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“…students consider extremism in pursuit of anything a vice; a turn-off, not a turn-on”

Jewish students are largely disengaged from Israel. They are more likely to be able to distinguish between different fraternities and sororities than between the parties in the Knesset, or the panoply of Jewish communal organizations. When ideological groups take strident positions on campus, the majority of Jewish students respond with a deafening “Huh?” Campus professionals will confide that students consider extremism in pursuit of anything a vice; a turn-off, not a turn-on.

Jeff Rubin, “It’s Jewish Education, Stupid”, The Jewish Week (10 January 2014), 28.

“…today, the rabbi’s position as a consultant on halachic matters is not very relevant”

…today, the rabbi’s position as a consultant on halachic matters is not very relevant. How many people turn to rabbis with questions about kashrut? Today rabbis are being asked to solve totally different problems: husband-wife or parent-child relationships, and sometimes also issues of faith. As such, the rabbi, who is not a trained marriage counselor, psychologist or philosopher, is forced to answer them. Consequently, nowadays rabbis are, unfortunately, dealing mainly with issues for which they have not been properly trained, and rarely are they dealing with those areas for which they did receive the proper training.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, “The Rabbis of Today“, JPost.com (9 January 2014).

What Edgar Bronfman loved in the Babylonian Talmud

A devout non-believer, Edgar said his favorite book was the Babylonian Talmud, whose hero is not God but the argumentative and cunning human scholar. The paradigm of the Talmudic scholar requires a rigorous knowledge of foundational texts and a sharp wit, mixed with a healthy dose of competitiveness, a thirst for justice, an appreciation of one’s own fallibility… and a great sense of humor.

Rabbi Mishael Zion and Rebecca Voorwinde, “Edgar M. Bronfman: A Modern Talmudic Jew”, The Jewish Week (10 January 2014), 29.

Some Lessons About How Change Happens

So here’s what I’ve learned about how change happens: You start screaming about something and though many people turn their backs, some people listen. And if they don’t hear you the first time, they probably hear you the third or fourth time, and then some people take those messages and translate them into their own communities or their own language. And then one day you turn around and see major changes in places you’d never expected. And you start noticing that the wall you were worried about has a myriad of small cracks in many places, and you notice that the cracks come from other people banging on it or from the shoots climbing up through the wall in new places. And then one day, all those tiny cracks converge. And a big chunk of the wall comes tumbling down.

Bat Sheva Marcus, “How Change Happens”, The Jewish Week (6 December 2013), 23.

Trying to understand Jews who only see themselves as merely ethnically Jewish

Jews by religion as we have seen share a sense of sacred ethnicity, Jews of no religion have a sense of “ordinary” or “descriptive” ethnicity. Jews of no religion are indeed proud of their Jewishness (83%), however only 12% said that it was “very important” to them. Most of these Jews of no religion, as we have seen, do not wish to pass on their Jewishness to their children, nor do they have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people. In other words, Jewish ethnicity for these people is a fact about themselves. It is a fact that most are not ashamed of and are even proud of. However, it is not very important to them – for the most part, it does not incur any special sense of belonging or obligation. And if their children will not feel or be Jewish, that’s fine too. Thus, the ethnicity of Jews of no religion is very similar to the ethnicity of other white ethnics described by Richard Alba as being in a “twilight.” For the most part white ethnics are totally assimilated into the American heartland with very high rates of intermarriage. For some their ethnic or increasingly multi-ethnic background can be occasionally highlighted “symbolically” or “optionally” in those situations in which it can provide “spice,” status or interest. It certainly does not contain any sacred or normative dimension, and it is sparsely passed on to their children.

Shlomo Fischer, “Who are the “Jews by Religion” in the Pew Report?“, Times of Israel (18 November 2013).

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Ordained rabbis were rare in America before the mid-19th century

Ordained rabbis were rare before mid-century. The first arrived in Baltimore, in 1840, and even after they began to come over from Europe, congregations frequently used laymen or minimally trained leaders for the basic ritual services, such as reading the liturgy, providing music for worship, and chanting the Scriptures, as well as for running the synagogue or supervising the dietary regulations (especially for meat). When rabbis (or, as they were sometimes called, especially when they were not ordained, ministers or reverends) cantors (hazzanim), whether trained or not, were hired by these reforming congregations, they were usually given, in writing, the synagogue’s expectations about how they would lead (reading or singing or both) the liturgy, how frequently they would deliver sermons, in which language they would deliver them, their obligations with respect to life-cycle events such as confirmation ceremonies, weddings, and funerals (including compensation), their responsibilities with the choir, which ages they would teach, and even the precise order of the liturgy. At Rodeph Shalom, for example, the Ritual Committee instructed the service leader to begin the Friday-evening service with L’chu n’ran’na (Come let us sing) and then gave sentence-by-sentence orders. Shaarai Shomayim, a small synagogue in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (with an 1855 German constitution), hired its first ordained rabbi, Morris Ungerleider, in 1884 as “Chasan, Minister, Teacher, and Schochet.” Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation, in 1857, hired the Reverend S. Berman as “chasan, Shochet, and Shammes,” and twelve years later it sought someone who “can perform the duties of Chasan, teacher, and Shochet,” is “capable of teaching in the Hebrew, German, and English languages,” and could deliver sermons. The larger the congregation, that is, the greater the budget, the more likely these roles would be divided up among a rabbi, a cantor, a ritual slaughterer, a teacher, and a sexton.

In Atlanta, Abraham Jaffa, shochet, mohel, and hazan – slaughtered chickens in the rear of his home. Washington Hebrew Congregation, in the district of Columbia, hired two salaried officials in 1867, one to serve as lecturer and the other to serve as hazan or reader and teacher. In 1871, the congregation replaced the two two with one man, Michael Goldberg, “reader and teacher,” and explained to him that it no longer wanted sermons. He was to “read” the service, “keep” the religious school (twice during the week and on Sunday), and “educate” a choir, but he was not to preach during the Sabbath worship service. At the same time as the congregation was steadily introducing reforms, it returned to a centuries-old European tradition of eschewing weekly sermons and, instead, hiring someone to preach on occasional festivals and holy days.

Marc Lee Raphael, The Synagogue in America: A Short History (New York & London: New York University Press, 2011), 35-36.

“If “remembering the Holocaust” is an essential part of what it means to be Jewish, then it follows that a substantial core of Jewish identity is primarily defined by heinous acts committed by Nazis upon Jews”

If “remembering the Holocaust” is an essential part of what it means to be Jewish, then it follows that a substantial core of Jewish identity is primarily defined by heinous acts committed by Nazis upon Jews. In a tragic twist of history, it is the enemy who now writes the story of Jewish identity and who determines its emphases.

Perhaps even more regrettably, this “essential” feature of being Jewish is characterized by gaping loss, appalling destruction, and unremitting sadness. Hence, according to the popular view, the most pivotal component of Jewishness actually emerged post-1933 in the form of a horrendous cataclysm that was fashioned by others; and Jewishness is devoted to recalling this nightmare so that nobody should forget what happened.

Let there be no doubt: it is vitally important to remember the Holocaust and its lessons. But it is also vitally important to acknowledge that remembering the Holocaust is no more essential to being Jewish than remembering 9-11 is essential to being American. Both memories are of great consequence, but neither shapes the “essential meaning” of the nation.

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Schiff, “Remembering Our Identity”, eJewish Philanthropy (2 January 2014).

“Neither the brief exegetical comment nor the longer midrashic proem are imaginable as actual sermons delivered in synagogues”

Rabbis would, of course, also occasionally address the public, whether on the street, in the market or synagogue. But it is unlikely that they did so by using the literary forms which are transmitted in the written documents. Neither the brief exegetical comment nor the longer midrashic proem are imaginable as actual sermons delivered in synagogues. Even the parables usually presuppose a certain amount of Biblical knowledge which the ordinary person is unlikely to have possessed. They may have served rabbis to clarify certain aspects of biblical verses during the oral instruction of their student rather than providing moral and theological instruction to the populace. Apophthegmata or pronouncement stories memorialized rabbis’ wit and wisdom. Again, later generations of students would have been most interested in transmitting and preserving such stories about their teachers to make these teachers immortal and to maintain the reputation of their “schools”.

Catherine Hezser, “Form-Criticism of Rabbinic Literature”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martinez, Didier Pollefeyt and Peter J. Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 108.

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The salaries of rabbis in America in the 1890s and 1900s depended upon denomination

While the status of women was quite similar from branch to branch, the salaries of rabbis were not. Generally, with very few exceptions, rabbis of Reform synagogues received salaries, paid monthly, which provided a reasonable standard of living for them and their families. In contrast, rabbis of Orthodox synagogues everywhere struggled to make ends meet. Many of these rabbis, in the 1890s and early 1900s, earned less than $1,000 a year in salary, and they were forced to sometimes collect the money themselves and to charge Jews for each rabbinical service. They frequently supplemented their small salary by overseeing kashruth (especially supervising animal slaughter); serving as an arbitrator in questions of Jewish law; performing marriages, divorces, and other life-cycle ceremonies; selling wine for ritual purposes (including later, during Prohibition, legally, because of provisions that allowed the sale of wine for religious use); and selling collections of their sermons. For example, Rabbi Gedaliah Silverstone, of Orthodox Tifereth Israel in Washington, D.C., claimed to have sold 4,000 copies total of three of his privately printed books. Rabbi Abraham Schapiro, of Portsmouth, Ohio’s Orthodox B’nai Abraham, was paid $600 annually in 1896 (he was offered $500 additional salary if he would close the bookshop he owned for supplemental income on Jewish holy days), while Rabbi Abraham S. Braude of Chicago, in 1916, received the same salary from his synagogue. Baltimore’s Chizuk Amuno hired Rabbi Henry W. Schneeberger in 1876 at $1,200 annually; when he sought a raise after nine years, his appeal was rejected (“no way of increasing revenue: he was told); after sixteen years of service, the trustees raised his salary to $1,600, but, when there were “not enough” funds, they reduced it to $1,500. In contrast, when Portland, Oregon’s Reform Beth Israel hired the newly minted rabbi Stephen S. Wise in 1899, they paid him $5,000 a year.

Marc Lee Raphael, The Synagogue in America: A Short History (New York & London: New York University Press, 2011), 54-55.

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“Even in ancient times, allies of Jewish polities exerted cultural influence among Jews, and often enough, too, many Jews lived in the lands of allied countries…”

Even in ancient times, allies of Jewish polities exerted cultural influence among Jews, and often enough, too, many Jews lived in the lands of allied countries, including Egypt, Babylonia and Persia. These cultural/communal relationships had broad geopolitical significance over time, just as one would expect, since geostrategic decisions are never completely divorced from politics at large. So it matters that internal divisions within Israel today abrade against the sensibilities of some Americans and American Jews in particular. American Jews are becoming progressively more disenchanted with Israeli domestic religious policies that increasingly favor an ultra-Orthodox community whose mores are alien to them. Ever more American Jews are also unhappy with Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, even if the vast majority is not in principle hostile to Israel itself. Finally, as more and more American Jews drop their synagogue and communal affiliations, put forth little to no effort to learn about their own culture and history, and think of themselves as “just Jewish” (and then, often enough, only if someone asks them), their emotional stake in Israel wanes accordingly.

Dov S. Zakheim, “The Geopolitics of Scripture,” The American Interest (July/August 2012), 16.