Bring Them Close

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak at the Knesset in a caucus session on the subject of diaspora Jewry’s relationship with Israel. It was an experience both heady and humbling, to walk the halls of the Knesset, to see the Chagall tapestries, to meet with Israeli leadership, and most of all, to present on behalf of American Jewry. My remarks are posted on the synagogue website and published in The Jerusalem Post in English and Haaretz in Hebrew. I addressed the lack of religious pluralism in Israel: an Israel that does not recognize the Judaism we practice here in the States; an Israel that does not acknowledge marriages or conversions performed by American rabbis; an Israel that has allowed the symbol of Jewish unity – the Kotel – to become ground zero for fanaticism and intolerance. I delivered my remarks the week after America’s abstention at the UN, warning of the injurious consequences of an Israel that insists on alienating its most ardent diaspora supporters.

It is a conversation that I hope picks up steam; it is a cause over which I hope our community is able to mobilize; and it was a day that I will not soon forget. So you might find it surprising that this morning I want to speak to you not about what I said that day, but what was said by others in the room – two separate but interrelated conversations that I believe signal a fascinating and potentially promising development in the Jewish world.

The first was a conversation prompted by Rabbi Haim Amsalem, a founding member of the right wing Shas political party and now a political force in his own right – a brilliant scholar and fiery personality. Given his profile, I was startled to hear Rav Amsalem upbraid his Orthodox colleagues for unnecessarily increasing stringencies on matters of Jewish identity. In raising the barriers to Jewish engagement, he reasoned, the Orthodox were not only failing to stem the tide of assimilation, but were liable as contributories towards it. Don’t get me wrong, neither Rav Amsalem nor his colleagues are “meet you where you are” sorts of rabbis. The Judaism we practice here at Park Avenue would be both foreign and entirely objectionable to them. And yet here I was listening to a voice of inclusivity that I had never heard from a Haredi rabbi – namely, that it is the responsibility of religious leaders, Orthodox included, to provide on-ramps, not obstacles, to those seeking entrée into the Jewish world.

The second, connected comment, was voiced by several present, including Natan Sharansky, the chair of the Jewish Agency and famous former refusenik. Sharansky explained that what the Israeli public, especially Orthodoxy, failed to understand was the critical role liberal Judaism plays as a last line of defense against assimilation. For far too long the Orthodox community has operated on the mistaken and misguided belief that liberal Judaism is the root cause of assimilation – a deviant expression of Judaism that is to blame for a slackening of Jewish observance, rising intermarriage, and the unraveling of our people’s communal bonds. Not so, explained Sharansky. First of all, as one sociologist present in the Knesset explained, there is no correlation between the presence of liberal Judaism and assimilation; intermarriage rates are just as high in countries in which there is no Conservative or Reform movement. Second, and this is the important part, were it not for liberal Judaism, just imagine how dire our people’s condition would be; just imagine where our numbers would stand. Thank God, we should say, Sharansky said, for the liberal movements, because they are the ones on the front line of the modern Jew’s battle against assimilation.

Before I move forward, as a Conservative Jew I need to at least note that there is something mildly or perhaps deeply offensive about the views voiced in that Knesset chamber. Because while the role of liberal Judaism in the fight for the Jewish future was acknowledged, the reason given was not a terribly flattering one. We are, in their eyes, the last line of defense before the modern Jew falls into the abyss of secularism and assimilation – the beer goggles, theologically speaking, one puts on as last call is announced at the bar. I, for one, have consciously chosen to be a Conservative Jew and Conservative rabbi because I believe it to be the most authentic and compelling expression of Jewish life today, not as some desperate act of resignation. In the minds of the mostly Israeli and Orthodox crowd that day, whatever merits the liberal movements have, those merits are merely instrumental, not intrinsic. At best a backhanded complement, and at worst, a rather harsh assessment of the religious denominations of the vast majority of American Jews.

Be that as it may, it was their remarks, not those that I delivered myself that I have thought most about since that day. The combination of Orthodoxy’s stated desire to bring Jews into the fold and the characterization of Conservative and Reform Judaism as bulwarks against and not contributories toward assimilation was an eye-opening turn of events – not just for me, but for those with a sense of Jewish history – in the much wider arc our people’s story.

Let me explain.

For the past two-hundred years, as Adam Ferziger explains in a masterful article, Orthodox Judaism’s attitude toward the Reform and Conservative movements has been dominated by animosity and polemics. (Jewish Social Studies 15:3, 2009) The flowering of the Reform movement in early 19th-century Germany reflected a process of acculturation, one in which German Jews and then American Jews, felt “an incongruity between their world of origins and the modern world with which they identified and in which they longed to participate.” (M. Meyer, Response to Modernity) Be it changes in prayer, Jewish observance, or the definitions of communal boundaries, the driving thrust of Reform Judaism, according to the great scholar Michael Meyer, was to create an “ideology of integrating tradition with a changing modern life.” The subsequent emergence of Orthodoxy, a movement that hitherto had never existed, was a denominational objection against the assimilationist impulse of Reform Jews. Most famously, I think of Rabbi Moses Sofer, the Hatam Sofer (1762–1839), the Orthodox ideologue who taught that for Jews to remain shalem, whole and authentic Jews, they must retain their names (shemot), their language (lashon) and their dress (malbush). On matters of Jewish law: hadash asur min ha-torah, any innovation is strictly forbidden by the Torah.

Thus the poles of the debate were set. It wasn’t just that the liberal movements sought to innovate as Orthodoxy sought to preserve; rather, a sharp antagonism developed within Orthodoxy against the liberal movements. Given that the point of the Reform movement, even as stated by its own adherents and advocates, was to accommodate Judaism to secular society, one can understand why Orthodoxy perceived the liberal movements to be the first step onto the slippery slope toward assimilation. Guilty not just of their own sin, but of causing others to sin, we were worse than secular atheists in that we misrepresented Judaism to the masses. Our prayer books were burned, our rabbis excommunicated, and intra-communal dialogue was to be avoided at all costs for fear of granting legitimacy to deviant expressions of Jewish life and living. I personally have vivid memories from childhood of Orthodox family members refusing to set foot into my Conservative synagogue. Better not to go to shul at all, the thinking goes, than step into a cathedral of heresy.

And so it was, and in many cases, remains the state of affairs within the Orthodox Jewish world. But what I saw at that Knesset session was that there are those who realize that the Jewish world has changed over the past two hundred years. There seemed to be a consensus that modernity is not a passing fad, but is here to stay. So too, the raison d'être of liberal Judaism, to reform Judaism to fit the needs of a secular society and sensibilities, has run its course. No longer is the point of progressive Judaism to innovate, to explain why driving should be halachically permissible on Shabbat, why swordfish is actually kosher, and why the Bible is still sacred even if authored by human hands. What the Reform movement – but really all liberal movements came to understand – is that their present task must be one of Jewish retrieval and renewal: explaining our tradition, bringing the wayward Jew back into the fold, and reasserting the power of tradition in the face of the counterclaims of modernity. Most famously, the 1999 rewriting of the Statement of Reform Judaism – a revision that rallied Reform Jews to turn toward tradition and affirm the centrality of the mitzvot – is a call to arms unimaginable to prior generations of Reform Jews.

The light bulb that seems to have gone off is that a more self-assured Orthodoxy understands that not only need it not be threatened by liberal Judaism, but that liberal Judaism is in fact fighting the same battle and on the same side. We are all fighting for the Jewish future – we are all in this together. There are, to be sure, profound differences, but they are differences of degree, not of kind. Orthodoxy began to realize, as Chabad did long ago, that the target of all the movements is the same pintele yid, the same lost spark, embedded in the heart of every Jew. As intimated by my new colleague Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of KJ a few weeks ago when he invited me and Rabbi Buchdahl of Central Synagogue (Reform) into his Orthodox shul (unto itself a sign of changing times), an Orthodoxy that believes in itself is an Orthodoxy that is willing to be more assertive and inclusive in its embrace of American Jewry. Across Orthodoxy there seems to be an acknowledgement that all that energy spent shrei-ing gevalt over liberal Judaism would be better spent capturing the hearts and soul of American Jewry.

The story is not yet over and a host of contentious issues remain on our communal docket. I, for one, don’t love my spiritual ideals being branded as the last stop before damnation and, frankly, neither should you. Liberal conversions are not acknowledged by the Israeli Rabbinate; issues of funding, religious pluralism, and respectful dialogue remain unresolved, and there are all sorts of prickly issues, both in Israel and America, that still need to be answered on the “Who is a Jew?” question. And yet, I am hopeful. I can make out what could one day be a silver lining to the historic inner divisions of our people. As my mentor and former Hillel Director, Michael Brooks, explained to me, for a people so small, we Jews have an unfortunate knack for drawing lines, further separating ourselves into even smaller subdivisions. At the end of the day, the only line that really matters is whether you are inside or outside the Jewish conversation, and we should all be working together to bring more and more people inside that line.

In the final moments of Jacob’s life, Joseph brings his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, to receive a final blessing from their grandfather. The lads have grown up in the diaspora; assimilated Egyptians in name, language, dress, they are indistinguishable from any other youth of their day. So assimilated were Ephraim and Manasseh that as they approach their grandfather, Jacob asks Joseph, mi eileh, who are they? It is a heartbreaking question; after the passage of just one generation, here are grandchildren who are unrecognizable to their dying grandfather. Joseph responds to his father, “These are my sons, whom God has given me here.” To which Jacob replies: kahem na elai va-avarakhem, Bring them close to me, that I shall bless them, and he blesses the boys with words that are used by parents to children to this very day.

Orthodox, Conservative, Reform – it doesn’t matter. There are Jewish souls in the balance, Jews so alienated from our people and tradition that we could imagine someone, perhaps even ourselves, saying: Mi eileh, who are they? Why should I care? They are lost to our people, just let them be. Not us, not here, not ever. Like our forefather Jacob, we bring them close, we bestow our blessing upon them; they are, after all, our children and grandchildren. May all the arms of the Jewish world work in common cause, coming together in order to bring them close, always remembering that whatever our differences may be, we are all in this together.