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What I’ve Been Up To Lately
- dumbest article on jewish identity i've read so far this year http://su.pr/2Vcr4X 12 hrs ago
- rushkoff on colbert moved to july 15 1 day ago
- is drinking the #moonfruit juice 1 day ago
- More updates...
Jewish identity not an either-or proposition
You can view more photos from this panel, as well as from the rest of the President’s Conference, here.
I just sat through an hour and a half of infuriating dialogue on Jewish identity that has only further concretized my belief that Jewish leadership is completely out of touch with the greater Jewish public.
Jews and Judaism are moving forward, but many of the panelists in this discussion seem obsessed with keeping us still, or worse yet, moving us backwards.
With rare exception, few of the statements expressed by the panelist seemed to convey an understanding of where we, as the next generation, stand in relationship to our Jewish identities.
They are certainly capable of parsing the data. They have no trouble spotting the trends. But the conclusions they have drawn from this data border on lunacy.
Many of them spoke as if Jewish identity is a monolith and that you’re either with them or against them. With few exceptions, they spoke about fluid identity like it’s a disease. They spoke about individuals expressing their Jewishness in their own way as ignorance and self-aggrandizement. They spoke about Western Liberal values as if they’re anti-Jewish (as opposed to a new paradigm in which to be Jewish). Worse yet, they exposed their contempt for those outside their purview, by claiming that if you are not a Jewish nationalist and if you are not committed to traditional Jewish institutions, then you are uneducated, you are naive, and you have been corrupted by the goyishe world.
In every generation we receive higher revelations of Torah, vis-a-vis the higher revelations of morality that unfold in each new age. And yet, it seems that, in the eyes of these individuals, progress threatens the continuity of the Jewish tradition. There is no acknowledgement that progress — responding and adapting to new paradigms in thought — is itself a Jewish tradition.
They cry that we are disappearing, that Jews aren’t interested in Judaism. Yet they project the impression that the Jewish tradition itself contradicts the values of modern Jewish people. Worse so, they suggest that to feel affection for and solidarity with the non-Jewish world is to abandon our commitment to our own people.
In that regard, they view Jewish social justice ventures that address non-Jewish problems (one of the fastest growing sectors in Jewish communal life) as only a means of moving Jews back towards particularism and tribalism. They do not recognize the value of that service work in-and-of-itself or the concept of service as a Jewish value itself, other than as a means to this end. They do not acknowledge our obligation to love all of G-d’s creation nor our tradition’s imperative to care for the downtrodden whether Jew or non-Jew. They do not see our commitment to the greater world as the logical extension of our tradition, but rather a recipe for our self-destruction.
They pat themselves on the back for their purported forward-thinkingness in bringing young Jewish leadership into the fold, in creating a space for these purportedly “new” forms of Jewish expression, yet they appear only to be co-opting these initiatives with the goal of advancing their unchanging agenda. Indeed, for every dollar they spend on new Jewish initiatives, they spend 10 to fortify the old guard.
I stepped to the microphone and asked (paraphrasing), “Rather than repackaging and rebranding the same old Judaism, what are Jewish institutions doing to make themselves relevant to future generations? If we have new moral revelations in every generation, why are we tolerating the panelists’ characterization of Western Liberalism being as anti-Jewish?”
What I have concluded from this panel — and from the utter isolation I felt in response to my challenge to the panelists, as embodied by their avoidance of these questions and the contemptuous looks I drew from the audience members — is that it is not we who have abandoned the organized Jewish community. Rather, it is the organized Jewish community which has abandoned us.
[Update] The full audio of the panel (1 hr 8 m), which featured Leon Wieseltier, Chaim Waxman, Joseph Kanfer, Sergio DellaPergola, Rachel Fish, Eliette Abecassis, and Rabbi Yehuda Amital, is available (missing only minor introductions), below.
[audio:http://danielsieradski.com/blog/downloads/jpppi_jewishidentity.mp3]
[...] Daniel Sieradski of the excellent blog Orthodox Anarchist brings us a totally compelling summary of a panel he attended recently that was apparently a microcosm of ever…. [...]
amen
[...] panel, calling it “infuriating” and that it “further concretized my belief that Jewish leadership is completely out of touch with the greater Jewish public.” I am curious if there is audio or video from this panel [...]
there IS a case to be made that the Enlightenment or ‘Haskala’ and the liberal western values it introduced WERE opposed to Jewish values.
And if those leaders made the case more intelligently, in a way which integrated the best of western ideas (or even acknowledged the debts and resonances between Jewish and western/democratic ideas) while affirming that a strong and more primary connection to Torah above western ideals is still central to Jewish identity, it might be worth listening to them.
But Dan, you must admit that because you ARE educated in Torah, because you ARE engaged with the halachic structure, you fall into a different category than Jews who are ignorant of those things and claim that by being western, they can still be just as ‘Jewish’.
You can speak from a place of knowledge and real connection to the tradition, and thus IMO your opinions of Jewish identity hold far more weight, than the average Reform or unaffiliated activist Jew.
I’m not sure, Mathew, why someone who is “educated in Torah, because you,” and “engaged with the halachic structure” is more able to have opinions that hold more weight (”thus IMO your opinions of Jewish identity hold far more weight”) than someone who is Reform or unaffiliated. I ask because it is not the case that those two labels imply a Jew who has not struggled with and studied about issues of Jewish ID and Judaism.
Please explain:)
Thanks:)
kol tuv…
little eve, i’m sure dan could weigh in on this differently, but jewish civilization is thousands of years old, with a wealth of texts, ways of thinking, ways of living, and even languages representing whole cognitive models.
i was a modern-secular-liberal-reform Jew, and I DID think that my opinion was SO great. But now that I’ve gotten to live in Israel, in Hebrew, in yeshiva, in the religious and israeli and sephardi and kabbalistic worlds, i realize that my opinions about judaism were like a teenager making pronouncements about medicine and pretending that they have equal validity to an MD.
Is it possible that a secular or Reform Jew could be genuinely knowledgeable about the breadth and depth of the Jewish tradition, ways of life, halacha, etc., and thus have an INFORMED opinion? It’s unlikely, but possible.
I took a class with Harold Bloom, for example; brilliant guy, with some interesting opinions about the bible which impressed me at the time, but now that I’ve been exposed to the great rabbis and to the tradition on its own terms, i think it’s just a shame that such a great mind such as Bloom’s didn’t have the grounding in a comprehensive Jewish education.
An educated opinion has more weight than an ignorant one, IMNSHO does that answer your question?
ACK! BT syndrome!
Okay, perhaps during the time of the Haskala, “Western values” were “foreign imports”, and perhaps even “contrary” to “Jewish tradition”. But now that they’re an integral part of modern Jewish society, whether we like to admit it or not, do you think it’s even feasible to excise them completely or even partially? The State of Israel was built on the foundations of two (however contradictory) Western values: Liberalism and Marxism. Do you expect Israeli society to remove key pillars from its foundation for the sake of a more “pure” Jewish identity?
Considering that the vision of Reform Judaism is “informed choice”, YES I believe that Reform Jews can be educated about all aspects of Jewish tradition, halachic or otherwise. (Now, whether the Reform movement has pushed people towards this goal is another story…)
b barnavi: i have no problem with people making an INFORMED choice to be Reform. My friend Rebeka went to religious day schools her whole life, burned out, and later found reform and loves it. My friend Yossi was raised crazy-chabad, got orthodox semicha, THEN did reform rabbinical school and became a reform rabbi!
But Jews who grow up secular or Reform usually do NOT have that kind of information to make choices. I don’t care whether people are religious, i just think it’s a shame when people are ign’ant, and when they state opinions as if they should have weight. It’s the difference between a tinok she’nishba and an apikoros. Apikorsim, I respect.