ascanius

I forgot to mention, when I was down in St. Thomas my dad and I went to Friday services at the synagogue down there. It's the oldest continuously operating synagogue in the Western hemisphere and it's a pretty amazing place. The Rabbi is your typical New England reformed Rabbi. He moved down a couple years ago from New Hampshire. His sermons are half jokes and half social justice and the service is in English as much as it is in Hebrew. It's an Ashkenazic synagogue rather than a Sephardic synagogue, which means its rooted in the Spanish and North African tradition rather than in the Eastern European tradition like most American synagogues. So, what does that mean? Well, not a whole lot, particularly because the congregation are mostly Sephardim. The layout of the room was a bit different. Rather than rows of seats facing the ark where the Torah is kept and the podium at which the rabbi stands, it had two sets of benches facing each other with the ark off to the East side of the room and the rabbi on a raised dias off to the West. They also keep sand on the floor, a tradition I am told that goes back to the time of the inquisition when the Spanish Jews would pray in their basements and used a layer of sand on the floor to muffle the sound. It was a pretty unique setting.

Edit:
Also, I don't know what this is trying to say, but it's kinda funny: