Comfort in Copenhagen

There’s a dinosaur knocking at my door, knocking One Two Three / There’s a dinosaur knocking at my door, / And he wants to have Shabbat with me!

I would not have expected that my Shabbat in Copenhagen with the Shir Hatzafon Progressive Jewish community would have brought me back to both my Board of Jewish Education (BJE) pre-school education and Reform Judaism roots. Nor would I have expected that upon learning the history of the Jewish people in Copenhagen, would I be brought back to the Spanish history in 1492 material learned in my Spanish History and Culture class at ICADE.

Google, Gmail, and time were factors allowing me to experience Shabbat in Copenhagen last weekend. Now I want to go back in time to re-live and reflect on this unique encounter.

Perhaps it was sitting in a circle surrounded by 13 people I never met before singing in rounds of a familiar song Mah Tovu in an unfamiliar melody. Perhaps it was the Rabbi’s four-year-old son, bouncing on his mother’s lap, whose face lit up when we closed the service with Yom Zeh and whose voice was both the loudest and most excited during the chorus. Perhaps it was everyone touching the shoulders or backs of one another so that we were all connected as one during the Hamotzi over the challah. Perhaps it was missing home when we said blessings over sons and daughters, and I longed to hear my parents’ voices in unison with the group. Or perhaps the husband reaching to take his wife’s hand for a small squeeze during the service.

Unlike my previous Shabbat experiences in Europe, there were no police, armed forces, or security waiting outside the community center where I was told to meet for the service and dinner. After trekking across the city of Copenhagen to the service, my friend Daniella and I arrived just before 7pm. The large front door of the building was locked, which we learned after climbing up the grand steps, so we wandered around to the back of the building, finding an unlocked side door. We found ourselves in an open lobby-type area with periwinkle blue walls. Instantly, we were greeted by the Congregant member I had been emailing the week before and his wife. Then the Rabbi, Sandra, introduced herself. After hanging up our coats, we went into the large room next door, where tables covered in white tablecloths were set up and chairs were moved into a circle in the right corner of the room. The Rabbi’s young son, whose name was the Danish version of Elijah, was running around the room holding his stuffed pig, George, and overheating in his onesie pajamas tied at his waist.

Waiting for the service to begin and being told that our help was unneeded, Daniella and I struck up a conversation with Emil, the 25-year old son of the congregation's chairperson/president.When asked about what it was like to be a Jewish student in Copenhagen, Emil revealed that he actually was not Jewish—his mother converted to Judaism when he was 16. He was actually raised going to Church, and when asking more questions about his mother's history, we were told to ask her later. A deep love overcame his face when he talked about his seven trips to Israel to visit his mother when she did field work there. I was gravitated to him becauase of my respect for him, a non-Jewish Zionist who wanted to join us for Shabbat service and dinner, as there are Jewish people who would not attend such a service and dinner nor call themselves Zionists.

After more congregants arrived for the service and brought their share for the potluck Shabbat dinner, we made our way over to the circle of chairs. At first, the Rabbi would jointly lead the service in English and Danish, but upon second thought, she asked for permission to solely lead the service in English. Through eye contact, head nodding, and encouraging smiles, Emil’s mother and the Rabbi led us through the service. A congregant member, who happened to be from New York, volunteered to light the candles, as the Rabbi asked someone who experienced something special to have this honor. This congregant member was honoring both the anniversary of meeting his significant other, a Danish woman who vaguely reminded me of the grandmother on my favorite TV show “The Nanny,” as well as the Rabbi officially joining the congregation. Throughout the service, the Rabbi prefaced each new prayer, sharing the significance and notifying us when we would stand to welcome in the Shabbat Bride. Emil’s mother followed in-suit, her foot tapping the linoleum floor and her hand tapping the Kabalat siddur, with her beautiful voice guiding us through the melody. Influenced and inspired by his mother, Emil sat next to her, helping her lead rounds of song and face intent reading the text in the siddur. For one prayer, the Rabbi asked the tween-aged boy, Taos who was accompanied his father to Shabbat, to open the door to welcome in the Shabbat Bride, reassuring him that she would look his way so he would know when he would fulfill his special responsibility. Then, for another prayer, the Rabbi spent time on a particular Hebrew text that appeared grammatically feminine but was actually masculine; she explained that we cannot judge what appears or seems in front of us.

Sitting in my chair, feeling curious yet at-peace simulteneously, I was overcome with comfort. This was the first service where there were more melodies familiar to me than unfamiliar to me. Flipping through the pages of the siddur, a smile spread across my face as I recognized one half as translitterated Hebrew and another English to Danish.

Following the service, the Rabbi, smiling as she looked at her son, said that we would sing a song that the Americans—Daniella and me—would probably recognize. There, in the heart of Copenhagen, I was brought back to the formation of my Jewish identity during preschool in Long Grove, Illinois. A song that I had not heard for at least ten years washed over me, words that I forgot I knew coming out of me. After the Rabbi’s son humored us all after quickly slurping down his small 3 centimeters worth of overly sweet wine, we made our way over to the plastic table covered in salad, humus, fish, cookies, and soda.

During dinner, I sat between the Rabbi and Emile. From the Rabbi, I soon learned that she was born in Denmark but moved to London, where she now primarily serves as a Rabbi for a congregation there as well as actively leads the Progressive Jewish community. She explained to me the difference between Progressive and Liberal Judaism in London, and in return I shared with her the albeit little I knew of the Reform Movement in the U.S. On a deeper level, she shared with me a little about her story, something that touched me. She embodies the Hebrew text inscribed on a heart-shaped necklace worn around my neck: follow your heart and you will go far. She was a very early member of the congregation even before she studdied for the Rabbinate, and she never thought she would find herself as a Rabbi. In time, she realized this was something that interested her more and more, and so she applied to rabbinical school on a whim. And there she was, leading the Progressive Jewish community in Copenhagen, flying out from London once-a-month, and integrating her family, including her dedicated parents, into the congregation as well. Next to me, Emil also shared more about himself. Similar to the Rabbi, he too had a wandering path, in which after finishing high school not on the best academic foot, he worked for UNICEF and Amnesty International in Copenhagen, passionate about the difference he made. He since returned to academics to receive his bachelor's degree. and did not really have any idea of what he wanted to do with his life; perhaps study sociology like his mother.

Towards the end of the allotted time we had in the community center and with her eye on the time, the Rabbi shared a somewhat sermon with the fifteen or so mostly adults nibbling on the remaining meal on their plates. Her focus was on the Progressive Judaism movement and the future of their congregation. My heart outreached to this group when the Rabbi concluded by asking the most important question a leader can ever ask: how can she best serve this community? For a leader does not exist without followers. There was some silence after she asked her question, which she then followed up with a slight joke—the silence confirmed that indeed this was a room of Danes. Turning to me, she asked if any of the Americans had any ideas or experiences to share of best-practices we knew from the U.S. In response, I spoke of the popularity and importance of youth group for American teens, the work of Hillel International for university students, and my experiences in the Reform Jewish Community of Madrid. To ensure that the challenges that this congregation faced were universal to some degree for all Jewish communities, I shared in particular about my experience working as an assistant Sunday School teacher at my congregation my senior year of high school. Engaging today’s children is always difficult, but it starts with the parenting. I spoke of this challenge because it was a sore spot brought up from another congregant, who shared his disappointment when he took a break during the High Holiday services last fall to find the children bored, disengaged, and without anything to do. He quickly ran to the store next door to bring them a game to play. How do you make the children want to come? The Rabbi steered the conversation by gently asking Taos, the boy who helped welcome in the Shabbat Bride, what his thoughts were? There he was, the only tween-ager in attendance. He didn’t have any ideas. When asked why he liked to come to Shabbat on Fridays, he lacked words but possessed feeling. I just really like it, he calmly said, a slow smile spreading across his face. In an effort to work towards solace and solution on the topic of engaging children and teenagers, the Rabbi mentioned that she was passionate about youth education, proposing a creative Shabbat engagement program on-the-spot for families once-a-month when she visits from London. Imagine, she began, a Shabbat where children and parents came in their PJs and carrying blankets and pillows, where we led an interactive program children-centered on the floor. She thought out of the box, and the congregants were grateful for this.

When asked about other challenges on the congregants’ minds, one shared his frustration for lack of a building … space … place of worship for the community to finally call their own. Having to set-up and then clean-up every Friday and Saturday for Shabbat created"work" on Shabbat. Not being able to decorate the walls is hard, symbolizing the lack of physical ownership the community feels. While the Rabbi reassured the group that owning a building is by no means an easy task, she listened to them. And I did too. Before switching congregations when I was eight or nine years old, my family belonged to a synagogue in Chicagoland called Shir Shalom—a small congregation that also did not have a physical building. I remember going to Hebrew and Sunday School in a local junior high school, having Purim carnivals in the school’s cafeteria, and attending High Holiday services at my high school in the large 2,000-person-seating auditorium. Never before had I reflected on that personal experience of not owning a space; now I felt this sense of loss.

And yet.

Decorated walls with gorgeous pieces of Judaica art and remnants of the Danish-Jewish history do not lie at the core of this passionate, dedicated congregation. Like all organizations, the people do. The middle-aged man who baked the mouth-watering, seasoned challah; the congregant who responded to my inquiry email inviting me to join this congregation and sharing their e-newsletter with me; Taos and his father; the mother and her young teenaged daughter who joined us in dinner; the former-New Yorker and his Danish significant other; Emil and his mother; and Sandra—the Rabbi—who was leading, reviving, and sustaining this congregation that began around 15 years ago. Small-in-size but mighty-in-strength, these are the people sustaining part of the Copenhagen Jewish Community: a community first originating from a few Sephardic families fleeing the Spainish Inquisition in the 1500s, then Ashkenazi refugees fleeing the Pogroms in Eastern Europe, and now mostly ex-pats or converts seeking ruach.

Perhaps it is this sense of always leaving one place to then find refuge in another, where community is the infrastructure of safety, normalcy, and sustainability, that connects Jewish people around the world. Perhaps this is why joining a group of 13 strangers for Shabbat felt so comfortable and natural.