New piece up at Religion Dispatches:
The single-dwelling home has long been seen as the consummate test of an architect’s skill. For Jonathan Block Friedman, a theoretical architect and professor at Long Island’s New York Institute of Technology, that test left out buildings designed for community functions: birth, death, and marriage. “Just as we cannot specify the surroundings of our own births, nor supervise our own burials,” Friedman explains, “some architectural concerns require a consciousness of the world as a community.”
Friedman’s extension of that question to synagogue architecture is the basis for a new exhibit of his work, “Idea About Synagogue,” based on series of plans for synagogues inspired by the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, closing on April 9 at NYIT. The idea sprang, somewhat improbably, from his early teaching years at the University of Kentucky in the late ’70s, when a student (“maybe one of the other 15 Jewish guys in Kentucky at the time,” Friedman says) asked him why there was no history of synagogue architecture comparable to that taught about Christian cathedrals.
Friedman wrote a nearby theological seminary in Cincinnati with the question, and received several articles written by a liturgist outlaying the few, basic mandates for synagogue design: that the Ark of the Torah be on the east side; that there be a window to the community, to prevent isolation from society; and that thebimah, or altar, be no more than six steps above the congregation, to curb haughtiness among the clergy. With the basic scriptural requirement of a synagogue being not a building, nor having a rabbi, but merely a quorum of ten Jews, Friedman says that the form of synagogues have a primary democratic impulse.
“The basic thing I took away, is that I thought, all these years I’ve been in a synagogue and I’ve thought of it as a movie theater: everybody sits in rows and looks at this thing in the front. But it didn’t have to be that way.”
