THE JEWISH COMMUNITY AND HOW IT WORKS

If the family and the home constitute one focus of Judaism in the world, the community and the synagogue constitute the other. The difference between the home and the synagogue is the difference between the private and the public sphere. These two are impossible to separate in the life of the individual Jew. The life of the home leaves spaces which are to be filled by the synagogue and public observance. The home observances of Yom Kippur, for example, the two family meals, frame the long hours of synagogue worship. Equally the synagogue leaves room for the home. And the two spheres sometimes break in on each other: when the family go to synagogue and pray together, as they now can in Reform and Conservative synagogues, and particularly when they gather to celebrate a family occasion such as the birth of a baby, a Bar Mitsvah or a marriage; or when the community gathers in a house of mourning to express their solidarity with their grieving fellow members and to make up a minyan for the recitation of the Kaddish.