Elliot Cosgrove, PhD May 23, 2017
It is a fortuitous coincidence that tonight’s leadership development session is taking place in these days between Passover and Shavuot. Passover: the festival of our freedom, when our people were finally able to express their faith as they wished but had yet to stand at the base of Mount Sinai to receive the law. We were liberated, but not yet commanded – emancipated, but not yet in service to God.
I share with you the sentiment of our season because as I think about our task for this evening – to consider what the opportunities and anxieties of our time may be and to ask aloud whether the educational and programmatic goals of our community are aligned with the calling of the hour – I believe our present era has much in common with the wilderness wandering of these weeks following Passover and leading up to Shavuot. What is American Jewry, after all, if not a community experiencing unprecedented freedoms and opportunities, able to express their Judaism any way they want and yet also anxious over an uncertain future? We know we are Jews, but we are not quite sure how to express that Judaism – our boundaries are undefined and our sense of peoplehood is in constant flux. Like our Israelite ancestors, we do not live in the Promised Land and yet we know that that land is part and parcel of who we are. We are God’s precious possession – am segulah, a treasured nation. And yet, our mission is to be a light unto nations. It is a curious, but not unprecedented time to be a Jew, and as a synagogue seeking to set its mission and priorities moving forward, I thank you, the leadership of our synagogue, for giving of your time and wisdom this evening to pause and reflect, seeking both to understand where we are, and more importantly, where we need to go into the future.
This evening, I want to share with you what I believe to be five tensions that sit on our communal docket. Not the symptoms, but the root causes, the forces that lie beneath the surface, that, more often than not, we don’t have a chance to discuss. After identifying them, we will turn the workshop over to you, the lay and professional leaders of the community charged with the task of filling Park Avenue Synagogue with the most dynamic expression of congregational life possible. Our conversation begins here tonight, but really continues into the year and years ahead as we seek to align all that we do with the beating heart of the Jewish community we seek to serve.
The five issues will be familiar to those of you who have heard or read my sermons over the past year, as they are concerns that I have addressed more than once. So what are they?
Number one: radical autonomy. We live in an age where the choice to be Jewish is just that – a choice. Judaism is voluntary, we can opt in or opt out without any damning social consequence. Do I want to be part of a synagogue, do I want to enroll my children in Congregational School, do I want to have my child’s bar mitzvah in the shul or do it myself? Judaism exists in the marketplace of ideas; being Jewish is but one of many identities we hold. A colleague put it to me in the language of computers: in days of old, “being Jewish” was the operating system upon which every program functioned, today “being Jewish” is but one program running among many programs.
The volitional nature of our Judaism is happening in an age of disintermediation; the middle-man is being cut out. Blockbuster Video doesn’t exist any longer, people are going to malls less and less. Jews live in an on-demand, Netflix universe in which we choose our content how we want and when we want. Being part of a synagogue, adhering to communal norms, living according to a calendar of times and expectations – these are absolutely countercultural ideas. This is the cause; the symptoms are everywhere: Congregational School attendance, drop-off in engagement after Bnei Mitzvah, waning observance, and otherwise. We seek to address this challenge all the time. Our services, our programs, our classes, our trips –we offer them knowing that our competition is not the shul down the street, but the Historical Society, the gym, the concert hall, or the alumni club. Our challenge is how to validate our people where they are, but know that the measure of a religion is not the degree to which it mirrors where people are but how well it inspires them to aspire to where they should be! We walk a tightrope between individuality and community, autonomy and covenant, validation and aspiration.
Second: Jewish literacy or competency. Our members are some of the most secularly educated Jews ever to have walked the planet – sophisticated, engaged, successful professionals. And yet in terms of Jewish literacy or competency, for many if not most of us, our formal Jewish education ended at our bar or bat mitzvah. How do I say Kiddush? How do I find my way through a prayer book? Can I read Hebrew? How do I talk about the Torah reading with my children at my Shabbat table? What is this upcoming holiday of Shavuot about anyway? The rabbi keeps mentioning it, but I don’t know much about it, never mind if there are any special customs connected to it. In some respects we are that proverbial fourth child who does not even know how to ask the question. Our challenge is how to model a traditional expression of Jewish life that educates and empowers those seeking souls who need a point of access, an on-ramp to the riches of our tradition. We need to create a warm, authentic, and non-judgmental culture that embraces every Jew’s journey – in much the same way that Chabad does so well. Introductory classes, opportunities for private tutorials, home study groups – not only for children, but also for their parents and grandparents.
Third: shifting boundaries. Who is a Jew, how does someone become a Jew, and what is our approach to the non-Jew in our Jewish family? The statistics speak for themselves. Seventy percent of all non-Orthodox weddings are to someone who is not born Jewish. I have spoken about this many times in the last few years, but it all comes down to the same point: Our synagogue must operate on the possibility that your children, my children, our children may fall in love with someone who is not Jewish, and because we love those children, and we want their homes to be Jewish homes, our communal attitude and approach must reflect that. We need a three-step approach. First, we unapologetically message the value of endogamy, of marrying a Jewish partner. Second, if our children fall in love with a non-Jew, which they are statistically likely to do, we make the invitation to Jewish life as embracing as possible, through introduction to Judaism classes, conversion classes, a rabbi’s mentorship, the ritual of mikveh. Our efforts in this regard are under Rabbi Zuckerman’s leadership but are really the responsibility of us all. And third, if and when a non-Jewish partner chooses not to convert (and there are many thoughtful reasons why that may not be an option), then we make our community as embracing of that non-Jewish partner as possible – an effort that begins by understanding their needs and the needs of their interfaith family. This is not your grandparents’ Jewish community. The boundaries are shifting, and we need to be strongly positioned to meet our future.
Fourth: the universal and the particular. As Jews our sightlines are directed both internally at our own parochial needs and externally toward the world at large. We are attentive to and remember our own particular history and destiny, but we also remember that to be Jewish is to be a light unto the nations. We were once strangers in a strange land, and so we are attentive to the condition of the stranger in our midst. But how do we balance it? How shall we tend to our own needs and also be responsive to the refugee, the cry of the poor, the hungry, those seeking access to education, healthcare, and human rights? The challenge is not just theoretical but practical. A synagogue is not a political action committee; there are legal considerations and, more importantly, communal ones that would counsel against turning our community into a political platform. And yet, as any study of American Jewry will tell you, the fastest on-ramp to Jewish life, especially for the millennial generation, is social justice/tikkun olam, a belief that our Judaism speaks with a relevance to issues of the day. In other words, we need to be a community of activism not just because our prophetic conscience demands that we do justice, but also because it is good congregational practice. We must strike a balance between the particular and the universal – carefully, thoughtfully, and always with an eye to communal strength and cohesion.
Fifth and finally: Israel. We are living through a fascinating and troubling time when it comes to the Jewish state. Especially on a day like today – Yom Yerushalayim – we must always remember the miracle that is the modern Jewish state, the threats it faces, and the opportunity and obligation we have as American Jews to be its advocate. Through education, travel, the Hebrew language, music, and otherwise, Israel can and should be the great unifier of our people. And yet, we also know that because Israel is a sovereign state, no different than any other state, it also has imperfections, imperfections that can cause a rift within our American Jewish family. The very thing that has the potential to bring us together is a toxic political football that risks pulling us apart. Moreover, and on this I have spoken many times, it is a bitter irony that the Judaism of our community, the Judaism that demands us to engage and to advocate on Israel’s behalf, is not considered Jewish by the state of Israel. Our rabbis, not rabbis; our marriages, not marriages; our conversions, not conversions; our Judaism, not Judaism. It is a state of affairs that is not sustainable. How long will , American Jewry continue to fight for an Israel that appears not to love us as much as we love it? It is not an easy challenge. It is our responsibility to articulate a “New American Zionism,” namely, how to be unceasing supporters of Israel in light of all its political and religious complexities and imperfections.
Five concerns. My hope is that while we may not have all the answers tonight, by identifying the issues we can, as in a good therapy session, at least begin asking the right questions and formulating a response. In other words, that we can align our mission with the critical conversations we face. Not every effort addresses, or needs to address one of these issues – but these are the broad categories of our concern. I hope these reflections also enable us to think in terms of our synagogue’s mission statement. To be a community that “seeks to inspire, educate, and support our membership towards living passion-filled Jewish lives – connected to each other, to Torah, to God, to the people and state of Israel and our shared humanity.” Tonight’s goal is to take these five categories, to consider our mission, and then to do the most important thing of all: to build a compelling and welcoming community for our membership and for those who seek entry into the riches of our tradition.
A final point: Thus far I have spoken about content – about the “what” of Jewish life, if you will. In the years ahead, we must also turn to the “how,” namely, how we communicate our offerings. Whether it is ordering from Seamless, signing up for a class, getting news, or ordering new contact lenses, I do it from my iPhone. We need to put the goods and services of our synagogue into the hands of our members no differently than they receive all their information. Whether it is our publications, our website, maybe one day a PAS app, we need to transform our communications to meet the needs of the ever-changing community we serve not only in the present but in the future. It is a big project, it won’t happen overnight. But know that it is already a congregational priority, and there are great people, lay and professional, already working on it.
Friends, I didn’t choose to live in this time and place and neither did you, but we do. I believe it is a time of unprecedented opportunity. Yes, there are anxieties, but to be a flagship synagogue means to be eyes wide open to where we are and to formulate the answers for the community we serve. As a friend recently said to me, “Elliot – You have to hit the ball where it lies.” We know what needs to be done, let’s line up our shot, breathe deeply, and take a big swing. This is our moment; let’s take full advantage.