Having been a member of a Shabbat morning study group for over ten years it's difficult sometimes to relate to how my life was before I joined. In fact not being able to remember what I did with myself on Saturday mornings is all too common for me. Some of my friends think I'm nuts. For them, only a crazy person could forget not being in synagogue on Shabbat (make that Saturday) morning. For them, not attending services is a large part of their lives. For me, it has become such a part of my life, I can't see myself living any other way.
It's not that I am such a mench. I am only a mench.* But people treat me differently when they find out that I study and attend services. It gets embarrassing to have people tell me how they would really like to go to services, and how they will soon, as soon as their life quiets down. I am only a man. Not a saint or a sage or rabbi. I'm a regular, ordinary person who has found value in prayer and study.
Yes it is very tempting to stay in bed, or to go play golf with my son. If I skip I usually find myself thinking about the weekly parasha and wondering how study group is going. But yes, I have skipped Shabbat study and services. Once I even played golf with my son. But most people don't believe me, and I suppose you may not either, when I say that when I don't go to synagogue on Shabbat I most often take my tallis and my siddur and go to the woods and pray.
There is no feeling in the world quite like the feeling you get praying out in God's creation. I have been out in every season. One winter it began to snow and I had to put my tallis over my head to keep the snow off of my prayerbook. I often wonder what the person who came quietly up behind me thought when they saw someone with a funny cloth over their head speaking Hebrew . (I know they were there, I saw their tracks in the snow when I finished.) One foggy Shabbat morning, I was praying on top of a pretty good size hill overlooking a river valley. The fog was so thick the world ended twenty feet in front of me in a solid wall of white. As I neared the end of the morning service the fog began to break. I could see the wind blowing ragged bits of cloud from the top of the valley. The sky above turned bright blue, the valley below was still white. After I finished praying I stayed and watched the fog slowly blow out of the valley until I could see the barges and boats on the river. Prayer has become such a part of my life that I never thought of that experience as strange. In fact, the beauty of that morning has stayed with me.
This past ten years Torah study and Shabbat morning services have become such a part of my life I find it difficult to relate to people who cannot relate to me. I know that at one time I thought that anyone who spent as much time as I do praying and studying must be crazy, or some kind of saint. I'm not crazy or a some kind of a saint. Like I said, I'm just a man. But I'm a man who has learned not to be afraid of a little Torah.
John
* Mensch is a Yiddish word meaning "man." Since the traditional Jewish view of manhood is of a (religiously) educated and observant person, over the years the word has also come to mean "a very good person."
