Doing Jewish With Other Jews

One of the most intriguing, intelligent and important articles written this year on the subject of Jewish identity came from a totally unanticipated and at least to me, unknown source. The piece is called “The Rise of Social Orthodoxy: A Personal Account”; it appeared in the April issue of Commentary. The author is Jay Lefkowitz, a New York lawyer who served as President George W. Bush’s special envoy for human rights in North Korea. Though he is much published, scanning Lefkowitz’s CV indicates that matters of Jewish identity are not his primary focus of concern – making his public reflections on personal religious practice all the more interesting.

At first glance, Lefkowitz’s article reads like yet another self-congratulatory article written by an Orthodox Jew in the wake of the Pew study of American Jewry. With intermarriage and assimilation on the uptick and Jewish identity on the wane, the only pocket of good news is coming from the Orthodox. Unlike Conservative, Reform or unaffiliated Jews, the intermarriage rates for Orthodox Jews remain low, the birth rates high and the sense of Jewish identity strong. Ever since the Pew study was published, scores of such triumphantly-minded articles have been penned, schadenfreude-filled pieces picking apart the liberal arms of American Jewry, more often than not, from the cheap seats of Israel or, as I initially assumed with this article, the bosom of the Orthodox world.

As Lefkowitz’s article progresses, what becomes clear is that the direction of his argument is actually far more interesting than the potshots of his Orthodox co-denominationalists. With refreshing candor, Lefkowitz shares that the “secret sauce” of the Modern Orthodox community is not its ideology. Because unlike the intellectually closed Haredi community on the far right, Modern Orthodox Jews are fully immersed in the debates of our time: women’s rights, gay rights, ordaining female clergy, shared participation in prayer services, to name a few. You may have read recently of mainstream Orthodox schools in New York permitting women to wear tefillin. Lefkowitz shares the open secret of Orthodox teens texting and using technology on Shabbat, eating vegetarian in non-kosher restaurants and engaging in all sorts of other “un-Orthodox” practices.

Lefkowitz’s laundry list of “foot-faults” in the Orthodox community reminds me of the story related to me by the owner of a Manhattan NY Kosher Deli who was approached some years ago by a local Orthodox rabbi. Though the deli was kosher, it was open on the Sabbath, and because of that, it lacked certification as kosher by the Orthodox rabbinate. Believing he could play to the owner’s business instincts, the rabbi pleaded, “If only you closed on Shabbat, then I could stand before my community and announce the news that you are kosher and all my congregants could then eat in your restaurant!” To which the deli owner matter-of-factly replied, “Rabbi, all your congregants already eat in my restaurant.”

But even more interesting in my mind than the private practices enumerated by Lefkowitz are the theological ones. Namely, that because Modern Orthodox Jews are both modern and Orthodox, literalist readings of the Torah are passé. The Torah may or may not be the revealed word of God. The world is not five thousand plus years old, evolution is taught unapologetically in school. The theology or ideology of these Orthodox Jews is not, it would seem, quite as Orthodox as we would otherwise believe.

All of which leads us to the point of the article. If Modern Orthodox Jews are neither intellectually nor socially segregated from the world at large; if they look, believe and sound, in some sense, like Conservative Jews of a generation ago – then what exactly is the key to their demographic strength? The answer, in a word, is community. Lefkowitz explains that Orthodoxy is strong and growing because Modern Orthodox Jews have committed to living “intensive Jewish lives.” They may not be Orthodox in practice or theology, but they are, as the title of the article indicates, “socially Orthodox.” The language, the literature, the calendar, the institutions, the land, the Sabbath and yes, the rituals of the Jewish people serve as the foundation for a robust and resilient Jewish identity. The communal assumptions of Modern Orthodox Jews – where one lives, vacations, spends time, spends money – all point to what sociologists call “a thick sense of Jewish identity.” The observances of Modern-Orthodox Jews are determinative not owing to their belief in being literally commanded by God, but rather because their practiced Jewish behaviors cultivate a sense of Jewish belonging. The connective tissue they form, at shabbos tables, shivah houses, gap years in Israel and holiday cycles collectively contribute towards a self-imposed kinship with other Jews. They are socially Orthodox, and it is a communal posture that has made all the difference.

All of which got me thinking. If the upshot of Lefkowitz’s article is that the key to Jewish identity and continuity is not what you believe, but what you do and with whom you do it, then the implications extend well beyond the relative merits of Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Judaism. If Lefkowitz is right, then ideology is entirely secondary to sociology, or to put it more simply, what matters most is whether you “do Jewish with other Jews.” Yes, Orthodoxy has a competitive advantage in that it has a built-in system of observance by which to generate a sense communal belonging; but it is not the only way. Identity formation and group affiliation is not the provenance of any single denomination of Jewish life. Ask any person who went to Jewish summer camp – Reform, Conservative or Orthodox. What made it work? Doing Jewish with other Jews. What about Birthright? It has no ideology, but it has transformed Jewish life. Why? Again, doing Jewish with other Jews. What about the State of Israel? Doing Jewish with other Jews – on a national scale. We can go down the list – synagogues, youth groups, day schools, year-abroad programs, any program able to generate and sustain a deep sense of communal connection – these are the institutions and efforts that produce a thick sense of Jewish identity for the contemporary Jew.

Ever since the Enlightenment and Emancipation, there has been a tug-of-war within us all. Once granted the ability to live beyond parochial communal boundaries, we seized the opportunity to do so. With permeable communal walls and with fluid social identities, Jews entered into new personal and professional space, relishing the unprecedented freedoms of citizens of the modern world. And because here in America the internal and external forces that compelled us to remain tightly knit were no longer in play, the Jewish community could not longer assume that Jews would “do Jewish with other Jews.” The realignment of communal points of association was not, and is not, limited to the Jewish world. As Robert Putnam argued in his aptly titled book Bowling Alone, the fabric of all institutions of communal life – PTAs, Rotary clubs, bowling leagues and the like – has also frayed. The last fifty years of American life have yielded a world of increasing disconnect – from family, from friends, from communal life. And as if these forces weren’t enough, our reservoir of social capital has been further depleted in recent years by new technologies that, though seemingly intended to connect people, actually further undermine our ability to create communities of meaning. No longer, writes Howard Gardner in The App Generation, must one ask for directions, engage in face-to-face conversation or engage in dialogue beyond 140 characters. It is a perfect storm of circumstances, from the Emancipation to the iPhone – a world of diminished intimacy between teens, between adults and between Jews. It is the bitter irony of our moment. Never before has it been as easy to connect to other Jews, never before has the modern Jew been as alienated from his or her Jewish community.

Which is why, by any means necessary, social and actual capital must be directed towards creating communal structures that are aimed to be socially (not theologically) orthodox. Of course we cherish our autonomy, but deep down we want to be at home in our Jewishness; we want to be part of our people. “To be free and to belong,” to paraphrase Natan Sharansky, these are the two, sometimes contradictory, impulses within each of us. The strength of this synagogue and others, is that for so many people they serve as the hub of communal and personal identity – at times of joy and sorrow, a place of prayer, learning and compassion. Synagogues are the only Jewish institutions on the American landscape whose primary mission is to generate the connective tissue that binds one Jew to another and one generation to the next. But to be fair to the conversation, we also need to cheer on those efforts that seek to accomplish the same goal by other means: Jewish camping, Birthright, Jewish day schools and others. Our attention and support can and should run proudly against the grain of contemporary American life. We must, at every juncture, create opportunities for Jews to do Jewish with other Jews, even when – especially when – the rest of the world would tell us otherwise.

And there is one final element – perhaps the most critical – and that element is you. Far too often, far too many people sit around and kvetch about the movements, that the leaders of Orthodox, Reform or Conservative Judaism are yet again missing an historic opportunity to reinvigorate Jewish life. We blame some underpaid ideologue or funding-strapped programmer sitting in a midtown office building as if they are responsible for our personal Jewish identity. We need to stop doing this. The only person stopping you from building Jewish identity is you. It is not rocket science. Find a family with kids the same age as yours, call them this week and invite them over for Friday night dinner and then do it the next week and the week after that. Sign up for a class. When picking your next vacation, choose to go on a synagogue trip to Israel. Designate one night a week (you have seven of them) to “do Jewish with other Jews.” Find a Jewish organization committed to your highest values and get involved. Do anything. Just don’t sit around bemoaning the state of the organized Jewish world, when you yourself have not organized yourself to step into into that very world that you are criticizing so vocally from the bleachers.

Im b’hukkotai teilekhu, v’et mitzvotai tishmoru, “if you you walk in my laws and observe my commandments,” our Torah reading begins, “then you shall be blessed.” (Leviticus 26:3) The medieval commentator Rashi remarked on the seeming redundancy of the verse. Wouldn’t it have been enough to say only “If you observe my commandments?” What does “walk in my laws” add? Rashi explains that to receive God’s blessing, one must be intensively immersed in the Torah of our people. Yes, we must observe the commandments, but equally important is that we should surround ourselves, literally toiling, collectively, in doing Jewish with other Jews.

My Hillel director, mentor and friend Michael Brooks once told me: we Jews spend so much time drawing lines among ourselves, further subdividing a people that isn’t all that big to begin with. Ultimately there is only one line that matters, the line separating who has opted in to the Jewish community and who has opted out. Take a leap of faith, be on the right side of the line, immerse yourself and write yourself into the narrative of the greatest story ever told. Most of all, leave the light on, so others know they can do the same.