Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/111

 of the best illustrations wherewith to contrast your adaptability to discipline and our lack of it is to be found in the difference between your behavior in church and our behavior in our own unmodernized synagogue—the orthodox synagogue.

In church all is order and decorum, rhythm and régime. In the synagogue all is chaos. In the church leaders and responses are carefully prepared, carefully followed and observed. It is clean and neat, charming and exact. You behave well. You do as you are told—in mass. You create esprit de corps in the church: there is a suggestive, hypnotizing decency in the trained correctness of your service. In the synagogue all is disorder; we talk during service; we answer out of turn; and when we answer in mass one begins earlier, another ends later; 107