Letter from a Jewish Late Bloomer

by

David A. Harris

Executive Director, American Jewish Committee

December 3, 2002

            There’s much talk these days about the delayed American Jewish population survey. I’m as interested in the data as the next person, but I suspect I don’t need a mega-study to understand the basic story line of American Jewry today. In essence, it’s the familiar words from the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

            Or, to put it in contemporary Israeli terms: Moshe meets Rafi on the street. “Moshe, my friend, how are you?” “In a word, good,” replies Moshe. “In two words, not good.”

            All I need to do is look around me. Encouraging news abounds, but then again so does the opposite.

            In the past decade, since the 1990 National Jewish Population Study was issued, many synagogues, federations, community centers, and other Jewish agencies, including the American Jewish Committee, have laudably redoubled their efforts to strengthen Jewish identity and appeal to ever broader segments of American Jewry.

            While synagogues are sometimes accused of suffering from an “edifice complex,” there is good reason for numerous synagogues, my own included, to be building these days. Existing facilities cannot accommodate all the children in the school programs, and some sanctuaries are just too small. New congregations of every denomination are sprouting up, sometimes in the most unlikely locations, bespeaking Jewish mobility. Jewish day school attendance has never been higher. Jewish studies courses are to be found on a growing number of college campuses. Adult education courses on every aspect of Jewish life are experiencing a surge of interest.

            While the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest applies to Jewish organizations as well, leaving some agencies in the dust, many others are thriving, as measured by membership, income, program, and reach.

            Jewish political access in this country remains breathtakingly impressive, a far cry from an earlier era when American Jews could not muster sufficient clout to persuade the Roosevelt administration, in 1939, to admit 936 Jews aboard the St. Louis who were fleeing Nazi persecution, resulting in the ship’s return to Europe with its rejected human cargo.

            Discrimination against Jews in the United States is at an all-time low. True, there remain isolated pockets where Jews are unwelcome – a country club here, an executive suite there – but these are the rare exceptions, and no longer stand as barriers to Jewish professional, cultural, or social advancement.

            And perhaps most importantly, Jews need not choose between their American and Jewish identities to live the American dream. In the past, many Jews believed that to achieve success and fit in they had to become “less Jewish,” but that is far from the case today. There are countless examples in American politics, diplomacy, military, business, and culture of Jews who proudly affirm their Jewish identity and see it as strengthening, not weakening, their American identity.

            That’s the good news, and I’ve barely skimmed the surface. But then there’s the bad news.

            Demographically, we’re not growing. At best, our numbers are static, but, given current trends, they’re destined to decline. This is confirmed by the initial figures released from the 2002 Jewish population survey, but I confess that my primary sources are not always academic.

            First, I am a regular reader of the New York Times Sunday Styles section on weddings. Now, I realize this isn’t exactly a scientific method, but nonetheless it’s a pretty revealing indicator. I knew we were headed for trouble when I saw the pièce de résistance: A Jew and a Christian being married by Jewish and Christian “interfaith ministers,” who were themselves married to each other. Welcome to contemporary America and the à la carte menu of religious choices!

            Second, I read obituaries. It’s almost a sure bet that one or more of the deceased that the Times will write about on any given day is a Jew, even if religious identity is not necessarily mentioned in the article. Still, it’s usually pretty obvious by a person’s surname or biographical data. I look at the last paragraph of the obit, the one that mentions surviving family members – how many children, how many grandchildren, last names, places of residence, and the like. You can learn a lot about Jewish demographic trends from those few lines, and more often than not the picture isn’t rosy.

            Third, I just look around me. Take the world of northern Westchester County, where I live. There are welcome signs of Jewish growth and dynamism, but a closer examination reveals a decidedly mixed picture.

            While there are many examples to the contrary, the number of mixed-marriage homes with barely a trace of Jewish identity is striking.

            On my son Michael’s high school soccer team, for instance, there were more children of mixed marriages – in these particular cases, not one being raised Jewish – than there were Jews.

            One extreme example of this situation is a middle-aged Jewish man with a younger Christian wife. His first wife was a Jew, and their children grew up heavily involved in both Judaism and Zionism. In his second marriage, his daughter came home from middle school one day recently and said to her mother, a friend of my wife: “Mommy, we learned about Jews today. Do we know any Jews?” To which her mother replied: “You silly goose, don’t you know that your daddy is a Jew?”

            But our problems don’t stop there. What about endogamous Jewish marriages where there’s barely a hint of Jewish content?

            My children tell my wife and me about Jewish kids in school or college who come from homes where the parents just don’t care, or are once-a-year Jews, or send their children to religious school only out of habit or peer pressure, while bad-mouthing the experience in front of their own children.

            Is it any wonder that Jews end up all over the American religious landscape? If Jewish kids grow up in families without Jewish anchorage, pride, literacy, and joy, what will keep them on the reservation?

            Actually, Franz Kafka wrote of this phenomenon over 80 years ago in his revealing Letter to Father (1919):

            It was also impossible to make clear to a child who from sheer anxiety was too acutely observant that those few trivialities you performed in the name of             Judaism, with an indifference corresponding to their triviality, could have any             higher meaning. For you they were meaningful as small souvenirs of earlier times             and that’s why you wanted to impart them to me, but you could do so only by way of persuasion or threat, since they no longer had any value of their own, even for   you….

            In today’s America, it seems, anything goes. In a very real sense, religion has become a marketplace. Some people weave in and out of religions with abandon. In fact, a few years ago, the New York Times Sunday Magazine devoted a cover story to offering real-life examples of this very phenomenon. The transmission belt that passed on religious identity from generation to generation is in acute danger, and especially for Jews who, polls repeatedly show, approach religious practice and ritual with greater skepticism than do other religious communities in the United States.

            I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve heard more or less the same refrains from those who have drifted away, whether from observant or secular homes or somewhere in between:

“Hebrew school was a complete waste of time.”

“I had to sit for endless hours in synagogue for reasons that escaped me, while other kids got to sleep late, play sports, or socialize.”

“My parents didn’t seem to care a whole lot about being Jewish, so why should I?”

“I couldn’t understand any of the prayers in Hebrew. The whole thing seemed so foreign.”

“The rabbi wasn’t a spiritual leader; he was a fund-raiser and an ego massager.”

“No one ever explained to me the essence of Judaism. All I got was a bunch of stories.”

“Some people around me seemed more concerned with ritual than content. It smacked of hypocrisy.”

“It all seemed to be about burden and responsibility, not about happiness and fulfillment.”

“I never knew if there was anything more to being Jewish than remembering the Holocaust and keeping an eye out for the anti-Semites, who for some reason wanted to kill me. Is that a sufficient guide to life?”

“All I learned about was being a good person, but Jews don’t have a monopoly on ethics, so why did I need to be Jewish in order to be good?”

“I was looking for community, but instead found social hierarchy everywhere I looked in the Jewish world.”

            I grew up in a largely secular environment, and in my youth many of these thoughts occurred to me as well. My father couldn’t tell Purim from Passover, and I couldn’t wait to get my bar mitzvah behind me so that boring Hebrew school would be over and done with. But, at the same time, I always felt a visceral link to my Jewish identity and a profound connection both to the Jews who came before me and to those living around me.

            And my mother, though largely unschooled in things Jewish, knew exactly who she was and where she belonged. Even without religious or scholarly grounding, in a very real sense she embodied the meaning of the legendary philosopher Martin Buber’s words, written in 1923: “My soul is not by the side of my people; my people is my soul.”

            It wasn’t until my twenties, though, that I discovered I had been cheated.

            I was in Rome working with Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union. By and large, they knew even less about their Jewish heritage than I did, but at least they had a good excuse. They had emigrated from a country which had systematically denied them the chance, on penalty of imprisonment, to study about their religion and culture.

            When they asked me questions about Judaism – questions that might have been bottled up inside them for years, if not decades – I was, to my embarrassment, often clueless. And they were clueless as to why I was clueless. After all, I had grown up in America, hadn’t I, where opportunities to study about Jews and Judaism abounded.

            I realized I was far more grounded in American and European civilization than in Jewish civilization. I was more familiar with Montesquieu than Maimonidies. I could explain what kielbasa was but not Kabbalah. And, thanks to popular American culture, I probably knew more Christmas than Chanukah tunes.

            I urged the Jewish organizations working with Soviet Jews in Rome and Vienna (the two European transit stops on the way to permanent resettlement) to educate these newcomers about their identity, but for one reason or another, it didn’t happen. And so, by process of default, I, of all people, became a Jewish educator in my spare time. I organized programs for the refugees and eventually wrote a primer for them on being Jewish. Needless to say, to educate them I had to begin by educating myself.

            And in that process of self-education, I became acutely aware of two things: First, I realized that I was the custodian, together with every other living Jew, of a magnificent heritage that covered everything from theology to philosophy, from mysticism to music, from literature to art, from language to ethnography. And second, I might have gone through life without ever stumbling on this treasure trove had I not encountered Soviet Jews.

            To the extent that I can extrapolate from my own experience – and my experience, I know, was far from unique – how could it be that an otherwise highly literate group of American Jews could be so illiterate about their own Jewish identity?

            To sum it up, without wishing to sound excessively banal, we’ve got a great “product,” Jewish civilization, but we could have learned a lesson or two about promotion along the way. If religion has, as I said, become something of a marketplace, then we’d better figure out how to make certain that its inherent riches are on display for all to see and enjoy.

            There are innumerable entry points to involvement in Jewish life, but they need to be better known. In fact, there are so many different opportunities that, like those twelve-page menus in some diners, surely there’s something for everyone.

                     Jews in pursuit of a sense of community and belonging need not flock to other religions or cults. Those grappling with life’s overarching questions will discover that Jews have been wrestling with the very same questions for nearly four thousand years. Those looking for ethical guideposts will find the maps. Those seeking the sense of awe that comes with the quest for the sacred need not look beyond Judaism. Those in search of spiritual fulfillment can find it in a myriad of ways.

                     And those Jews who desire pride of affiliation can surely find it in the extraordinary achievements of the Jewish people. Consider these sample comments from distinguished non-Jews about the Jewish role in world history:

                     Thomas Cahill, the author of the best-selling The Gifts of the Jews: “The Jews were the first people to break out of this cycle [i.e., the belief that the cosmos was     profoundly cyclical], to find a new way of thinking and experiencing, a new way      of understanding and feeling the world, so much so that it may be said with some            justice that theirs is the only new idea that human beings have ever had.”

Charles Francis Potter, a Unitarian minister who wrote The Great Religious Leaders: “[Moses’] life seems actually to have been the historical bridge between animistic polytheism and ethical monotheism – that is practically to say, from superstition to religion.”

            Mark Twain, writing in the September 1898 issue of Harper’s New Monthly    Magazine: “If statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human     race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky             Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always        been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his      commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his             bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art,           music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to        the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all       the ages; and had it done with the hands tied behind him. He could be vain of             himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Roman      followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone. Other peoples have sprung up          and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now,     or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always         was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no   slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are       mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his             immortality?”

            John Adams, the nation’s second president, wrote in a letter to F.A. Van der     Kemp in 1808: “I insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than    any other nation….They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this             earth….They have given religion to three-quarters of the globe, and have           influenced the affairs of mankind more, and more happily, than any other nation, ancient or modern.”

Paul Johnson, the distinguished historian and Christian scholar, wrote in A History of the Jews: “One way of summing up 4,000 years of Jewish history is to ask ourselves, what would have happened to the human race if Abraham had not been a man of great sagacity; or if he had stayed in Ur and kept his higher notions to himself, and no specific Jewish people had come into being. Certainly the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. All the great conceptual discoveries of the intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they have been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the ideas of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person; of the individual conscience, and so of personal redemption; of the collective conscience, and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal, and love as the foundation of justice; and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind.”

            Reading Johnson’s powerful summation of the Jewish contribution to civilization, one understands why the Assembly of the Province of Pennsylvania, in 1751, turned to the Hebrew Bible, specifically the Book of Leviticus, for the inscription that was to be placed on the Liberty Bell: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

            Indeed, we have a great story to tell, but how do we do get the word out to those who need to hear it most?

            Believe me, if I had good answers, I wouldn’t keep them a secret.

            What is clear is that we have been endowed with the precious gift of a unique heritage and identity, one that we need to appreciate better ourselves and find ways of sharing with others. And today we have the incalculable advantage of a technological revolution that opens up all kinds of communication possibilities.

            Ultimately, it requires a full-court press. Every nook and cranny of the Jewish community must examine not just what we are currently doing, but even more, what we need to do to engage as many people as possible in the Jewish experience.

            At the risk of stating the obvious, there is no one address for transmitting Judaism and Jewish identity.

            We cannot simply expect rabbis or teachers to do all the work for us, though much responsibility does rest on their shoulders; it must be a partnership involving, first and foremost, the family. After all, the home is where it all begins. And our children should learn to understand – by our deeds far more than by our words – that we take seriously our Jewish identity, however we may choose to practice it, and that this identity adds immeasurably to our lives, as it can to theirs.

            We need to set an example for our children by conveying the message that Jewish education is a lifelong pursuit, a boon to mind and soul, that most certainly doesn’t end at the age of thirteen or sixteen.

            We should take advantage of Jewish experiential opportunities – camping, retreats, travel, quality time in Israel, conferences, study sessions, organizational involvement, online “virtual” communities, you name it – that give form and substance to our sense of connection.

            We must make the case that to be unabashedly American and Jewish is mutually enhancing, not diminishing.

            And we ought to ensure that those Jews who deliberately demean and trivialize the Jewish experience, like some authors or movie or television scriptwriters, don’t have the last word. Their watered-down, caricatured, stereotyped, and, yes, occasionally self-loathing treatment of Jewish themes should not be allowed to define the American Jewish experience.

            If I could wave a magic wand, there are several things I’d like to see happen, among them:

            I would try to find ways to keep all children in formal Jewish education past bar and bat mitzvah, at least until the age of sixteen. Not only would that keep kids connected to Jewish education for another three years, but it would also give them a much deeper understanding of their heritage than they currently have. And a trip to Israel, whether with family or a youth group, should become an integral part of the experience of every bar and bat mitzvah child.

            Moreover, American Jewry can learn from the experience of Australian Jewry – and other overseas communities – and create a network of Jewish day schools running through high school, that compete with the finest secular schools at every level, including academic, athletic, and other extracurricular activities, and that appeal to the broadest possible swath of the community. While a few such schools currently exist in the U.S., many more are needed.

            In the same spirit, and modeled on the visionary Birthright Israel initiative, every Jewish child in this country should have access to Jewish education, whether in day or after-school programs, without parents having to worry about the high tuition cost. Many schools, of course, offer scholarships, but much more could be done with increased communal support for those who find the costs prohibitive. The Jewish community has no higher long-term priority than education.

            Further, what if those families planning to leave funds in their estates (or via other means) for their children were encouraged to designate a sum to be specifically earmarked for “things Jewish?” In other words, that money could only be used for Jewish activities – Jewish school tuition or camping fees, trips to Israel, donations to Jewish charitable organizations, synagogue membership fees, etc. The creation of such individual Jewish family funds would send an unmistakable message about our values and priorities.

            And finally, apropos conversion and outreach, the Jewish community should make a far more concerted effort to invite people in, to make them feel welcome, and to encourage them to explore the possibilities for deepening their ties with us.

            I have never understood how the Jewish community, on the one hand, can bemoan static or shrinking numbers, while, on the other hand, some Jews put up roadblocks that make it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue active participation in the life of the Jewish people.

            In a post-Holocaust era, when anti-Semitism is again on the rise and Islamic radicals have declared all Jews to be fair game, should a non-Jew’s willingness to identify in a meaningful way with the Jewish community be taken lightly or dismissed out of hand? Some Jews, however, regrettably take just such an approach, which, in my view, is both insensitive and shortsighted in the extreme.

            Extending the reach and hold of the Jewish community is a daunting task, to say the least, but eminently worthwhile and, I firmly believe, doable. In our efforts, we should always be inspired by the esteemed Jewish theologian and social justice activist Abraham Joshua Heschel, who, in 1955, encapsulated in just a few words our mission:

            To be a Jew is to affirm the world without being enslaved by it; to be a part of   civilization and to go beyond it; to conquer space and to sanctify time. Judaism is   the art of surpassing civilization, sanctification of time, sanctification of history.

            And in the years ahead, may the good news of the Jewish community’s resilience, strength, and dynamism always outweigh the bad.

Note: This is # 25 in a series of occasional letters on topics of current interest. For copies of previous letters, please contact Alina Viera at vieraa@ajc.org or call (212) 751-4000, ext. 203.