This July, while attending a month-long research colloquium at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, I took the opportunity to experience worship in communities of faith different from my own. By far the most spirited services I attended were Kabbalat Shabbat (Friday evening) services at B’nai Jeshurun, a conservative Jewish synagogue on the upper west side of Manhattan, and a Sunday worship service at Brooklyn Tabernacle, an inner-city church with a Holiness and Pentecostal heritage, and a huge choir renowned for its Grammy-winning recordings of contemporary gospel music.

The heart of worship for both congregations was the singing of the people. Both groups sang in "contemporary" style with live bands leading and accompanying them, but there was none of the disjunction between leaders and people I have experienced in Seventh-day Adventist attempts at "contemporary" worship, a disjunction in which the leaders’ performance grows self-absorbed as the congregation’s responses become fragmented and confused.

At both synagogue and tabernacle the people took their cues from their leaders, but they knew what they were singing and their collective voices sounded an overwhelming unity of heart and will. Indeed, at Brooklyn Tabernacle, easily the larger and louder of the two congregations, I sang from the depths of my diaphragm and at the top of my voice, but, untypically for me, I could not hear myself. The sound of these Christians singing did not so much enter my ears as erupt from the floor and walls, vibrate though my entire being, and fly upward, carrying my spirit with it. I wept in joy and wonder.

Many of the contrasts between Brooklyn Tabernacle and B’nai Jeshurun would seem to make someone like me more comfortable at the tabernacle than at the synagogue. I am, after all, a Christian Protestant evangelical and thus quite accustomed to the gospel songs and choruses, the extemporaneous prayers and speeches, and, most of all, the many references to Jesus Christ and a personal relationship with him that pervaded worship at Brooklyn Tabernacle. At B’nai Jeshurun, on the other hand, I knew none of the tunes and had to work my tongue around baffling Hebrew transliterations if I wanted even to try to sing along. There was little extemporaneous speaking, as the highly liturgical ritual singing was guided by a prayer book. And of course there were no references to Jesus.

Still, I have come away preferring my experience at the synagogue.

The spirit of the music made the decisive difference for me. B’nai Jeshurun’s liturgical texts are set to folk melodies that bespeak centuries of Jewish experience as a pariah people all too well acquainted with suffering and grief, yearning for Shalom, the fullness of peace with justice. Based largely on minor keys and ancient modes, the tunes open the heart to the world’s pain. My experience at B’nai Jeshurun taught me that a heart thus opened is most ready to know the joy of receiving the Sabbath, the gracious gift of Adonai.

The high point of Kabbalat Shabbat for me was the Lekha Dodi, a sixteenth-century Kabbalist love poem sung to escort in the Sabbath as Queen and Bride. The lines we repeated as chorus to this love song translate as

Come, my beloved, let us greet the bride,
Let us welcome the presence of Shabbat.

At a moment specified in the poem, the whole congregation stood and turned to face the back of the synagogue as a wedding party would do in honor of the bride’s entrance and procession. Then the musicians changed to a faster tempo and parts of the congregation flowed into aisles holding hands in long snaking human chains to dance their delight in the presence of Israel’s Sabbath Bride.

I cannot pretend to represent fairly what these moments meant to my Jewish friends and colleagues who so generously shared them with me. As a lifelong Christian Sabbath-keeper, however, I was flooded with my own peculiar memories: Friday sunset meals in my parents’ home eaten to the sound of "Sabbath music"; facing the back of the church on a Friday evening twenty-seven years ago to greet my own bride, and then kissing her as my wife on nearly the stroke of sundown; the Friday evenings in our own household where the breaking of bread in hospitality has renewed the bonds of family, friendship, and faith for these many years.

Again I wept in joy and wonder—and in a deep yearning for the ultimate Shalom, the promised state of peace, justice, and love of which Sabbath fellowship is but a foretaste. It is this Sabbath sensibility, then, so powerfully conveyed in B’nai Jeshurun’s singing and dancing, that led this Christian Protestant evangelical, paradoxically, to appreciate the Jewish synagogue on Friday evening more than the Christian Protestant evangelical tabernacle on Sunday morning.

The gospel music at Brooklyn Tabernacle was powerfully, even relentlessly, upbeat. It proclaimed the miracle of Christ’s resurrection in bright, bold major keys, calling us to triumph and exaltation at every turn. The insistent note of triumph I heard at Brooklyn Tabernacle and hear even more stridently in much "contemporary" Christian worship seems to me to verge on denial of the travail of God’s good-but-fallen creation.

Seventh-day Adventists are a Sabbath people. They rest on the Sabbath in memory and celebration of God’s good creation. They also remember the Fall and its terrible consequences and yearn with all creation for redemption (Rom. 8:19-22). They rest and worship on the day their Lord and Savior rested in the tomb, knowing that the day of his final triumph is coming, but is not yet.

A Sabbath people will not deny the injustice in the world, or flinch from recognizing the sins that perpetuate the bondage of the poor, that swell the pride of the privileged, that inflame the lusts of the powerful, and incite violence of nation against nation across the globe as well as brother against brother on the street. A Sabbath people will call sin by its right name and cultivate repentance and the fruits of repentance. Their songs will speak as clearly of their sorrow, of their empathy for the suffering of God’s creation, as they will of their hope in the mystery of Christ’s resurrection and return.

If we move too quickly to the resurrection, we will move blindly and forget that grace is costly. Our blindness will bind us to a "power of positive thinking" that in the end will be a power not with us or for us or for the rest of God’s good creation. It will be rather a tyranny over us, demanding we deny our Lord’s death and our own mortality, and in suppressing these truths, cause us to live again in bondage through fear of death (Heb. 2:15). Our Sabbath rest allows us to acknowledge the most terrible truths about ourselves and our world and still to sing aloud to our God in joy and hope.

These are some lessons about Christian life and worship that I learned this summer with a little help from my Jewish friends.

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