On the Worrying Economics of Torah Observance

Tablet Magazine recently ran a story about the rising costs associated with maintaining Orthodox-level Jewish observance (the article focuses on Toco Hills in Atlanta, a heavily-Orthodox suburb). From food to housing to education, the article notes, it’s always been costly (when compared with how others fare) to be strictly Torah observant. It’s expensive to keep kosher in a manner that will pass muster in those communities. Housing costs get driven upward because of the need to live within an eruv (a legal fiction that defines a kind of private space in which the laws for carrying items between public and private spaces on Shabbat do not apply) or otherwise be within walking distance of a synagogue. And public education simply “won’t do” because no one teaches Torah and Talmud in the public schools.

(“Legal fiction,” by the way, does not mean that something is false. It means that the entity, concept, etc., is created by a legal enactment because it would not otherwise exist. Your Latin lesson for today: “fiction” comes from the same Latin verb–facio–as our words “fact” and “manufacture.”)

You could say many things about the economic circumstances at work here. It’s possible, for example, to “blame the victim.” I won’t do that here, and wouldn’t do so in any case. My concern is a systemic one.

Bloodline B.S. and Halakhic Hysterics

The opening paragraph to an article on the YNet site reads:

In the next generation, a significant part – which may even be the majority of ‘US Jewry’ – will not be Jewish according to the Halacha, in light of the growing dimensions of intermarriage throughout the past few decades.

Delight in the scare quotes–‘US Jewry’–and enjoy the derision and condescension that shines through this article. And, while you’re at it, note the slight of hand YNet plays, saying that the diagnosis comes not from some Orthodox authority but from a scholar at Bar-Ilan University.

Let’s break this down a bit, shall we?

How Conservative Judaism Lost Everyone Else

Michah Gottlieb, a professor at NYU, has an article on the Forward’s website titled, “How Conservative Judaism Lost Me.” In it, he discusses how his commitment to what he thought were the Conservative movement’s principles–devotion to halakhah with a more modern and secular-scholarly approach to issues–led him to leave the Conservative fold.

He argues that it was exactly people like him that the Conservative movement should have been courting as new leaders, but it failed to do so, and thus lost people to modern Orthodoxy.

I suppose there is something to this in the sense of leadership and purpose. But I’m not persuaded that this problem is really what caused the diminution of the Conservative movement from its prior place as the largest of the modern American movements.

I understand Gottlieb’s frustration (and it’s nice to see a fellow IU Bloomington alum do good), but JTS (the flagship seminary for the Conservative movement) had long been described as a group of Orthodox faculty teaching Conservative rabbis who would be spiritual leaders for Reform congregants. People like Gottlieb–and, at one point, me–haven’t really been the Conservative movement’s major problem over the last twenty years.

I understand how this could seem to be the case to Gottlieb. He mentions coming of age at a time when the ordination of women was the big controversy roiling the Conservative movement, and it’s easy to see a kind of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” thing happening: Conservative Judaism compromised halakhically on this issue, lost members and scholars to either the Union for Traditional Judaism (which was initially kind of Conservative Judaism without womens’ ordination) or the OU, and decline followed.

I don’t think the numbers necessarily bear that out, however. When you look at the Pew survey results, you would have expected Modern Orthodox Judaism to have grown proportionally, and it hasn’t.

I think, instead, what likely happened is that some people fell away from Reform affiliation and refugees from an adrift Conservative movement backfilled the ranks. Other Conservative Jews likely left affiliation altogether, and some–but a more limited number–likely took Gottlieb’s path. (His contention that his path is the more common one is not based on broad evidence, but rather is anecdotal and particular to what is possible in areas like New York. There’s nothing like what Gottlieb has here in Indianapolis, where the Orthodox synagogues have pushed farther to the right and alienated the folks who had come over from the Conservative movement in the past.)

I think Gottlieb’s article is important because, while I disagree with his conclusions about how the Conservative movement should have gone about retaining its place, I do agree with his observation about the movement itself–that it is ideologically adrift. Unfortunately, so is much of American Judaism.

That said, I don’t think that the Conservative movement’s new emphasis–expressed by one rabbi as Kadsheinu B’mitzvotekha (sanctify us with your commandments)–is going to appeal to anyone outside its present ranks and perhaps some on the conservative edges of Reform and the liberal edges of the Orthodox world. What It may do, however, is staunch the flow and preserve some kind of “middle,” which Gottlieb argues is important for the continued vitality of American Jewish life.

And even the new approach advanced by the United Synagogue is a bit schizoid. Kadsheinu b’mitzvotekha–but also be more welcoming to the non-Jewish family of Jewish members.

I suspect the bigger problem for the Conservative movement is that the membership of the Reform movement is starting to look more like most Conservative Jews, while retaining enough of a liberal edge to keep some–but not all–of its present membership profile. Meanwhile, Conservative rabbis talk enough like Orthodox rabbis to alienate liberal members while more conservative members will dislike the influx of LGB(T?) clergy and more favorable treatment of non-Jewish spouses.

All of this bodes ill for the continued vitality of JTS and the American Jewish University, which grew in response to the movement’s growth but will now inevitably shrink. This is particularly sad, I think, for JTS, which has in the past produced some very important scholarship and very important scholars. (Not that–as Gottlieb observes–this justifies its continued approach. And I find that realization especially disappointing because I’ve personally benefited from studying with some of its alumni.)

And all of this is wrapped up in the general lack of mission and direction. For example, the JTA article on the United Synagogue 100th anniversary convention shows that there is still navel-gazing on whether independent and alternative minyanim are harmful to synagogues–focused on the institution, not the needs of Jews themselves.

The question all movements should be asking–at the movement level, and within individual congregations–is, “What are we about?” After that, we can figure out where we are and where we should go. Unfortunately, the Conservative movement’s eternal compromise position likely puts it in the worst place of the large modern movements; it’s got a big hole to dig out of.

“Danger, Will Robinson!”

So, in my Facebook feed today I saw a link to an editorial on Haaretz.com by Rabbi Leon Morris titled, “Religion matters: Beware the American ‘cultural Jew.'” They’re trouble, I tell ya: too much lox, bagels, and bad Yiddish, and not enough commitment to Israel. And also, without faith, Torah, and mitzvot, those Jews are lacking “anything that matters much at all.”

Also, for our traditionally-minded friends: compromise with the Reform and Conservative movements, since they are the “shock troops” for getting people back into Judaism. Never mind that the same study Rabbi Morris cites to support his claim that cultural Jews are inherently bad for Judaism also points out that Reform and Conservative Judaism are not doing so hot, themselves.

Here’s an idea for Rabbi Morris. How about not talking to cultural Jews as though they’re only “Jew-ish,” rather than Jewish? How about taking seriously the idea that many of your congregants in the liberal Jewish world probably aren’t religious themselves? How about thinking about religion separately from belief in a divinity. (Humanistic Judaism is, after all, basically a form of religious humanism.)

Oh, never mind–we in the SHJ will happily take them.

You people with the hand-wringing!

Excuse me a moment, I have to go grab my soapbox.

(Clattering in the closet, drags out a box and plops it unceremoniously in the public square)

As you likely know by now, the Pew Research Center released the results of a major study of Jewish affiliation and identity. As you also likely know by now, thanks to the New York Times, the sky is falling.

Yeah, guess what I think? The voices in The Times are wrong. Their sky is falling. Our sky is not.

I particularly love this line: “a significant rise in those who are not religious, marry outside the faith and are not raising their children Jewish — resulting in rapid assimilation that is sweeping through every branch of Judaism except the Orthodox.”

Yet the same Jews who are “assimilating” are also largely proud to be Jewish, according to the poll. And they’re strongly attached to the State of Israel. These aren’t self-hating Jews.

I think the poll shows something important: Jews outside the “Orthodox” world have largely decoupled their Jewish identities from traditional modes of Jewish religion. Those modes don’t always mean that people believe; that definition is what happens when your concept of religion is dictated by being part of a mostly Christian, largely Protestant culture (as is true of the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe).

Rather, “cultural” Jews are becoming more the norm, and those Jews are comfortable having families that are much more diverse than those of their grandparents’ generations. This has happened despite all the hemming and hawing over the last forty years about shrinking Jewish communities.

So what are we to make of the problem of assimilation? The approach of the Humanistic Jewish world is to say that one of the great flaws of Jewish attempts at engagement is that we continue to impose the various halakhic norms–modified or not–upon Jewish identity. So we’ll find Reform rabbis that won’t perform intermarriages, for example, despite the position of the CCAR that intermarriage is permissible and that a child with one Jewish parent–either parent–is Jewish.

Look: if you welcome people in with one hand, and smack them away with the other, they’re going to leave. And when every Jewish institution behaves this way, you’re going to make a whole lot of people leave.

However proud they are of being Jewish, people know not to return to places at which they aren’t wanted.

In some ways, I’m one of those people. But I’m also one of those people who is so attached to a Jewish identity that, ultimately, I’m putting in work to create institutions and environments where the people smacked away can come and be welcomed; it’s why I’m a Humanist Jew working to build places that actively welcome blended families and individuals who are Jewish but don’t necessarily do Jewish the way our heavily Ashkenazic modern institutions think about doing and being Jewish.

I think existing Jewish institutions will continue to shrink–and may ultimately simply fail–if they continue to behave as they have for the last forty years.

The current generation of large donors will die out. Will the next generation be large enough and concerned enough with the older institutions to support them? I’m not sure.

Jane Eisner of The Forward is right: ““This should serve as a wake-up call for all of us as Jews,” she said, “to think about what kind of community we’re going to be able to sustain if we have so much assimilation.””

Let’s see what happens when we don’t push people away.

Member Poaching Part 4: So What Now?

Since first posting about this issue, I’ve discussed some of the problems I see in the American Jewish scene regarding engagement, leadership, membership, education, community models, and the like. Of course, it’s easy to pick nits without actually suggesting solutions.

So here are the ideas I’ve been thinking about.

And of course, hackneyed though this point may be, there is no silver bullet.

Jewish Education

Starting with Jewish education, the current model that exists outside much of non-Orthodox Judaism does not work. For too many children, and for too many families, the supplementary school model (which is what “Hebrew School” is called in more formal educational circles) is a drudgery of grueling sessions learning to make out Hebrew letters and vowels and maybe learning some prayers in order to perform well during a bar or bat mitzvah.

Unless Hebrew just really speaks to a child’s soul, that’s not going to create Jewish engagement.

What will? While I like the idea of social action/community service as a way to shake up the traditional model of education toward bar or bat mitzvah, that isn’t distinctly Jewish. Plenty of high schools require volunteer experience before students can graduate.

So I think it will have to be a mix: social action will have to be tied to sources of Jewish provenance that make sense for the children, the congregations they belong to, and the children’s and parents’ values. And that means bar/bat mitzvah education will be more time-intensive for educators. But it will also be more meaningful and have a better chance of creating meaningful connections between bnai mitzvah and their Jewish identities.

That education will also, for many, focus much less on “learning Hebrew.”

That education will also, for many, focus much less on “learning Hebrew.” I’m not sure that’s as big a problem as we might think, because let’s face it–what supplementary school kids learn now doesn’t exactly match up to really learning Hebrew.

Jewish Organizations

Jewish organizations will also have to change. I think Prof. Wolfson has written a bit that starts down this road in his Relational Judaism, but I don’t think he goes far enough or is willing to really rethink Jewish organizations enough.

Prof. Wolfson is right that Jewish organizations need to do better at reaching out to new potential members. But that’s not really enough–that’s just doing better at marketing. Jewish organizations–synagogue, educational agencies, social service agencies generally–will need to figure out what Jews want and how to deliver on those desires.

The modern Jewish community will, gradually, begin to look like the rest of the American population. We will have more diversity. Jewish community organizations will fail if they do not begin to figure out how to deal with special needs children. They will fail if they do not figure out how to genuinely welcome interfaith families.

Jewish community organizations will fail if they do not begin to figure out how to deal with special needs children. They will fail if they do not figure out how to genuinely welcome interfaith families.

There are no easy paths to these ends. In fact, these will not be ends. Improvement is a process, not a product, and successful improvement will be the result of continuous feedback loops between organizations and community constituents.

Improvement will also be a result of recognizing that stakeholders in the community will not only want to contribute money, but time. Many of Jewish organizations aren’t prepared to handle the DIY ethic shared by so many younger members of the American Jewish world. That, too, will have to change unless Jewish community groups want to alienate large portions of the next generation of Jewish leaders.

The Synagogue

The synagogue will also need to change. I’ve already let on in this series that I think the high-cost, centralized rabbinic model is flawed in many communities, and that we will need to make more training and ordination options available to willing clergy.

But I also think we may see increased decentralization of synagogue-like groups–e.g., havurot–that may benefit from sharing educational work. There are even some larger synagogues that do this–the Indianapolis Jewish community is a somewhat impaired version of this.

Belief

This may be the toughest nut to crack–not because of where I think the typical American Jew sits on the ideological spectrum, but because of what people are willing to admit to in public.

The American Jewish community is interestingly reticent about saying what it thinks. Dissent is muted on a number of issues: Israeli politics, American foreign policy, American domestic policy, and statements of faith. To grow–to be able to encompass the broad range of Jewish viewpoints–we will need to create a more open environment for dialogue.

In particular, I think we need a vocal, growing Humanistic Jewish movement to push the edges of the debate.

This last point is where I think we need vocal smaller movements. In particular, I think we need a vocal, growing Humanistic Jewish movement to push the edges of the debate.

Unfortunately, I think is where those of us in the Humanistic Jewish world will have the greatest difficulty, because what we do–the songs we sing and the language we use–is often very unlike what Jews in the rest of the Jewish world do. We will need to work hard to bridge that gap.

I think it can be done–but we’re going to have to work at it.

I’m ready. Are you?

Related articles

• Series alert: member poaching and pay-as-you-go synagogues (sjewindy.wordpress.com)
• Member Poaching Item 1: Rabbinical Roles (sjewindy.wordpress.com)
• Member Poaching Item 2: They’re Eating our Lunch (sjewindy.wordpress.com)
• Member Poaching Item 3: Affiliation (sjewindy.wordpress.com)

Member Poaching Item 3: Affiliation

Headed back to the article that kicked things off, one of the dividing lines that emerged between the “new,” lower-cost Reform-style synagogue and the more established ones was that the established synagogues contended that the new synagogue was acting to damage the established Jewish community.

I mean, this just makes me want to sputter with rage. (Imagine a guy sputtering. There you go!)

Why? Because if you’re fighting to keep people connected to the Jewish community, is there a worse way than to convey the message that unless you’re willing to pay a couple thousand dollars a year just to be affiliated with something, you’re actively harming the Jewish community in your area (and ergo the Jewish people)? I’m not sure there is.

So I’d point you, dear reader, to this first reminder: it doesn’t cost anything to be Jewish. Nothing.

It may cost more to do Jewish, depending on what it is. And it shouldn’t cost anything to be able to feel like you can walk into a synagogue and attend services. It shouldn’t cost anything to be affiliated. Why do we have so many synagogues that charge for High Holiday tickets if you’re not a member?

Sound crazy? Guess what institutions don’t charge anything to be affiliated or go to Easter and Christmas services?

Christians. I hear they’ve been in rapid decline for the last 2000 years.

To answer the objection that will come up: yes, institutions require support to survive. But ask yourself: do we need these institutions in this form? Is what we have the best possible set of institutions, with the best possible array of priorities, programs, and activities?

At bottom: should we have only one model?

As you can tell, I’m not convinced we should.

Next time: what can we do about it?

Related articles

• Member Poaching Item 1: Rabbinical Roles (sjewindy.wordpress.com)
• Member Poaching Item 2: They’re Eating our Lunch (sjewindy.wordpress.com)
• Series alert: member poaching and pay-as-you-go synagogues (sjewindy.wordpress.com)