Monthly Archives: February 2014

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“…the legacy of American Judaism in the 21st century — a Judaism that has been undersold and watered down”

American Judaism is in crisis. But it isn’t the crisis that mainstream American Jewish leaders would have you believe. It is at once much better and much worse.

The false crisis — declining Jewish continuity, caused by assimilation and an intermarriage rate of 52 percent — has become the rallying cry of institutional Judaism. But fundamentally, it is a red herring. The real crisis is one of meaning and engagement. For the first time in centuries, two Jews can marry each other and have Jewish children without any connection to Jewish heritage, wisdom or tradition.

Part of the problem is that there are very few places that offer Jews an opportunity to experience the power and mystery of Jewish tradition firsthand. Even people who are in-married by and large have little connection to Torah, Jewish practice and values. They are dependent on others to translate Judaism for them, and they trudge to High Holiday services to receive the requisite “Be good!” sermons, only to return to their lives unchallenged and unchanged.

They have been sold a world in which Judaism is a bunch of platitudes, at best matching their existing modern liberal values (but adding nothing beyond what they already know), and at worst completely irrelevant to the struggles they experience day to day. Who can blame these Jews for disengaging from Judaism?

This is the legacy of American Judaism in the 21st century — a Judaism that has been undersold and watered down. It is a Judaism where those who know its beauty are often unable or unwilling to connect to the larger Jewish community, and those on the front lines of the welcome wagon to Judaism have little skill or facility with Jewish texts to elucidate the beauty to others. People want deep meaning and connection, but they move through life thinking of Judaism’s contribution to the world as “Seinfeld” and guilt. Many would be shocked to find out that Judaism has vigorous debates about the most central existential problems facing people today.

Elie Kaunfer, “The Real Crisis in American Judaism”, The Jewish Week (7 April 2010), 1, 12.

More independent Jewish communal professionals due to the economy?

Jewish communal professionals and clergy nearing retirement who have jobs cannot afford to stop working, closing off opportunities for the next generation of leaders. Meanwhile, the professional preparation institutions continue to graduate teachers, educators, communal service workers, cantors, and rabbis, who enter a shrinking job market, often laden with significant student loan debt. What shall these people do? Some will have no choice but to hang their own shingle and offer their services to an increasingly savvy population of Jews who, whether forced by the economic circumstances or because they do not see the value of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars over a number of years, decide to forgo “membership” in Jewish institutions and hire single practitioners, eager for their “business”.

Dr. Ron Wolfson, Relational Judaism: Using the Power of Relationships to Transform the Jewish Community (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2013), 32.

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When Jews left their communities and moved to the suburbs in the 1940s-1960s, they “usually abandoned their synagogues”

When Jews left communities such as Lawndale in Chicago or the near east side in Columbus, Ohio, and moved to suburbs either inside or outside the city, they usually abandoned their synagogues (just as white Christians abandoned their churches). Of course, there were exceptions. As the black population exploded in the Hyde Park-Kenwood area of Chicago in the 1940s and 19505, K.A.M. made a commitment to remain in the neighborhood and worked vigorously to create a fifty-fifty balance of whites and blacks. Rabbi Jacob J. Weinstein could claim, at the end of the 1950s, that “this temple was the single most effective anchorage in holding the white people here.” This was no easy task, as he also noted in a Yom Kippur sermon, for the “movement to the suburbs is, in the framework of our social and economic mores, almost as natural and instinctive as the flight of the birds to Capistrano.” And, in postwar Philadelphia, rather than flee the city, Mikve Israel and Rodeph Shalom reinvented themselves and remained in the city center as their congregants (and other synagogues) left North Philadelphia for the northern Philadelphia suburbs and beyond the city limits. Such congregations, however, were the exception.

Most abandoned synagogues became black churches, and Jews, in their new communities, either built new buildings with the same synagogue name as the old or started over with new synagogues with new names.

Marc Lee Raphael, The Synagogue in America: A Short History (New York & London: New York University Press, 2011), 125.

“Judaism, to be a thick identity,… is not part-time commitment with full-time benefits”

Judaism, to be a thick identity, in the words of philosopher Charles Taylor, is not part-time commitment with full-time benefits. It is the framework and the lens, the core and the vision. Why would you “affiliate” with anything that demands less of you? It’s not about affiliation. It never has been. It’s about meaning and wisdom. And our language must change to reflect this.

Erica Brown, “Part-Time Judaism”, 2013-2014: The Year Gone By…The Year Ahead, A Special Supplement to the Florida Jewish Journal and the New York Jewish Week (27 December 2013), 7.

Ruth Calderon on Encountering Talmud and Becoming Enamored with it

…I contained — a void. I did not know how to fill that void, but when I first encountered the Talmud and became completely enamored with it — its language, its humor, its profound thinking, its modes of discussion, and the practicality, humanity and maturity that emerge from its lines — I sensed that I had found the love of my life, what I had been lacking.

Ruth Calderon, “‘The Time Has Come To Re-appropriate What Is Ours’”, Israel Now: A Special Supplement to the Jewish Week, trans. Elli Fischer (31 May 2013), 13.

Rashi Does Not Simply Dump Midrashim Into His Biblical Commentary

If anybody ever learned רש”י and compared it to the מדרשים on many of the פסוקים, you see how careful רש”י was in what to cite and what not to cite. Often, there are three or four or five interpretations and he only quotes one! So, clearly, רש”י does not simply download – it’s not a מדרש-dump into רש”י. So, clearly, רש”י left a lot out.

Rabbi Nathaniel Helfgot, “What is פשוטו של מקרא?” YCT Yom Iyun (New York City: 13 January 2014).

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“We do not have the luxury of assuming that Jews will feel engaged in the Jewish tradition just by experiencing a few inspiring programs”

We do not have the luxury of assuming that Jews will feel engaged in the Jewish tradition just by experiencing a few inspiring programs. Jews must become self-directed translators of the Jewish tradition — for themselves and their peers. This means less focus on “experiences” and more focus on the building blocks of educational discovery. This is not about religious indoctrination. This is unlocking the power of Jewish heritage.

American culture supports so many forms of creativity and experimentation — but this rarely extends to Judaism. We believe that an education must include Shakespeare, Joyce and knowledge of the Civil War, yet not the Mishnah or Psalms. What would it take to promote a deep engagement with the building blocks of the Jewish tradition and to make this pursuit an acceptable pre- or post-college endeavor?

Elie Kaunfer, “The Real Crisis in American Judaism”, The Jewish Week (7 April 2010), 12.

The Talmudic Sages Asked the Same Questions that Contemporary Biblical Critics Ask

I think that חז”ל saw the questions. One of the things I find interesting about studying Biblical critics nine times out of ten, or even ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the questions that Biblical critics are asking are typically anticipated by מדרשים.

חז”ל’s answers are very different from the answers that modern Biblical scholars give, but the fact that Jews have been aware of these questions for two thousand years is something that I find very comforting, that, somehow, they were able to go on.

Rabbi Jeff Fox, “Joshua’s Farewell Speech“, YCT Yom Iyun (New York City: 13 January 2014).

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Football has “served as a loyal and satisfying proxy” to the “moral incoherence of the wars” abroad

Over the past 12 years, as Americans have sought a distraction from the moral incoherence of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the game has served as a loyal and satisfying proxy. It has become an acceptable way of experiencing our savage impulses, the cultural lodestar when it comes to consuming violence. What differentiates it from the glut of bloody films and video games we devour is our awareness that the violence in football, and the toll of that violence, is real.

The struggle playing out in living rooms across the country is that of a civilian leisure class that has created, for its own entertainment, a caste of warriors too big and strong and fast to play a child’s game without grievously injuring one another. The very rules that govern our perceptions of them might well be applied to soldiers: Those who exhibit impulsive savagery on the field are heroes. Those who do so off the field are reviled monsters.

The civilian and the fan participate in the same basic transaction. We offload the mortal burdens of combat, mostly to young men from the underclass, whom we send off to battle with cheers and largely ignore when they wind up wounded.

Steve Almond, “A Fan’s Farewell Note”, The New York Times Magazine (26 January 2014), 45.

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Do children become “bilingual” in an intermarried family?

Children become “bilingual,” Katz Miller contends, the way that they might in a home where more than one language is spoken. But often what really happens in homes where two languages are spoken is that children are semi-lingual in both, unable to sustain a robust conversation in either.

Erica Brown, “Part-Time Judaism”, 2013-2014: The Year Gone By…The Year Ahead, A Special Supplement to the Florida Jewish Journal and the New York Jewish Week (27 December 2013), 7.