A white-pillared converted stone church beside a coppice of pine trees and over a sloping meadow from the grave of poet Robert Frost, might seem like a strange location for a sukkah, but this fall the Bennington Museum hosted two of them to mark the centennial of organized Judaism in the Vermont town.
Members of the local Congregation Beth El erected a timber-frame sukkah, which they also used to celebrate the holiday, on the museum’s wooded hillside.
Its counterpart appeared in the museum’s second-floor gallery as a part of artist Emmett Leader’s exhibit, Revisiting Traditions — Illuminating Our Times, which closed on November 8. Made of salvaged wood, and decorated with a lulav and a clay figurine of the artist’s father riding an Allis-Chalmers tractor, this ornamental sukkah highlighted the exhibit’s meditation on the complexities of making a Jewish home in rural New England.
Though the Hebrew Congregation of Bennington first associated in 1909 as part of the Orthodox movement, it took an additional 14 years to put up a synagogue. A decline began in the 1970s, as the older generation retired and the younger one moved away. In 1988, members were unable to gain access to a dilapidated Beth El over the High Holy Days, and they resolved to revitalize the community and renovate the building.
The synagogue has since affiliated Reconstructionist, and its membership has grown to 110 families, the result of an effort to reach out to a scattered Jewish polity making up no more than 1% of the state’s total population.
“No one moves to Vermont to be a part of the Jewish community,” said Beth El’s rabbi, Joshua Boettiger. “But these off-the-beaten track communities can be creative experiments in what it means to be Jewish.”
Boettiger’s own rustic background includes certification as a timber-frame carpenter, an older method of woodwork that relies on the joining of carved posts and beams in place of the nail-intensive methods of stud-carpentry. (He is also the great-grandson of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and has been called upon to reflect on Roosevelt’s relationship to the Jews.) Boettiger co-led a workshop in September that culminated in the raising of the sukkah on museum grounds, a blending of traditions he called “an honest marriage of Vermont and Judaism.”
It was also a milestone in Beth El’s yearlong centennial observances, which will soon conclude with the rededication of the synagogue’s building at Hanukkah, symbolizing the community’s renewed commitment to cultivating Jewish life in this improbable locale. The festivities have already featured a class on the counting of the Omer, a reading by novelist Jamaica Kincaid (a congregation member) and, as the centerpiece, Leader’s exhibit.
Leader has deep roots in Jewish Bennington. His grandfather, Rabbi Isaac Leader, arrived in 1908, having emigrated from the shtetl of Slonim, and played a significant role in establishing the community. Emmett Leader grew up on a family farm in nearby Andover, developing a deep connection to Vermont’s landscape and sensibility, and ambivalence toward his family’s attenuated Judaism. He eventually left Vermont in his late 30s and moved to central Massachusetts to participate in a more cohesive Jewish lifestyle. Revisiting Traditions represented a double homecoming: not only a physical return, but also an artistic synthesis of two parts of his identity.
Clay-fashioned Judaica and pictorial terra cotta tiles were clustered around three larger installations that Leader described as “homes I felt a very strong urge to make.” Along with the sukkah, there was a partial re-creation of a wooden Russian synagogue, called “Slonim Revisited,” and a dovecote inhabited by such family artifacts as letters, photographs and his grandfather’s shechitah (kosher slaughter) knives, as opposed to the pigeons that normally dwell in these structures. It hearkened back to the huddle of buildings on Vermont homesteads that captured Leader’s imagination when he was a child.
“Barns influenced who I am,” he said. “You’d look up and realize they were made over a hundred years ago, and see the purpose and ambition. They were like cathedrals.”
Discovering an analogous handicraft tradition in the annals of Eastern European Judaism, particularly the wooden synagogues he found through the scholarship of architectural historian Thomas Hubka, enabled Leader to derive his own rural Jewish vernacular.
“I got the same sense of awe from these shuls,” he said, “as when I went into a barn…When I saw this folk culture that was Jewish, it just gave me a green light.”
Leader’s symbolic language was poignantly employed in a triptych, “My Grandfather’s Rabbinate,” depicting the true story of Isaac Leader’s Vermont metamorphosis from rabbi to meat market operator and, allegedly, hog butcher. Though his grandfather died long before Emmett Leader was born, the specter of the man, both closer to a primal Judaism and guilty of corrupting his ways, has long preoccupied the artist. This particular piece, drawing on the iconography of the medieval “Birds’ Head Haggadah” and set against a backdrop that could be Andover or Anatevka, conceived a generous resolution: the Green Mountains as a place not of ultimate loss, but of inevitable wandering perhaps leading to renewed vision.
Standing in Leader’s version of Slonim’s wooden synagogue, an exploration of Jewish material culture conditioned by a rural American upbringing, Boettiger suggested that Vermont Jews might have a unique receptivity to the Jewish past.
“In some ways,” he said, “we’re closer to the shtetl. Maybe we’re freer to embrace aspects of Jewish culture that aren’t as intuitive in cities and suburbs.”
Leader, who will be exhibiting his work next fall at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City, concurred.
“Judaism doesn’t always grow from the center,” he said. “Sometimes it comes from the edges.”
Benjamin Weiner is a writer and rabbi living in Boston.
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“Judaism doesn’t always grow from the center. Sometimes it comes from the edges.” This finale of the article is so dramatic, so impressive. Yet, it's not clear what is the growth that justifies such a statement. We learned in the article that a decline in the community began in the 1970's when the younger generation moved away (the artist himself, Mr Leader, has left the community). Today, there is a nice community of 110 families that has renovated its wooden synagogue. It's very interesting, it's very nice - and I was glad to have read about the community. But why is it necessary to pretend that this is something that it's not. It is NOT the shtetl where the Jewish spoke their own language and had their own distinctive way of life. The Jews of Vermont are English-speaking Jews for whom American culture (and NOT Jewish culture) is their core identity. This is not Anatevka of a Sholom Aleikhem story just because of its rural environment. I just can't imagine the "Tevye" of Bennington, quoting and misquoting the Hebrew sources.
The reality of Jewish life in America is the struggle for continuity. Numbers are dropping, and dropping rapidly. Most Jews are unaffiliated. Jewish education is a multi-generational failure. Jewish life continues, of course, but let's not get carried away and pretend that there is "growth". It's fine to tell us about the art exhibition, and it's wonderful to hear about Jewish life anywhere - but it's a disservice to the readers of the Forward to pretend that Jewish life is making its comeback.
You should read the article a little more closely, perhaps. No one is claiming that Bennington is the shtetl, nor that the kind of growth that has gone on there is somehow solving the long-standing problems of Jewish tradition. Please also note the use of modifiers like "some ways" and "sometimes," which are certainly not absolutest statements. In fact, I think that the growth of a community from about 30 families in the early-90s to around 110 now is a rather impressive bit of growth, maybe even a "comeback," especially in an area where Jews are not particularly prone to affiliation. And the point of Judaism "sometimes" growing from the margins is that this growth has been achieved, at least in part, by working hard to find points of engagement between these semi-rural, detached Jews and meaningful Jewish community. As this exhibit and other elements of the centennial celebration demonstrated, this was done in part by finding points of connection between Vermont life and Judaism, such as the aspects of shtetl folk culture that don't find all that much exploration in more urban areas. That was the extent of the point. The artist, in fact, participates very actively in his Jewish community in Central MA, and the rabbi who made the comparison to the shtetl was very clear that the main point of distinction was the lack of all embracing Jewish community and language. There just wasn't space in the article to print the full quote.
Not sure what exactly you are looking for on top of that, unless it's Orthodox practice, in which case good luck. This is a community that has worked very hard to combat attrition in their area, according to their lights, and had been reasonably successful.
Thanks for reading!
Ps. In case it wasn't clear: I don't think anyone is or would dispute your claim that Bennington doesn't hold a candle Jewishly to the actual Jewish experience of the shtetl, where, as you say Jews spoke a Jewish language and lived lives thoroughly determined by Jewish tradition. No argument here. And "growth" as used here isn't intended to suggest that now everything is a-okay and there's no need to worry or lament loss of Jewish life anymore. All comparisons and word usages were meant more modestly than you appear to have taken them.
Mr Weiner - Thank you for reading my comments so carefully and taking the trouble to comment in return. My agenda is not Orthodoxy at all. What I'm concerned about is the overly positive atmosphere that one senses in the Jewish press in America. I feel that the Jewish press is the only real tool that we have in order to create an awareness that there is a major crisis in Jewish continuity. Problems cannot be addressed unless there is - first and foremost - an awareness of their very existence.
In your reaction, for example, you write that a community of 110 families is very impressive "especially in an area where Jews are not particularly prone to affiliation". That's true; however, in your article there is no such comment of criticism mentioning the problem that there are areas in America "where Jews are not particularly prone to affiliation". The article is focused on a "success story" without commenting on the overall background of crisis. That is the general impression when reading a paper such as the Forward. When discussing Israel, some very sharp comments are possible, pointing out her failures and difficulties (here the Forward behaves like a real newspaper) - but when discussing the Jewish experience in America, everything is described with a most pleasant smile (as if we're reading a leaflet of the youth movement at summer camp).
I found your article to be very interesting. My criticism is that the Jewish press should take upon itself to say the harsh words of criticism, pointing out failures and difficulties. The Jewish public is not aware "that Bennington doesn't hold a candle Jewishly to the actual Jewish experience of the shtetl, where... Jews spoke a Jewish language and lived lives thoroughly determined by Jewish tradition", as you wrote in your PS. This observation should be included, as well. The creation of a sense of crisis is all that the Jewish press can do. Hopefully, the Jewish public - once it is brought to an awareness that something has gone very wrong - will rise to the challenge and find the way to real renewal. And it's really urgent.
Thanks for clarifying your position. It's a fair point, and I'll consider it in future reporting. I'll tell you, though, that as a working rabbi (in addition to an occasional reporter) you often have to play a line between scare tactics and the soft sell. It is not always effective to encourage people to be Jewish by telling them we will die as a people if they do not. One of my teachers called this the "Titanic method" of Jewish outreach--"the ship is sinking, come on board!" Like it or not, in a consumer economy, you have to make it attractive to them. And beyond this, as a spiritual leader, you have to help them to find very deep and meaningful, and personal, connection with tradition, a positive identification with Judaism, which is what some of this Vermont story is about, I think.
But, again, your point is taken. Thanks for articulating it further.
Qol, my friend, we are not rising to our call...we are walking deeper in error.
All these diffrent thoughts on how to save us. G-D has one--leave sin, run to Him. Unless G-D builds a house, it cannot stand.
for it is written...Ps.31..turn your ear to me, come quickly to my rescue; be my Rock of refuge, a strong Fortress to save me. Since you are my Rock and my Fortress, for the sake of Your name lead and guide me. How is this done...were is this Rock this Fortress??? Do you know? I do, let me tell you how to enter in.
David entered in....Psalms 118....The Stone the builders rejected has become the Capstone; the LORD has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes. NOTE: ...in...our....eyes!
Many have seen and are saved from death that sin leads us to.
for it is written...Job 33 The Spirit of G-D made me (below, flesh, death) but the breath of the Almighty gives me life. (above, brought forth like David in Ps. 2 the Declared Decree that we are all to obey. David turned and a child was given Us (G-D) a son is born to Us (G-D) and the government will rest upon him. Now made in the mirror image of our G-D ....Man.... Man was first male and female...we turn and become in our fullness of our G-D.
We errored when we did not walk as our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in unity with our G-D.
Forward, free speach??? I wrote it all down Nov. 18 you have taken it off?
Forward, are you trying to control, and move the world? First my friend you must move yourself.
The unexamined life is not worth living, nothing endures but G-D. The days are numbered are they not?
What you leave behind in death is not engraved in the stone, that G-D is building his temple with. We are the stones ingraved above, our Capstone is our G-D Ps. 118. Forward, we are woven into the lives of others...
I want to improve and I am content to be thought foolish and stupid!
One needs G-D and His power and strength to actually apply what you have learned. The problem is generations after generations has avoid facing what they feared. We were wrong! We have to take action face your fear. Fear only the lose of your G-D. Fear holds you back form truth and wisdom and the hidden part. Read Ps. 51, thank you. Your G-D waits for you to turn. You can do this.
This was a great article to read. I remember Beth El in the early 1980s, when having services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur was a questionable proposition. As a former Vermont Jew, I think one advantage that Vermont Jewry (and Northern New England Jewry in general) have over others with regard to Jewish continuity is the anchor of strong Orthodox communities in the early 20th century and a respect by newcomers for their traditions and institutions. The old shuls are a visual representation of a simpler, more purposeful life with basic values -- which is exactly what many back-to-the-landers are looking for. These Jews may be doing the "pick-and-choose" Judaism that the community's founders would have opposed, but at least they are largely basing themselves on these traditions and values, and being very serious about what they do choose to observe. This type of Judaism was not enough for me personally as a halakhic Jew (which is why I am in Israel), but it may offer some promise for continued Jewish commitment in places like Bennington that would be far more difficult to maintain in places without such tangible connections to the past. The shtetl replications of 100 years ago won't make a comeback, but hopefully the commitment within these Jewish communities will.