Ramadan, part seven (iftar)

By the middle of the afternoon on Sunday, I was feeling recovered from the Equinox party, though hungry for dinner.

I'd planned to make a vegetable side dish for the self-described progressive iftar in the suburbs, but there were enough dates and tabouli leftover from the night before that I decided to take them instead. Around 5:30, I slung the same bag over my shoulder that I'd carried to the Shabbat potluck, with the same big, blue Tupperware bowl inside, and headed for the Metro.

I'd found this group of progressive Muslims online, and I'd been invited to the iftar by a woman I'll call Tish. I arrived early to the apartment building in Fairfax where the iftar was to be held in the community room, so I sat on a bench and scribbled in my journal for a few minutes while the sun was sinking. A few minutes before 7, I walked into the building, and found the room I was looking for labeled with a small sign by the door, just past the front-desk of the building. The doors into the community room were glass, with glass panels on either side, so I could see into the room, and saw that maybe 30 to 40 people had congregated.

Entering, I approached a waist-high bar by the small kitchenette, where the others had deposited their potluck offerings. I placed my food amongst the rest of the bowls, and introduced myself to the Arab woman behind the bar, and to the white woman standing by my side. After a short conversation with the white woman, who was busy getting things ready, I surveyed the room. A long dining table with seating for 25 or so sat to one side of the room, with sofas and padded chairs, in a sort of generic hotel or airport style, sitting in a circle off to the side with a low, blocky table in the center. The group appeared to be mostly Arab or black or multi-racial; only one or two other obviously white people joined the group. Of the 15 to 20 women in the room, perhaps four of them wore headscarves.

One man sat on the padded furniture apart from the sparsely populated table, while others stood in groups around he room. I joined the man and introduced myself and we began to chat about the fast. His wife joined a few moments later and greeted me in Arabic, which confounded me. I felt silly having to ask her to repeat herself, and then stumbled over my apology for not understanding. She instructed me on the appropriate Arabic response to her greeting, which I repeated to her and promptly forgot, and soon others joined our small group. The conversation spun away from me and my ignorance, moving on to topics like the upcoming progressive Muslim paintball outing, and who had lost or gained weight during Ramadan.

When the sun was down, someone announced with little fanfare that we should all get something to eat, and a woman in a headscarf circulated with a tray of dates as we queued up with our small paper plates. I lingered toward the back of the room, not wanting to be one of the first to eat. Making small talk with those around me in line, I asked a man if he could point out Tish to me, so I could thank her for inviting me. The man gestured toward a white woman in a flowered skirt, who was holding a child with bright eyes and bronze skin, and talking to a darker-looking woman in a black blouse and black pants. The woman in black was Tish.

After filling my plate, I returned to the circle of furniture and sat near where I had before, though the other seats filled in with a different collection of people. My interest here, of course, was religious and theological, but I quickly realized that the focus of the dinner was social, so I felt bad wanting to quiz everyone I met about their beliefs in God, or what they do at prayer time, or how their interpretation of the Koran informs their outlook on life. "What makes you progressive," I wanted to ask everyone, "and what do you find in Islam that conflicts with your values? What do you do when you find conflicts? What makes you want to be Muslim in the first place?"

I overheard the first white woman I had met by the food counter say to someone next to her the phrase "when I converted," and I also overheard that she is a vegetarian. Quickly, I formulated a plan to bond with her over the vegetarianism and then quiz her on her religious conversion, but I wasn't close enough to strike up a conversation. I limited myself to the conversation around me: a discussion about a photography class, for example, and someone confessing to breaking the fast to go on a hike.

Eventually bored, and sitting there sipping water with an empty plate in my lap, I got up to throw my plate away, and when I did, someone moved in to take my seat. I thought I would go find Tish to introduce myself, but she was deep in conversation and surrounded, so I floated back against the wall and observed. Feeling self-conscious, I decided I had to go the bathroom. And I did have to go... just enough to justify stepping out of the room for a moment. "Maybe Tish will be less busy when I get back," I thought. "Or maybe my chair will be free again."

I was in my stall, buckling my pants and about to flush, when the door to the restroom opened, and someone came in to wash his hands. I'm shy about running into people or talking to them in public restrooms, so I decided to linger in the stall a moment longer. Suddenly, the bathroom door opened, and I heard many more footsteps come in, with dozens of voices rising in a mixture of English and Arabic, until I could tell the restroom was full of men, and I realized that ritual washing was happening -- and quickly. There was barely enough time for a rinse of the hands -- nevermind a full cleansing of face and feet -- before the stampede was gone as quickly as it came, and I snuck out of the stall to wash my hands myself.

By the time I got back to the community room, prayers had begun. I couldn't see who was leading, and the first thing I noticed was that not everybody was praying. A group of men who were not praying had stepped out onto the patio. A group of women who were not praying sat chatting (chatting!) on the padded furniture. One man sat silently next to them. Those who were praying were arranged in rows, on mats, facing east. The men had all lined up in the front, and the women lined up behind them -- all now wearing headscarves. A pile of shoes sat by the door.

I slipped in and sat next to the only man in the room. He did not speak to me, and despite the example set by the women, I felt uncomfortable speaking during the prayers, so I kept silent as well. When the prayers were over, Tish pulled off her lavender headscarf and wrapped it around her neck. The iftar was winding down, and I slipped over to introduce myself. In addition to Sunday's iftar, she has invited me to her own home for study of the Koran as well as an iftar in one week, so we chatted briefly about the logistics of how to get there, and then I grabbed the rest of my tabouli and headed back to the Metro.

Ramadan, part four (Jews and Unitarians)

I walked to Shabbat services on Friday, carrying the vegetarian dish I had prepared for the potluck in a canvas bag slung over my shoulder, while listening to a sermon from my sister's non-denominational Christian church on my iPod. It occurred to me that I had heard about groups of Orthodox Jews who would forbid carrying my shoulder bag to services, and I made a mental note to investigate later what the deal is with carrying things on Shabbat.

The group I was joining for the evening is a gathering of mostly twentysomethings and early-thirtysomethings who have formed their own self-led congreation. There is no rabbi, no cantor, no ark, no giant Torah scroll. Members of the congregation take turns leading the service, or introducing the guest speaker, or leading the clean-up effort after the potluck. There is no synagogue; the congregation meets in another organization's space, which it has over time outgrown, and is now looking for a larger venue, perhaps the basement of a local Unitarian church.

I had accompanied my friend to services once before, on a night when the congregation sat in a circle, and the songs were accompanied by a guitarist. Last Friday was different; it was an a cappella service, with the chairs arranged in rows facing east. I own a kippah, acquired on a previous visit to a more traditional synagogue that required one, but I do not tend to wear it to my friend's congregation, because they are not required. A quick survey of the room revealed that about 10 percent of the men and maybe 50 percent of the women were without kippot.

The kippot issue is a good one to illustrate the spirit of my friend's congregation. They welcome all, and they also want to respect tradition. The group therefore offers a basket of kippot for attendees who have arrived without one, and who prefer to wear one. Originally, this basket was placed on the table next to the prayer books. However, my friend informs me that there were those who felt this placement might mistakenly imply an enforced pro-kippot stance on the part of the congregation, and so the basket was moved to the floor. This placement struck other congregants as disrespectful, and now the kippot basket resides on a chair next to the prayer book table.

Bare-headed, I selected a seat at the very back of the room, and my friend sat with me through the musical portion of the service, until she needed to step forward to introduce the guest speaker (a representative from a local nonprofit organization that provides low-income women of color with free child-care). My friend introduced the speaker by reading a poem written from the perspective of a woman who was present when Moses descended from Sinai. The woman had not written down her story, said the voice of the poem, because her hands were always full of children. Her voice, said the poem, is like the vowels of the Torah -- missing but implied. It is up to us to fill in her voice.

The guest speaker provided background on her organization and offered congregants the chance to sign up to provide child-care for those in need. She connected her organization’s mission to the poem, describing the child-care opportunity as a way to take children out of their mothers’ hands long enough for them to participate fully in public life in a way denied to the women at Sinai and beyond.

By chance, on Sunday, two days later, I heard another stirring sermon on themes of gender and race, delivered by a professor of Politics and African-American studies from Princeton University. I had decided to attend services alone at a Unitarian church about three blocks from my apartment, and it turned out that day that the Unitarians were also welcoming a guest speaker.

The guest preacher/professor began her sermon with these words: "I am a cradle Unitarian. My mother was a white woman who was raised as a Mormon, and my father was a black man who shared a room at Howard with Stokely Carmichael, so for our family, in the 1970s, in northern Virginia, there was no other place for us to worship, but in a Unitarian church."

She went on to preach from a children's book (Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn't Know She Was Extinct), after noting that one of the things she loves about being a Unitarian is "You can preach on whatever text you want!"

Her message was what I have come to expect from a Unitarian service -- a blend of social justice exhortations, encouragements toward optimism in the face of despair, a reminder of the Unitarian commitment to embrace everyone, and a few somewhat understated liberal political messages, including jabs at current conservative leaders and candidates, and props for the current hope of the Democratic party.

I know that I have heard Unitarian ministers talk about God before, but I do not recall the guest professor invoking a deity in her sermon. The core of her message, it struck me, was deeply humanist in its outlook, and this message was underscored by her sermon's structure. Periodically throughout the first 2/3 of the sermon, after describing a human-caused tragedy that reflects negatively on our nature as people (the public whipping of an innocent black woman in turn-of-the-century Ohio, the failure of government response after Hurricane Katrina, etc.), the professor would utter a string of negative pronouncements, such as "Democracy is dead" or "There is no benevolent spirit of love and life to answer our prayers."

When her sermon turned a corner toward a more hopeful outlook, she modified those negative pronouncements from earlier, making them more positive. "What if democracy is only bruised," she asked, for example.

When it came time to reverse the assertion that there is no benevolent spirit to answer our prayers, she phrased her modification like this: "We are the ones who are here to answer each others' prayers."

I enjoyed her sermon immensely but was feeling shy when services were over, so although the professor and the church's minister both stood together on the outside steps to shake hands with the congregants as they exited -- he in his black robe and sash, and she in her sleeveless hot-pink shift dress and three-inch pink heels -- I slipped out a side door and avoided them.