Links to Temple Beth Israel

The links between Saint-Nectarios Chuch and Temple Beth Israel are evident because of the similar manifestations of Judaism and Greek Orthodoxy. Both religions offer similar frameworks in terms of their direct correlations to cultural and ethnic developments. Appartenance to these schools of worship are consequently directly linked to certain cultural customs and traditions that transcend a simple ideological framework. Judaism and Greek Orthodoxy are inherently correlated to a larger cultural structure that allows them to adopt an additional role in the lives of their adherents. 

Temple Beth Israel and Saint-Nectarios Church ultimately focus on cultural events, festivals, holidays, and customs in an attempt to establish a more concrete link between the ideological and tangible facets of religiosity. Their innate connections to an ethnic background facilitates a closer connection to the religion. However, it is unfair to categorize both as simply religions given their inherent links to cultural and historical traditions. 

Geertz offers the best explanation for the proliferation of religious ideologies through the prism of culture. He states the following: 

"The religious perspective differs from the common-sensical in that, as already pointed out, it moves beyond the realities of everyday life to wider ones which correct and complete them, and its defining concern is not action upon those wider realities but acceptance of them, faith in them. It differs from the scientific perspective in that it questions the realities of everyday life not out of an institutionalized scepticism which dissolves the world's givenness into a swirl of probabilistic hypotheses, but in terms of what it takes to be wider, nonhypothetical truths. Rather than detachment, its watchword is commitment; rather than analysis, encounter. And it differs from art in that instead of effecting a disengagement from the whole question of factuality, deliberately manufacturing an air of semblance and illusion, it deepens the concern with fact and seeks to create an aura of utter actuality. It is this sense of the "really real" upon which the religious perspective rests and which the symbolic activities of religion as a cultural system are devoted to producing, intensifying, and, so far as possible, rendering inviolable by the discordant revelations of secular experience. It is, again, the imbuing of a certain specific complex of symbols—of the metaphysic they formulate and the style of life they recommend—with a persuasive authority which, from an analytic point of view, is the essence of religious action. Which brings us, at length, to ritual. For it is in ritual—that is, consecrated behavior—that this conviction that religious conceptions are veridical and that religious directives are sound is somehow generated. It is in some sort of ceremonial form—even if that form be hardly more than the recitation of a myth, the consultation of an oracle, or the decoration of a grave—that the moods and motivations which sacred symbols induce in men and the general conceptions of the order of existence which they formulate for men meet and reinforce one another. In a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world, producing thus that idiosyncratic transformation in one's sense of reality to which Santayana refers in my epigraph. Whatever role divine intervention may or may not play in the creation of faith—and it is not the business of the scientist to pronounce upon such matters one way or the other—it is, primarily at least, out of the context of concrete acts of religious observance that religious conviction emerges on the human plane."

Any chronic failure of one's explanatory apparatus, the complex of received culture patterns (common sense, science, philosophical speculation, myth) one has for mapping the empirical world, to explain things which cry out for explanation tends to lead to a deep disquiet—a tendency rather more widespread and a disquiet rather deeper than we have sometimes supposed since the pseudoscience view of religious belief was, quite rightfully, deposed. After all, even that high priest of heroic atheism. 

The rituals, cultural traditions, and undeniable historical linkages between Judaism, Greek Orthodoxy, and their respective societal frameworks allows for a much more immersive religious experience. Rather than simply relying on an ideological understanding of the religion, recurring involvement in activities and cultural traditions solidifies the religion's role in a person's life while also offering palpable manifestations of community and belonging.