Local News

How did the Jewish faith go from all but destroyed in its structures by the Roman Empire nearly 2,000 years ago, to the modern world religion as we know it today?

To Rabbi Dr. Ruth Langer, that’s the “billion dollar question.”

The internationally recognized Jewish studies scholar visited Saint Leo University on Nov. 5 to present a free lecture titled “Rabbis and the Ancient Synagogue.”

Langer also was on hand to receive the university’s Center for Catholic-Jewish Studies’ Eternal Light Award — recognizing her efforts to promote respectful interreligious dialogue.

Langer is an ordained rabbi and professor of Jewish studies at Boston College.

She also is associate director of Boston College’s Center for Christian-Jewish Learning and  author of several books and scholarly articles.

Her talk at Saint Leo spanned from synagogues in late first century Judea to modern times.

Synagogues in Jesus’ time were much smaller in nature, maybe accommodating up to 20 to 30 people at a time, she said.

She acknowledged “there’s very little we can say about what exactly was happening in the (ancient) synagogue based on what archaeological remains show,” but noted New Testament stories mention reading scripture and preaching or teaching based on said scripture.

Langer went on to point out the New Testament makes no mention of a rabbi or “real authority figure” and “no indisputable evidence there was indeed some kind of verbal worship of God” inside these ancient synagogues in the early first century.

Simply, it is believed these ancient synagogues originally functioned more as a Jewish community center and a house of study, rather than a house of worship.

So, how did synagogues develop into a place of prayer that follows rabbinic leadership as its clergy common today?

According to Langer, the rabbinic-synagogue tradition formed slowly following the exile and destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in the Jewish-Roman in 70 C.E.,  which led to the end of the Jewish monarchy.

The Temple of Jerusalem in ruins, Jews no longer had a place to sacrifice animals as their official form of worshipping God.

“Today’s scholars are pretty well agreed that losing the only place where Jews could fulfill God’s expectation of worship generated a major trauma. Jews were in shock,” Langer noted of this event.

Because of that, Langer explained worship evolved from sacrifice to become “purely verbal,” and “met the needs of the world that no longer had the Jerusalem temple.”

Further, the responsibility for this new form of worship “transformed from belonging to a hereditary priesthood, to resting on the entire community,” she said.

With that, Langer said it was a relatively small group of rabbis who rose up and won out in this endeavor, throughout the Land of Israel and Babylonia initially.

“They (rabbis) fairly quickly found out what temple rituals could be continued elsewhere and how to compensate for those central ones that could not,” Langer said.

To spread influence, Langer explained these early rabbis used persuasion tactics and developed arguments “to convince both rabbis themselves and non-rabbis that there are advantages to participating in public prayer in the synagogue.”

That, she said, included various forms of exhortations in rabbinic text on the significance of community gathering in a synagogue for prayer, such as:

• “One must pray in a place specifically designated for prayer.”
• “When one prays within its home, it’s as if one prays encircled within an iron wall.”

(Presumably, praying in the home prevented prayer from reaching God, Langer said.)

• “Prayer in the synagogue is especially effective, because it’s like an ideal sacrifice in the temple.” (Prayer in a synagogue compensates for the loss of the Temple of Jerusalem, Langer said.)
• “Prayer offered in the synagogue is guaranteed to work, and failure to participate has dire consequences.”
• “If one enters synagogue with a buddy to pray, but does not wait for buddy when leaving, then one’s own prayers are ruined.”

But, the shift to get Jews to comply to such edicts didn’t happen overnight.

Langer noted some Jews previously had gotten used to ancient synagogues as not for prayer, but “for all sorts of profane purposes,” such as using the space for funerals, for making rope or fishnets and so on.

Langer said the rabbis’ efforts to get non-rabbis on board to conform to their liturgy and rituals “was a long and bumpy process” that took centuries. In fact, she said it wasn’t until late third century “there were some, but perhaps not all synagogues that housed rabbinic ritual life.” And, it wasn’t even until the end of the first millennial, or another 700 years or so, that the symbiotic rabbi-synagogue union became normalized, she said.

Published November 13, 2019