Personal Narrative: My Visit To The Touro Synagogue

During the month of October our class visited the Touro Synagogue and experienced their Sabbath ceremonies. The Sabbath day is a day of observance and abstinence from work. For Jews, it’s from Friday evening to Saturday evening and celebrated by Christians on Sundays. I attended the first Friday (10/2) service when they were celebrating Sukkot. Sukkot is a major festival held in the fall to commemorate the sheltering of the Israelites in the wilderness; additionally, they give thanks for the fall harvest. Although the service was very short, it was interesting and very different to my normal religious service. I felt very indifferent during the event because I was genuinely confused. The first thing I noticed as we walked through the door was the singing in a foreign language. I noticed how many of them fluently spoke Hebrew and could pronounce almost every word in the program and Song Book. From our practice in class and Sis. Mary Anne’s verbal translations she read out loud in class, a word that was spoken often was Adonai. The second thing I noticed was how the song

I’m not sure why God allowed the Jews to go through the Holocaust, but it is not my place or anyone else’s to ever question God and his motives. I learned that the Jews went through a lot of discrimination even before the Holocaust. The ancient pagan people considered the Jews to be different because they labeled them as atheists and anti-social because the ancient Greeks and Romans were polytheistic and the Jews believed in a uni-God along with Christianity. I have also learned that as a Christian, I should be more open to learn about Judaism and try to understand it better because without Judaism and the Jews there would be no Christianity because it started among the Jews. Understanding the Jewish traditions will help us to better understand our Bibles