Rebuilding the Temple of Jewish Education

It’s Tisha B’Av today, but instead of mourning the destruction of the Temple or remembering the Holocaust, I’m thinking about how we can rebuild our Jewish community. Many of us believe that the key to a brighter Jewish future is Jewish education that is better, that reaches more people, and that is more relevant and applicable to our lives.

Today, Jewish children receive a Jewish education through Jewish day schools, Jewish supplementary schools, or Jewish camps. And of course, some Jewish children receive no Jewish education at all. There’s plenty of research out proving that day school is an effective way to deliver Jewish education for those who are willing and able to access it. The costs of accessing day school education, both in dollars and in lifestyle choices are very high, and even stipulating that the content of that education is terrific, day school will not be a realistic solution for many Jewish families. Camps, on the other hand, may be a fine complement to education received during the school year, but few would consider it to be an effective way, by itself, to provide Jewish education.

We must instead consider supplementary Jewish education – Hebrew school. Today’s Hebrew school is not the Hebrew school of the past, as caricatured in such films as A Serious Man. The days of uninspiring teachers, rote memorization of Hebrew, and listless classrooms filled with bored students are behind us. Today, and for some years now, Hebrew schools have provided an enjoyable experience that students emerge from with a sense of pride in their Jewish identity, some community service credits, and perhaps some Jewish friends and memories. What they do not get is Hebrew literacy, or even much by way of Jewish knowledge. While progress has been made, claiming success would be a case of setting the bar far too low.

There are many challenges to doing Hebrew school right, but I want to focus on two big-picture issues. The first is content, and the second is distribution. In the non-Orthodox world, the primary values of Jewish life have been Zionism and Tikkun Olam – supporting the State of Israel philanthropically and politically, and perfecting the world through a variety of social, political and environmental initiatives. A framework of Jewish holidays, rituals and traditions that were at times harmonic and at times dissonant with these values provided the structure for Jewish communal living. Hebrew schools taught to this content – the values and the framework for their expression. However, over time, allegiance to these values has waned, and questions and doubts continue to emerge about the values and the framework of non-Orthodox life.

The result of these growing doubts has been a complete lack of confidence and conviction over the way to express Jewish identity and to live a Jewish life within a Jewish community. The very meaning of who is a Jew and what is a Jewish community continues to go through convulsive changes.  In the world of education, the question of what to teach is so toxic, so fraught with division and doubt that it is rarely broached at all. The absence of leadership is most evident when you consider that the newest thinking on this challenge is to privilege the consumer, and provide a plethora of options for the learner in a marketplace. Put another way, rabbis, educators and leaders are stepping away from the responsibility of defining a core set of content, values, rituals, and behaviors, and instead letting the market decide. No doubt, some curating of the vast sea of choices is happening, but nevertheless, it is astonishing how much Jewish leadership has conceded that it has no idea which way to lead.

Viewed in this light, the declining rates of synagogue affiliation and attendance reflect the declining interest in the type of Judaism these institutions stand for. Teachers continue to teach students how to live a Jewish life that most will find outmoded and irrelevant as they grow into adulthood. Students come away with vague good feelings about being Jewish but few Jewish habits or behaviors. Judaism becomes a more superficial identity that can be shrugged on and off, rather than the organizing principle for our values, our choices, and our life missions.

Is there hope in the emerging class of Jewish movements and organizations that are forging new paths in Jewish life? Perhaps, taken together, they are defining new possibilities for Jewish identity and community. Certainly, the growth, vitality, and passion in Jewish life is found more in the independent minyans, the new Jewish food movement, and radically open Jewish learning than in JCCs, Federations, and traditional synagogues.

Yet these new approaches face many challenges. Many of them haven’t even built educational material and pedagogies for teaching children and teens, and there’s certainly no comprehensive curriculum that existing schools could adopt or adapt. And let’s face it, so many of these celebrated young organizations are composed of no more than a handful of idealists who lack the requisite capital, expertise, and manpower to reach significant scale. Too many operate in such financially precarious states that they have to focus on making payroll instead of making change.

The truth is that we have no effective distribution mechanisms in the Jewish community. Our institutions, built to raise money and deliver social services to Jewish communities defined by geography and proximity, are struggling to reinvent themselves in the wake of the ongoing communication revolution. There are no national clearinghouses of educational programming, no open databases of comprehensive educational content, and a dearth of online programs of Jewish instruction. A consolidated online school? Not yet.

But can you solve the problem of distribution without solving the problem of content and conviction? I’m not sure. Why bother investing in a robust distribution mechanism when you have no confidence in your content? As a counter-example, take a look at Orthodox kiruv institutions. Chabad and Aish have invested themselves into building extraordinary distribution systems, from world-class websites with rich offerings across the full range of Jewish life and learning, to a world-spanning network of actual schools, synagogues and centers staffed by caring pastors and educators who serve their communities with tremendous dedication. The success of that system is predicated on the deeply-held convictions about how to be a Jew, how to live a Jewish life, and the nature and purpose of Jewish community.

There is no doubt that we need to build a better distribution system for Jewish education. But the only way we’re going to do that effectively is if we find our own commitments to Jewish life. I don’t think we all need to believe the same thing to build a good distribution system. FedEx doesn’t care what you put in your box, email is agnostic to the words you’re sending, and Google will find any webpage. Content-neutral networks can be enormously powerful. But paradoxically, they only exist because consumers of content are highly discriminant, and value some kinds of content much more than others.

Sina’at Hinam, baseless hatred, the Sages tell us, was the sin for which the Second Temple was destroyed, and only Ahavat Hinam, baseless, boundless love, can restore it. I believe that there is no better expression of boundless love than helping someone teach something to others, even if you disagree with it. Our love for the diversity of Judaism must be expressed by building a distribution network that helps share all those passionate and vibrant approaches to Jewish life with Jewish children and families – including those not attending school or synagogue – and all those interested in being enriched by Judaism. That’s the kind of Temple I pray we will merit to build, speedily and in our day. Amen.

Do Liberals do Holy?

From Ross Douthat in the New York Times:

[…] today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianitywith other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.

Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

This is all very similar to what’s happening to liberal Judaism. But why? Focusing on liberal, universal values does seem to dilute the value proposition of a specific religion. You don’t need the particular rituals and practices of Judaism, or Lutheranism to believe in stopping genocides. But the implication of liberal religion is that these rituals are secondary in importance, or perhaps not even intrinsically important at all. That once you’ve oriented yourself towards the proper values, there’s no need to take communion, or sanctify the Sabbath day over a glass of wine.

Since liberal religions often dispense with much of the metaphysics of traditional religion, it’s hard to embrace rituals in a consistent way. Yes, a practice may be beautiful, or deeply meaningful, or inspiring, but typically we experience practices that way when we engage in them intermittently. As soon as those practices become habit, they often lose their ability to impact us as we grow accustomed to them.

I suspect though, that customary practice may be part of the secret of holiness. You see, even if you make kiddush every week without a thought for the meaning of the words, and without any deeper sense of connection to God or the world, the very act of making kiddush every week has an impact that spills over to your entire life. Your life is now organized around this practice, and everything else must make room for this ritual, for this jar upon a hill and should you miss a week, the absence would trouble you.

The ritual is holy. It isn’t for understanding, or for providing access to upper worlds, or for creating conduit for blessing to flow down. It’s a way that we make meaning, not out of our pragmatic minds, or our sensitive hearts, but out of our habit-forming hands, our one-foot-in-front-of-another legs. Taking on these kinds of commitments creates a whole world of mutual dependency with our community-members. It helps us nurture our positive instincts and inscribe them into our lives with the force of habit.

I’m not sure myself. Traditional religion has plenty of its own problems. But it seems like liberal religion has made how we treat one another not just the pinnacle of religion, but perhaps its only sphere. Without god, without a deep sense of the sacred, without a metaphysics, or at least the possibility of one, religion becomes too pragmatic, too technocratic, and too self-reliant. Liberal religion needs to rediscover why it needs God again.

Pesach and the Holocaust

I am convinced that in the future, we will commemorate the Holocaust as part of our Pesach celebration. At first glance, Pesach and the Holocaust seem entirely unrelated. The Holocaust was the most tragic Jewish experience in two millenia, while Pesach is the archetypal redemption. Yet Pesach is also the most appropriate place to call to mind moments of slavery and oppression. The Freedom Seders and the cries of Let my people go!” of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry were themselves ignited by the Eichmann trial of 1961. The struggle for the liberation of Russian Jews was ignited by greater awareness of the Holocaust (and the passivity, ineffectiveness, and sometime complicity of Jewish communal leadership in that tragedy), and these activists took Passover and Exodus as the central motif of their struggle. Since that time, the Seder has become a main stage for expressions of solidarity and protest of oppression, and many rituals have been invented to highlight these causes. Miriam’s Cup, adding an orange to the seder plate, or a potato, or coffee beans symbolize the struggles for women’s rights, GLBTQ rights, the Ethiopian exodus, and the ongoing challenge of forced labor around the world. African-Americans have also embraced both the language of Exodus and the ritual of the Seder to commemorate their cultural history of bondage, liberation and ongoing struggle.

There are two dynamics we can consider: how the story of Exodus and its language has been appropriated, reinterpreted and deployed for one, and how the Seder and Passover itself has evolved, and see a convergence. Passover and its themes has been adapted to stand for moments of great triumph that are nonetheless followed by painful, slow and ongoing struggle. Passover is the incomplete redemption, and the call for renewed activism to overcome oppression. Is that the story of the Holocaust?

In Exodus 13:18, the Jews are described as leaving Egypt and heading to the desert:

יח  וַיַּסֵּב אֱלֹהִים אֶת-הָעָם דֶּרֶךְ הַמִּדְבָּר, יַם-סוּף; וַחֲמֻשִׁים עָלוּ בְנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל, מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם.

18 But God led the people about, by the way of the wilderness by the Red Sea; and the children of Israel went up armed out of the land of Egypt.

The word chamushim, translated as armed, is an unusual word, and its similarity to chamesh, five, birthed an infamous midrash that claims that only one-fifth of the Israelites actually came out of Egypt. The rest has perished there. What follows in our tradition is a flurry of arguments, apologia, interpretations and ponderings on this strange and difficult midrash. But I think the matter can be understood simply. For hundreds of years, the Israelites had been enslaved in bitter conditions. Babies were drowned in the Nile, while men and women performed back-breaking labor under the whips of cruel taskmasters. The bondage in Egypt was the first Holocaust, and Pharaoh’s intentions were as genocidal as Hitler’s (though Pharaoh was more comfortable with the notion of Israelite assimilation into the Egyptian race).

With the Passover story so many years in our past, it is difficult to truly evoke the horrors of Egyptian slavery, especially in the face of the mighty redemption by a revealed God that follows. Yet the Hagaddah does its best to bring to light the full measure of depravity that was the Egyptian bondage. The Hagaddah interprets every word of the verses describing the cruelty of the Egyptian slavery, and expands upon it. If we fail to bring the evils of slavery fully to life, the failure is not in our seders, but in ourselves. And that’s where I find the Holocaust. Millions of Jews were killed, and not just during the war. Christian Europe was a Mitzrayim – a Metzarim – a strait and narrow place for the Jews. Over the course of nearly 1000 years, from the earliest pogroms committed during the First Crusade, Jews lived in bondage and oppression. The liberation of the concentration camps and the repudiation of anti-Semitism as a legitimate government policy flowered into statehood in Israel and the breaking down of barriers to Jewish advancement and freedom in the US and elsewhere.

This Pesach, I encourage you to view Pesach expansively. Our most recent bondage lasted for nearly a thousand years. And our Exodus from Europe did not happen all in one moment, nor did we all go to the same place.But for us, the Holocaust was just the final intensification of a long period of exile – exile not from a land or a country, but exile from membership in the human race. Our redemption was not a journey to one geographical region, but a journey from the ghettos,the shteltls, and the margins of human history and society to the very center of world culture. Judaism was once again relevant, vibrant, honored, and appreciated. It may take more time for the scars of the Holocaust to fade, so that we can see it in the larger context of our history and our narrative, but those scars will fade, and this new vision of exile and redemption will take the stage at the Seder, on Pesach.

Chag Kasher v’sameach to everyone

Purim and the Holocaust

If you’re never sorry
Then you can’t be forgiven
If you’re not forgiven
Then you can’t be forgotten
If you’re not forgotten
Then you must live forever
If you live forever
You cannot be reborn

Pound of Flesh, Regina Spektor

I was lucky enough to catch Regina Spektor perform recently, thanks to a generous friend and colleague who invited me. The convert was terrific, the cause (HIAS) important, but these words have crowded out nearly every other memory from my mind.

Purim celebrates the victory of Mordechai and Esther over Haman, and the victory of the Jews over Amalek, our ancient nemesis. On the Shabbat prior to Purim, we read Parshat Zachor, a brief set of verses from Deuteronomy 25 commanding us to recall our first encounter with Amalek:

יז  זָכוֹר, אֵת אֲשֶׁר-עָשָׂה לְךָ עֲמָלֵק, בַּדֶּרֶךְ, בְּצֵאתְכֶם מִמִּצְרָיִם.

יח  אֲשֶׁר קָרְךָ בַּדֶּרֶךְ, וַיְזַנֵּב בְּךָ כָּל-הַנֶּחֱשָׁלִים אַחֲרֶיךָ–וְאַתָּה, עָיֵף וְיָגֵעַ; וְלֹא יָרֵא, אֱלֹהִים.

יט  וְהָיָה בְּהָנִיחַ יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ לְךָ מִכָּל-אֹיְבֶיךָ מִסָּבִיב, בָּאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר יְהוָה-אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לְךָ נַחֲלָה לְרִשְׁתָּהּ–תִּמְחֶה אֶת-זֵכֶר עֲמָלֵק, מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמָיִם; לֹא, תִּשְׁכָּח.

17 Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way as ye came forth out of Egypt;

18 how he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, all that were enfeebled in thy rear, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God.

19 Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget.

Even as a child, I remember confronting the paradox of being commanded to remember what Amalek did on the one hand, and to blot out all remembrance of Amalek on the other hand… and to not forget to blot out Amalek’s memory. And then I listen to Regina Spektor, and I feel like she’s solved the mystery. Amalek can never be forgotten because Amalek is the evil that will not apologize or seek forgiveness. Amalek achieves eternal notoriety, and in a sense lives forever, but is forever unable to be reborn, to be redeemed. Jews will always remember to blot out Amalek, and they will never forget.

Zachor. Remember. Never forget. I know these words. I know them from another context. Not Purim, but the Holocaust. And now I’m confused. Hitler and the Nazis are the only historical people to widely be considered Amalek. Not in a racial, genealogical way, but in the fashion of rich Jewish irony, by explicitly rejecting racial descent as a requirement for being Amalek. And even though the Amalek label has been applied to others in Jewish history, like the Romans, it hasn’t stuck to anyone quite like it has for the Nazis.

It’s a weird thing, to have Amalek crop up in our language again, in relation to the Holocaust. Though our original battle with Amalek was difficult, the Purim story presents an overwhelming victory over Amalek. No Jews are harmed in the making of this miracle. No casualties in battle, no slaves who never saw redemption – just the opposite, Jews were elevated to positions of greater authority, they wre feared by their enemies, and many non-Jews converted (As per the Megillah, anyway).

Purim is a Jewish fantasy, a flight of wish-fulfillment. Even without God’s overt presence, everything just goes the Jews’ way. It’s a daydream that an exilic Jew might have about how God is still looking out for us, and how our greatest enemies, those who harbor us ill will for no reason other than being Jews, will be defeated. Purim is the idyll, but the Holocaust (and the pogroms, and inquisitions, and all the troubles of the Exile) is the reality.

So how should we relate to our struggle against the enemies of our own day? Are we like Moses, Aaron and Hur, trying to keep arms raised to the heavens, trying to invoke God’s will? Do we take up the sword like Joshua and wage a war of attrition, suffering casualties and slowly, by force and by blood eke out small victories? Or is Mordechai’s realpolitik tinged with religious certainty the correct path? I’m not sure, but I look forward to Purim, and to enjoying the beautiful daydream.

The Gezerah of Zionism

Reading Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus in preparation for Pesach, I came across her elucidation of the concept of Gezera – a Heavenly Decree. The servitude in Egypt is considered in Jewish theology a gezera. As Zornberg explains,

In the gezera view of the world, reality is perceived in freeze-frame mode. Things are what they are, what they must be. There is no other basis for decision, for evaluation… The way of those who live in the gezera mode is to limit knowledge, vulnerability, empathy…

Zornberg writes repeatedly of the heaviness of gezera, of its inevitability, inertia, and static nature. This was the nature of the bondage in Egypt. But it made me think about the religious Zionists.

Of all different Jewish ideologies, religious Zionism was the only one to see in the founding of the State of Israel a Divine redemption. The Satmar rejected the possibility that this secular state founded by anti-religious Jews could embody some aspect of a Divine deliverance from exile. And the Zionists themselves agreed! They saw their project as a project of self-redemption, without help from God or anyone else. It was the Religious Zionists who identified a reishit tzmichat geulateinu, a first flowering of Divine redemption.

At first, the story unfolded well, from the victory of 1948 that made the state a reality, to the miraculous 1967 war that became an instant near-Biblical myth. Yet since that time, and particularly from 1973 on, redemption has stalled. Today, Religious Zionists, the only ones to see in the State of Israel a Geula, a Redemption, are now stuck in the world of Gezera. They have no answer for the Palestinian question. They do not believe peace is possible, and the only solutions to the status quo are too terrible for them to consider. They are stuck, they are frozen, they are laid with the heaviness of Gezera. There is no basis upon which to make different decisions or new evaluations. Instead, Religious Zionists limit information, reduce perspectives, and avoid empathy or other human dimensions of relation.

The metaphor for redemption in Judaism is that of birth. When a birth is stalled, when a redemption flounders and runs aground, a forceps delivery is the answer. So too, we see in the Torah that at the end of Parshat Shemoth, the deliverance from Egypt is stuck. Pharaoh won’t listen to God. The Israelites won’t listen to Moses. And Moses himself resists God’s message, complaining that so far he’s only made it worse for the Israelites. At this moment, God introduces the forceps and delivers the Israelites by bringing on the plagues. Though today we don’t relate to it as such, there is no doubt that the plagues were traumatic for the Israelites as well as the Egyptians – and traumatic for God as well!

Zornberg poses the question in her exploration of the Exodus, but I think it applies today as well. “[I]s there any other solution to the problem of impasse, of stalled birth, than the invasive solution of a forceps delivery? Is the Exile… a fate for which there exists a more organic form of release?”

I believe that the answer lies in the human capacity for narrative. The main Mitzvah of Pesach is just that, to tell a story, l’saper. Pesach has no fixed text for us to recite. The Hagaddah is not the Megillah of Purim, whose every word must be recited clearly to fulfill one’s obligation. Rather, we must tell a story that can be understood by our children. In telling that story, we have tremendous liberty to meet our obligation. We can tell a halachic story like the Chacham desires, we can tell a story of redemption and punishment, like the one we tell the Rasha, we can tell the story of our ongoing relationship to God through worship, like we tell the Tam, or we can tell the broadest outline of our national origin, like we tell the She’eino Yodea Lishol. Or perhaps some other story to some other child. But the story creates the possibility for a different kind of future, and we must construct a story of our own redemption in this day that doesn’t end with us waiting for the forceps of redemption to inflict their terrible price on all involved.

Alt-Neu Jewish Identity

In a brilliant post, Daniel Septimus, Executive Director of MyJewishLearning.com, suggests that we discard the concept of strengthening Jewish identity to frame the work of engagement of Jewish young adults, or of Jewish continuity.

“What do organizations mean when they say they want to strengthen or cultivate Jewish identity?” asks Septimus. He goes on to say, quoting Dr. Erica Brown, that the Jewish world today “aggressively emphasize[s] the emotional.” This desire to get young Jews to feel good and proud about being Jewish is a shallow and meaningless educational goal that has no roots in Jewish tradition. Septimus suggests that we replace Jewish identity as a concept with a much older rubric, composed by Shimon HaTzaddik, who says in Pirkei Avot that the world is sustained by three things: Torah, Temple service (avodah) and acts of kindness (gemilut hassadim). Septimus reads in Torah all of the study and intellectual and cognitive aspects of Judaism; into Avodah, the religious, ritual and spiritual aspects; and into Gemilut Hassadim the ethical demands of Judaism and the conduct among human beings.

Needless to say, I heartily agree with Septimus. While many theories of identity exist, including the aforementioned Dr. Brown’s schema of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional components of identity-building, I think we can settle on a layman’s simple and direct approach. A person’s identity is composed of those things that he does, those things he refuses to do, and the intentions behind those choices. The problem with the non-Orthodox Jewish institutional community is in its own identity! Jews fifty-five and up, who sustain and captain Jewish institutions, have largely chosen not to commit to regular Torah-study, nor to observing very much ritual or spiritual practice. I’ll grant the ethics though, and will salute this generation for defining as primary the ethical role in Judaism.

When this generation talks about strengthening Jewish identity, I’m not sure that they are just talking about emotions. I think they are talking about some real choices. The makeup of their own identity rests on the choice to support Israel and Zionism through unblinking solidarity, to affiliate with synagogues (but not to attend much), and to donate to Federations. These choices simply do not resonate with young adults, many of whom don’t suffer a sense of shame around being Jewish and don’t need Israel to feel strong, or impressive synagogues to feel proud, and who especially don’t feel like they need an ethnic social safety net to be cared for like any other American.

The Judaism of the previous generation was an expression of their cultural and spiritual needs. Those needs were the needs of an immigrant community to take care of its own in the face of active discrimination, to build institutions and establish itself as a legitimate part of American society, and to support the state of Israel as a point of pride, but also as a potential safe haven.

None of these cultural and spiritual needs are in play today. Young Jews in America feel safe, and they feel as though they belong. They want to express theiur values by giving of their time, not their money. They don’t fear Judaism will be destroyed, they seek to understand why it was so important to preserve it. They don’t want to draw pride from Israel because Jews there fight back, they want to support and be proud of Israel because Jews there make peace. Those are the actions and intentions of the next generation of Jews. That’s their Jewish identity, that’s their Torah, Avodah and Gemilut Hassadim. Let’s support that.

Back to the Future with Jonathan Sarna

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 Guilt

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?

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.

The Gap Between Hareidim and Modern Orthodox

In XGH’s most recent post, How to stop Chareidim breaking the law, the suggestion was to emphasize Kiddush Hashem/Chillul Hasehm (sanctification/desecration of God’s name, usually through public conduct) and its implications for practical conduct in the public square.

While I agree with the sentiment of the post, I think it misses a fundamental point.

There is a 3,000-year old debate in Judaism as to whether human initiative and human judgment is of value.

One position is that God has laid out for us the manner in which we should act, and that the human challenge is to submit to that, to yoke ourselves to that path, and to blind ourselves from anything that might lead us astray. This is the path adopted by Hareidim today.

The other position is that we have been granted a Divine gift of judgment and decision-making, and that we must use those faculties to choose a proper path through an ever-changing world. This is the Modern Orthodox (MO) position.

When the MO look at the Hareidi world, they level a critique based on observed facts. How can it be, they say, that you are following the Divine path, if your real-world outcomes are so poor? Your institutions are built on corruption and theft, your youth are delinquent, uneducated, and filthy, and your communities rally behind th emsot odious villains and act out violently as thier only means of expression. Surely this can’t be God’s will!

In turn, when Hareidim look at the MO, they don’t look so much on the facts on the ground as much as the influences. If you, the MO, want to believe your judgment is sanctified and in line with the Divine will, you must purify yourselves. If you were influenced only by Torah and expressed excellent character traits, perhaps we could believe in your judgment. But instead, your homes have televisions and internet showing obscene images and abhorrent culture. Your children grow up knowing more rock songs by heart than mishnayot, idolizing movie stars instead of Gedolim, and wasting their time on Harry Potter instead of Halacha.

I’m not sure how to bridge this gap, but I do know that the first step towards bridging it is understanding it. This is an ancient Machloket. It’s the same as the argument over whether the world was created in Tishrei or in Nisan. It’s the same as the argument over whether God performing miracles on your behalf is a good reflection on your or a  bad reflection on you. It’s the same as the argument over whether we should start the Haggadah with the story of our slavery in Egypt or our idolatrous roots in Mesopotamia. And this isn’t something we’re going to easily resolve.