American Jewish life

America: A Crisis of Faith

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I’m an old-fashioned news hound. I can’t start my day without reading the newspaper. The Washington Post is my paper of choice. And I read the hard copy that gets thrown on my lawn every morning around 5am. But then, as I start my workday, I work in a professional bubble of my own creation. I get no news feeds at all. Given how upsetting the news has been for the past four years, putting the news out of sight and out of mind once my day gets going has been an act of self-preservation.

On January 6th, I had a 4pm call with a rabbinic colleague. It started with him asking me: “Have you seen the footage of the U.S. Capitol being overrun by Trump supporters?” I was incredulous. My friend filled in a few more details, we agreed to proceed with our business and, when the call ended around 5pm, I left my study to watch TV for the next few hours.

This article appeared in the Times of Israel on January 14, 2021.  

It has taken a few days for some of the details to get filled in. The colossal failure of the Capitol Police to heed the warnings from the FBI about the threat posed by those who came to Washington to stop Congress from ratifying the election of Joe Biden as our next President. The heroism of many police who, badly outnumbered, tried to protect the Capitol and the legislators inside from an angry mob. The complicity of other police who aided and abetted the insurgents. The courage of members of Congress to come back that same evening to finish the business of certifying Joe Biden’s victory. The craven actions of other legislators who, even after living through an attempt to sabotage a democratic election through violence that cost five lives but could have taken many more, still voted to reverse the outcome of the election.  

Donald Trump’s culpability for, what can only be called, an insurrection, is beneath contempt. From the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017 to the sacking of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, he has given Presidential sanction to White Nationalists, Neo-Nazis, racists, anti-Semites and other purveyors of violence and hate. What has long lurked on the peripheries of American society has now been given a national spotlight. Who would have ever thought that these dark and evil forces would be championed by a sitting U.S. President?

I, like many Americans, find myself deeply rattled by the events of January 6th.  Is America a land of equal opportunity for all? Does the American justice system treat all people the same? Do we welcome to our shores, (in the words of Emma Lazarus, carved on the Statue of Liberty) “the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free?” Black Americans, living a totally different reality than White Americans, have long despaired of these American myths. For the rest of us, this new consciousness creates a crisis of faith.

The Talmud tells the story of Elisha ben Abuyah. Born to a prominent Jerusalem family, Elisha earned a reputation as a most promising, young, rabbinic scholar. It is told that he witnessed a young boy climbing a tree to take some eggs from a bird’s next. Following Jewish law, the boy chased away the mother bird before taking the eggs, showing a concern for the feelings of the mother bird. And yet, when coming off the tree, the boy was bitten by a snake and died. Having fulfilled a mitzvah for which the Torah promises a long life, Elisha witnessed the opposite and he suffers from a crisis of faith. Elisha abandons Judaism, becomes an apostate and from that time forth, is only referred to in the Talmud as Acher, “the other one”.

So much of our faith in America has been shaken. It is easy to despair. We could take Elisha’s path—by becoming cynical; by disengaging from politics; by demonizing all those who don’t agree with us. And each of those options will accelerate the erosion of America’s democratic fabric. No. Despair is not an option.

The Jewish community has a large stake in what is unfolding in Washington D.C. A significant number of Jews turned a blind eye to manifold examples of Donald Trump’s assault on truth and alleged criminal behavior because he was “good for Israel”. It is no different than Evangelical Christians who ignored the many ways that Donald Trump’s ethical behavior violated core teachings of the Church just because he could deliver a few, reliable conservative justices for the Supreme Court. The Jewish people paid a heavy price when a previously democratic country came up with all kinds reasons to allow a demagogue called Adolf Hitler to take over Germany. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s powerful video this week draws the obvious parallels between the rise of Nazism in Europe, which his family lived through, and the behavior of Donald Trump.

After four years of Trump’s Presidency, we have suffered tremendous damage to our country’s democratic institutions and principles. Within days of this writing, we will have a new President and a Democratic-led Congress. What is certain, is that the road back to an America that is worthy of cherishing, will require the commitment and energies of every person who cares about liberty, tolerance and justice.  

May we be equal to the challenge.

The New Paradigm Spiritual Communities Initiative

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During the first week of March some 60 people gathered under the aegis of a new national initiative called the New Paradigm Spiritual Communities Initiative (NPSCI). NPSCI is sponsored by Clal: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership as part of its mission to make Jewish into a public good. Funded by the William Davidson Foundation, NPSCI is co-sponsored by Bend the Arc, Hazon, the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and Mechon Hadar.

The gathering was anything but conventional. In fact, the invited participants were given only the barest of details about what would transpire. We called it a “Consultation” and, once convened, we used the language of a “conversation for possibility.” For over a year we developed a data base of individuals who were leading initiatives that might represent a new model for Jewish spiritual communities in America. In our invitation letter to a sub-set of that database, we indicated that we wanted to explore what might be a significant new phenomenon in American Jewish life. The Consultation was designed to better understand what this phenomenon looked like. Clearly, what attracted the invited participants was the interest in meeting other, like minded innovators, social entrepreneurs and “creatives” working in the Jewish space.

Note: This column appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on March 31, 2016. On the same date, Gary Rosenblatt wrote a cover story in the New York Jewish Week about the Initiative. You can find that story here: http://tinyurl.com/Spiritual-Comm

The significance of this first gathering cannot be underestimated. For generations, Jews have thought of synagogues as the institution that nurtured their religious and spiritual lives. But as growing percentages of people describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”, synagogues that do not nourish souls are suffering from a loss of relevance and declining membership numbers. This is happening at a time when trends in American society (e.g. effects of internet culture, the erosion of social capital, partisanship replacing the “public square”), are making the need for spiritual community greater than ever before.

American Jewish life is in a time of transition that calls for bold, new thinking and the development of new models for identification. Membership and affiliation patterns that have sustained synagogues and other legacy Jewish institutions for more than a century are eroding. At the same time we see a dramatic growth of interest and energy in new expressions of Jewish community. Some are focused on learning. Some are focused on social justice. Some are focused on contemplative practice and spirituality. Some are focused on food and environmental sustainability. Some are focused on prayer. Some look like synagogues; some do not. Each sector has seen one or more organizations emerge that have either seeded the phenomenon or have created a network to sustain and support the phenomenon.

What the sectors have in common is that they utilize a particular idiom unique to contemporary American culture that attracts other Jews with similar interests. The richness of the Jewish heritage is literally being re-invented in our time by the way in which Jewish wisdom is being applied to the challenges that confront our world today. If properly nurtured and encouraged, these “communities of meaning” can form the nucleus of an American Jewish renaissance.

Our working definition for new paradigm spiritual communities are groups that use the wisdom and practice of Judaism (chochma), to help people live lives of sacred purpose (kedusha) and inspire people to contribute to a more just and peaceful world (tzedek). The context for this work are covenantal communities (kehillot) in which a group of people intentionally enter into a mutual obligatory relationship, commit to a common mission and give of their time and psychic energy to support the viability of the group and the material and spiritual needs of the members of the group. What we discovered at our inaugural Consultation was that despite the wide variety of Jewish groups that we convened, the vast majority resonated to the definition of spiritual community that we proposed. Some are already doing awesome work integrating the elements of chochma, kedusha, tzedek and kehilla. Others saw that integration as aspirational. The “conversation for possibility” opened up a door for us to imagine how this emerging phenomenon could be advanced and supported.

The New Paradigm Spiritual Communities Initiative (NPSCI) will be creating forums where the people leading contemporary efforts to re-define Jewish life and community for themselves can come together, learn from each other and be supported in their efforts to create communities of meaning. NPSCI will gather together individuals whose work and/or thinking can advance an understanding of this phenomenon from many different sectors of the Jewish world. Participants will benefit from seeing their particular endeavors in the context of a changing socio-political landscape and a rapidly changing Jewish community. There will also be participation from significant thinkers and practitioners beyond the Jewish world that will enrich and broaden our conversation.

In the course of the next year NPSCI will be engaged in several efforts. First, we have engaged Dr. Tobin Belzer, a leading sociologist based at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, to do a study of the new paradigm spiritual community phenomenon in the Jewish community. Second, we will be sponsoring a weekly blog on new paradigm spiritual communities which will appear every Monday on our website, www.npsci.org. We hope to be a catalyst for a broad range conversation among those interested in the phenomenon to comment on the weekly blog. Anyone can subscribe by going to the website’s Home Page. Third, we intend to convene on a regular basis the individuals driving the phenomenon to network with each other, to identify best practices and to upgrade organizational capacity.

While many of the new paradigm spiritual communities are being created outside of the walls of American synagogues, we believe that synagogues that care about being relevant and compelling to Next Gen Jews will benefit greatly from participating in this effort as well. We welcome all those who want to learn and who have something to teach.