Wandering Jew seeks synagogue on Cape Cod

I REMEMBER once explaining to a lovely Orthodox Jewish lady in Brooklyn, when I was visiting for a Shabbat, that I couldn’t help driving on the Sabbath – my house was six miles from the synagogue.

She arched her brows and said, “Would you build your house six miles from your kitchen?”

Point taken. If it’s that important, that central in your life, what are you doing living in a house so far from your synagogue? And yet we do.

We’ve made it harder for ourselves in the summer. I feel the absence of Saturday morning services, absence of week day minyanim. When we’ve taken vacations in Europe, we’ve found a synagogue – in Florence, in Venice. When I taught for a few weeks in Singapore, I discovered a beautiful old synagogue and a vital Jewish community with a Chabadnik rabbi.

But not on the Cape. Wellfleet on Cape Cod is filled with Jews in the summer – throw a bialy into a crowd, you’re sure to hit a landsman.

But there’s a difference between seeing Jews on the next beach blanket and praying together with them in services.

Yet, here we are again in Wellfleet, 13 summers now, happy to be back in our small house in the middle of the National Seashore, but impossibly far from services.

I bake my own challah (there used to be a baker who made challah, but he sold his business).

There are twice-monthly Reform Friday evening services in the next town, but we stay home and light the candles and offer blessings on Friday nights. There’s nothing on Saturday mornings.

We could drive to Hyannis, but on a weekday that’s an hour trip; on a Saturday morning, it’s more like two, bumper to bumper – a lot more in the category of desecrating the Sabbath than not attending services.

I miss Shabbat morning services when we’re down here. I daven alone, as I do weekdays, a congregation of one. I try to make the best of it, and it’s certainly a beautiful place to feel the spirit of Shabbat.

If it’s a nice day – and most days on the Cape are nice – I take my tallis and prayer book and walk down our little dirt road to the bay beach. I climb the back of a dune to a small hollow of sand at the top.

From here I can look northwest across the bay to the tall Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown and southwest along the bay toward Orleans. Across the bay, if it’s clear, I can see the cooling tower of Pilgrim nuclear plant. Pilgrims everywhere, I guess.

Me, I don’t really belong here. Our house was built in 1747 by a Yankee fishing captain. His grandfather had built his house down the road; his father’s house is across the road. What’s an old Jew doing among all these pilgrims?

Nevertheless, I’m here. On top of a dune to be exact, standing on an old sheet to keep sand off, tallis over my shoulders, standing unseen by anyone except possibly a fisherman a mile out if he happens to turn his field glasses this way. The thrum of his engine plays in the background like the hum of a congregation. All right, so it’s not like the hum of a congregation.

I murmur or chant the Shabbat morning service right through the Standing Prayer. Nishmat kol chai, the breath of every living thing, feels more vivid in the wind at the top of the dune.

Then I turn to the Chumash and read (in English, except when I want to understand why a word was translated the way it was) the parasha for the week, the Haftorah for the week. Having no rabbi, I think about questions raised by the parasha and read the commentary at the bottom of the page.

It’s very early, not too hot. No one is below me on the beach. The sun casts long shadows over the sand and stones. In the middle of my solitary service, maybe a runner comes along, maybe an early riser with a dog – though not this year: no dogs are allowed on our beach because the plovers are nesting at the base of the dunes. You can hear their high-pitched cries even from up here.

The sea comes in, sometimes quietly, sometimes really wildly. The skies speak of the glory of God; God’s handiwork is told by the firmament. The psalm tells us that the natural world praises without words, simply by its being.

I’m not making a case for preferring this solitary service on the dunes to taking part in a congregation. But it feels vividly real and powerful, the holiness we’re affirming, the holiness at the core of the service. It’s hard to stand at the top of a dune in a light wind and not feel spirit infused in everything.

Still, when I go back at the end of the summer and drive to services on a Saturday morning, I feel I’ve come home. My kitchen is only six miles from the rest of my house. I don’t have to go it alone.

John Clayton can be reached at jclayton.english.umass.edu.