Milestone is an old word, as solid as a pillar marking
distances along an old post road. In contemporary use, the meaning is temporal;
a milestone is a significant event, the beginning or end of a stage in
life — the stuff of memory.
I was married in the sanctuary of Congregation Beth El of
the Sudbury River Valley — the same place my baby daughter was named, became
bat mitzvah at 13, and graduated from the temple high school program. It is the
only place she can imagine her own wedding.
I’ve been in that room for 30 years’ worth of holiday
observances. I’ve wept at the funerals of friends there. I laughed and sung and
studied there. On occasion, I’ve sat alone and savored an unusual but
comfortable silence.
According to the fire marshal, 240 people are permitted
in the sanctuary at any given time, but there is no legal limit on the number
of memories. Sometimes when I walk in, I feel embraced by the past; other
times, ambushed.
This has nothing to do with the temple’s architecture,
which is unassuming, even artless. Beth El was built in 1970 by a local prefab
construction company at a cost of $135,000. The sanctuary’s best feature is the
vaulted ceiling, 25 feet at its peak, made of bare wooden planks stained a dark
walnut color. It looks like an inverted boat and makes me think of Noah’s ark,
which landed well. I remember someone looking up and making the imaginative
leap to another biblical vessel: the waterproof basket that floated baby Moses
down the Nile.
The west-facing windows look out on a meditation garden
dedicated to remembrance; inside the names of our dead are etched on panes of
frosted glass the size of business cards and displayed in a white wooden
lattice near the altar, the bimah.
The custom of placing stones on a loved one’s grave is
reprised within the grid by a supply of polished black pebbles. I place one
beside my father’s name on the anniversary of his death and whenever I want to
draw closer to his memory. A few spaces above, my friend’s infant son is
memorialized, his untimely death a family tragedy that becomes fungible and
communal in the company of this congregation.
The word “remember” appears 169 times in the Torah, the
first five books of the Hebrew Bible. For Jews, the methodology of remembering
is ritual, which Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described as “the art of
significant forms in time, as architecture of time.” Passover rehearses the
story of Exodus to make that memory personal in every generation. The annual
tributes to loved ones gone recall entire lifetimes.
The sanctuary is
redolent with sense memory; the smell of warming casseroles, the taste of a
hundred thousand bagels, the press of handshakes and hugs, the echoes of
spontaneous harmonies, the afterglow of smiles from my groom, my daughter, my
father, and 240-plus faces who remember me.
This article appears in the current issue of Boston
Architecture Magazine.
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