Becoming a Spiritual Producer

Kol Nidre 5778 / 29 September 2017

This spring, with God’s blessing, my parents will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. When they married in 1968, Atlanta had just a handful of synagogues, and people went where they fit in: if you were Reform, you went to The Temple; Orthodox, to Beth Jacob; and so on. For nearly everyone, this meant attending the synagogue whose denominational label matched the label of the synagogue in which they grew up. But half a century later, Jewish communities across the country have seen dramatic changes. By the time I was going to bnai mitzvah, metro Atlanta boasted more than a dozen synagogues and several Jewish day schools, and the community has expanded even more in the twenty-five years since. But the most significant changes have come very recently, within the last decade.

In large part, the recent changes reflect overall trends in American religious and social life. Dr. Arnold Eisen, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, often cites a statistic that 44% of Americans do not practice the faith in which they were raised, and one in three are married to someone of a different faith.^[1] When I consider those numbers, what strikes me most is not the number of people practicing a different faith, but the other side — if two out of five people are outright changing their faith, the other three who remain within their original tradition are almost certainly expressing their religious practice differently than the way they were raised. Just within my own social circle, I have friends who were raised Reform and are now Ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox who are now Conservative, Conservative who are now Reform, and so on. This kind of internal religious shift is by no means simple, but remains vastly easier than outright conversion.

At the same time, a growing population of Jews eschews denominational labels altogether. This trend, which becomes more prevalent as you look at younger demographic cohorts, provokes deep anxiety in established movements and their affiliated synagogues.^[2] And yet even this trend has not led to widespread abandonment of synagogues; many of the same people who resist standard classification regularly attend denominational synagogues.^[3] I’m sure some people in this room are thinking, “He’s talking about me!” In truth, I’m even talking about myself. After college, I didn’t join an affiliated synagogue until my second year of rabbinical school — and even then I felt decidedly ambivalent. And yet throughout those years, I regularly attended just three independent miynanim and six different denominational synagogues! Where my parents felt comfort and security in denominational affiliation, I felt a visceral resistance. Don’t label me! And that from someone who had grown up a “movement kid” — shul every shabbat, Solomon Schechter Day School, Camp Ramah, USY — and was enrolled in a denominational seminary at the time.^[4]

Judaism, like so many things in life, used to come in a neatly bundled package. On every issue of religious significance — gender, sexual orientation, kashrut, shabbat — “Conservative” meant something specific, and “Reform” and “Orthodox” meant something different on those same important questions. Love it or hate it, the bundle was the bundle; people made do, or they went somewhere else, or they dropped out altogether — but in any event the package was defined by someone else and was one-size-fits-all for the movement.

Now, the bundles have come undone. While I was in rabbinical school, students would regularly ask about טהרת המשפחה, the set of laws governing sexual relations within a marriage — only to find out that when our teachers had attended JTS, those halakhot were kept out of the curriculum. What an earlier generation had deliberately removed from the “Conservative” bundle, our generation now wanted back. Among the minyanim I attended in my wandering years were two, one in New York and one in Jerusalem, that were founded by people who identified as Orthodox and wanted a prayer space where women had access to lead the services. And in Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan, a small community has emerged around the Fort Tryon Jewish Center that can only be described as “Haredi Egalitarian” — ultra-strict in matters of halakhah and also so committed to full inclusion that Rabbi Yosef and I are studying their ritual practices as we work toward increased sensitivity for the transgender community. I think this unbundling is largly a good thing — you can be whatever kind of Jew you want to be — but it also creates significant challenges for anyone working to build Jewish community.

My teen years came at the height of paranoia over a perceived “demographic holocaust:” the 1990 Jewish Population Study, with its statistic that 52% of Jews were “marrying out,” hit the organized Jewish world like a ton of bricks. In another generation or two, so we were told, Judaism would be wiped out if we didn’t do something to stem the rising tide of intermarraige. In the end, none of it came to pass: rates of interfaith marriage among Jews have remained more or less where they were in 1990 — remember that 1/3 of Americans married to someone of a different faith? — and not only are we still here, in many respects American Judaism is at its strongest point in a long time.

The demographic scare led, in Jewish education, to a heavy emphasis on endogamy. The necessity of marrying another Jew was far and away the dominant message of my adolescent education — eclipsing prayer, social justice, even Zionism — and for all the resources poured into convincing a bunch of teenagers who they should (or shouldn’t) marry, it’s not clear that it achieved much of anything. My experience as a rabbi has only confirmed the skepticism I felt in high school. I have no desire to try convincing people whom they should or shouldn’t marry. In seven years, no one has ever asked me, “Rabbi, what do you think about my life choices?” Every week, someone comes to ask, “Rabbi, given the choices I have made in my life, what can I do to lead a meaningful and engaged Jewish life?” The second question seems much more deserving of an answer.

More bizarrely, the obsession with “marrying in” largely eclipsed any awareness of the wide semantic field encompassed by “Jewish.” A couple once came to see me in advance of their wedding, both brimming with happiness at having found a Jewish partner. It fell to me to point out that while the bride had attended regularly attended synagogue as well as a youth group, Jewish day school, and summer camp, the groom’s parents had dropped their synagogue membership before he became bar mitzvah. They were both Jewish, and they had a lot to talk about. As Rabbi Elie Kaunfer observed, “For the first time in centuries, two Jews can marry each other and have Jewish children without any connection to Jewish heritage, wisdom, or tradition.”^[5] On the whole, we were so focused on interfaith marriage that no one paid attention to the other kind of “mixed” marriage: two Jews from fundamentally different backgrounds. We have many families like that here at BZBI, and sooner or later, prompted by a baby or a bar mitzvah or a parent’s funeral, someone ends up in my office trying to make sense of the religious friction in their household.

Once upon a time, when the bundles were intact and people largely stayed within the bounds of their upbringing, a synagogue like ours could rely on shared background and context to give people a sense of belonging in the service and in the broader community. People who grew up Conservative ultimately joined Conservative synagogues, where the atmosphere was largely familiar. We can no longer assume consistency of background — many people come to BZBI without the contextual knowledge to make sense of our services. Terri Soifer, our Director of Community Engagement, likes to joke that half of our membership is ideologically committed to Conservative Judaism, while the other half happens to live west of Broad Street. It becomes our responsibility to ensure that anyone who wants to be here can feel welcome — not by changing who we are, but by being clear about who we are, and taking care to frame context and offer opportunities for people to gain the skills and knowledge necessary to feel empowered.

It’s interesting that our tradition refers to Torah study not as חינוך, “education,” but as לימוד, “learning.” Education deals with what we know. In Chicago, one of my students was a high school English teacher. One day, when it came up that I had never read Faulkner, she insisted I get a copy of Light in August — and I loved it. Since then, in addition to reading newly released books, I have also journeyed through many of the classics that I didn’t encounter in class. I have a bed table stacked with Camus and Rilke, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Herman Melville — and a wife who mercilessly mocks my choice of bedtime reading. I also did very well on my AP Calculus exam. I can’t remember how well, but then I also can’t remember how to do any of the calculus, or even why it might be useful. I’m sure somewhere in the room is an engineer or scientist who wants to bang their head against the pew in frustration. But every adult gets by with an uneven education. None of us needs to know everything, so we don’t.

Learning takes a fundamentally different approach; it seeks more than acquiring skills and information.^[6] Instead of teaching us things to know, learning teaches us how to think. Those of you who have taken Midrash and Talmud classes with me know I am fanatical about methodology — because those central books of our tradition teach us habits of mind central to Jewish learning. We learn in hevruta because the act of discussing our ideas with a partner teaches us how to think critically about our own assumptions. The quintessential story about hevruta learning comes from the Talmud: After Resh Lakish died, Rabbi Yohanan took Rabbi Elazar as a hevruta. Each time Rabbi Yohanan would state an opinion, Rabbi Elazar would offer a text that supported Rabbi Yohanan’s view. After some time — the Talmud doesn’t say how long, but I like to imagine it was sometime around mincha that first afternoon — Rabbi Yohanan screamed at Rabbi Elazar: “You’re useless to me! When I learned with Resh Lakish, if I stated an opinion he would give me twenty-four arguments against my view, and I would need to sharpen my reasoning. All you do is tell me I am right!”^[7]

Traditional Jewish learning also hones our sensitivity to the circumstances that shape every experience. It is said that, in the shtetl, if a woman took a slaughtered chicken to the rabbi to ask if it was kosher, his first question would be, “How is your husband’s business doing?” — because the answer about the chicken partially depended on whether she could afford another one. That story may not be exactly true, but it reflects a broader attitude about the need for halakhic practices and customs that fit with people’s real lives.

In a mix-and-match world, each of us needs that learning in order to make deliberate and meaningful choices about our Jewish lives. As I see it, however, this “change” in Jewish engagement is less of an innovation than a return to the heart of Jewish living. Our new Director of Youth and Family Education, Shula Cooper, now begins Shabbat morning in the Neziner Hebrew School with Asefa — the Hebrew word for “gathering” — a kind of morning pep rally to kick off the day. For ten minutes parents and kids together sing songs, get updates on the school, and then before classes start we close with the blessing for Torah learning: לַעֲסוֹק בְּדִבְרֵי תוֹרָה.

This blessing uses a surprising description of learning. The Hebrew verb עָסַק has nothing to do with learning at all — it refers to any “engaged occupation.”^[8] The blessing suggests that true Torah learning depends on making, not taking, meaning. We learn in order to develop the tools we need to make sense of tradition, life, and the world we encounter around us, and to share that meaning with the people around us. In her recent book Got Religion? about patterns of religious observance among American millennials, Naomi Schaefer Riley quotes a Catholic priest who perfectly distills our era: “You can’t just be a spiritual consumer. You have to be a spiritual producer because other people need what you have.”^[9] 

The defining shift of our time — not only in religion but in all areas of life — is from consumer to producer, from spectator to participant. When my parents married, their ketubah was a pre-printed form that the rabbi filled in. When Rebecca and I were getting married, most people used websites where you picked a pre-printed design and the company printed it with the full text of your ketubah. These days, I often officiate for couples whose ketubot are one-of-a-kind artworks made by talented friends, family members, or even artists they found on Etsy. The shift from taking to making brings us back to the foundation of a strong Jewish life. In Rabbi Kaunfer’s words, at our best Jews are “self-directed translators,”^[10] drawing on the best of our tradition and blending it with the newest emerging ideas. That’s the whole point of traditional approaches to Jewish learning: students should learn how to make new meaning from the sources, not just repeat what is already known. To get there, we need a community with the tools to filter, interpret and build on what has come before.

Understanding learning as עֵסֶק also implies a very long time horizon.^[11] Our tradition has no expectation that anyone will ever master all of Judaism. If you’ve been in my office — and if you haven’t, I welcome you to come by — you know I have lots of books. Lots of books. Every so often someone will ask, in wonder, “Have you read all of these books?” I always laugh a little when I answer, “No, but I’ve probably looked at a page or two in most of them.” I haven’t counted, but I would guess I own at least fifty different commentaries on the Torah, and I’m still buying new ones. There are some commentaries I have studied so intensely that I know how the author thinks, almost as if I am inside his head, but I can’t imagine ever mastering all of those interpretations of the Torah — and that is true for Talmud, Kabbalah, Halakhah, and pretty much every other area of Jewish thought. Mastery, ultimately, is beside the point. Treating Torah learning as עֵסֶק, a long-term engaged occupation, allows us to make Torah instead of just taking it. The most important things in learning happen not within any one book, but in the collision of ideas between the books — and that can only happen in the mind of a trained, engaged learner.

The first time I came to BZBI, I fell in love with two things: our dedication to learning, and our commitment to inclusion. Anyone who has learned with me knows it doesn’t take much to get me excited about a class. But I am more excited than usual to introduce On One Foot, a class that brings both of these qualities together. On One Foot is a distinctive and innovative introduction to Judaism course, taught in cooperation with the Goodblatt Academy, our regional conversion program. With a curriculum focused on individual expression and personal meaning, On One Foot sets students on a path to becoming the “self-directed translators” and “spiritual producers” that form the backbone of Jewish community. Its interactive format challenges students to place themselves in relationship with Jewish tradition, history, ideas, and practices. I believe in this class so much that we have opened the class to everyone, not only conversion candidates. If you feel like there are basic gaps in your Jewish education; if you sometimes feel lost or out of place at BZBI; if you’re coming back to Jewish community and practice after a long time away — this is the class for you. We will also continue expanding our offerings for more experienced students and work with people who want to develop new hands-on skills, including leading services and reading Torah.

Even if you don’t enroll in On One Foot, the class will still affect you. As Gary Bramnick pointed out on Rosh HaShanah, Jewish community is built on the individual contributions we bring. Each person we engage benefits everyone in the community. As we move ever forward in this open, unbundled world, our learning — together, as a community — will ensure our strength and stability into the emerging future.

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Tags: America, community, Conversion, education, Interfaith