Marmalade Daydreams

A couple of weeks ago, when it still looked like the Yankees had a good chance of stealing the division title from the Red Sox, I spent a Saturday morning in church, that is to say, drinking Guinness in a crowded sports bar. However, to the dismay of both myself and my Bostonian friends with whom I shared onion rings despite our formalized animosity, the setting we had chosen to spend our holy hours was dominated by another congregation altogether – approximately thirty Ohio State fans hooting, hollering, and singing fight songs (complete with bugle accompaniment – mind you, this is a crowded indoor bar) – and this drew us even closer together, as respectful devotees of civilized baseball in contrast to these vulgar college football fanatics.

Well, my devotion to New York (more specifically, the Bronx, where my father lived as a child) has waned a bit as the awesome –- a late-season Yankees surge coinciding with a Sox slump, inspiring old-timers to retell the ’78 “Boston Massacre” that culminated with Bucky Dent’s legendary home run over the Green Monster in a one-game playoff -– has subsided (wild-card, schmild-card), and as a deeper tribalism has exerted its annual calling – it’s time again for the Jewish High Holy Days.












I venture to say that Honolulu has a greater diversity of churches and temples than anywhere I’ve ever been on four continents. On my walk to the fish market, I pass the wafting smoke of a Chinese Buddhist temple, a Catholic organization in a nondescript office building, and a beautiful Japanese shrine constructed in 1906. Walk in the other direction from my house and within two blocks there is another Japanese Buddhist temple, a Portuguese Catholic church, and a Chinese cemetery; along the 1.5 mile stretch between my house and the Reform Jewish temple, you’ll find three more Japanese temples (and the Japanese are commonly categorized as unreligious!), a Unitarian church, a Mormon ward, a cemetery started by Protestant missionaries in the 1840s, and the Royal Mausoleum containing the mortal remains of the Hawaiian royalty, once revered as the last of the great ali’i that ruled with divine mana (vital power). Further up the road you’ll find yet more Japanese Buddhist temples, the state headquarters of Seventh-Day Adventists, and a Hare Krishna temple (whose vegetarian restaurant, I learn, is a popular place for Jews to lunch after Saturday morning services).

After spending Rosh Hashanah with a distant relative at Chabad, a Chasidic group whose breakneck renditions of the liturgy always leave me disoriented and spiritually unfulfilled, I decided to check out Temple Emanu-el, whose Reform services I assumed would be much closer to the ones at Larchmont Temple, whose absence gnaws at me whenever autumn finds me in distant lands. Since Emanu-el, set in the lush Nuuanu-Pali valley that connects Oahu's south shore and windward coast, is only about a mile from my house, I decided to walk. Much to my chagrin, as I set off at dusk on my journey into the valley, I discovered that the highway is not made for pedestrians. It began to rain. I was about ready to turn around, but I decided to stick out my thumb for five minutes. Perhaps an angel would slow and stop. He did, a Baptist minister with a Texan drawl, who administrates over a hundred churches throughout the Pacific and "always ready to help out our Jewish brothers and sisters." Hmm... an expansion of the tribe? I was troubled by being implicated in missionary work throughout Polynesia, iven its sordid history, but I appreciated the ride.

I was surprised that I was significantly overdressed -- not only was I one of the only congregants in a jacket, most were in short sleeves and sandals. I sat alone and followed the liturgy, somewhat comforted by the words and some familiar melodies, but a bit put off by the large choir, which always strikes me as distinctively Christian. Still feeling a bit out of place, I stayed for a while afterwards helping put away the prayer books for the evening and meeting some of the younger temple members. I was unsure about whether I'd attend the next day, but there I was the following afternoon, spending the last five hours of my fast following Chaim Stern's service in Gates of Repentance, its poetic reflections on human frailty, and its signature interpretations of Jewish responsibilities for social justice and Zionism. It was all very familiar, but I felt as though I were applying analytical reason to many of its claims for the first time. But as I grew weary of oscillating between flickers of the spirit and applications of analytic reason, the light grew dim, and I realized that soon we'd eat.

At this point, the temple performed a ritual I've never seen -- the lights were turned off, and as the world grew dark, we finished the service reading along by penlights. Looking around the crepuscular synagogue and the remaining congregants huddled around tiny lights, I had the sense of being in a medieval sanctuary, where we studied Torah in secret. This experience did wonders to transcend the everyday and instill a sense of being in the presence of the divine. This sensation increased even more as we were asked to congregate at the altar for the recitation of the blessings of Havdalah, a weekly Jewish ritual that is undoubtedly my favorite: saying farewell to the sacred time of the Sabbath with a haunting, ancient melody, sweet-smelling spices, and the extinguishing of a beautiful braided candle in a glass of wine. The sensory richness of this poignant service was enhanced by the fact that we stood arm-in-arm encircling the ritual objects in a hall lit only by the three wicks of the Havdalah candle. It was a vivid moment of comunitas, the feeling that alienation is dissolved through ritual group formation and the attainment of numinous unity with others. I count it among the most spiritual social experiences of my life.

Post-script: Though I believe "God was with us" at Emanu-el that evening, I never got integrated into the temple community out here. To make a generalization, I think that multiple membership is a characteristic of our post-industrial society; while I'll always be a Jew, I feel that the transition from being a "mainlander" to being a local is much more crucial right now. Due to the spatiotemporal location of my birth, my Jewish identity doesn't come into account in too many of my day-to-day social interactions; but being a "haole" in the sense of "outsider" (its original meaning, though now it's used generally for "white") affects the way I'm perceived here and thus my relations. While race and ethnicity are incredibly important out here, I've found that people draw tribal boundaries based more on how long you've lived in the islands than by ancestral background. Despite racial prejudice out here against both blacks and whites, I've heard a lot of locals talk about Barack Obama as "a local boy." The fact that he graduated from Punahou (Honolulu's equivalent of Stuyvesant H.S. in New York), is often cited as proof of his presidential qualifications, much the way Clinton's Rhodes scholarship was mentioned back in '92 (regardless of the . Despite a good deal of ethnic pride (I've never met so many people so eager to list their variety of ancestors or so bold about inquiring about yours), the provincialism here is intense. Last night, a buddy of mine whose family is Hawaiian but grew up in Texas expressed ambivalence about who he'd root for if the Warriors and the Longhorns had to play each other in a bowl game, and not a single local expressed empathy. "But brah, your family's from here!" Regarding his reluctance to renounce membership of one tribe, yet his desire to be more accepted by the members of another, I know how he feels.