2008 July « Rejewvenate!

Kosher Klothes?

July 31, 2008 at 7:46 am | In economics, ethics, halacha, kosher, orthodox | 8 Comments

Growing up, my father always expressed suspicion about kosher certification. As he saw it, a shochet (ritual slaughterer) was considered trustworthy, without need for supervision, unless he specifically did something to lose that trust. The Kashrut industry turns that presumption on its head, by insisting that nobody can be trusted without supervision, but even a non-Jew who never spent a minute learning the laws of kashrut can be trusted for many things, so long as the threat of an inspector coming exists.

What truly jaundiced my father to the whole business was when products like water and bleach began to receive the OU, and when chickens were sold as Glatt Kosher (a halachic category which does not apply to fowl). It was then that he realized that kashrut was a business, and had little to do with religious duties. At that time, perhaps twenty years ago, he said to me that a business like kashrut can only grow in one of two ways. The first is to increase the number of customers who keep kosher or are interested in buying kosher. This is relatively difficult, though the industry has had success in this area. The second, and far easier method, is to certify more goods, irrespective of the whether there is any halachic imperative to certify them.

Why do I bring all this up? Because, as The Wolf reports, there is a movement underfoot to create a Vaad Hatzniyut (Modesty Council) in Lakewood. In Israel, there already exist organizations that will give a ‘hechsher’ to clothing store. My father was right – the industry needs to grow (after all, proceeds from the kashrut business prop up the yeshiva world system).

What makes this even more bitter is the response to the Agriprocessors scandal from within the Orthodox community, and the hostility towards the Conservative movement’s Hecsher Tzedek, which would grant certification to businesses with ethical practices. The outcry from many corners in the Orthodox world has been that, for example:

The fact remains that no one has challenged AgriProcessors in terms of its conformity to the laws governing the production of kosher food. Rather, there have been attempts to graft onto those laws issues that, while important in and of themselves, simply do not relate to kashrut as it is properly and historically understood.

That from the Jewish Press. The stink of hypocrisy doesn’t only taint the Kashrut industry and its apologists, it is humiliating to the entire Kosher community. Here, the zealous guardians of my kashrut observance, who have made sure that I don’t eat non-kosher bleach, or lettuce, or even water, suddenly wake up to the ‘proper and historical’ understanding of Kosher to justify their cruelty to man and beast.

Where has this led us? Raids by the US government on the largest kosher slaughterhouse in the US. Exposes in leading magazines. Investigative articles in the New York Times. A Chillul Hashem. A Shande fun deGoyim, a black eye, a gift to antisemites, arrows in the quiver of those who seek to ban kosher slaughter entirely. A sickening, gut-wrenching parade of rabbis and community leaders lining up to defend a rotten conspiracy all in the name of cheap meat and easy money.

I’ve had it. I won’t touch a Rubashkin product again. Moreover, I will try to avoid purchasing products that have certifications when they are not required. That’s right. I will favor uncertified bleach! I will not drink OU water. I won’t even shy away from “untrustworthy” certifications. We all see exactly how far the trustworthy ones got me, whether with regards tot his scandal or the Monsey chicken scandal. At this point, if the old boys of the Kashrut industry don’t trust or like you, you must be doing something right.

Gan Eden vs. Olam Habah (The 100th post!)

July 27, 2008 at 1:52 pm | In beliefs, books, orthodox | Leave a Comment

In honor of the 100th post on this blog, I thought we could talk a little bit about redemption.

Underlying most, if not all, religions is the promise of transcendence. This world and our lives have limited meaning, and all will fade in time. Religion offers the possibility of eternal existence and relevance to the individual. Redemption is a related idea. It takes the promise of individual transcendence and applies it to the entire nation of believers, and by extension, to the world.

Judaism has a few different models for redemption, both personal and national. My trouble-making uncle asked me “why do we need olam habah (the world-to-come) if we have techiyat Hametim (resurrection of the dead)? And what does Gan Eden have anything to do with either of those?” Each represents a different point in the spectrum of Jewish beliefs about the afterlife, and the End Times. The truth is that there is tremendous confusion about these terms, and others, like Yemot HaMashiach (The Days of the Messiah), Acharit Hayamim (The Latter Days, or perhaps, the End of Days), Yom Hashem (Day of the Lord), and many others. For an excellent treatment of this topic, I suggest reading Simcha Paull Raphael’s Jewish Views of the Afterlife.

What I want to highlight is that there are different ways to think about redemption. In the Orthodox tradition, redemption is something that happens out of time. It represents the final moment in our linear history, and as such, it is the end to history. As such, the expectations for the Messianic Age are revelation, revolution, and an end to the natural order. For many, the Messianic era is seen as a transition from the physical world to the spiritual world.

My vision for redemption does not discard the physical world. I’m not really waiting for the kind of redemption described above, with its God-like Messiah, anachronistic Temple, and precursor wars and devastation. For me, the Holocaust was war enough, and the Return to Zion was redemption enough. I believe we already live in redemptive times.

My model for redemption is the return to Eden. When Man eats from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge he becomes discerning, but in so doing he also becomes alienated from everyone. He no longer lives at ease with God, or the Garden, or even Eve, the flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone. Enmity is sown between Man and Man, Man and God, Man and Nature. Our job is to resolve this enmity, and our redemption is restore harmony within God’s creation.

In very real ways, the Jewish nation has been redeemed from the long night of 2,000 years. What remains for us is not to pray for God to descend from on high and shatter the Golden Dome with thunder and lightning. Nor should we pray for Isaiah’s Christ-like
king, or Maimonides’ rabbi-warrior. Surely, we need great leadership, but more than waiting for great leadership to bring change, we need to seize the opportunity to bring the change that too often we only pray for.

Redemption is about a harmonious relationship with nature and our fellow man that enables us to unify with God’s will. We can achieve it in our land, in our own homes, and in our own hearts, but we must share it with our family, our friends, and our neighbors throughout this world if true redemption is to come in this world, not the next.

More Boundless Drama

July 22, 2008 at 6:59 am | In beliefs, culture | 1 Comment

We’ll get back to regularly scheduled programming soon enough, but after yesterday’s post on the structure of the institutional Jewish community I find myself inspired to write a bit more, thanks to another post from Boundless Drama, who today writes about the term Tikun Olam.

Boundless Drama finds himself opposed to the use of Tikkun Olam to refer to the repair and rebuilding of Jewish institutions and institutional life. I wonder whether that’s a proper use for the term at all. I don’t know of the history of the term itself in modern usage, but it reminds me of the Bilu movement.

Those secular Zionists chose the name Bilu, which was an acronym for Beit Yakov Lechu V’nelcha. The words are taken from Isaiah (2:5), but notably, this is only the first half of the verse. The second half, B’Or Hashem, was purposefully left off. To the secular Zionists, the House of Jacob was to rise up and go, without reference to or expectation of God.

Tikun Olam’s source is from the Aleinu prayer – L’Taken Olam B’Malchut Shadai. It does not mean to fix the world. That’s a more modern meaning to the world l’taken, which is more precisely defined as ‘to establish’. Nor is this part of Aleinu even directed at us. It’s directed at God. In Aleinu, we are depicted as hopefully waiting to see God establish the world under His kingship, so that all will worship Him.

The first part of Aleinu does call upon us to praise God, and perhaps if we praise God through words and deeds, the world will come to acknowledge Him, and in that sense we take part in Tikun Olam. The Lurianic approach of the Gathering of the Sparks is built upon this concept. But what’s missing in our modern execution is the focus on God. We often base our work on the notion that mankind is created in the image of God, when in fact, the formulation that all men are created equal resounds more loudly in our ears.

So much of our work in Tikun Olam, whether it be focused on individuals, institutions, or ourselves, is disconnected from the Divine dimension. We see ourselves as expressing our essential humanity in acts of kindness and compassion, not the reflection of our Divine spirit. All glory for these acts is ultimately to us, not to God, such that Tikun Olam becomes progressive narcissism, not a transformational spiritual act.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

July 21, 2008 at 8:24 am | In culture, education | 1 Comment

I was reading a new blog this morning called Boundless Drama of Creation, and one post caught my eye. It was about how traditional Jewish institutions, be they synagogues or Federations, are interested in having young Jewish leaders fix what’s wrong with these institutions, when the blogger thinks that these young leaders need to be building something new.

I suppose the above tension is an ancient one. Dor holech v’dor ba – generations pass, and it’s out with the old, in with the new. Certainly, based on traditional measures including affiliation, philanthropy, attendance, and ritual observance these institutions have been rejected by the new generation of Jewish adults. But in the past ten years, new Jewish organizations have sprung up and found great success.

My theory is that the Federation system as a whole dictates a particular relationship structure between funders, professionals, and recipients of service, and it is this relationship model that has been rejected. Federations are fundraising and grant-making organizations. A Jewish community has a variety of social needs, from elder care to political action to education to ritual worship. Rather than having every social organization raise money individually, a Federation raises money from the entire community and allocates money to service organizations.

Already, we can see that the relationships will focus around who has versus who needs. The constituents of a Federation are its top donors. Those who receive services from charitable organizations are basically disempowered – they’re the needy ones. Those who care about a problem, but are neither wealthy nor interested in becoming Jewish professionals largely have no place in the process. Since raising money is no longer about creating relationships and sharing a vision with the Jewish community at large, but rather with a select few people at a Federation or other mega-donor, the entire process is insular, politically charged, and dominated by back room dealing.

The new organizations have fundamentally changed this paradigm. Take Hazon, whose mission is “to create a healthier and more sustainable Jewish community — as a step towards a healthier and more sustainable world for all.” Hazon does not offer a service to the needy. It offers a new vision for a Jewish relationship to food. It is a hybrid organization that offers education like a school, a vision for living everyday life (and programs to support that vision) like a synagogue, and raises and grants money like a Federation. Meaningful participation in Hazon is a bike-ride away!

It is not just the democratization of activism and involvement that makes Hazon or its bretheren (eg Hadar, Mazon, Storahtelling, Reboot, etc.) successful. It’s the fundamental shift away from building organizations that are meant to meet a need – to group the world into those who have problems and those who solve problems – and towards building organizations around ideological communities. There is likely still a role for the older-style institutions. After all, community needs do exist, and those needs can’t all be met through the newer style of organization, but the future belongs not to the synagogues and Federations of the past, but to the new wave of Jewish organizations.

The 600,000 Hoax

July 17, 2008 at 4:54 pm | In beliefs, tanach, torah | 11 Comments

One of the ‘proofs’ that has gained much currency in the Orthodox world for the historicity of the Torah and its reliability as a document produced by a single author at the time the events it describes were unfolding goes something like this:

The Torah describes that 600,000 men (and their families, so maybe 2-3 million people) took part in the Exodus and received the Torah at Sinai. If the Torah was in fact written later, how could such a claim be made? Wouldn’t people reject the claim because they had never heard this from their ancestors? The Torah would nver have been accepted! It must be that the only way such a claim could exist in the Torah was if it were true. Judaism is unique in that no other religion claims this type of mass revelation.

There are a few underlying assumptions to this argument. First, there is the assumption of literacy and familiarity with the text of the Torah on the part of laypeople. It’s as though the above argument assumes some kind of vetting process, something like a referendum, on the text of the Torah. The second assumption is that people, even if they did know the text, would take these numbers literally. Aside from our own biases, there’s no reason to believe that this would be the case. The third assumption is that all mythic origins stories need to have some basis in truth to become acceptable. This too is a weak claim – did Romans reject descent from Romulus as their origin story because men are not raised by wolves? Myth is myth. Some of it has roots in actual events, some of it does not.

Fundamentally, however, it’s the fourth assumption that really tears down the whole argument. And that’s the assumption that if the Torah was not given all at once, from God at Sinai to Moses and Children of Israel, then it must be a fraudulent text foisted upon a people at some discrete moment in history. Of course, no credible historian or Biblical scholar suggests that this is the case.

The Israelites were themselves composed of many different groups, despite the Torah’s insistence that they were all descendants of one family. This is an indisputable point. How else could you explain, for example, the different accents of the tribe of Benjamin, who could not pronounce the word Shibboleth? Each of these different groups had different traditions.

We can see echoes of ancient traditions from particular groups in the text of the Torah. Consult Joshua 24. Joshua is speaking to the people of Israel and recounting their history. In his detailed retelling of history from the time of Abraham’s father through to the present day, he makes an astonishing omission. He leaves out the revelation at Sinai! Stunning! Moreover, at the end of the chapter (verse 26), Joshua sets up a witness-stone (Even Matzevah) under the oak that was in the Sanctuary of God in Shechem. Deuteronomy 16, of course, forbids precisely those practices. And besides, what Sanctuary of God was in Shechem? The Tabernacle? Perhaps… except the Tabernacle itself is mentioned only once in the entire book of Joshua.

The Israelites had different origins. Ancient traditions from groups based around Shechem, Beit-El, and Hebron within the land of Canann, and Egypt, Aram, Haran, and Ur from outside of the land Canaan all survive to some extent in the Torah. Not all of the Israelites were at Mount Sinai, but they did all embrace the tradition of revelation at Sinai. That evolving, coalescing sense of peoplehood is finally captured in the Torah and its story of mass revelation. Just as Americans today speak of their ancestors landing at Plymouth Rock, even though this is not strictly genealogically true, Israelites from different backgrounds all embraced this story.

The story of the writing and development of the Torah is not a hoax. It is the true story of how a disparate group of peoples became one by embracing a God, one history, and one homeland.

Good Point!

July 16, 2008 at 3:55 pm | In Uncategorized | 7 Comments

XGH had a great point in a comment the other day that I wanted to share.

We all know that the Jews at Manna in the desert for forty years. Fair enough. But the Jewish people also had enormous flocks. What did the animals eat?

I’ve never seen this issue addressed in the classical commentators. Anyone else see this somewhere?

Where Have All the Rabbis Gone?

July 16, 2008 at 6:35 am | In beliefs, education, jewish denominations, torah | 4 Comments

Reading Jordanna Birnbaum’s post about a “rabbi roundtable” she attended, I was struck by the extent to which the role of the rabbi has changed, not necessarily for the better. Birnbaum relates that at the roundtable, rabbis from different denominations stopped at particpants’ tables one at a time, and fielded questions. A common denominator to all their responses was the focus on the individual as arbiter of the tradition, and of personal meaningfulness as the epitome of the religious experience.

Far be it from me to prefer a religion that is devoid of personal meaning, but meaning is not a static thing. One rabbi, for example, noted that he doesn’t like Rashi, and prefers to “look at the text and see what is says to me.” I don’t particularly like Rashi’s approach either, but ignoring him isn’t an option in Jewish learning. And even if it was, interacting with Rashi will lead you to discover new meanings in the text. Circumscribing your Jewish understanding so that it contains only that which you find unobjectionable and/or personally meaningful means living in a religious community of one.

And what of the rabbis in all this? Once, rabbis were figures of authority who compelled their followers in religious worship, ethical practice, and many other dimensions. At other times they were teachers, guides, counselors, and confidants. Today they are priests at the Temple of Me, serving as spiritual cheerleaders for congregations and individuals who feel empowered to celebrate their own ignorance of Jewish religious life, theology, and spirituality.

At the lay leadership retreat I recently attended at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Rabbi David Hartman spoke to the assembled congregation of both lay leaders and rabbinical leaders (who were on a simultaneous rabbinic retreat). Speaking to the rabbis, he said that in his shul, the board told him that if he wanted to receive a raise, he should begin to announce page numbers during the service. At this point, Rabbi Hartman became animated and roared “they wanted to turn me from a rabbi into a monkey!”

His message to the rabbis was courageous, powerful, and challenging. Reinvent yourselves! You are obsolete. Your ‘leadership’ over the last sixty years has led the Jewish community to its highest rates of disaffiliation, assimilation and ignorance. You have presided over a collapse, not a renaissance! Rabbis must teach Torah. Not just the parts that correspond to a congregation’s secular ethics or humanist leanings. The actual authentic Torah. Don’t like Rashi? Good. Go learn him and tell me exactly what you don’t like about him, and then go compare him to his grandson the Rashbam. Don’t want to follow halacha as written in the Shulchan Aruch? Don’t think it’s appropriate to modern times? How would you know, if you’ve never studied it? Rabbis have enabled this ignorance and abandoned their central mission in order to become fundraisers and salves to the conscience of Jews who will never flourish until more is demanded of them by God, by faith, and even, yes, by their personal sense of self-worth.

Einstein v. Kagan

July 13, 2008 at 8:15 pm | In beliefs | 6 Comments

Here’s a fun parlor game/internet meme for the jblog crowd:

Would you rather that your son grew up to be Albert Einstein or Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, aka the Chofetz Chaim? These two men lived during roughly the same period (Kagan passed away in 1933, Einstein died in 1955). Einstein changed our understanding of time, space, energy and the universe, and left a changed world in his wake. Kagan authored the Mishna Berurah, an important commentary on Orach Chaim, one of the four sections of the Shulchan Aruch, and also codified the laws and practices related to guarding one’s speech (Lashon Harah). Einstein believed in the god of Baruch Spinoza, Kagan believed in the God of the Exodus. Einstein was a universalist, who rejected the notion that the Jewish people were “chosen”, whereas the Chofetz Chaim was characterized by his certainty that the Jewish people were God’s firstborn, who would be redeemed momentarily by Him. The Chofetz Chaim kept Shabbat; Einstein did not.

Take your pick.

The Role of Sacred Texts in Judaism

July 3, 2008 at 6:32 am | In beliefs, tanach, torah | 1 Comment

Just so you folks know, I’m currently at the Shalom Hartman Institute, attending their Lay Leadership Retreat, which has been terrific so far, and has been very good for coming up with blogging ideas!

One issue we discussed with Rabbi Dr. Alfredo Borodowski was what exactly the purpose of the Torah text might be. The Torah is a poor history book, a distracted legal compendium, and a fractured take on theology. Were any of these the primary aim of the Torah, we should have to say that it was a failure.

The Torah itself informs us that none of the above were its purpose. The Torah tells us of other books, like Sefer Milchamot Hashem, the Book of the Wars of God, that record military history. The Talmud teaches that the Torah was given “megillot megillot” – one scroll at a time, thus answering what the Torah means when it speaks of Sefer HaBrit (Book of the Covenant) or more generally when Moshe, and later Joshua, are depicted as writing some particular chapter or passage in a book. Evidently, more focused segments of the text were intended to fit the more traditional categories of literature.

Yet all of these, and others, were combined into one text, the text of the Torah, and later, into one compendium, that of the Tanach. Why? To the scholar, the haphazard nature of the Torah text is evidence of its scattered origins. in time, place, and religious outlook. All true, but what of the redactor? Why did he do such a poor job of combining these texts? What purpose did the text have that prevented him from editing the text into some semblance of coherence?

A few ideas come to mind. Let’s assume that Ezra is the redactor of the Five Books of Moses. What did he have to work with, and what degrees of freedom did he have to alter what he had? Presumably, Ezra had texts that he simply could not change. The most ancient texts, like the Song of the Sea, or Ha’azinu, or the Blessings of Jacob, were probably inviolate. They were almost certainly committed to writing by this point, and they were surely committed to memory by many Jews.

Other texts were more fluid, both in precise form and in placement. Genesis 1, a P text, was moved from where it most likely stood at the beginning of Leviticus to the beginning of the Torah. Though Noah shows both J and P strands, they are tightly interwoven, indicating that Ezra had a great deal of freedom with the relative placement of these texts. What Ezra has little contol over, throughout, is the specific content. He cannot read out of the Noah story the tradition that Noah took seven of the ‘pure’ animals and two of the impure, even though it makes the story more consistent. The tradition is too strongly rooted by his time to change or eliminate.

The inclusion of these contrary traditions is, in a very real sense the role of the sacred text in Judaism. As Dr. Borodowski put it, the Torah is a narrative about narrative. The internal contradictions, repeated stories, ambiguities, and other lacunae are the result of compromises between traditions, sources of authority, and political and religious leadership. The preservation of controversy is a key function of the text, because it serves to include all these different voices, and creates interpretive possibilities that do not exist in a more consistent text. The interpretive possibilites lay the groundwork for possible future compromise and inclusion.

Later texts in the Tanach have the same features, for example, the three Isaiahs, the competing historical records of Chronicles and Kings, or the multiple traditions of conquest in Joshua and Judges. Israel Knohl is set to publish a book going back to the earliest days of Israelite presence in the land to unwind these competing traditions and connect them back to their sources in Shchem, Beit-El, Hebron, and so forth, but it is a credit to Judaism that we successfully subsumed so many different voices into one whole not by silencing them, but by including them, even where they disagreed with us.

The Mishna and Talmud embraced this exact methodology, creating a legal code unique in history for preserving controversy and embracing the authority and validity of the minority position. Only recently have legal institutions like the US Supreme Court preserved dissent in a similar fashion. Sadly, Judaism has not done so, and today, legal and religious Jewish writing makes no attempt to create a collective text out of many dissenting voices. Perhpas that is why our dissent divides us so bitterly, where in the past it was a source of strength.

Reflections on Jewish Transformation

July 2, 2008 at 8:57 am | In beliefs, culture, education, halacha, israel, jewish denominations | Leave a Comment

As you know I’ve been studying at the Hartman Institute for the past week, and I want to thank them publicly for the opportunity to study and reflect with so many notable scholars, teachers and participants. This post is among the fruits of this wonderful retreat.

The greatest transformation of the Jewish religion is usually credited to Rabbi Yochanan Ben-Zakai, who together with his colleagues at Yavneh, reinterpreted and reestablished Judaism as a religion based around law, and the house of study and prayer. But his was not the first transformation of Judaism, nor is it destined to be the last.

In sweeping terms, the great reformulations of Judaism responded to the greatest moments of crisis and redemption in Jewish history. Let’s explore them briefly.

The Judaism of the period of the Judges is really the first historical Judaism – a Judaism not based on the ongoing revelation of God to Moses, or even to Joshua. Instead, it was the religion of a people living in history, day by day and generation by generation.

We need not detain ourselves with precisely which texts and practices these Jews had. It is sufficient to consider that this was a time when Jews did not celebrate Rosh Hashana as we do today – as a day of judgment – nor did they celebrate or commemorate many other moments, including Purim, Chanukah, Tisha B’Av, Simchat Torah, and so forth. They did not pray in a minyan, or celebrate a Bar Mitzvah. They did not gather together in shul on Shabbat, and they did not study the Talmud or draw inspiration from Isaiah. Nobody sat around a Shabbat table and explained what was bothering Rashi, or told over a vort from the Rebbe. Truly these were very different Jews!

Their religion was not centralized. A tabernacle existed, but Jews continued to worship, through sacrifice, in many places, including their own homes, as the Tanach attests. There were no kings, but there were many prophets, local potentates, and family worship rituals. Whatever texts were possessed were not studied by the general populace, and literacy was limited to a very few people. Religious worship was also closely tied to agrarian and pastoral cycles.

David, Solomon, and the First Temple changed all that. Central governance and worship created a state religion, and an attendant bureaucracy. Sacrificial worship was restricted to the Temple, even if unsuccessfully, and the king and High Priest joined the prophet as the means through which the nation and God advanced their relationship. The construction of the Temple encouraged pilgrimage as a more significant aspect of worship.

The destruction of the First Temple led to even more significant reforms. Ezra the Scribe redacted a Torah text that became standard, and other books, such as those recorded by the prophets, began to appeat. The institution of prayer began to emerge, even as prophecy declined. The notion of a Diaspora community took hold, as most of the exiled community in Babylon did not return with Ezra and Nehemia. In this Diaspora, Jews did not perform sacrificial worship, nor did they make pilgrimage. New modes of organization and communal life began to emerge.

The Second Temple period within the land of Israel was marked by even greater centralization of worship in Jerusalem, and during the Hasmonean dynasty, a merging of the offices of king and High Priest. Judaism had largely shifted from a rural religion to an urban one, complete with a central High Court – the Sanhedrin - but around the edges, the seeds of a backlash began to sprout. Synagogues, houses of gathering, Batei Midrash (houses of study), sectarian communities, prophets in the hinterland and scholars in the villages all flourished outside of the sphere of influence of the Temple.

When the Great Rebellion led to the destruction of the Temple and the second great exile in 70 CE, there already existed the beginnings of institutions that would reshape Judaism for the next two thousand years. They turned Judaism into a religion of text study and interpretation, prayer and community. The primary institutions were the aforementioned synagogue and Beit Midrash, with their attendant practices of prayer and study. Without an investment in schools, this highly literate mode of religious life could not have emerged.

The Holocaust (and the destruction of many other Diaspora communities, especially in the Sephardi world), and the birth of the State of Israel, along with the rise of another great Diaspora community in the United States has reshaped our religion once again – and we’re just at the beginning. Judaism changes in response to challenges, not in some sort of vacuum. Reform Judaism and Zionism were only the first responses to a world changed by the social and political values of the French Revolution and the economic values of the Industrial Revolution. It is impossible to understate the impact of these twin forces, and nobody, including Jews and the entire world, is done responding and adjusting to these changes.

I believe that the most important changes for their impact on Jewish practice are gender and racial equality, the ease and speed of travel and communication, and the transformation of societies away from traditionally mandated groups and associations towards wholly voluntary participation.

We’ve already seen how some of these changes impacted Judaism, but we have not yet reformulated our institutions around them. On any given Shabbat, our synagogues are populated only by whomever is celebrating a lifecycle event. Our students fill prep schools and universities, not Batei Midrash. We deconstruct our texts and often eviscerate them, and our new texts go unread except by a cloistered few.

What we need to do is to reshape Judaism around these realities. The Orthodox will not lead this change, as they feel the need less sharply. Their isolationism buffers them to a greater extent from the new reality, but this too is a matter of time. For the non-Orthodox the time need is hard upon us.

The new Judaism will not be about sacrificial worship, or about the synagogue in its current form. It will be about travel, including pilgrimage to Israel and travel to communities in need. It will be about leadership in non-profit organizations and social change ventures. And it must be about education, including mandatory high-school-level Jewish education and high-level continuing adult education. Not service learning. Not one-off lectures. Not the rabbi’s speech. We need more intensive learning, perhaps structured around our holidays, to connect our ideologically rooted think-tanks and institutes to the laypeople. We must realign our laity and our clergy once again. The task is before us, let’s get to it!