American Judaism Slowly Discovering That Believing in Things Matters
MR, 2/13/05:
[R]evitalizing Jewish communities by emphasizing Jewish values... doesn't go far enough to solve the suffocating fog that is young Jews' apathy towards their heritage... fom the moment they can be shipped off to Hebrew school, American Jewish children are provided with an almost limitless number of ways to be "connected" to Judaism. And yet somehow prepackaged life cycles, canned trips to Israel, and lessons on counting in Hebrew have all failed to ignite a commitment to Judaism. In the meantime, Islam and Christianity is growing throughout the United States. College and high school students shout their devotions in gigantic stadiums... because their religious leaders tell their followers that they have the truth ... Of course the young flock to that kind of message. Christian evangelicals, for instance, tell young Christians that their religion is true, that Christians are blessed, and that the rest of the world is wrong. In response, young Jews are told that they can believe whatever they want and that the sum total of their religious obligation involves bringing some canned goods from home around the High Holidays.
Slate's Samantha Shapiro, 8/28/06, describing the graduation speech of outgoing Jewish Theological Seminary chancellor Ismar Schorsch:
I grew up in the Conservative movement, and my religious ideals line up with it in many ways. Yet I agree that it often misses the mark and suffers, as Schorsch said, from "a failure of nerve." As the world is growing increasingly religious, the faithful are not growing more interested in reconciling modernity and tradition. They are becoming more orthodox. It's somehow liberating (if not encouraging) to see the leader of a religious movement whose goal is to hold the middle ground forcefully wrestle with his sense of failure. In his speech, Schorsch described the Conservative religious ideal as one that maintains a fragile balance between two poles, truth and faith. He said that during the heyday of the JTS, this tension was sustained by reverent, but critical, scholarship that analyzed the historical context surrounding Jewish texts, rather than viewing them only as a message delivered by God at Mt. Sinai... Liberal denominations of any faith tend to make a religion out of tolerance and humanistic values. But this misses some of the point of faith. There is a sweetness, intensity, and pleasure that comes from religious practice that isn't wholly rational.
The fact that this is something that has to be explained and debated is very, very worrisome.< br>
[Full disclosure: our personal views on the content of the Reform vs. Conservative vs. Orthodox debates have nothing to do with the blinding empirical reality that you can't make a religion grow by letting people pick and choose what parts of dogma they want to believe. Now, the greatest scholars who argue with precision may justify their violations of Jewish law as still within Judaism, but the rest of us have to either do Jewish by following their example of concede that what we're doing is not a part of Judaism. Which may be fine - but the Reform impulse to turn everything their congregants want to do into a Jewish act seems untenable. Generally, the relationship between dogma and adherent flows the other way. Of all the major religions, Judaism is the farthest from acknowledging a personal relationship with a personal God - it is a collective practice in dialogue with particular, collective historical texts that set constraints on behavior. You can't do what you like and then insist that it's 'your way of being Jewish']
[R]evitalizing Jewish communities by emphasizing Jewish values... doesn't go far enough to solve the suffocating fog that is young Jews' apathy towards their heritage... fom the moment they can be shipped off to Hebrew school, American Jewish children are provided with an almost limitless number of ways to be "connected" to Judaism. And yet somehow prepackaged life cycles, canned trips to Israel, and lessons on counting in Hebrew have all failed to ignite a commitment to Judaism. In the meantime, Islam and Christianity is growing throughout the United States. College and high school students shout their devotions in gigantic stadiums... because their religious leaders tell their followers that they have the truth ... Of course the young flock to that kind of message. Christian evangelicals, for instance, tell young Christians that their religion is true, that Christians are blessed, and that the rest of the world is wrong. In response, young Jews are told that they can believe whatever they want and that the sum total of their religious obligation involves bringing some canned goods from home around the High Holidays.
Slate's Samantha Shapiro, 8/28/06, describing the graduation speech of outgoing Jewish Theological Seminary chancellor Ismar Schorsch:
I grew up in the Conservative movement, and my religious ideals line up with it in many ways. Yet I agree that it often misses the mark and suffers, as Schorsch said, from "a failure of nerve." As the world is growing increasingly religious, the faithful are not growing more interested in reconciling modernity and tradition. They are becoming more orthodox. It's somehow liberating (if not encouraging) to see the leader of a religious movement whose goal is to hold the middle ground forcefully wrestle with his sense of failure. In his speech, Schorsch described the Conservative religious ideal as one that maintains a fragile balance between two poles, truth and faith. He said that during the heyday of the JTS, this tension was sustained by reverent, but critical, scholarship that analyzed the historical context surrounding Jewish texts, rather than viewing them only as a message delivered by God at Mt. Sinai... Liberal denominations of any faith tend to make a religion out of tolerance and humanistic values. But this misses some of the point of faith. There is a sweetness, intensity, and pleasure that comes from religious practice that isn't wholly rational.
The fact that this is something that has to be explained and debated is very, very worrisome.< br>
[Full disclosure: our personal views on the content of the Reform vs. Conservative vs. Orthodox debates have nothing to do with the blinding empirical reality that you can't make a religion grow by letting people pick and choose what parts of dogma they want to believe. Now, the greatest scholars who argue with precision may justify their violations of Jewish law as still within Judaism, but the rest of us have to either do Jewish by following their example of concede that what we're doing is not a part of Judaism. Which may be fine - but the Reform impulse to turn everything their congregants want to do into a Jewish act seems untenable. Generally, the relationship between dogma and adherent flows the other way. Of all the major religions, Judaism is the farthest from acknowledging a personal relationship with a personal God - it is a collective practice in dialogue with particular, collective historical texts that set constraints on behavior. You can't do what you like and then insist that it's 'your way of being Jewish']
