Synagogue Visit

I went to The Kesher Israel which is a modern orthodox Synagogue in Georgetown on November 15th to attend their 7:00 p.m. Thursday service which is considered Maariv because it was an afternoon service. The inside of the Synagogue looked very old fashion and somewhat like a regular Baptist church of I would attend but with a few differences. There were 12 rows of pews going forward and in the middle was I was sort of area which look like a pool pit which I found out was called a Bimah and that is were a person reads the Torah out loud to the audience. The Torah is the Jewish bible, which consists of 5 books of the old testaments, which is Genesis Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. There were only seven people when I came in but they were friendly even though they seemed curious why I was there. When I told them I am just visiting for my class assignment, they seemed understanding and were pleased to answer my questions. Ellen Epstein was the lady assign to help me with any questions I might have. As soon as I start writing, a lady said she knew it is going to happen so she was waiting to tell me but nobody can write in the Synagogue but memorize what they see and talk about. She even invited me to have a sweet wine and bread with them. After the service, people went to a social room and had conversations. I asked a guy if the bread and wine have certain meaning having Jesus giving out bread and wine to represent his body and blood but they were not related.

According to the people at the service, the Thursday service usually takes from forty-five minutes to one hour. They start singing the prayers in the book called "Nashira Shabbat", which goes in reverse way since the Hebrew is read from right to left and is composed of prayers from Psalms, and then talk about the Torah that they start reading from the beginning every year and finish reading and discussing by the end of the year. But the day I went to was special since the rabbi trainee wanted to sing only and talk about the Bible longer on the Saturday service, which goes about two and a half hours. The "Nashira Shabbat" had Hebrew prayer, pronunciation of Hebrews in English, English translation, and explanation for the translation written in English. However, during the whole service, they sang in Hebrews. Therefore, the service was all Hebrew to me. The book does not have music notes but only the letters so I wondered how they sang all together. I asked the rabbi trainee and he said it is up to the Synagogues if they sing, read aloud, or just read by themselves but they usually sing it because they like it and they learn song rhythms and notes as they sing it every week since they were young. All twelve people in the Synagogue were born and raised in the Jewish family according to him.

In the middle of the singing prayer, everybody suddenly stood up and bowed to the entrance and the guy behind me who I was talking to earlier pulled me to give me a signal so I managed to stand up with them to blend in. Then, people suddenly turned to the front