Interfaith

Jews and the “Faith” Question

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I recently had the opportunity to speak at the Chautauqua Institution (CI) about the “Crisis of Faith” in America. For those unfamiliar, CI was founded in 1874 by Methodist Bishop John Vincent as a summer camp for Sunday School teachers on the shores of Lake Chautauqua near Jamestown, NY. Today, CI functions like a summer camp for the NPR crowd, the days filled with internationally known speakers and the evenings replete with symphony, opera, ballet and theater.

This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on August 29, 2017.

Each of the ten weeks of the CI summer season is built around a theme and “Crisis of Faith” proved especially popular. The CI community has not yet outgrown its WASP roots although Jews are said to make up as much as 25% of the attendees today. A few years ago, the Everett Center was established, named after Jewish philanthropist Henry Everett, and it gave Jews their first permanent home on the grounds, joining the houses of virtually every Christian denomination in America.

The marquis draw of the week was journalist Bill Moyers. Best known for his PBS specials, Moyers is a man of prodigious intellect and a record of public service that dates back to his role in the Kennedy Administration where he was one of the architects (and then deputy director) of the Peace Corps. Unknown to me before I had a chance to spend some time with him, was that he got a Masters of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and has been a person of deep faith for all of his life, worshipping most Sundays at the historic Riverside Church on the upper West Side of Manhattan. Moyers framed each day’s presentation, interviewed the speakers after their lectures and then spoke himself on the final day of the week.

My antennae were already sensitized to the challenge that lay ahead when the speakers of the week were all asked to join a call with Bill Moyers about a month before the program was to take place. Moyers asked us if we intended to speak about our own “crisis of faith” or about the crisis being faced by the faith communities we represented. To a person, we all assumed we were being asked to take on the latter assignment although I sensed from Moyers some surprise, if not disappointment.

Because there are two main lectures each day at CI, I had the unenviable task of following Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom and author of over 30 books. Rabbi Sacks spoke about the simultaneous growth of secularism and religious extremism in the world and the consequences of losing the moderate middle ground. Quoting Jonathan Swift he observed: “We have just enough religion to hate one another but not enough religion to love one another.”

In my presentation, I spoke about my work with rabbis and American synagogues. I drew a correlation between the declining membership numbers in synagogues and the parallel decline taking place in most mainline Christian churches. I also highlighted the success of synagogues that were powerfully mission-driven, where the spiritual leaders make a clear connection between inner, personal transformation and the work of social transformation that we need to do in the world at large. I also spoke about what we are learning in the new national initiative that I am leading-Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network. I argued that even as the stewards of historic religious communities believe that the next generation is engaged in a wholesale abandonment of the institutions they have built, in fact, religious identity is being re-invented in exciting new ways.

But perhaps even more interesting to the 1,000+ people in the audience, was how differently I framed the “Crisis of Faith” for the Jewish community as compared to how Christians spoke about the same topic. Jews are quite adept at engaging in interfaith dialogue. Even though Jewish organizations and clergy have been deeply engaged in interfaith dialogue in American since the mid-20th century, the terminology for the conversations are usually Christian categories. As the minority sub-culture at the party, we play by the rules and definitions set by the majority culture.

Christians are accustomed to speaking about themselves as “faith communities”; Jews, not so much. Jews are less a “community of faith” than they are a “community of fate”. Jews are not united by a common understanding of God, a common lexicon of liturgy, or a common observance of ritual. Those matters of “faith” are hardly shared within one denomination or one synagogue no less across the full range of Jews in world. But as a “community of fate” Jews do feel a powerful sense of connection to a shared history and a common destiny. If Jewish behavior were to be defined by one core phrase, kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, “all of Israel is responsible, one for the other”, would be a far more accurate descriptor than “shma Yisrael…”. And while some rabbis might bemoan that fact, I would argue that the sense of mutual responsibility that Jews have acted upon, generation after generation is, in fact, the secret to Jewish survival.

Many a Christian colleague has remarked to me over the years how Jews don’t seem to attend worship services, they have the lowest “belief in God” quotient of any religious sub-group in America and they are not particularly observant of Jewish rituals at home. How is it, they ask, that Jews stand in greater solidarity with one another than do Christians?

In my experience, it is because for Jews, “belonging” has always been more compelling than “believing”. Even as we document the weakening ties to Jewish identity among Next Gen Jews, the “community of fate” factor is still powerfully at work. However, increasingly, that loyalty needs to be “earned” and that can only be accomplished to the extent our community continues to prove itself to be one of “sacred purpose”.

Rev. John Steinbruck: Spiritual Role Model

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, a life counts for a million or more. Last week I attended a memorial service for Reverend John Steinbruck who died on March 1st at the age of 85.

When I moved to Washington D.C. in 1984 to take the post as the executive director of the Jewish Community (Relations) Council of Greater Washington, John was already a legend in a city that is somewhat jaded by all of the personages of importance (or perceived self-importance). John came to Washington in 1970 to be the senior pastor of Luther Place Church. His church was at the corner of 14th and N Streets, an area that a couple of years earlier had burned in the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Luther Place had a beautiful, historic building but its membership had made the exodus from the decaying inner city and its future looked dim. John liked to say that his church stood at the crossroads of prostitution, drugs and political power because all three were in the vicinity in great quantity.

This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on March 31, 2015.

I first met John standing on 16th Street across from the Soviet Embassy. The Community Council that I headed was the sponsor of this demonstration of solidarity with our sisters and brothers behind the Iron Curtain. Every day at 12:30pm, a different Jewish organization took responsibility for standing silently across from the Embassy for 15 minutes holding signs that said “Free Soviet Jews”. The vigil took place without interruption for 21 years, from 1970-1991. John was a great champion of human rights and that commitment led him to take a trip to the Soviet Union in 1976 to meet with Jews. He came back deeply committed to the cause and on many Jewish holidays John, along with a handful of his congregants were the ones who stood vigil across from the Embassy.

But Soviet Jewry was only one of John’s many crusades. Aware that within a few blocks of his church a few dozen people slept on the streets of the Nation’s Capital, John challenged the churches and synagogues of the area to practice “Biblical Hospitality” by taking the homeless into their buildings overnight. The idea made for a great sermon but no clergyperson in town had the courage and the determination to walk the talk. How would a congregation support such an effort? What would it cost? How would security issues be handled? How could budgets accommodate the exorbitant insurance premiums that would result? John taught by example. His Sunday School classrooms were not being used. Let’s open the doors he told his Board. His Board raised all of the expected objections at which point John said: “This is a church and we don’t put God to a vote”.  The sheer force of his moral argument carried the day and within weeks homeless people were invited to come in off the street to get a hot meal and bed down in Luther Place’s classrooms.

Very few congregations followed John’s lead in bringing the homeless into their buildings but they were inspired to support his efforts through financial contributions and a legion of volunteers. John built a compassion-industrial complex, an array of institutions all growing out of his simple but profound commitment to help the most vulnerable among us. At his urging, Luther Place bought the townhouses across the street from his church which became a continuum of care facilities for homeless women. He then raised millions of dollars to build a state of the art residential facility for homeless women called N Street Village. The homeless needed medical care so the Zacchaeus Free Clinic was founded where physicians volunteered their time to provide free care to the city’s homeless. To address the chronic food insecurity of the city’s poor, John inspired the founding of Bread for the City whose “glean machine” van picked up leftover food from events all over the city and turned that food into meals for the poor.

Realizing how many young adults were turned off to institutional religion but motivated to follow the model of the life of Jesus in serving the poor and needy he created the Lutheran Volunteer Corps (LVC) modeled on the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. For a year, recent college graduates would live communally in a house in the poorest section of a city and work with a non-profit social justice agency, earning just enough money to pay for their expenses. The Jewish organization, Avodah, which offers the same opportunity for Jewish young adults, owes its founding to John Steinbruck because Rabbi David Rosenn, Avodah’s founder, spent time with John and LVC which inspired him to create Avodah.

It is breathtaking to realize the power of one person’s ministry to change the life of so many—from homeless people who got a new lease on life because they were nurtured by the institutions created by John Steinbruck to middle class people of faith who came to realize that religion can and should be about much more than worship and ritual.

As I sat in the pews at Luther Place Church during the memorial service for Rev. John I could not help but think what our world would look like if clergy across the religious spectrum acted on their faith in the way that John acted on his. Very few are cut out to be a prophetic voice the way John was; it is a hard and lonely road. Yet people are hungry for that kind of inspired spiritual leadership in a world that seems more broken every day.