Shacharit- 3 siddurim, 8 people, oy vey! (9am Monday July 25, 2011)

Today was the 2^nd straight day with morning services.  With 1 Artscroll siddur (Nusakh Sefarad) and 2 siddurs with Spanish, Hebrew, and transliterated Hebrew (1 hard copy and 1 computerized version), we somehow figured out how to hold services for 8 people. It involved me running back and forth and finding the correct pages, because each siddur was published by a different company and had different pagination.  It also involved people taking turns putting on tefillin. In a community that has 30 tallits and somehow belongs to both the Reform and Renewal Jewish movements, I decided for egalitarian and pedagogical purposes today to show the 2 women how to put on a tallit. And due to lack of siddur resources, everyone had to sit close together to share. The donning of the tallit on the women this morning, created some frustration from the community leader, who explained to me that women don’t count in their minyan and therefore shouldn’t wear the tallit.  Women also usually sit in the back during the Huanuco Friday night services.  It is later explained to me that this “male chauvinism” is probably not derived from Judaism, but is rather a cultural custom of Huanuco  Apparently at parties in Huanuco, men and women shmooze separately, and thus this male-female separation is ingrained in the people Huanuco. Carmen suspects that this male-female separation was another cultural concept that the Jews brought to Huanuco several hundred years ago (like the haircut at 3 years old), but I have my qualms with these assumptions as there’s no actual proof for the correlation of these claims.

The difficulty for me is that I view everything in terms of the Jewish communities that we have in America. It’s interesting that here in Huanuco, the way I practice and preach have to be completely different. Sometimes this cognitive dissonance is difficult and I’d never feel alright teaching something in America like I’m doing here in Peru, but here the circumstances are so different here. At the end of the day, I respect the community’s desire to be a semi-egalitarian Reform/Renewal Jewish community and I’m here to help them be the best of what they want to be.