Church Snob and Seder Chickens: Another Week on the Left Coast
September 2nd, 2006
September 2006
Last week I attended a Jewish Sabbath dinner on Friday (a seder) and went to my first Los Angeles church service on Sunday. At The Forum. That’s right—the arena where the Lakers used to play; where Madonna rehearses for world tours.
I was a little skeptical about The Forum: how would the music fare at this non-denominational church-arena? How could it compare to New Orleans? Would there be brass? How could there not be brass? If Glenn David isn’t singing, then do I really want to be there? I had a litany of questions for my poor friend. I was such a pain in the ass about it, anyone else would have said, “You’re so concerned about the music? Stay home with Johnny Coltrane then.” But Nicole is a patient friend—a virtue with which I am unfamiliar. Spiritual and fairly regular about her bible study, she’s far too kind to let a little music snobbery get in the way of soothing my soul.
In the same way that my Jewish friends would never serve sweet traditional wine at their sabbath dinner because (A) They’d be celebrating alone, which means that B) in effect, it would get in the way of the communal spirit. My lovely friend, who actually hates chicken but felt compelled by tradition to make her maiden cooking foray into that pedestrian bird, blessed the garlic-spiked fowl in Hebrew—a language almost as unmusical as Kevin Federline. An unfortunate mix of spitting, choking, and complaining, it is jarring to the senses seeing a beautiful woman speaking such gutteral words. Like using expletives in the nave. At least German is…funny. I always laugh at the thought of myself barking German orders to my late (incredibly German) Shepherd. But Hebrew isn’t funny. It’s depressing. The seder—which was only religious in the sense that the chicken was baptized, kosherized and otherwise sanitized—was beautifully scored with iPod shuffled spirituals including The Harmonizing Four’s “Motherless Child,” a rendition that remains unparallelled. It’s like a world record in dulcet harmony, The Guinness Book for bass. How low does he go? How can he go that low and still sound like God?
Doesn’t matter; at least it offset the Hebrew. There was all kinds of good music that night while we downed Spanish and California bottles and tore the flesh of figs. As I marveled at their rice, I wondered too—perhaps to the point of blaspheme—how Christ got his word across if he was speaking Aramaic? It’s not exactly Italian. The rest of dinner was Hebrew-free, free-range fowl and free-flowing bottles and conversation, while my beloved wowed them with a limited but impressive Yiddish vocabulary. Impressive because his people hail from Acadiana, South Louisiana–essentially, they’re all from Spain.
How could the Forum on Sunday beat the seder score?
Forty minutes of song and praise lifted my eyes to the rafters where sodium lights threatened to make me squint, so I blocked them with my hands—which made it look as if I were prematurely raising the roof instead of protecting my vision. And high in the stands were flag draped liturgical dancers, little boys and girls, grandmothers with bellowed fabric. Sure, the music was amplified, I didn’t recognize a soul, and I couldn’t make out the faces except when I looked at the giant screens, but the gospel was good, the people were lively, the spirit manifest. After a chorus or two, in good spirituals style, you picked it up and carried it along… with the 5,000 other churchgoers. L’Chaim!