One Big, Happy, Pluralistic, Dysfunctional Family - Vayehi 5775

I returned from Israel last Thursday, flying from Ben-Gurion Airport on Christmas Eve, which in Israel is known as “Wednesday night.”

My son and I spent two weeks having fun around the Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee). One day we went up to Mercaz Canada, the Canada Centre, in Metulla, which is a huge complex built entirely by Canadian Jewish communities. Its central feature, of course, is the regulation-size ice rink, where no professional hockey team ever actually plays, but there is a hockey school for kids and plenty of aspiring skaters come to practice. We spent some time on the ice there, and then warmed up by immersing ourselves in the jacuzzi. Soaking alongside us was an older Israeli couple, whom I will call Yossi and Iris. They were very talkative, and soon I knew everything about their family, of whom they were clearly very proud. At some point, they ascertained that I was a Conservative rabbi, and then Iris asked me, “Is it true that you have women rabbis in your movement?” I responded affirmatively.

Yossi offered that he was very troubled by the extreme measures that some haredi Jews were taking to separate men and women: the gender-segregated buses, the separate sidewalks, and so forth. And then he told me something that made my jaw hit the warm, bubbly water: that there are now stores in Benei Beraq (a predominantly haredi city near Tel Aviv) where men and women shop separately.

“What, you mean that there are two sides, and the men get their cottage cheese on one side, and the women get their cottage cheese on the other side, from a separate refrigerator?”

“Yes,” he replied. We sat and soaked that one up. Iris, a calloused police officer, clucked her tongue and shook her head. She asked me if I had heard about Women of the Wall. “Of course,” I said.

Sitting there in the jacuzzi, I gave them a thumbnail sketch of what it means to be a Conservative Jew: like Orthodoxy, we understand halakhah / Jewish law to be valid and binding, but we account for modernity with conservative changes within the halakhic system. We accept men and women as being equal under Jewish law. We have a historical view of Judaism, understanding our tradition as having unfolded gradually in the context of many places and cultures, rather than having all been given at Sinai. We accept contemporary understandings of the origins of the Torah and of God.

Many of these ideas are not welcome in some quarters of the Jewish world, and some of the ideas that emerge from those quarters I find objectionable. But there is still, at least for now, some mutual sense of belonging. We are all still Jews. And as we soaked there in the hot tub, we shared what you might call a little pluralistic moment - an acknowledgment of the different ways of being Jewish.

We concluded the first book of the Torah today, and as Bereshit drew to a close with the patriarch Jacob on his death bed, each of his sons received some parting words. Some were flowery words of praise; others were clearly critical. For example:

Gen. 49:8 (re: Judah)

יְהוּדָה, אַתָּה יוֹדוּךָ אַחֶיךָ--יָדְךָ, בְּעֹרֶף אֹיְבֶיךָ; יִשְׁתַּחֲווּ לְךָ, בְּנֵי אָבִיךָ.

You, O Judah, your brothers shall praise;

Your hand shall be on the nape of your foes;

Your father’s sons shall bow low to you...

cf. Gen. 49:5-6 (re: Simeon and Levi)

שִׁמְעוֹן וְלֵוִי, אַחִים--כְּלֵי חָמָס, מְכֵרֹתֵיהֶם. בְּסֹדָם אַל-תָּבֹא נַפְשִׁי, בִּקְהָלָם אַל-תֵּחַד כְּבֹדִי:  כִּי בְאַפָּם הָרְגוּ אִישׁ, וּבִרְצֹנָם עִקְּרוּ-שׁוֹר.

Simeon and Levi are a pair;

Their weapons are tools of lawlessness.

Let not my person be included in their council,

Let not my being be counted in their assembly.

For when angry they slay men,

And when pleased they maim oxen.

At this stage, the Israelite nation is really only a family. Jacob is here driving home the point, at the end of his life and effectively the end of the family narrative, that our family has internal strife. (BTW, I am from the tribe of Levi!) Not only do we disagree with each other, we are sometimes openly hostile. Not too dissimilar today - our internecine struggles are effectively ancient.

Jacob Jordaens - Self-Portrait with Parents, Brothers, and Sisters. c. 1615. Oil on canvas. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia

In some ways we still retain the sense of family. The Talmud (BT Shevuot 39a) tells us that:

כל ישראל ערבים זה בזה

Kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh

All of Israel is responsible for one another.

We are all dependent on one another, all connected. We have always thought of ourselves in this way. We even have our own term for our connectedness: kelal Yisrael. Loosely translated, it means, “All of us Israelites.”

We are kind of like a giant cousins’ club. Since the late 19th century and the beginnings of the Zionist movement, some have called this phenomenon “peoplehood.” One of the major results of this sense of peoplehood in modern times is the State of Israel; a more mild form is the pride that American Jews used to take in playing “Spot the Jew”: knowing that the Three Stooges and and Dinah Shore and Kirk Douglas were all Jewish.

But the Jewish world is much more fractured than it used to be. I am not sure exactly why this happened, but I think it might be harder today for us to acknowledge that we are all connected, that our souls are bound together, that we have a shared destiny, common values, and so forth.

Nonetheless, I believe we are indeed still one people. We are all Jews, even if large fractions of the Jewish world do not accept other large fractions. And certainly, the rising tide of anti-Semitism in some quarters of the world might serve to remind us all that those who hate us surely do not care about our divergent approaches to halakhah or whether or not we ordain female rabbis or call women to the Torah.

Let’s consider where we are as a people.

Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Chabad (they get their own category), Reconstructionist, Humanist, secular, apathetic. Yes, the demographic studies of recent years continue to show that we are on a continuum with respect to religious observance and other measures of engagement. But we are also deeply divided, and to some extent, that is the Jewish tradition. From the moment that the Israelites left Egypt, when they began to complain to Moshe Rabbeinu about the lack of food in the desert, continuing through to the Talmudic tradition of rabbinic argument (Beit Hillel vs. Beit Shammai, etc.), to the response to modernity that gave us the range of movements and synagogues and political and cultural rivals, we like to disagree.

Even so, it seems to me that the rift between Orthodoxy and non-Orthodoxy is still growing. It used to be that most American Jews, regardless of their level of Jewish observance, kept a kosher kitchen so that anybody could come over and eat. That is hardly the case today; I suspect that not too many Orthodox-identified Jews would even eat in my house.

Perhaps the greatest point of fracture is intermarriage. You know the numbers, at least anecdotally: two-thirds or more of American Jews marry non-Jews. Yes, that statistic is lower for Conservative-identified Jews (roughly ⅓ of those who grow up in our movement marry out), and much lower for Orthodox. But the reality is inescapable. We are not going to stem the tide of intermarriage. That ship has sailed. The question facing us all now, and particularly here in the Conservative movement is, how can we stay true to our principles of accepting the validity of halakhah and yet not lose all of those Jews?

A colleague of mine, Rabbi Wesley Gardenswartz, the senior rabbi of a large Conservative congregation in suburban Boston, recently floated a trial balloon about intermarriage. As you may know, Conservative rabbis are bound by a standard of rabbinic practice not to perform weddings between Jews and non-Jews. His idea was to perform such weddings, with the proviso that the non-Jewish partner commits to raising Jewish children.

Immediately after going public with the idea, there was an uproar in his congregation that compelled Rabbi Gardenswartz to backtrack.

And furthermore in the “uproar” department,just last week at the USY International Convention, the student leadership of USY voted to change the language in its policy regarding inter-dating for regional officers. While the policy used to say, “It is expected that leaders of the organization will refrain from relationships which can be construed as interdating,” the new language is, “The Officers will strive to model healthy Jewish dating choices. These include recognizing the importance of dating within the Jewish community and treating each person with the recognition that they were created Betzelem Elohim (in the image of God).”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of interdating, but certainly not quite as strong as the original language. (I actually prefer the newer language because, rather than merely being prohibitive, it actually challenges our teens to consider the aspects of holiness in human relationships.) Coverage in the Jewish press has been scathing (the JTA wire article on the subject was titled, perhaps unfairly, “USY Drops Ban on Interdating”).

The issue goes right to the heart of who we are today, not as Conservative Jews per se, but as American Jews. Do we see ourselves as Americans who occasionally dip our toes into the sea of Judaism, or does halakhah infuse all parts of our lives with holiness? Obviously, this issue is so trying because some of the members of our cousins’ club see any tolerance of intermarriage and intermarried Jews as a threat. In their minds, this is not Hillel vs. Shammai; this is Hillel vs. Antiochus and the hellenized Syrians of yore.

Nonetheless, I am convinced that the concept of kelal Yisrael, of the Jewish sense of shared heritage, destiny, and values still resonates. We have made certain strides right here in Great Neck, and that bodes well: the recent Shabbat Project, the joint study and siyyum in memory of those massacred in a Jerusalem synagogue in November, and the ongoing friendly Rabbinic Dialogue are all good signs of healthy, pluralistic engagement and cooperation.

Pluralism means that we should tolerate each other, acknowledge each other. We who call women to the Torah will never agree with those who must walk and ride and shop in single-gender environments. Those of us who support the State of Israel with all our hearts will never understand our fellow Jews who protest its very existence. We do not have to agree, but we have to at least acknowledge each other as fellow members of the tribe. And I think that we are still doing that. We may be a dysfunctional family, but we are still a family.

We have to continue to work together, for the benefit of our extended cousins’ club. I very much hope that we will.

Shabbat shalom.

~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(A variation of this sermon was originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 1/3/2015.)

On Derekh Eretz and Being Refreshed in Texas

I lived in Texas for five and a half years, earning an M.S. at Texas A&M University (Go Aggies!) and then working in steamy Houston for a huge, multinational engineering and construction firm. When I returned to Dallas last week for the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international professional organization of Conservative / Masorti rabbis, I was flooded with memories of my time in Texas, and particularly that Texans LOVE air conditioning, and prefer it to be blowing on them on full blast at all times. So while the weather outside the Dallas Hilton was pleasant and not too hot, inside it felt like March in Iceland.
 

Nonetheless, the company was warm, and the material was hot. I had a few shiurim with one of my beloved Bible teachers from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Dr. Walter Hertzberg, who laid out a stunning array of traditional commentaries for us to sample and draw on. I heard sessions on crafting new, engaging tefillah experiences (a particularly timely talk with respect to our process here in Great Neck), reaching out to so-called Millennials and Gen-Xers, expanding adult learning options. 

I also participated in a stellar four-hour marathon examination of textual sources with Dr. Donniel Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem (where Rabbi Stecker is sabbatical-ing in July) on the tension between fulfilling God’s word and moderating some of the extreme halakhic positions found in the Jewish canon. Maimonides, for example, notes in his halakhic compendium, the Mishneh Torah (Laws Pertaining to Acquisition 9:8), that while the Torah permits one to order your Canaanite slave perform excruciating labor, it is more important to treat slaves justly and mercifully. Not that slavery of any kind today is permitted or encouraged in any way, but the wider point that Maimonides makes is that even within the letter of the law there is an obligation to treat others with respect and dignity, even if it may contradict the fundamental understanding of the written and oral Torah. This wider message is essential for the work that we do in the Conservative movement: halakhah (Jewish law) is valuable and binding, but must also be moderated by derekh eretz (respect) as well as contemporary sensibilities.

The convention atmosphere was bullish on the future, and as we welcomed a new president of the RA, Rabbi William Gershon of Congregation Shearith Israel in Dallas, speeches were made about the vitality of the Conservative movement and the bright spots that lay ahead despite the well-known challenges that we face. While my own optimism has been occasionally challenged by the relentless stories of the movement’s decline that may be found in virtually any Jewish newspaper, I always find my spirits buoyed by fellowship with colleagues. To hear about the inspired work that my colleagues and Seminary buddies are bringing to their individual congregations is always encouraging, and so I return with not only new insights to offer as divrei Torah, but also a list of hot new ideas that have succeeded in other communities.

Put succinctly, we’re not dead yet. My rabbinic colleagues and I are still working to engage, inspire, and enlighten our kehillot (congregations), and to do it in a way that reflects our positions of moderation and derekh eretz. I look eagerly to the future with a renewed sense of purpose.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(To be published in the Temple Israel Voice, 5/29/14.)

A Call to Action - Lekh Lekha 5774

I’m sure that many of us saw the article in the New York Times last week about the demographic state of American Jewry. (The full report from the Pew Research Center may be found here.) The major findings are the kinds of things that set off alarm bells and rounds of hand-wringing in certain quarters of the Jewish community. For example:

• 22% of American Jews now consider themselves “Jews of no religion,” and that figure is higher for younger cohorts
• 72% of non-Orthodox Jews marrying in the last 13 years married somebody who is not Jewish
• Affiliated Conservative Jews now account for 18% of American Jews (cf. 35% Reform and 10% Orthodox
• The Conservative movement is now, on average, the oldest movement (median age of members is 55 years) and the one with the fewest children living at home (0.3 per family)

And so forth. There are plenty more where those nuggets came from.

Now it is very easy to let ourselves get agitated over this, and of course the Times loves stories that get Jews agitated. (Arnold Eisen, the Chancellor of JTS, invoked a classic joke in his blog post on the subject: One Jew sends a telegram to the other: Start worrying. Details to follow.)

But, like Chancellor Eisen, I’d like to suggest that we let cooler heads prevail here. The essential message that we should glean from this report is this: we have to read this not as a threat, but as a call to action. Allow me to explain by illustrating a point in Parashat Lekh Lekha.

Our newly-minted everyman hero, Abram, whom we just met at the end of Parashat Noah, is instructed by God to pick up and leave his home, and move to some other place:

וַיֹּאמֶר ה' אֶל-אַבְרָם, לֶךְ-לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ, אֶל-הָאָרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ.

God said to Abram, “Go forth from your land, and from your homeland, and from your father’s house, to the land that I shall show you.

Abram does not know where he is going, but he trusts God, and so he picks up and leaves his homeland and his father’s house to head out to what we know will some day be called Israel. This is his Lekh Lekha moment, where Abram (according to a midrash), goes off in search of himself, primed to be the father of a new nation.

Ladies and gentlemen, we in this room, who are among the most committed American Jews, and in a wider sense the Conservative movement, we must go off in search of ourselves. And to do that, we have to leave the comfort of our homeland, of (dare I say it) Rabbi Waxman’s house. And I mean that in both the tangible and spiritual sense.

I was on a conference call this week with Dr. Jonathan Sarna, the prominent professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, to put the Pew survey into perspective. He pointed out that (א) studies like this pop up from time to time, broadcasting dire predictions and precipitating much communal angst, and (ב) that they have also spurred the major movements into action, and have even succeeded in helping turn them around.

Dr. Sarna pointed out that this is not the first such seeming statistical low point. In his book, American Judaism (Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 224-5), we read that in 1919, the American Jewish Year Book offers that less than 23 percent of the Jewish population was “regularly affiliated with congregations.” (That is far less than today, percentage-wise.) In 1926, the US Census of Religious Bodies found that “average length of stay in a Jewish school” was two years total. The San Francisco of 1938 had an 18 percent affiliation rate. In Brownsville, Brooklyn in 1935, only 8 percent of men regularly attended synagogue (and the women even less), and ¾ of young Jews in all of New York City in had not attended services AT ALL in the past year, including High Holidays. And so forth.

Dr. Sarna noted that in the 1930s, Reform Judaism was seen by most American Jews as a small movement with limited appeal, and would soon disappear. But in response, Reform reinvented itself, and is today by far the largest movement. Similarly, he noted that his teacher, the sociologist Marshall Sklare, predicted in the 1960s that Orthodoxy would soon languish away. But Dr. Sklare was wrong, and Orthodoxy is thriving today, even though it only accounts for 10% of American Jews.

While news outlets have been quick to point out that the numbers look especially bad for Conservative Judaism, these kinds of surveys have spurred movement-wide change before, and this should be our call to action. This may be our Lekh Lekha moment.

We are living in an age in which fear/mistrust/dislike of institutions is rampant. Government. Corporations. Organized religion (although I’m not sure why anybody would call Judaism “organized”). Indeed, the very concept of “religion” is alienating to many people today; such is the hazard of living in an open, secular society. But that’s why we have to leave our comfortable surroundings, the physical and the metaphorical, and extend ourselves, to reconsider what we do and how we do it.

For decades, and especially through the periods of dramatic growth that the Conservative movement and Temple Israel experienced in the middle of the 20th century, we did not have to work to attract adherents. It was enough for congregations to hire a brilliant rabbi and a cantor with a soaring voice, set up a Hebrew school, and voila! In came the Jews.

But we are no longer living in those days. We cannot expect that people will just walk in the door and join us. Yes, that is true for a few people (we welcomed a bunch of new families this past weekend with a special welcoming ceremony). But many Jews today think that the synagogue experience is not for them; many Jews think that they just don’t have time or money or interest for shul, that they can’t manage the Hebrew or synagogue choreography, and are therefore intimidated or bored. Reaching those people will require that we go out to them, and provide avenues for involvement that are not solely focused on ritual. And here is where we can take some cues from Chabad.

Where do we usually encounter Chabadniks? On the street with lulav and etrog. On campuses offering free Shabbat meals and a welcoming home. Holding big, splashy programs with wide appeal for families. They go to where the Jews are, and they attract them with free offerings, a judgment-free, friendly environment, and the promise of an authentic Jewish experience.

But we have some things that Chabad does not. We are egalitarian, counting women and men as equals in Jewish life. We welcome dissenting views and incorporate history, science, and scholarship into our understanding of Jewish texts. We think and approach Judaism like contemporary Americans. And it is for this reason that we cannot cede the realm of outreach to Orthodoxy: we need to be out there where the Jews are, too.

A Reform colleague, Rabbi Leon Morris of Sag Harbor, offered the following in an opinion piece in Haaretz:

“... the troubling results of this survey actually underscore the urgent need for non-Orthodox Judaism to be successful. If a case needed to be made that the vast majority of American Jews will never become Orthodox, this study makes the case clearer than ever. The synagogues that have the greatest potential to reach the growing number of “Jews of no religion” are the non-Orthodox ones. If American Orthodoxy cares about the survival of Jewish life in America, the results of this study should in fact encourage American Orthodox leadership to work together more closely with the Reform and Conservative movements. Those movements are the shock troops for deepening Jewish life for the most endangered Jews described in this study.”

We are on the front lines, ladies and gentlemen, but we’re all looking the other way.

Dr. Sarna pointed out a few encouraging statistics: that a whopping 83% of the “Jews of no religion” say that they are proud to be Jewish, and 46% of them believe in God! And then he indicated another group: 36% of American Jews are in the “Other” category. They are not affiliated with a mainstream denomination, or describe themselves as “just Jewish.” These are the people, he says, that we should be going after. To this end, Dr. Sarna suggests a few things. We should...

• feature musical Friday night services at a fixed time each week
• reconsider the de-funding of Koach, the Conservative movement’s arm on college campuses
• refocus our energies on promoting day schools - making them affordable as well as the best educational option for Jewish children
• meet the technology challenge - not only to use the new tools of social media better, but also to stop telling people to turn off their phones in synagogue. (And let me assure you that this is a hard thing for me to accept.) People used to come to synagogue to be connected to others; now when they arrive they are told to disconnect

I think we could even come up with our own creative new approaches. There are things that we do already that are so creative and engaging and work on so many levels, but most of them are small programs that reach only a select few people. The things that I think work the best are those that create holy moments outside of the formality of synagogue services, where it is easier to make personal connections: tashlikh, the Sukkah-building workshop, the new members’ welcoming ceremony that we did last Sunday, the Youth House trip to Israel, the retreat at Camp Ramah that we led for Vav class students last spring, and will be doing again, the new groups like Temple Israel Bonds (for parents with children in the Religious School) and the EmpTInesters group.

Along these lines, we should have more retreats, more creative services that are held outdoors, more social groups that bring like-minded people together. We should have meet-ups in Kings Point Park where we learn Talmud, say. We should reach out through Facebook to gather people for a surprise, late-night qiddush halevanah (blessing over the moon), maybe with cocktails. We should organize a volunteer staff of community outreach coordinators, who keep an eye peeled for newcomers to Great Neck and reach out even before young couples sign up to bring their kids to Beth HaGan, or sign up for High Holiday seats.

The point is, we have to think outside the sanctuary. We can’t rely merely on the Bar/Bat Mitzvah process to capture and hold people, especially when so many can easily avoid our “requirements” and fees by going elsewhere.

In two weeks, I will be attending a training session at JTS about implementing the community organizing model, a workshop for rabbis that will help us in building our communities, and I hope that it will give me fresh ideas to bring back to Great Neck.

But it cannot be just the clergy; we have to work harder as a community as well. We cannot sit idly by, even here in this beautiful sanctuary, as 22% becomes 30% becomes 50%. If we want this community to grow, we have to find those “other” Jews, the 36%, invite them in.

So this is a call to action, and an opportunity. There are plenty of people, right here in Great Neck, that might well join our community if we can reach them and offer them appealing points of entry. Our Lekh Lekha moment has arrived - we may need to leave our current model, but we will do it knowing that the Promised Land is at the end of our journey.

Four Essential Jewish Questions of Our Time - Shabbat HaGadol, 5773

Every year around this time, Rabbi Stecker and I find ourselves working very hard to help others with their sedarim. Starting a month before Pesah, we teach seder skills and material in a wide variety of formats and before many different audiences: the Men’s Club, the Nitzanim Family Connection, the Religious School Bet class, the Shabbat afternoon se’udah shelisheet crowd, and so forth. 

Pesah is, as I am sure many of you know, the most-practiced ritual of the Jewish year among American Jews. About 4 out of 5 of us show up to a seder of some sort, and for some of those Jews, this will be the ONLY Jewish experience that they will have in 5773; far more people come to a seder than seek forgiveness in the traditional ways on Yom Kippur.  For those of us who are regulars, who are committed to Jewish life, this is an opportunity to engage, and I encourage everybody here to reach out as ambassadors of Jewish living.

Related to that, I think that now is the time to start asking the hard questions about American Judaism, and talk about them around the seder table. After all, the seder is meant to be not only a meal, but also a discussion. It is modeled after the Greek symposium, an ancient type of dinner party that featured food, wine, discussion, and entertainment, all of which was enjoyed while reclining. We have the haggadah to guide us through our Jewish symposium. But the haggadah is only a guideline, a kind of framework: you can fulfill your Pesah obligation of “Vehigadta levinkha bayom hahu,” (Shemot / Exodus 13:8) of telling the story to your children on that day by reading it from the haggadah, but you can also fulfill it if you leave the printed page. The very word, “haggadah,” is derived from the same shoresh / Hebrew root of the commandment “vehigadta” in that verse; haggadah means telling, and does not necessarily mean reciting from a book.

Telling the story of Pesah, of traveling from slavery to freedom, usually raises a few questions. Well, four at least. But in fulfilling the obligation of “vehigadta levinkha,” of telling your children, should we not connect our modern world with our ancient tales? Here are four more questions for discussion, questions that we should all be asking around the table on Monday and Tuesday night:

1. On this Festival of Freedom, how will we ensure that our own contemporary freedom does not lessen, or indeed sever our connection with Judaism?

2. Is it indeed possible for us to continue to be Jewish while enjoying full assimilation into American society? Or is the only recourse to preserve our Jewish identity, as the Haredi world seems to believe, to self-segregate, i.e. to “enslave” ourselves, to curtail our independence?

3. What kind of Jewish world do we want in the future?

4. What are the things that we can do to make sure that our grandchildren have strong Jewish identities, and healthy, modern and open synagogue communities where they can practice comfortably?

And, like the traditional Four Questions of the seder, these can be summed up in one question: “Where are you headed, Jewishly speaking?” The question is to be asked, as it is to the Four Sons, in a manner that is both national and personal.

Let me tell you why these are the essential questions of our time.

Five years ago, Dr. Arnold Eisen, then the newly-minted Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, spoke here at Temple Israel. Responding to the state of the Conservative movement, he said that the decline in our numbers was not insurmountable, but that if things did not turn around in 5-10 years, the then-future prospects were not so good. Well, it’s been five years, and (Temple Israel’s relative stability notwithstanding) I have not detected any real change in the slope of that decline.

Numbers in the Reform movement and in Modern Orthodoxy are not much better. The only segment within Judaism that is growing rapidly is, of course, the Haredim, the fervently Orthodox.

There is no question that we Jews have greater freedom here and now than we have ever had; we are fully integrated into American society. There are few remaining barriers to Jews: We are not excluded from the best universities, as some of us were in the first half of the 20th century; we are welcome at the most prestigious workplaces and social forums in the nation; we occupy a third of the United States Supreme Court; the idea of a Jewish president is not beyond the realm of possibility; and much of non-Jewish America is willing not only to date us but to marry us as well.

There are no surprises here; we have come a long way in a few generations. Many of you know that statistics (from, for example, the National Jewish Population Survey) have shown the intermarriage rate hovering at about 50% for more than two decades. Related numbers show that children in intermarried families, on the whole, grow up with a far lower connection to Judaism. There are, of course, Jews who have married non-Jews who succeed in raising strongly-identified Jewish children, and there are many non-Jewish parents who are committed to raising Jewish children -- bringing their kids to synagogue, Hebrew school, and so forth -- but they are the exception, not the rule. 

But really, the issue is not intermarriage, which is I think merely a symptom of the greater problem. It’s about American Judaism in general, and particularly non-Orthodox Judaism. It’s time to think critically, not just about numbers, but the strength of our community’s connection to Judaism.

We know that Orthodoxy, and in particular Haredi Orthodoxy, is booming. They are growing rapidly, with many children per family, strong communal interconnection, and of course a zeal for Judaism and Jewish life. You may have read NY Times columnist David Brooks’ piece on this recently, a fawning account of his visit to black-hat Brooklyn titled “The Orthodox Surge.”

Brooks reports an excursion to Pomegranate, the top-shelf kosher grocery store that he likens to the specialty-food supermarket giant Whole Foods. I will not dwell on the strengths of Brooks’ argument, or its weaknesses. But in response, Jordana Horn of the Forward wrote an opinion piece that should be mandatory reading at your seder table. Ms. Horn describes herself as a committed Conservative Jew, and resents Mr. Brooks’ implication that Orthodoxy holds the Jewish future.

After pointing out that it is possible to be dedicated to Judaism and not Orthodox, she makes the following observations:

I fear that when my children grow up, they will encounter a world in which they will have to choose to be Orthodox or secular, and that no other options will exist — that while Conservative and Reform Jews were busy building gorgeous edifices of synagogues, they will have neglected to build communities that ensure their survival. 

I long for someone to stand up in Conservative and Reform synagogues and say, “Hey — if we want our egalitarian models of Judaism to have a fighting chance in the future, we need to think out of the box.

“We need to put our money where our mouths are when it comes to ensuring a Jewish future. We need to make sure our young congregants are on JDate. We need to make sure to reach out to and include Jewish singles and young families as much as we do senior citizens.

“We need to have a financial plan for making Jewish nursery school the best possible option, and an accessible one, for Jewish parents. We need Jewish day care in our synagogues for working parents so that the synagogue is seen as an indispensable part of life. We need to have infant and child care in every single service and program we offer.”

Ms. Horn is right on. And she could have said far more. Not just Chabad, but many variants of Orthodoxy have a tremendously impressive suite of outreach offerings that are easy to enter; they bring them right to you. They go where the Jews are, and they invite people in. Ladies and gentlemen, we say on two nights of every year, in front of all of our friends and family, “Kol dikhfin yeitei veyeikhul,” “Let all who are hungry, come and eat.” But aren’t we just paying Aramaic lip service? Are we really working hard to bring people into our fold? 

And furthermore, are we working hard with the people who are already there at the seder table, young and old, intermarried and in-married, to give them the tools that they need to live authentically Jewish lives as mainstream Americans?

Many of you have heard me say this many times in this space that we in the Conservative movement are committed to Rabbi Mordecai Waxman’s slogan of “tradition and change.” You know that I am committed to the Judaism of the Torah and the Talmud, the faith which inspired our ancestors and sustained them through centuries of misery, poverty, persecution, and wandering across continents and oceans. You know that I hold steadfast to the principles that Moses Mendelssohn, as the first emancipated Jew, held dear in the middle of the 18th century when he successfully joined German society as a practicing Jew. You know that I reject the isolation that the Haredi world pursues, that I am committed to living as much as an American as a Jew, that I support the moderate approach to halakhah and interpreting our canonical texts through a lens that is at once traditional and modern and scholarly. You know that I, that we at Temple Israel, stand for open engagement with both the Torah and with science, with egalitarianism and modernity, with Israel and with America.

And yet I, like Jordana Horn, wonder if my daughter and her children and grandchildren will have to choose between the Jewish approach that is stuck in 18th-century Poland and the one that hangs bagel ornaments on Christmas trees.

So those are the four questions we should be asking our friends, our family, our children and grandchildren. Where are you going, Jewishly? 

And hey, maybe that’s OK with most of those 80% of American Jews who show up for a seder. Maybe they do not care if there is a middle ground to Judaism. But I’d like to think that they do, and that if we all reach out to them, just like Chabad is doing so successfully, maybe they would be happy to come around here once in awhile, and not just on a major holiday or a family simhah.

For extra credit, the followup question is this: If you do indeed want a middle path to Jewish life, what are you going to do to make sure it does not disappear? Are you going to marry a Jewish person, or insist on conversion for a non-Jewish partner, or at the very least, work to agree that said partner will commit to raising your children as Jews? Are you going to join a synagogue? Are you going to take your family on vacation to Israel, rather than Mexico? Are you going to make sure your children obtain a Jewish education? Are you going to challenge yourself to try on for size just one new mitzvah, one that is easy and meaningful to you, like lighting Shabbat candles or blessing your children on Friday night, or studying some Torah? Are you going to discuss with your children how important it is to you that your grandchildren know that they are Jewish and why?

After all, what is the use of freedom, and freedom to practice our religion, if there is only one variety to choose from, and that variety rejects the very freedom we enjoy, and the secular structures that make it possible?

From the second day of Pesah until Shavuot we count off seven weeks of Sefirat HaOmer, the counting of the sheaves of grain that our ancestors were commanded by the Torah to do. Although today we bring no sheaves, we are understand this period as one of self-discipline, of kabbalistic meditation on the emanations of God, and as a period of preparation for receiving the Torah on Mt. Sinai. It is a time of study, and as it seems likely that the theme for our Tikkun Leyl Shavuot will be an examination of the role and power of the qehillah qedoshah, the synagogue community, I urge you to begin to consider these themes as we launch into Pesah and beyond.

 Where are you going, Jewishly? Ask these questions around your seder table.  Shabbat shalom and hag sameah.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 3/23/2013.)