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Back to the Future with Jonathan Sarna

August 13, 2009 at 6:41 pm | In beliefs, culture, dating and marriage, economics, education, israel, orthodox, politics | Leave a Comment

The more I read of Jonathan Sarna, the more impressed I am with him personally, but the more I fear for institutional Judaism. Sarna is intelligent, considered, insightful and articulate, but he’s also an historian, and my feeling is that movements led by historians and sociologists rather than activists and entrepreneurs are already moving into their exhibit space at the museum.

I bring this up to comment on Sarna’s recent article in Reform Judaism Online, published by the URJ. Sarna has some thoughts to share looking backwards, and a few predictions for the future Judaism, inlcuding:

In the past, economic crises have caused American Judaism to turn inward and away from Israel and its troubles. It has also gutted educational spending, with terrible consequence.
Jewish institutional life tends to benefit from expansions in government services and social safety nets, as these free up significant funds and manpower for Jewish charities and social service organizations.
Expect to see lots of Jewish organizations go under, particularly in the hard-hit Orthodox sector, as we finally learn whose been swimming naked as the tide goes out. Mergers between Jewish instutions will increase, as will mergers between Jewish and non-Jewish institutions.

He’s got quite a few others, but I particularly want to focus on Dr. Sarna’s prediction that, as in the 1930s, American Judaism will turn inwards, and disengage to some extent with Israel. As evidence, Sarna cites the fact that fewer Jews are attending summer-long or semester-long programs in Israel.

My main objection to that piece of evidence is that it discounts Birthright Israel, which has sent over 200,000 Jews to Israel over the last decade. Much of the decline in summer and semester programs in Israel can be attributed to the fact that participants in those trips are ineligible for a Birthright tour, and many high-school students in particular have declined to go to Israel with their youth movements, synagogues, or schools precisely because they prefer to go on Birthright for free.

In any case, Sarna also points out that entirely endogamous Jewish couples are outnumbered nearly 2-to-1 by intermarried couples. If roughly 50 out of 100 Jews marry other Jews, you get 25 endogamous couples. That leaves another 50 Jews marrying 50 non-Jews, and thus you get that 2-to-1 ratio that is simply astonishing. Judaism in America has already been redefined on the ground, and we’re still left sorting out exactly what that might mean.

Aliyah Update

August 12, 2009 at 6:47 pm | In culture, israel | 6 Comments

Great article in the Jerusalem Post about the insignificantly small numbers of Americans making Aliyah – only about 3,000 per year. The article is interesting throughout. Heres a good bit:

To Israelis, “aliya” refers to waves of refugees fleeing a cruel world to take control of their destiny in a place where Jews are an indigenous nation. The vision of Israel as a free Jewish political space, a refuge and a voice for a people that had neither, informs Israeli Jewish identity in deep ways.

But Americans have no parallel memory of destruction, and no experience of sacrifice. They are five generations removed from the Czarist pogroms that drove so many Eastern European Jews to America’s shores in the 19th century. Their Jewishness is a personal choice, as valid as many other chosen identities, and their national experience one of prosperity, freedom and social acceptance.

“Aliya” cannot mean the same thing in such radically different cultures.
Indeed, it doesn’t.

Aliyah Guilt

August 6, 2009 at 7:38 pm | In beliefs, culture, israel, politics | 12 Comments

On a recent trip to Israel I met up with an Israeli couple for dinner in Jerusalem. They are old family friends who raised three boys in Efrat, one of the early settlements around Jerusalem, east of the Green Line. As always, conversation was lively and interesting, but one topic stays with me still. The husband turned to me at one point and asked “ How do American Jews deal with their guilt over not living in Israel?”

The question took me by surprise. At first, I thought that maybe it was just because my friend is, well, a settler, a right-wing religious Zionist who believes that a Jew’s place is in the Biblical land of Israel. Nonetheless, the expectation that American Jews actually feel guilty about not living in Israel seemed a bit extreme, even for someone the media might characterize as an extremist.

I realized quickly that my friend was not alone, and his opinion was not extreme, it was in the mainstream. The ideology of Zionism had no room for a Diaspora, because Zionism redefined Jewish identity as a national identity, bound to a land. Early Zionists, and even not-so-early Zionists fully expected that the Jews of the Diaspora would flock, en masse, to the Jewish State. It took at least two decades after the birth of Israel for the realization to set in that the Diaspora was likely a permanent feature of the Jewish community.

In recent years, the Jewish Agency has come under criticism for not doing its job well, for being inefficient and bureaucratic, and for losing its way now that the mass immigrations of Russian and Ethiopian Jews are complete. My criticism cuts even deeper. Why should the Jewish Agency be encouraging and incentivizing Aliyah at all? There’s a huge difference between rescuing Jewish communities under threat and trying to convince Jews who are comfortable and secure in their Diaspora communities to move to Israel. It’s not like Aliyah attracts enough people to have any real impact on the demographic struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. Moreover, Aliyah as currently structured gives incentive to those who have the least to contribute to the State and the most to take from it. Still, most Israelis remain enthusiastic about supporting Aliyah, even as most Americans are unmoved by the prospect.

I think that both Israeli and American Jews have lost their sense of purpose. In the Zionist narrative, Israel was a solution the problem of Jewish oppression in the Diaspora. The vision for the state itself was to be a nation like any other. American Jews are not so attracted to that narrative because they already live in a place where they feel safe from oppression, and where they are able to fully participate politically and culturally in the life of the nation. What’s the point of Israel? Sure, the land is important, but there are nearly 6 million Jews living in it already. What kind of personal responsibility should an American Jew feel in such a case?

Israel, in turn, looks to America and expects Americans to feel a sense of guilt for not living in Israel,, because such feelings of guilt would validate the Israeli national project. But even among Israelis, the certainty about why Israel exists and what purpose it is meant to serve has faded. Many Israelis emigrate, seeking a safer, easier, less tense life. Why live in existential crisis every moment, says this new breed of Israelis? What’s so important about Israel that it is worth all that sacrifice?

I believe that the state of Judaism and Jewish identity is at a moment of great uncertainty. The Zionist narrative is threatened and confused, and its ideological power is waning. But in America, assimilation threatens Jewish identity in lockstep with fading support for and relationship to Israel. The American vision of Tikun Olam and ethical monotheism had strongly influenced American culture, but at the cost, perhaps, of its power as a Jewish identity. I believe that Israel and America need each other, and that they need a shared narrative that dignifies both communities. Both America and Israel need flourishing and vibrant communities, seized with vision and creativity. We need a shared sense of purpose, a shared language, and a shared future. To get there, we will need to step back from all the old expectations and assumptions and open new dialogues, but most importantly, we’ll need to ask ourselves the hardest questions: Why are we here? What is our purpose? What is the next chapter of the Jewish story that we’d like to tell?

Why?

July 30, 2009 at 12:10 pm | In beliefs, culture, holidays, israel, jewish denominations, politics, tisha b'av | 2 Comments

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? All around the Jewish Internet, and around the Jewish world, we are asking “Why?” I asked “Why?” last year too. Why do we mourn on Tisha B’Av? What relevance does it have today? Who wants a Third Temple anyway?

Traditionally, we believe that both the First and Second Temples were destroyed on Tisha B’av, hundreds of years apart, the First for idolatry, and the Second for baseless hatred among Jews.

Though we typically say that the First Temple was destroyed because of our sin of idolatry, the idolatry of the day was not a matter of private worship. Religion was an organizing principle of government, social interaction, law, and ritual practice. To worship Molech meant to immolate young children. To worship Ashera meant to participate in orgiastic rape rituals with temple slaves. Idolatry was really a matter of competing lifestyles and ideologies, of competing sects seeking to define Israelite life, culture, and worship.

The same is true of life in the Second Temple. Hellenists, Jewish Christians, Sadducees, Pharisees, Sicarii, Zealots, Essenes, and other sects were characteristic of a highly fragmented social, political and religious milieu. These groups fought between and among themselves, to devastating consequences. But the question remains, why do we call this baseless hatred (Sina’at Hinam) ? The ideological differences between these groups were massive! Issues at stake including how many gods were to be worshipped, whether god was corporeal, what was the role of written text of Torah versus oral traditions of Torah, was religious leadership hereditary or earned, what was the appropriate practice of the Sabbath, and who controlled the Jewish calendar. There’s nothing baseless about the bitter rivalries and conflicts that played out over these issues!

A further question. On Tisha B’av we mourn the destruction of the Temple because the Temple was supposedly the symbol of Jewish unity. Yet the Temple was the very site of the political and religious power struggles described above. The Talmud is replete with stories about violent confrontations and devious machinations occurring in the Temple itself. The building that was destroyed, Herod’s Temple, was an enormously controversial project when Herod, considered and Edomite non-Jew and Roman puppet by many of his subjects, built it only a few decades prior to its destruction. I can mourn over Jewish hatred, but why mourn the destruction of the very forum in which they played out? It took the destruction of the Temple for Jews to consolidate and unite around Rabbinic Judaism, which sustained it for 2000 years!

In the last 2000 years, Tisha B’av has become a catch-all day of mourning. Kinot (mournful poems) are recited for the Crusades, pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holocaust. The last, in particular, has become an important part of the modern Tisha B’av, because it is both so enormous in scale and so recent as to be quite relevant and relatable. People can still find tears for the Holocaust that they cannot find for a 2000-year old Temple ruin. But the problem with Tisha B’av as a Holocaust memorial is that first question I asked, “Why?”. We have reasons for the destruction of our Temples, but what reason do we have for the Holocaust? Last year, I wrote:

We are still mad from the Holocaust. We can find no meaning in it, we are estranged from God, from ourselves, and from our destiny because of it. We drink in all of its memories, we recite very name, stare at every photo, and listen to every story, but we never master it. We cannot bring ourselves to name its causes, to assign responsibility for it, or to reframe our relationship to God around it. And until we don’t change that, the creeping numbness that inflicts us every Tisha B’Av will grow, the distance between our values, our work, our God, and ourselves will lengthen, and we will become a faceless, speechless people with no lesson for the world but silence.

This year, I will try to formulate the beginning of a response.

The Temple is understood as a symbol of unity, even if in practical terms that unity proved elusive. Yet that unity is expressed in some contradictory ways.

The Temple is meant to be a house of worship for all people and nations, but its precincts are restricted. Non-Jews could not enter the main sanctuary at all, and increasing levels of restricted access governed the courtyard, sanctum and inner sanctum.
The pillar of smoke rising to Heaven from the altar symbolized the intimate connection between Man and God, but the smoke itself was produced in the basest way, by burning slaughtered animals.
Priests were to wear gleaming white difficult-to-clean linen garments, symbolizing purity, but would soon be spattered in impossible-to-remove bloodstains shortly after they started their sacrificial work.
The Temple was a site of pilgrimage, where you would gather to see and be seen by God, but when you got there, the closest you could come was the front lawn.
Though the Temple is the site of worship for every Jew, nowhere are the status distinctions between Jews more pronounced. Priests, Levites, and Israelites played very different roles. Wealthy Jews brought different sacrifices than poor Jews. Judges and scholars played official roles. Though all belonged at the Temple site, none were created equal there.
The courtyard of the Temple housed the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court of the Jewish people, which sat in between a bazaar and a slaughterhouse.
Although the greatest prohibition in Judaism is idolatry, sitting in the Holy of Holies, on top of the Ark of the Covenant that had held the Ten Commandments, was an idol! The center of all Jewish worship and intention was a statue of two cherubs facing one another.

The Temple’s lesson about unity one of the greatest lessons of Jewish wisdom. Unity is not about universal adherence to one idea or ideal. Judaism proposes that unity is about being able to hold many contradictory ideas in our minds at once, and to be able to express them in our lives. The point to aim at, the point where God’s presence could be said to rest, is between the two cherubs. The universe, and our relationship to God, is fundamentally complex. Life is not a morality play or kabuki theater, where obedience to the form defines right and wrong. But life is also not a solipsistic play, where our own egos and intellects determine morality for the entire universe.

To hold contradiction together requires diversity. One person, alone, cannot, contra Walt Whitman, contain all the multitudes. Judaism requires many sects, many tribes, many schools of Halacha, Hashkafah, and Haskalah. We’ve always had them, and together, as a milling and teeming mass of intellect, spirituality, zealotry, piety, and artistry we’ve expressed our love, awe, fear, passion and intimacy for our Father, Master, Teacher, King, and Beloved, the Breath of Life, the Universal, the Unmoved Mover, the Unknown and Unknowable, and all the other seventy names for God.

Last year, I talked about how the Satmar Rebbe blamed the Holocaust on Zionism, while the Zionists blamed the Holocaust on the Jew of Exile, who could not shake himself out of his existential misery, shake off the shackles of his religious tradition, stand up, declare himself a nation and not a faith, and redeem himself. Both are wrong, but both are right. The answer is not to unify around one pole or the other. Had all Jews abandoned Judaism to move to Palestine, we would have lost the very soul of Judaism in exchange for a piece of dirt and a UN membership. Had Jews not taken to the Zionist dream and built what was to be the State of Israel, the Holocaust might well have ended the Jewish project entirely. And they are not the only ones who are right and wrong. The Reform, who cast away law in favor of ethics, and the Orthodox, who cast away ethics in favor of law, and the Conservative, who cast away principles in favor of compromise, and secular who cast away history in favor of culture, and all the other sects, groups and denominations of Modern Judaism, they are all wrong, and all right, and all need to learn not just to tolerate, but to dignify the other as necessary, as valid, as honored.

Diversity ensures our survival. Without it, we have no mechanism for finding new ideas, for defining new ways to express our core values in a changing world, or for striving for our own improvement and drawing closer to our ideals and our vision of the Divine. Tisha B’av teaches us that baseless hatred is baseless not because there are no core issues at stake between groups, but because each group is striving for a common goal. Each group is working ‘lishma’ for a pure purpose, even as differences abound about how to pursue it or even what it is. Our challenge is to wrap our arms around all of this stiff-necked people with its squabbling and bickering, to love it, to nurture it, and to lead it it to achieve its promise as a light unto the world. So long as we have not achieved that, I’ll have reason to fast on Tisha B’av.

Netilat Yadayim Redux

July 28, 2009 at 7:30 am | In culture, halacha, orthodox | 5 Comments

A little while back, I was invited to guest post on DovBear. I wrote about how Orthodox Judaism has emphasized the ritual and symbolic value of its practices at the expense of the concrete and pragmatic values of those practices. One example I used was Netila Yadayim, ritual hand-washing. Netilat Yadayim has significance connected to ritual purity, but it is also undeniably part of a rich Jewish tradition of cleanliness. In my own personal practice I’ve sought to reclaim the practical value of cleaning my hands prior to eating, and also raising that value to the level of religious virtue by washing my hands with soap and water, and then rinsing with a traditional pitcher of water poured ritualistically over my hands.

Introspective Hareidi, a commenter helped, albeit unwittingly, illustrate my point. He noted that my practic,e of Netilat Yadayim might well lead me to saying an invalid blessing (bracha l’vatalah) because if there was still soap on my hands when I rinsed them, that soap would act as a block (chatzitza) between my hands and the water, thus invalidating my hand-washing and turning my blessing into an act of taking God’s name in vain. I’ll admit to having a pretty good laugh when I read the comment. How absurd! This guy was worried about the soap, but evidently, he had no concern about the dirt that the soap was washing away!

According to the halacha, Netilat Yadayim must be performed with hands that are already clean, precisely because dirt on the hands will block the water and invalidate the ritual efficacy of the hand-washing. But if you position yourself to observe people doing Netilat Yadayim, almost none of them pre-wash with soap. Culture trumps law, as usual.

I bring all this up because my engagement with Netilat Yadayim has been a really fascinating journey. I grew up with Netilat Yadayim being part of the Shabbat. I knew that it was something you were supposed to do at every meal with bread, but practically, it was a Shabbat thing. Having chosen to take it on as an adult for both its ritual and practical sides, I finally found myself meaningfully engaged in religion in a way that has been absent from my life for a long time.

The reason behind my new commitment to Netilat Yadayim was precisely because it was both ritual and purposeful. But in order for it to be purposeful, it needed to include soap. And that meant that the whole shape of the ritual was up for grabs. For a while I experimented with different approaches, before finally settling on a practice. Along the way, I puzzled over why we recite the blessing for Netilat Yadayim after we perform the act, and also tried on for size eliminating the entire ritual rinse in favor of just a good old-fashioned washing your hands with soap. This exploration alone was a tremendously rich experience.

The richest part of the experience, however, was not around the specifics of the practice. It was about the commitment to the practice. Sometimes I would forget to wash my hands, and remember only in mid-meal. Even though my hands were basically clean, I felt a pull to wash them, a pull I largely honored. Other times, I would be about to start a meal shortly after washing my hands for some other purpose, like if I had recently been to the restroom. My hands were clean, so did I need to wash them again? I didn’t really think so, but I often did, simply to retain the habit. In the few weeks since I adopted the practice, I felt like I was going through thousands of years of Jewish ritual evolution aimed at meeting my commitment both to ritual and to the practical value of having clean hands.

I’m certain that most Orthodox Jews reading this will shake their heads, perhaps in amusement, and perhaps in disdain. I don’t begrudge them those reactions. I just wish that on some level, they will also nod their heads in recognition. The struggle around religious practice is dignified by human initiative. My choices felt meaningful, powerful, and sometimes, when everything balanced out just right, they even felt holy. That’s an experience that I’ve rarely felt in the Orthodox world, and I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that absence.

Dealing with Dweck

July 26, 2009 at 2:54 pm | In culture, economics, ethics, halacha, jewish denominations, jewish ethics, orthodox, politics | 4 Comments

I’m not really a current events blogger, but the corruption scandal in NJ raises some interesting questions around a topic I am very interested in: the relationship between the US government and the American Jewish community.

Lots of websites and commenters have been throwing around the term moser to describe Solomon Dweck, the FBI informant who cooperated with authorities to help implicate rabbis, politicians and other notables in the recent sting. A moser, according to traditional halacha, is a Jew who delivers other Jews into the hands of secular authorities. The sin of mesirah is a grave one, and the violator is considered worthy of being killed, even in an extrajudicial manner (as in, vigilante justice). It makes no difference whether those being informed against are innocent or guilty, by the way. The law prohibits turning Jews over to non-Jewish authorities even if these Jews are despicably evil.

It’s easy to understand how Maimonides, for example, who writes in such terms about a moser, might feel so strongly. Whether living in Christian Spain or Muslim Egypt in the 12th and 13th centuries, little could be expected by way of justice, fairness, or humane treatment by the prevailing governments and legal systems. Some would argue that the Dreyfuss Affair, the trial and convictions of Julius and (especially) Ethel Rosenberg, and Jonathan Pollard suggest that modern democracies and even American democracy don’t have a much better track record. The point, though clearly an overreaching, is well-taken.

In the modern world, where does this leave us? We know that child-molestors like Baruch Lanner and Yehuda Kolko were left free to ruin more lives and abuse more innocent victims precisely because rabbis in the Orthodox community refused to turn them into secular authorities. These same rabbis also lacked the tools and powers to prevent these men from committing further abuses.

Omerta may be appropriate when secular authorities are capricious at best and violently cruel and antagonistic at worst. Faced with such an enemy, the Jewish community must be secretive, protective, and devious. Yakov deals with Lavan, just such an enemy, b’mirmah, deceitfully. Trust, honesty, and openness must be mutual to be meaningful.

However, in the United States, where Jews live with a government that they too elect, and in a nation that is unprecedented in history for its embrace of Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish leadership, this culture of silence is a corrosive and corrupting influence, particularly when silence is coupled with zero enforceability. Instead of protecting us from an exploitative and dangerous authority, it actually endangers us further, because it encourages corruption, extortion, bribery, and a general disrespect and abuse of the system of laws and justice that protect all of us.

If our communities are built on corruption, we encourage hatred of Judaism by Jews and non-Jews alike. How many Jews felt a sense of revulsion upon hearing this latest sordid story? The Syrian community feels betrayed and slandered. The Orthodox community at large feels a pit in its stomach, particularly as this is the period of the Nine Days, a particularly tragic and mournful time in Jewish history. And the broad family of Jews is sickened as well by yet another story of financial malfeasance that seems to confirm all the worst hatreds and stereotypes still held by some non-Jews, even in this, the fairest of nations.

The answer is a difficult one. If we hold fast with the prohibition of mesirah than we, as a community, are the true criminals, for failing to police ourselves, and for allowing this evil to take root in our midst. Alternatively, we can turn over the powers of investigation and enforcement to the State, and lose some of our dignity, identity and uniqueness in the process. What is for sure is that this is not an isolated incident, and that a culture of corruption and contempt for government and for Gentiles is thriving, particularly in some Orthodox communities. We need to address the moral and economic causes underlying this immediately, lest we breed a new generation of anti-Semites, and lest we fail to treat our fellow American with the full measure of justice and fairness that he surely deserves.

Land, People, and God (pt 1)

June 8, 2009 at 9:57 am | In beliefs, culture, israel, jewish denominations, politics | Leave a Comment

What is Judaism It’s not a race, nor is it just a religion. Ethnicity doesn’t capture the religious elements, nor does nation. The Mordechai Kaplan idea that Judaism is a civilization is sufficiently expansive, but not really specific enough.

The best paradigm for defining Judaism to date is the three-pronged approach. Judaism is a civilization that expresses commitments to the land of Israel, the Jewish people and their culture, and the God of Israel as worshipped through Jewish religion.

Speaking broadly, we can say that throughout history, strong expression of any two of these three prongs has been sufficient to create a Jewish society. Expressing all three, however, requires an intetgrative vision that has proven elusive.

We can divide Judaism, with exceptions, into three time periods. Ancient Judaism, from the Exodus through the destruction of the Second Temple, can largely be seen as Judaism built on Land and God, but not on the people of Israel. The people lived in the Land of Israel and defined themselves around that reality. They also worshipped the Jewish God. What they lacked was a sense of cohesive identity. Tribal identities, local loyalties, and ethnic differences all stood in the way of a sense of united peoplehood.

Over many hundreds of years, Jewish identity emerged, but it took the volution of many new institutions and new ideas. The move from tribal judges to a monarchy, and from decentralized worship to Temple worship were important steps, but progress did not happen in a straight line. The split of the monarchy into Judah and Israel, the establishment of alternate sites of worship , and the evolution of separate holy texts rmained significant obstacles to unity.

The Babylonian exlie and the reforms of Ezra helped create a single sacred text and a shared sense of identity, but Jewish sectarianism of a non-tribal nature replaced the previous tribal splits. Hellenists, Essenes, Baithusians, Samaraitans, Sadduccess, Pharisees, and Christians were only some of the sects that divided Judaism and defeated any sense of common purpose or identity.

The destruction of the Second Temple and the seconf Exile posed an enormous challenge to Judaism, forcing it to reorganize. The Land of Israel was gone, and Judaism reformed around Nation and God. Over the next few hundred years, Judaism would shed most of its sects, divorce decisively from Christianity, abandon Jewish Europe and its Greek coonnections, and recenter itself around a new set of leaders whose authority flowed from their mastery of religious matters. The central institutions of synagogue and study hall brought regular religious practice into a communal space; so different from the Temple in Jerusalem. The cohesiveness of these new communities was such that the lack of a land or polity could be overcome through a strong sense of peoplehood.

This strong sense of peoplehood was reinforced throughout the Middle Ages by the outside. It was very difficult for a Jew to be anything other than a Jew. Full conversion to Christianity was possible, but it carried with it the cost of leaving your entire old life behind. Similarly, there was little social or economic mobility for most of the period.

The Enlightenment changed all that. Among its revolutionary ideas was the notion of history as a tale of human progress. Economic and social mobility, along with a borad redefinition of human rights and a rejection of class and caste systems, birthed the possibility of a person selecting an idenitity rather than being born into one. Religious ideas like predestination were rejected, religious institutions were subject to withering attacks, and the concept of national identity was forwarded to replace religion as a means of uniting people and creating common cause.

Zionism was born in this era. It represents a Judaism of People and Land, wiith no God. The Zionist concept was the Jews were a people like any other, and needed to redeem themselves, retake their land, and live their national destiny on the soil of their ancestors. Religious opposition to Zionism as a forbidden hastening of the Messianic era was deemed archaic – an expression of a Jew so imprinted by the ghetto that he no longer wanted to be free.

Conceptually, Zionism was very attractive,and following the Holocaust, it was seen as proven correct and desparately necessary. So long as the Jewish people felt an existential crisis, Zionism represented an ideology of survival that encompassed and sheltered all that was destroyed in Europe, from the cosmopolitan Jewery of Berlin to the Jews of the shtetls.

Each of the above representations of Judaism is missing something, and is therefor uniquely vulnerable. Thought the State of Israel has been through trying times, by 1973 it was clear that Israel did not face an existential threat to its existence from its Arab neighbors, and its nuclear deterrent capabilities drew the period of widescale, open conflict in Israel to a close.

With survival no longer the only issue, but with Israelis continuing to pay a high cost to live in Israel, it was inevitable that the question would arise – why? Why live in Israel? America had a thriving, secure, robust Diaspora community. Life was easy, there was no army service, or violent neighbors, or random acts of terror. Zionism had not really considered any ongoing role of Diaspora Jewish communities, even as it depended on their ongoing financial and political support. Suddenly though, many young Israelis began to abandon the Zionist dream in favor of personal salvation from the burdens of being an Israeli, and of living in Israel. Theodore Herzl said ‘Im Tirtzu, Ein zo Agadah’ – if you will it/desire it, it is not a dream. Modern Israeli graffiti today attributes a different statement to Herzl – ‘Lo Rotztim? Lo Tazrich!’ – You don’t want it? Fine, we don’t need to have it.’

Some might say that this view is short-sighted, and that the American Jewish experience is unique in history, or unlikely to last. One day, America will become hostile to Jews, and Israel will be needed as a refuge. While this analysis may prove true, its power as an ideology is waning. Israel cannot just be a place to run to, not for those who live there and often feel they’d raather run somewhere else, or those who live elsewhere and will not excuse Israel’s conduct in exchange for a promise of haven that they will likely never need.

And that leaves us where we are today. We need a new vision for Judaism, that can integrate, to some extent, our land, our people and our faith. It must give purpose to our presence in Israel as well as in the Diaspora. It must cast a broad net over all of us, a Sukkah under which we can all shelter, that gives us a sense of commonality and peoplehood. And it must mediate our varied relationships to God and faith. We can’t pick two out of three – we have to integrate all three.

In the next post, I’ll look at the rise of denominationalism as a response to Enlightenment, and the ways in which denominations responded to the Zionist rejection of God by attempting to articulate Godly philosophies of Zionism.

Alternative Models for Jewish Education

March 12, 2009 at 10:03 pm | In culture, education, jewish denominations, orthodox, politics | 12 Comments

I’ve been reading a lot of posts about Jewish education, often in the context of the economic difficulties we are currently in. I’d like to just sketch a few alternative models for Jewish education that may be more sustainable than what we’ve got now.

Model 1:

Existing day schools slash costs and give a bare-bones offering. No extra-curriculars (or pay-as-you-go), no AP classes, and a scaled-back Judaics curriculum. High schools run for only three years and graduate students per the minimum state standards (like a NY Regents diploma). Access to education is increased, and quality instruction will still be available, but less will be taught. Students who want to get into top colleges will need to go elsewhere.

Model 2:

Community schools. For this to work, all denominations need to pull together to make the schools attractive to all. Secular studies will benefit from economies of scale, and facilities and overhead costs will be significantly reduced. Judaic studies can be offered on different tracks, so that parents can still have their children study the brand of Judaism they subscribe to. The big obstacle here is aprticipation of the Orthodox, most of whom would not send their children to a co-educational school, or to a school where they might be exposed to ‘heterodox’ children and influences.

Model 3:

Public schooling/Charter school followed by Talmud Torah/Hebrew School. Though this model can be economically affordable, it suffers two major flaws. For the Orthodox, sending your kdis to public school is the only thing worse than sending them to a community day school. For the non-Orthodox, Hebrew schools are usually a 4-6 hours/week commitment. Kids very quickly get the message that Hebrew School isn’t important. Little of educational value ends up being achieved, which only confirms that the exercise is not valuable.

Model 4:

Home-schooling networks. These are great ideas, especially for small communities, but I can’t imagine how these would scale up to meet the needs of large Jewish communites. That said, their existence will particularly benefit the Orthodox, for whom home-schooling wouldn’t carry mcuh of a stigma.

As for me, I would like to see Model 2, the community schools, become the dominant model. Enough already with all of our separate institutions and insistence on ideological purity. Teaching our kids together is the surest and swiftest path towards greater Jewish unity, appreciation of Jewish diversity, and flowering community.

Speculation on the Future of Orthodoxy

February 22, 2009 at 5:46 pm | In culture, economics, education, jewish denominations, orthodox | 8 Comments

The Orthodox community of the last few decades has seen itself as a community on the rise. The growth in numbers of adherents, the large families, and the explosion in the numbers of synagogues and schools attest to that rise, and feed into the phenomenon of Orthodx triumphalism that I personally find upsetting. Some, like Rabbi Harry Maryles at Emes V’Emunah, believe that this growth, and its concommitant rightward motion, will lead to a Hareidi future for Judaism.

As the market has taught us though, past results are no guarantee of future performance. And it is the market’s recent performance that makes me speculate on the future of Orthodoxy.

Dr. Jonathan Sarna, writing about this topic from the perspective of Jewish philanthropy, has identified a few trends that bode ill for the Orthodox community.

In most economic downturns, it is the weakest companies and institutions that take the biggest hits. Sarna points out that the Orthodox community faces a double-whammy. Not only are the Orthodox disproportionately emplyed in the banking and financial sectors that ahve been hardest-hit in this downturn, but Orthodox institutions are also the most vulnerable financially. On top of this, the Orthodox use two very expensive classes of institutions very heavily: synagogues and schools.

Based on the above, we might predict a few things. First, educational expenses will continue to rise, and many schools will be forced to close. Some Orthodox Jews will surely yank on the escape cord and make Aliyah. Others will be forced to consider other educational options for their children. Despite all the news about vouchers and charter schools, at this time, public school is the only real alternative.

The effects of this will be felt broadly. As Rabbi Maryles correctly points out, the Hareidi domination of Orthodox education has been a key factor in the general rightward tilt of Orthodoxy. But with fewer students attending these schools, and a lesser demand for teachers in Orthodox schools from right to left, the Hareidi economic system will come under even more pressure. Orthodox institutions, particularly those providing social services, will also be under tremendous strain, and some will surely fold. Organizations that provide what one might call ’shadow’ care – that is, services that are already avaiable through the government (eg Hatzalah ambulance service) or through non-Orthodox organizations will see their support dry up as critical charitable services receive top priority from stretched donors.

Taken together with the already-precarious economic structure that Orthodoxy rests upon, and what we have is the makings of a severe decline for Orthodoxy. Some will push further right, embrace lives of faith, poverty and subsistence on government programs. More will enter the workforce. As more Orthodox children attend public educational institutions, demand will rise for supplementary education that can help students navigate their more socially integrated lives. As an educator, I would guess that those precious hours in after-school programs will not be spent on learning how to decode the Talmud. Instead, the currciulum will focus on Jewish identity in a plural society.

All this may well be a boon to Orthodoxy, American Judaism, and American society as a whole. It will certainly erase many denominational lines, as Jews from across the denominational spectrum will all be faced with the same essential challenge of how to maintain a Jewish idenity and grow a vibrant Jewish culture without the help of ghetto walls. But it will be a difficult blow to the Orthodox community of today, and to many of its finest institutions.

New York Times Gets Religion

January 1, 2009 at 9:59 pm | In beliefs, culture | 1 Comment

Every single person should read, study, meditate and focus on this quote from Dr. Michael McCullough, a psychologist from the University of Miami. The quote was delivered in the context of an interview for a New York Times article (interesting throughout) about the role of religion in influencing self-discipline and self-control.

Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness.

The aura of sacredness; the ability to be mavdil ben kodesh l’chol, to distinguish between the sacred and the mundane is the base mission of humanity, and in fact, God’s first act of creation that was not ex nihilo. In other words, God’s first act that is imitable by mankind is separating the sacred from the mundane, and the proven method by which we humans come to acquire that ability is through religious practice and worship. Good stuff.