely.
“This year, everything is changed, from the prayer books, to the seating… I’d say almost every detail,” Rabbi Andrew Markowitz of Shomrei Torah in Fair Lawn told NJ Advance Media.
Many Orthodox synagogues have reduced their capacities and found ways to accommodate all in the community who wish to pray in-person, adhering to the state’s newly expanded guidance that says 150 people or 25 percent of a room’s capacity, whichever is lower, can gather for religious services.
Orthodox services contrast with Conservative and Reform synagogues, many of which held virtual services over Zoom and with the help of video crews for Rosh Hashanah. The Conservative movement’s religious authority ruled in March that remote participants could count towards a minyan, a ten-person-quorum needed for activities like reading from the Torah.
Orthodox Judaism has released no such guidance, as technology like video-conferencing is not permitted during the holidays.
So that left Orthodox Jewry with a conundrum: how to create worship opportunities for droves of people without them being able to participate virtually from home?
For Poupko’s temple, it meant creating 11 different services and utilizing its spacious facility to serve 1,500 worshippers during Rosh Hashanah. Congregants were spread out in five different sanctuaries, five outdoor tents that held up to 200 people each and six backyard services serving 50-100 people each.
Poupko and two associate rabbis circulated between each service, delivering 5-minute sermons, as opposed to a normal lengthier one. Like many other Orthodox synagogues, Poupko looked for ways to shorten the service, eliminate much of the singing and stick to the essential elements.
“Some people felt like we could have sung more, we could have had a longer service, we’re outdoors, everybody’s wearing masks,” Poupko told NJ Advance Media. “But part of physical distancing is also to minimize the time that we’re exposed to each other.”
Other synagogues, like Netivot Shalom in Teaneck helped coordinate backyard services as well, eager to create worship opportunities for those who might not have felt comfortable participating in a much larger service. Congregants volunteered their yards to host others in the community with a layperson leading services.
“Not everybody is a skilled hazzan or a skilled cantor, but it will be, like so many things this year... as good as it can be,” Netivot Shalom Rabbi Nati Helfgot told NJ Advance Media.
Additionally, many services, backyards or otherwise, require advance registration so social distancing can be facilitated.
“You have to register for each minyan,” Helfgot said. “Nobody can just walk in, which is sad because you want to be an open and welcoming community, but you also need to protect everybody.”
Chabad in Medford, which Rabbi Yitzchok Kahan said usually has an open, come-on-in policy, made the same requirement. But, Kahan will do his part to bring the Yom Kippur service to his community, offering to roam town with his shofar and travel to people’s homes within a two-mile radius, so all can fulfill the commandment of hearing the instrument blown.
Other shofar-blowers will likely follow Ahavath Torah in masking their shofars, as advised by the Orthodox Union, the main religious authority associated with the Modern Orthodox movement.
In some congregations, only one person will read from and touch the Torah, from behind plexiglass-covered podiums. Of course, anyone gathering indoors must wear masks and bring their own prayerbooks and prayer shawls.
And Tashlich, another annual High Holidays ritual, has seen adaptations too. Congregants typically gather at a flowing stream of water, before Yom Kippur, to throw bread as a symbolic casting off of sins.
Congregants of Shomrei Torah of Fair Lawn participate in a Yom Kippur ceremony at Great Falls in Paterson on Sunday, September 27, 2020John Jones | For NJ Advance Media
Some synagogues held self-guided Tashlichs, allowing people to stay away from others while partaking. For those who still held communal Tashlich services, participants were masked and spaced-out, like at Shomrei Torah, where families gathered at the Great Falls of the Passaic River on Sunday.
Even though it means adapting rituals, shortening services and re-orchestrating building floor plans, Orthodox communities have placed renewed focus on the significance of physical gathering.
“The meaningfulness this year is from something that I think maybe we took for granted in the past: and that was that the synagogues were just full, every high holiday service,” Markowitz said. “That was a given. This year, we’re going to look around the room and it’s going to be emotional, it’s going to be special.”
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Josh Axelrod may be reached at JAxelrod@njadvancemedia.com.
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