PASSOVER 5774 EDITION SECTION A PAGE 10
It is among the most apt and poetic of synagogue names.
Beth Evergreen conjures images of the pleasant foothills village southwest of Denver, and of the beautiful trees — pines, spruces, firs and many others — which surround it in lush abundance.
The word “evergreen” can also mean, according to one dictionary, “remaining fresh,” like those trees which never lose their leaves or needles, regardless of weather or season.
And Beth Evergreen, which last month celebrated the 40th anniversary of its existence, has indeed remained fresh.
A gathering that first came together in 1974 as a handful of Jewish residents of Evergreen and surrounding areas — really more of an casual chavurah than a congregation, not even a minyan — Beth Evergreen in 2014 can contrast that humble beginning with an auspicious present:
— The eight founders of 40 years ago have become the 200-some members of today;
— The group that once met in participants’ living rooms — eventually ascending to resort meeting rooms and theaters — now has an attractive, distinctly alpine-style, synagogue building with a panoramic view so inspiring it can be considered a spiritual asset;
— Beth Evergreen’s founders once struggled to educate themselves and each other to the degree that they could function as an actual synagogue; now, Beth Evergreen’s religious school and youth and adult education programs are growing steadily, providing wide-ranging instruction for every age group from kindergarten through retirement;
— A group of people who functioned for decades without a rabbi or formal identification with any Jewish movement now has a fulltime spiritual leader, and has decided that its progressive and broadminded values are well reflected in the Reconstructionist movement, with which it is now affiliated.
Overall, the signs indicate a synagogue that has achieved a level of stability that many small congregations might envy. It not only has a building, a rabbi and an affiliation, but a steadily growing and energetic membership.
Beth Evergreen seems to be living up to its verdant name very well indeed.
Joanne Greenberg was there at the inception.
“I was one of the eight,” she says of the first group of Jews in the Evergreen area who, in the early 1970s, came up with the idea of starting a congregation.
“Most of them are gone,” she says of the other founders, one of whom — Steve Bloom, is not gone and who, in fact, led the congregation in singing “Turn, Turn, Turn” at Beth Evergreen’s anniversary celebration on March 8.
Another member of the eight — Bernie Goldman, who passed away last autumn — was the true founder, Greenberg says.
“He was the first,” Greenberg says of Goldman.
“He was the one who advertised in the Canyon Courier. He called me on the phone. It was very interesting. It was on a Sunday afternoon and I picked up the phone. He asked ‘Are you Jewish?’ I said, ‘Yes, we are.’ And he said, ‘Terrific’ and I said ‘Amen.’
“Then he told me he was on a Jew hunt. I said, ‘Well, you’ve found one.’”
Greenberg, an author recognized for the prize-winning I Never Promised You A Rose Garden and 18 other novels and short story collections, has lived in the Evergreen area (Lookout Mountain, specifically) since 20 years before Beth Evergreen was founded.
Back in the 1950s, she may have been the only Jew in the area who practiced any form of Judaism at all.
“I taught the hora to a bunch of Girl Scouts at a camp up here,” she says with a chuckle. “There was an article in the Intermountain Jewish News about it.”
Asked about other Jews in the area in those days, Greenberg says there were “almost none, at least none that I knew.”
When the High Holidays came around, she says she would sometimes go to an abandoned mica quarry near her home “and read from the machzor.”
When Goldman proposed something more Jewishly substantial, she thought: “I didn’t have to do that anymore.
“Bernie said he wanted to find some more Jews,” Greenberg says, “and then he did.
“We wanted to do a congregation and be serious. It wasn’t just Yiddishkeit, more than bagels and lox. Something. The real thing.”
The earliest days of Beth Evergreen were very informal, with members meeting in each other’s living rooms and no rabbis or prayer leaders.
The founders were self-starters, Greenberg says, and really weren’t looking for any help from elsewhere.
“You had to do it yourself. Nobody else would ever do it for you. A lot of times, in an established congregation, people move there and they expect a rabbi or some trained person to do it for you, do Jewish for you. We didn’t have that. If we didn’t do Jewish for our kids it wasn’t going to get done.”
She says her contributions to the congregation were mostly in the form of education.
“If you wanted a Bar Mitzvah, I was what you got,” says Greenberg, who had helped prepare her own two children for the mitzvah.
“I learned enough Hebrew and I also learned the chant and I kept on doing it, learned more Hebrew and more chant, and we were off and running.”
As the congregation slowly grew, members began meeting in the Greystone Castle, a popular resort on Upper Bear Creek Road.
“They were not ecstatic to have us,” Greenberg recalls. “We would meet there for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, under a moldering moose head.”
Later, High Holiday and special services took place at the Evergreen Elks Lodge, the United Methodist Church “and some of the larger houses.”
In time, the young congregation began attracting rabbinical and educational assistance from the Denver Jewish community.
“Rabbi Daniel Goldberger came up often to be with us through the High Holidays, and then Uncle Max, Max Frankel. They were both wonderful. That was a great blessing.”
She has similar praise for those who have guided Beth Evergreen more formally: Rabbi Eliot Baskin, who served as part-time rabbi from 1997-2004, and the current leader, Rabbi Benjamin “Jamie” Arnold, who was hired full-time in 2005.
“He is a joy to everybody in this congregation,” she says of Rabbi Arnold. “He’s exactly what we needed.”
And Beth Evergreen was exactly what she needed back when it was founded.
Greenberg says she was not raised in a particularly religious environment. “My parents observed Yom Kippur and the seder, that was about it.
“So I am observant today in spite of, not because of, everything that happened to me. I lived through World War II. I know about prejudice. We were always told, ‘Be proud you’re Jewish but don’t tell anybody.’”
Later, in Colorado, Greenberg had the desire to be Jewish and openly proud of it.
“And out here it was possible,” she says. “In New York there were a lot of Jews and a lot of prejudice. When I came out here, it was like a weight I hadn’t known I had fell off.”
She suspects that the other founders of Beth Evergreen had similar backgrounds and attitudes.
“A lot of us, myself included, were refugees from the kind of Judaism that we didn’t want to have. It was a mass aliyot. Anybody who wants an aliyah can have one. In the old days, in the old synagogues, it was always the same people.
“And if you were an unattached woman you sat in back, nobody said anything to you. A lot of us were refugees from that. We are not that.”
The openness and egalitarianism that have long been identified with Beth Evergreen were natural outgrowths of the founders’ feelings.
“It wasn’t any sort of formal declaration,” Greenberg says. “We took it for granted.”
Which is not to say that the evolution of Beth Evergreen was all rainbows and unicorns.
“I’m not saying that we didn’t have trouble. The more we developed, the more trouble we had, as to what, where, when, how much.
“Some of them left the synagogue because it was no longer in somebody’s house. It was more formalized. There were dues. We didn’t have dues for the first, what, seven years.”
Over the years, the congregation faced, and often argued over, important foundational issues.
“How kosher are we? Since half of us are intermarried, is the non-Jewish partner allowed to go up on the bimah? Is he allowed to read from the Torah? Is he allowed to be on the board? Do we build a synagogue? That was harrowing. How much should we spend, what should we build? All of that was argued over.”
Of course they argued, Greenberg says. “We were Jews.”
Such vicissitudes of congregational self-definition notwithstanding, Greenberg stayed throughout all of it and remains glad she did.
“I can’t even begin to tell you what it’s done for me,” she says. “The word infinite is too big, but certainly it circles around there. It is an entirely different life that I would have led without it. A whole different life.”
Rabbi Arnold, who has been with Beth Evergreen for nearly a quarter of its history, says that 40 years has a special significance in Jewish thinking.
Its recent anniversary, he says, was “an opportunity to link the narrative history of this congregation to the mitzvah-marriage of our ancestors — a 40-year formative time as a people in crossing the wilderness and entering the land of promise.
“It’s an opportunity to connect to that story and also to see our own story as a congregation in light of that, and simply for its own sake, to recognize how far this congregation has come, from wandering from home to home and shaping its identity early on to spending a couple decades being hosted by a church to having its own building and fulltime professional staff.”
In the nine years that Rabbi Arnold has led the congregation, he has witnessed many changes.
“In my first three or four years the congregation had a relatively new building, just a year or two old. And from 2005 through 2008 the synagogue grew substantially, from about 120 households to about 200. The religious school attendance almost doubled in size.
“From the first year of my coming, we doubled the number of services for Shabbat, to have services every weekend.
“We enlarged our religious school and the adult education program has grown pretty much consistently every year.
“We’ve done three different trips to Israel as a congregation and are planning a fourth one this coming year.”
Such growth, the rabbi feels, is not just reflective of the general population upsurge in Colorado itself, but because of Beth Evergreen’s own progress.
“The congregation has provided more services and become more appealing,” he says.
“Also, there was a good deal of effort in the first couple years that I was here to reestablish bridges and connections with members who had been a part of the congregation early on but had drifted away.”
That drift, he says, came about as a result of disagreements over how the congregation should handle its growth and evolution.
“Every family who tries to build a house together can create some difficult dynamics,” the rabbi says.
“There were some members who weren’t in favor of the significant jump in dues that occurred alongside the fundraising that was necessary to build the building. We’re still bringing a bunch of those folks back on board.
“And then, I think as a result of having a fulltime rabbinic presence here, Beth Evergreen had much more visibility in the community. Having a building and being involved in educational activities helped increase exposure for the congregation.”
That increased visibility, coupled with more Jews looking to move into the foothills, worked together to accelerate interest and, in many cases, new memberships.
“People who were moving into the area and were looking for participation in organized Jewish life and synagogue participation had it available for them.”
The growth and renewed energy presented important challenges for Beth Evergreen, Rabbi Arnold says.
“There were three major questions that were put in front of the community in the late 90s and early 2000s: Building a building, hiring a fulltime rabbi, and affiliating.
“They decided to affiliate in that process before I arrived. The affiliation was sort of sealed, I think, during the rabbinic search process. The Reconstructionist movement stood out in one way, because they made rabbis available in their rabbinic search even if they weren’t affiliated with the Reconstructionist movement.”
Beth Evergreen’s identification with Reconstructionism started even before the congregation began working with the movement. Partially under Rabbi Baskin’s guidance, members had been using the Reconstructionist prayer book for more than a decade.
In addition to several practical advantages of affiliation — networking for professional staff and access to Reconstructionist camping and youth programs — Rabbi Arnold feels that the movement’s long identification with the chavurah model of worship was a natural fit for Beth Evergreen, which itself began in that way.
“Beth Evergreen long functioned very much like a chavurah in terms of doing a lot of things, such as lay-led services and using a three-ring binder prayer book where people were encouraged to write and bring in poetry and do different kinds of things with prayer. Those are all hallmarks of the chavurah movement and the Reconstructionist movement has close ties to the chavurah movement.”
More important than the movement to identify with, the rabbi adds, was the decision to affiliate at all, given Beth Evergreen’s sense that ‘We’re mountain Jews and we do things differently. We like the different culture that we’re creating up here.’”
At the end of the day, he thinks it was the Reconstructionist policy of granting member congregations full autonomy over decision making that won the day for that movement.
In any case, Beth Evergreen’s affiliation with Reconstructionism has not kept members from other Jewish denominations, ranging from Reform to considerably more observant, from attending and enjoying its services.
“We certainly have people who come from the whole range of Jewish backgrounds and several who are actively involved grew up in very traditional homes,” Rabbi Arnold says.
“While we do some creative and alternative things, like gospel and reggae services, especially musically, we also do a pretty traditional morning minyan on Tuesday mornings and we often do a very traditional second day Rosh Hashanah service, for those who are more comfortable in a more traditional ritual setting.”
The success of Beth Evergreen is attributable to several dynamics, Rabbi Arnold feels — including the sheer non-Jewishness of the Evergreen area serving as a sort of “external pressure” to encourage area Jews to get together.
Much more important, such founders as Joanne Greenberg, Steve Bloom and Bernie Goldman started things on the right foot.
“It was so important having Joanne and a handful of people who were really committed to the idea of Beth Evergreen as a place for Jewish life in the mountains, and who also had the link to Jewish knowledge and heritage and language that could give it a sense of authenticity.”
Even brighter than its past is its future, the rabbi believes.
“The future prospects are really bright and exciting. We continue to make strides in terms of long-term financial stability of the congregation. In the last couple of years we’ve paid down our mortgage from over $400,000 to $40,000. Our endowment continues to grow — we’ve more than doubled it in the last five years.”
The energy of the members is evident in the appearance of what the rabbis calls “organically emerging, sort of radiant, centers of Jewish life.”
These self-initiated and usually self-sustaining groups — Rabbi Arnold compares them to chavurot — concentrate on such things as organizing Shabbat services for families with young children and the Musar practice of tikkun ha-midot, dealing with character refinement.
“Those are examples of things that are sprouting up that are adding immensely to the life and energy,” Rabbi Arnold says. “For me, as a rabbi, to see those seeds sprouting on their own and growing gives me a lot of hope for the future.”
Speaking for himself, the rabbi adds that he has “every intention” to be a part of that future.
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
