No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

...as my father has been known to say. In this case, speaking out against ostracizing those who intermarry has, as one might have suspected, drawn the trolls who live under the bridge of I Must Defend Traditional Judaism Against Apikorsim and Apostates.
So here's what I had to say, continuing on from this earlier post:

Nothing you have written above, and nothing Noah Feldman wrote in his article, indicates to me that Feldman is "anti-Orthodox" -- and nothing in Rabbi Boteach's article suggests to me that he finds Feldman in any way anti-Orthodox either.

The question is not whether the Maimonides School or Orthodox Judaism "recognizes" Feldman's marriage -- it's what it does in reaction to the fact of that marriage. Not listing his simchas is one thing; taking him AND his then-fiancee out of a group photo, and pretending neither one of them exists, is quite another.

Not to mention that it's incredibly chutzapadik and lacking in derekh eretz (respect for other people) to presume that
1) because the woman with him is Korean-American, she's not Jewish
(I know Asian-American Jews of all sorts: raised Jewish by Jewish parents who are of mixed ethnic descent; raised Jewish after being adopted by Jews; Jews by Choice);
2) his children, when he announces their birth or milestones, are not Jewish -- even if it's known that their mother is not
(some families choose to convert their children at birth if they are not halakhically Jewish; whether or not the mother converts is not immediately germane, as long as she is supportive of the creation of a Jewish household and raising her children as Jews: see JOI's The Mothers Circle for more information and support for non-Jewish women who make this wonderful choice!).

Presumably the marriage depicted in his article, like the marriage of my Jewish mother to my non-Jewish father, does not constitute kiddushin and is not a marriage that takes place within the Jewish legal structure. But I am not convinced that therefore the relationship has NO standing in Jewish law, since there are means of acquiring a spouse other than via kiddushin ( e.g., through cohabitation, etc.): if he wanted to marry a Jewish wife, I think that halakha and not just the laws of the land would demand that he divorce his current one -- and if that's the case, then it's being "recognized" as a marriage for at least some purposes. A non-permitted relationship may be prohibited, but it still exists!

Marriage with someone who is not Jewish has always been a fact of Jewish community life and history --look at the marriages in Tanakh/the Hebrew Bible for countless examples, both positive (Tamar, Asenath, Zipporah) and negative (the "son of an Israelite woman" in Exodus, who abuses the name of God in a fight with another Israelite; he's understood to be the son of a non-Israelite, otherwise why say "son of an Israelite woman"?).

It doesn't sound to me as though Noah Feldman turned his back on Orthodox Judaism. The Orthodox Judaism of that particular community, and his school (or at least its administration), seems to have turned its back on him. I think that's a shame -- but I also want to invite him and his wife to come with us and find a home in a Judaism that opens its arms to them instead. (Hi guys--remember me and my husband Mike W. from Oxford?) My Jew-by-choice husband and I are part of traditional egalitarian Conservative communities -- in fact, I was raised in one here in the DC area by my Jewish mother and non-Jewish father, and never felt ostracized or strange -- where they would be very welcome. I have friends in the Reform and Reconstructionist and Renewal movements (several of whom are rabbis) as well, and know that there too they should find a warm welcome and the encouragement to be involved in any way they choose!

Asking the Right Question

It's about time someone did!

I'm definitely in the camp that thinks "Why Be Jewish?" is a much more compelling and important question than "How Many Jews Will There Be In 30 Years?" or "Who is a Jew?" ...and so, apparently, is Rabbi Eliyahu Stern, given this New York Jewish Week article:

We Must Have Answers For ‘Why Be Jewish?’

Eliyahu Stern

Demographers are locked in a furious battle over whether American Jewry is at five million and dangerously dwindling or 6.7 million and growing strong. But either way one looks at the numbers, counting heads is a poor means of evaluating the strength of Jewish affiliation and identity. Both sides of the demographic debate are overlooking the biggest question facing Jewry today, which is not “How many Jews are there?” but rather, “Why would one want to be Jewish in the first place?” The misplaced emphasis on demographics has led us down a path of making intermarriage the central issue in Jewish life. Though important, encouraging Jews to marry within the religion will only go so far. The Jewish community forgets that the people who brought us to the demographic quandary we are currently facing are the children of fully Jewish couples — fully Jewish ethnically, but barely Jewish spiritually or intellectually. An unengaged Jew married to an equally unengaged Jew does not translate into Jewish children; it translates into children who will probably not identify as Jewish. If we want to answer this generation’s real questions, we must move beyond initiatives rooted in marriage questions alone. We must be ready to engage Judaism in its entirety, through its ideas, practices and texts. Are we confident enough in our tradition to promote mitzvot such as prayer, Shabbat and kashrut in meaningful, unapologetic and original ways? Are we ready to invest in cultivating a religious leadership that could make Jewish ideas and wisdom touch peoples’ lives? Are we prepared to welcome those of different backgrounds and even different religions into our homes and institutions to experience the love, care and joy that a Jewish community provides? Most importantly, we need to convey that Judaism adds a palpable higher value to our life experience. A strong and enduring Judaism must be able to provide answers, supply meaning and address issues that affect the way we live. A Judaism based merely on survival questions will produce at best short-term survival answers. My own personal answer to “Why be Jewish?” is clear but complex: it involves the search for meaning, the love of study and the heightened sense of self-awareness, consciousness and choice that result from engaging the world of mitzvot. Such an emphasis does not exclude deep-felt feelings of peoplehood, nationality and community. In an era of choice, these latter feelings are still relevant, but they will most often emerge as the outcome of an engagement with Jewish convictions, practices and ideas, rather than vice versa. My answer to “Why be Jewish?” includes Israel as well, of course, but support for Israel will diminish if Israel cannot convince the Jewish people that it welcomes all types of Jews within its borders. For centuries, questions such as “Why be Jewish?” trumped Jewish survival questions in communal conversation. We stand up at synagogue for the reading of the Ten Commandments, not for a head count of the 12 Tribes. From Maimonides to Mendelssohn, Judaism’s spiritual energy derived not from demographic polls but from the quality and depth of Jewish life and thought. While modernity, the Holocaust, the American Jewish experience and threats to Israel’s existence have forced us to confront serious demographic concerns, oftentimes we use such issues as a veil to cover our ignorance of our own tradition. As the Hebraist Simon Rawidowicz described in his classic, “Israel: the Ever-Dying People,” it’s easier to kvetch about one’s grandchildren needing to be Jewish than to give them a reason why they should be. It might be heretical to ask, “Why be Jewish?” The results are unpredictable: we run the risk of failing to provide a convincing answer, making matters worse. But it is a timely and genuinely Jewish question. If we do not pose it, we face the even greater difficulty of promoting a Judaism that we are not sure we believe in ourselves. n Rabbi Eliyahu Stern is director of “Why Be Jewish?” a conference convened by Adam Bronfman in Park City, Utah, July 29 -31 under the auspices of The Samuel Bronfman Foundation.

Let's talk about God, baby...

More discussion growing out of a religion thread on That Message Board -- I've said things like this before, but not sure if I've posted them here, so for what it's worth here it is!

My advice to you, Jewel, is to focus on how you would like to live your life more than on abstract questions of belief, doctrine, or theology.

The joke version of Reconstructionist Judaism is "There is no God, and Mordecai Kaplan is his prophet."
But there's an element of truth there, and it's pretty close to what I "believe" (i.e., the model that works best for me in terms of intellectual honesty and my understanding of the world) about God -- that God has no independent or transcendent existence, but is valuable to me as a conceptual and poetic embodiment of our highest and noblest ideals, a divine force that represents the best in us. Kaplan called it "the Power that makes for salvation," among other things -- but he didn't "believe in" God as an anthropomorphic SuperPerson.

You could call this "belief" of mine a species of atheism. I don't believe in the God that many theists believe in, and "God" doesn't mean to me what it means to them.

And yet you'd be hard pressed to look at me and see what people think of when they say "atheist," or even "secularist"/"humanist" (which are terms I would embrace in some contexts, though not so much in opposition to religious identifiers). I work at a synagogue, I'm a leader in several different member-led (not clergy-led) Jewish worship/study communities, I keep kosher, I keep Shabbat, I wear a kippah most of the time now...

I live a life in which "our God and of our ancestors"--words that open the Amidah, the central prayer that traditional Jews say 3 times daily as the core of the prayer service--has a meaningful presence. I've said those words twice today (afternoon & evening services--I skipped the morning, and the only day of the week I regularly make it through all 3 of the prayer services I'm "supposed" to do is Shabbat...), while fasting in observance of Tisha B'Av (the 9th of Av--commemorating the destruction of the Temples and other historical disasters).

I hope that the spiritual preparation of this practice of prayer, and my engagement with the ethical teachings of my religious tradition, contribute to making me a better person, one who will make her world a better place -- which is, in my book, an act of godliness.

So if the God-who-does-not-exist-independently-of-us-all speaks to me through my involvement in the tradition, through the love I feel for friends and family and the love they feel for me, through natural beauty and music and art... is it really accurate to say that God has no place in my life, because I don't "believe in" God?

I would say not. But I would also say it doesn't matter. I know what my God, who does not exist, wants of me, in the words of the prophets of my tradition (not because they saw God, not because they were especially holy -- but because these words are true and beautiful and right):

He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?
(Micah 6:8)

Shmuley Gets It!

Now I've also read the piece by Shmuely Boteach that was also linked to on the IFF blog.

Here it is, with my comments following:

Stop Ostracizing Those Who Marry Out

Posted July 22, 2007 | 09:04 PM (EST)

---

Read More: Breaking Living Now News, Harvard University, Shmuley Boteach

This column would not have been written had its subject not first described himself and his predicament in this week's in New York Times magazine.

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Noah Feldman was a brilliant, orthodox Jewish Rhodes scholar who arrived in Oxford in my forth year at the University as Rabbi in 1992. He and I quickly hit it off. For one thing, there was scarcely a subject - Jewish or secular - upon which Noah did not have some profound knowledge. We studied Talmud together several times a week and I made Noah a kind of secondary Rabbi at our L'Chaim Society, such was the range of his Jewish erudition and his phenomenal capacity for teaching. His resume easily made him one of the most accomplished young students in the entire Western world. He was valedictorian of Harvard, a Rhodes and Truman scholar, and completed his Oxford doctorate in about eighteen months, which may or may not be a University record. It was a source of great pride for me that Noah was observant and wore a Yarmulke. A student that gifted was a natural leader to others and was looked up to by so many of the other students. We all marveled every Shabbat at Noah's incredible ability to lein (read with its proper notes) any section of the Torah for our student Synagogue.

After graduating from Oxford, Noah went to Yale where his observance began to wane. I heard from some of his class mates that he was now dating a non-Jewish girl. Hearing that he was quite serious about her, when his girlfriend came in turn to Oxford as a Marshall scholar, I made a point of reaching out to her and inviting her to our Shabbat dinner. My thinking was that Noah was far too precious to me and to the Jewish people to lose. If he was dating a woman whom he wished to marry, then it was our duty to try and expose her to the friendliness of the Jewish community with a view toward her exploring whether a serious commitment to our tradition was something that would suit her.

Sadly, however, others took a far different view. A mutual friend of ours who was a Rabbi in Noah's life essentially told him that if he married outside the faith he would have to sever his relationship with him. Apparently, many of Noah's orthodox friends made the same decision. The net result was that one of the brightest young Jews in the entire world was made to feel that the Jewish community was only his family if he made choices with which we agreed.

I took a different view. Of course I wanted Noah to marry Jewish, and I took pride in the fact that I had helped to sustain his observance in his two years at Oxford. But the choice of whom he would marry was not mine to make. Before he got married I wrote him a note that said, in essence, that we are friends and that my affection for him would never change. I told him that he was a prince of the Jewish nation, that his obligations to his people were eternal and unchanging, that whether or not his wife, or indeed his children were Jewish would never change his own personal status as a Jew and that, as a scholar of world standing, I knew he would do great things with his life and that he would should always put the needs of the Jewish people first.
Till today we remain good friends. I admire and respect Noah and my wish is that perhaps, some day, his brilliant wife might see, of her own volition, the beauties of our tradition and how family life is enhanced by husband and wife being of the same faith and practicing the same religious rituals.

True to my prediction, Noah went on, in his thirties, to become one of the youngest ever tenured law professors, first at NYU and then at Harvard, and was chosen by the American government to serve as the constitutional consultant for the Iraqi provisional government in drawing up their constitution. Today he ranks, arguably, as the youngest academic superstar in the United States.
How tragic, therefore, that his article in the New York Times magazine is a lengthy detailing of the alienation he has experienced from his former orthodox Jewish day school and friends, who even cut him out of a class reunion photograph in which he participated.

For more than two centuries now, since the emancipation, Jews have been debating how to deal with those who marry outside the community. The conventional response has been to treat them as traitors to the Jewish cause. We are all familiar with the old practice of sitting shiva on a child who marries out, as if he or she were dead, made famous in Fiddler on the Roof. The extreme practice of ostracization was justified by the belief that only by completely cutting off those who married out would we be making a sufficiently strong statement as to the extent of their betrayal, thereby dissuading those who might follow suit.

There is one problem with this practice. Aside from the ethical and humanitarian considerations, it does not work. We have been practicing this alienation for decades and yet intermarriage has grown to approximately fifty percent of the Jewish population! Worse, the practice is a lie insofar as it propagates the false notion that our Jewishness is measured only in terms of our being a link in a higher chain of existence, and that our Jewish identities have meaning only through our children. This absurd notion would deny they idea of Jewish individualism and how we are Jews in our own right.

I am well aware of the fact that intermarriage is a direct threat to the very continuity of the Jewish people. But that does not change the fact that those who have chosen to marry out are still Jewish, should still be encouraged to go to Synagogue, should still be encouraged to put on tefillin and keep Shabbat, should still have mezuzos on their doors, and should still be encouraged to devote their lives and resources to the welfare of the Jewish people and the security of the State of Israel.

And as far as their non-Jewish spouses are concerned, do we really believed that by showing the most unfriendly behavior we are living up to our Biblically-mandated role of serving as a light unto the nations? Is there any possibility that a non-Jew who is married to a Jew would look favorably at the possibility of becoming halakhically Jewish if they witness orthodox Jews treating their husband or wife as pariahs?

I am proud today to call Noah my friend. I do my best to reiterate to him the message that, amid marrying out, we are proud of his achievements and need his participation in Jewish organizational life, especially given the immense clout he carries in academic circles. And it is my fervent hope that, given the love and respect that we show him, he will choose to show his wife and two children the glories of the tradition he knows so well with a view toward impressing upon them a desire to have them join in our eternal faith.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who served as Rabbi at Oxford for 11 years, is a national TV host and the author, most recently, of 'Shalom in the Home' (Meredith). www.shmuley.com

And my comments:

Yasher koach (well done!), Shmuley!

I knew you were a mensch when I met you at Oxford (my husband M. and I were Rhodes Scholars from '95-'98, and saw you again at Shmully Hecht's son bris in New Haven after our return to the U.S.--you'd know me as Becca B.), even if my Jewish involvement was primarily with the Oxford Jewish Community (including its then-nascent Masorti minyan, which has now been going strong for over 10 years) rather than with the L'Chaim Society (where I did sometimes show up for dinner and at least 2 of your debates, w/a Reform rabbi & a 'Messianic Jewish rabbi').

I was pleased to hear that you'd made sure that the Torah got 'round to the women's side during Simchat Torah festivities at the L'Chaim Society -- that when others tried to keep it away from or take it back from my fellow North American female Rhodes Scholar (she's now a rabbi in NYC, as is her wife--who is a Jew by Choice), you made sure she got to hold on to it.

I was impressed when I heard that you'd written a recommendation for another female friend in her (successful) application for rabbinical school at Leo Baeck -- the story (you can say if it's true or apocryphal) was that, when challenged by someone who couldn't see how you, an Orthodox rabbi, would support a woman's application to a liberal rabbinic seminary, you'd said "What, I should prefer that she be a cocktail waitress?!"

I found both your article here & Noah's essay via the Interfaith Family (IFF) blog. I have a vested interest, even though I'm not intermarried myself: I was raised as a Nice Jewish Girl by my Jewish mother and non-Jewish father, and dated and got engaged to a Nice Non-Jewish Boy who could handle being a supportive part of a Jewish family as my father had done.

Then he decided to become Jewish, surprising us both (we'd known each other for 10 years, we'd been a couple for 8; nice to still be able to have surprises!) and enriching our lives immensely.

In his year of studying for conversion we couldn't have been luckier in our companions: we learned from amazing friends who were exploring their own Judaism, intellectually, ritually and spiritually.

3 are now rabbis; one is a Jewish studies professor and co-founded the Hadar independent minyan in NYC; another is a professor of philosophy at a prominent university and has 2 adorable daughters with his non-Jewish wife, whose Jewish wedding (with chuppah and ketubah) we joyfully attended.

Virtually all of them have non-Jews in their Jewish family life -- as in-laws; as partners or spouses; as parents -- and only one grew up in a traditionally observant (Conservative, as it happens) Jewish home.

You're 100% correct that we're not going to enhance anyone's Jewish life or our Jewish community by ostracizing those who have non-Jews in their family (as partners, parents, what have you) or those who are non-Jews who have chosen to make their lives with someone Jewish.

Ruth said "Your people shall be my people" before she said "and your God, my God" (Ruth 1:16). Anyone who has committed his or her life to being with someone Jewish (a spouse, a child, a parent) is living Ruth's words: "Whither thou goest, I shall go; whither thou lodgest, I shall lodge." Our people ARE their people (but need not be their ONLY people!)--and we should acknowledge, indeed celebrate, that they have gone beyond their "mother's house" (Ruth 1:8) and the "land of your birth, and have come to a people you did not know before" (Ruth 2:11).

These wonderful people--whose Jewish family and partners treasure them, and who have cast their lot with those Jewish family members and partners--are living the commitment "your God, my God." They may mean it in its universalistic or metaphorical sense--"we share the same Divine Source and force, the same ideals"--but by the very lives they have chosen, whether they live as Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, agnostics, humanists, you name it, they are sharing their highest values and ethical selfhood with the Jews in their families. Their God is my God.

If some of them choose to make that statement a particular Jewish one rather than a universalistic one--to worship not only the same deity but in the same words, with the same texts, at the same seasons that the Jewish people do and have done; to embrace Judaism for themselves after having embraced it as the faith or background of someone they love--that's up to them. But our love and respect and welcome should never be contingent upon this choice.

I love my father and am glad that he is who he is. I love my husband and am glad that he is who he is. This Shabbat, my mother and husband and I, as adult Jewish members of our community, will be called up to the Torah (which both M. and I will read from); my friend K. and her 13-year-old daughter will hopefully be called up as well. My father, K.'s husband, and my brother's fiancee will be there with us at Shabbat services: some of them will read prayers in English on behalf of this community of worshippers. They are not Jews -- but they are part of our Jewish families, offering their prayers in Jewish space [the synagogue] and Jewish time [Shabbat morning] on behalf of this Jewish community, of which they are an important part.

They are not second-bests who should have been pushed aside for a Jewish partner but can perhaps be tolerated, now that they're unavoidably and permanently here.

They are not threats to Jewish community or Jewish continuity--in fact, they all have raised or intend to raise children who are exclusively Jewish in faith.

My people is their people; my God, their God.

In and Out -- Intermarriage, Modern Orthodoxy, Claiming Our Pasts or Being Rejected By Them...

So much to blog, so little time -- watch this space for thoughts on:

• my new stealth tallit (which I love, and will use at mincha in 2 1/2 hours in a non-stealth Conservative egalitarian context: it was debuted on Shabbat morning at the Chabad synagogue in Cleveland for my cousin Noam's bar mitzvah),
• Rabbi Strangeblood, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mikvah (really! I'm going tomorrow morning for the third time this year -- prior to that, I'd only been as part of the pre-wedding preparation 10 years ago--and I've been looking forward to it!)
  
• 10 Years of This Jewish Life -- Saturday, Shabbat Nachamu, the 13th of Av, is the 10th anniversary of our aufruf; Sunday, the 14th of Av, we will have been married fro 10 years on the Jewish calendar. We have already marked this summer the 20th anniversary of the day M. and I met (June 26, 1987); 18th anniversary of the day we first saw each other again 2 years later/for the first time as a couple (June 24, 1989)... and of the day M. asked me to marry him (June 28, 1989); and the 10th anniversary of his becoming a Jew (the week of Parshat Pinchas in 1997--late July).

But for right now, I just want to make everyone aware of this amazing New York Times Magazine article by Noah Feldman, who deserves many props for it! We met him and his wife in Oxford; I would love to talk with him/them about their experiences -- because, as you'll see from the piece, they're very relevant to my family situation (both the one I was born into/raised in and the one M and I have created together). Thank you to the IFF Network Blog for making me aware of it!

I've re-bolded the section headers, etc., below -- but some of the formatting has no doubt been lost -- so you may want to follow the link above, or pull out your NYT Magazine (or borrow it from your neighbor or read it in the library) so you can put up your feet & read it...

Orthodox Paradox

R. Kikuo Johnson

By NOAH FELDMAN
Published: July 22, 2007

A number of years ago, I went to my 10th high-school reunion, in the backyard of the one classmate whose parents had a pool. Lots of my classmates were there. Almost all were married, and many already had kids. This was not as unusual as it might seem, since I went to a yeshiva day school, and nearly everyone remained Orthodox. I brought my girlfriend. At the end, we all crowded into a big group photo, shot by the school photographer, who had taken our pictures from first grade through graduation. When the alumni newsletter came around a few months later, I happened to notice the photo. I looked, then looked again. My girlfriend and I were nowhere to be found.

I didn’t want to seem paranoid, especially in front of my girlfriend, to whom I was by that time engaged. So I called my oldest school friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked for her explanation. “You’re kidding, right?” she said. My fiancée was Korean-American. Her presence implied the prospect of something that from the standpoint of Orthodox Jewish law could not be recognized: marriage to someone who was not Jewish. That hint was reason enough to keep us out.

Not long after, I bumped into the photographer, in synagogue, on Yom Kippur. When I walked over to him, his pained expression told me what I already knew. “It wasn’t me,” he said. I believed him.

Since then I have occasionally been in contact with the school’s alumni director, who has known me since I was a child. I say “in contact,” but that implies mutuality where none exists. What I really mean is that in the nine years since the reunion I have sent him several updates about my life, for inclusion in the “Mazal Tov” section of the newsletter. I sent him news of my marriage. When our son was born, I asked him to report that happy event. The most recent news was the birth of our daughter this winter. Nothing doing. None of my reports made it into print.

It would be more dramatic if I had been excommunicated like Baruch Spinoza, in a ceremony complete with black candles and a ban on all social contact, a rite whose solemnity reflected the seriousness of its consequences. But in the modern world, the formal communal ban is an anachronism. Many of my closest relationships are still with people who remain in the Orthodox fold. As best I know, no one, not even the rabbis at my old school who disapprove of my most important life decisions, would go so far as to refuse to shake my hand. What remains of the old technique of excommunication is simply nonrecognition in the school’s formal publications, where my classmates’ growing families and considerable accomplishments are joyfully celebrated.

The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study. Our advanced Talmud and Hebrew classes were interspersed with advanced-placement courses in French literature and European political history, all skillfully coordinated to prime us for the Ivy League. To try to be at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep school: that was the unspoken motto of the Maimonides School of Brookline, Mass., where I studied for 12 years.

That aspiration is not without its difficulties. My own personal lesson in nonrecognition is just one small symptom of the challenge of reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity — of Slobodka and St. Paul’s. In premodern Europe, where the state gave the Jewish community the power to enforce its own rules of membership through coercive force, excommunication literally divested its victim of his legal personality, of his rights and standing in the community. The modern liberal state, though, neither polices nor delegates the power to police religious membership; that is now a social matter, not a legal one. Today a religious community that seeks to preserve its traditional structure must maintain its boundaries using whatever independent means it can muster — right down to the selective editing of alumni newsletters.

Despite my intimate understanding of the mind-set that requires such careful attention to who is in and who is out, I am still somehow taken by surprise each time I am confronted with my old school’s inability to treat me like any other graduate. I have tried in my own imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me, expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere. As a result, I have not felt myself to have rejected my upbringing, even when some others imagine me to have done so by virtue of my marriage.

Some part of me still expects — against the judgment of experience — that the individual human beings who make up the institution and community where I spent so many years of my life will put our longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries. The school did educate me and influence me deeply. What I learned there informs every part of my inner life. In the sense of shared history and formation, I remain of the community even while no longer fully in the community.

If this is dissonance, it is at least dissonance that the modern Orthodox should be able to understand: the desire to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously and to defy contradiction with coexistence. After all, the school’s attempt to bring the ideals of Orthodox Judaism into dialogue with a certain slice of late-20th-century American life was in many ways fantastically rich and productive. For those of us willing to accept a bit of both worlds, I would say, it almost worked.

Fitting In

Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law — to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the reality of the modern world. You must strive to be, as a poet of the time put it, “a Jew in the home and a man in the street.” Even as we students of the Maimonides School spent half of every school day immersed in what was unabashedly a medieval curriculum, our aim was to seem to outsiders — and to ourselves — like reasonable, mainstream people, not fanatics or cult members.

This ambition is best exemplified today by Senator Joe Lieberman. His run for the vice presidency in 2000 put the “modern” in modern Orthodox, demonstrating that an Orthodox Jewish candidate could be accepted by America at large as essentially a regular guy. (Some of this, of course, was simply the result of ignorance. As John Breaux, then a senator from Louisiana, so memorably put it with regard to Lieberman during the 2000 campaign, “I don’t think American voters care where a man goes to church on Sunday.”) Whatever concerns Lieberman’s Jewish identity may have raised in the heartland seem to have been moderated, rather than stoked, by the fact that his chosen Jewish denomination was Orthodox — that he seemed to really and truly believe in something. His Orthodoxy elicited none of the half-whispered attacks that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism has already prompted in this electoral cycle, none of the dark hints that it was, in some basic sense, weird.

Lieberman’s overt normalcy really is remarkable. Though modern Orthodox Jews do not typically wear the long beards, side curls and black, nostalgic Old World garments favored by the ultra-Orthodox, the men do wear beneath their clothes a small fringed prayer shawl every bit as outré as the sacred undergarments worn by Mormons. Morning prayers are accompanied by the daily donning of phylacteries, which, though painless, resemble in their leather-strappy way the cinched cilice worn by the initiates of Opus Dei and so lasciviously depicted in “The Da Vinci Code.” Food restrictions are tight: a committed modern Orthodox observer would not drink wine with non-Jews and would have trouble finding anything to eat in a nonkosher restaurant other than undressed cold greens (assuming, of course, that the salad was prepared with a kosher knife).

The dietary laws of kashrut are designed to differentiate and distance the observant person from the rest of the world. When followed precisely, as I learned growing up, they accomplish exactly that. Every bite requires categorization into permitted and prohibited, milk or meat. To follow these laws, to analyze each ingredient in each food that comes into your purview, is to construct the world in terms of the rules borne by those who keep kosher. The category of the unkosher comes unconsciously to apply not only to foods that fall outside the rules but also to the people who eat that food — which is to say, almost everyone in the world, whether Jewish or not. You cannot easily break bread with them, but that is not all. You cannot, in a deeper sense, participate with them in the common human activity of restoring the body through food.

And yet the Maimonides School, by juxtaposing traditional and secular curricula, gave me a feeling of being connected to the broader world. Line by line we burrowed into the old texts in their original Hebrew and Aramaic. The poetry of the Prophets sang in our ears. After years of this, I found I could recite the better part of the Hebrew Bible from memory. Among other things, this meant that when I encountered the writings of the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I felt immediate kinship. They read those same exact texts again and again — often in Hebrew — searching for clues about their own errand into the American wilderness.

In our literature classes we would glimpse Homer’s wine-dark sea, then move to a different classroom and dive headlong into the sea of the Talmud. Here the pleasure of legal-intellectual argument had no stopping place, no end. A problem in Talmud study is never answered, it is only deepened. The Bible prohibits work on the Sabbath. But what is work? The rabbis began with 39 categories, each of which called for its own classification into as many as 39 further subcategories. Then came the problem of intention: What state of mind is required for “work” to have occurred? You might perform an act of work absent-mindedly, having forgotten that it was the Sabbath, or ignorantly, not knowing that action constituted work. You might perform an action with the goal of achieving some permissible outcome — but that result might inevitably entail some prohibited work’s taking place. Learning this sort of reasoning as a child prepared me well, as it has countless others, for the ways of American law.

Beyond the complementarities of Jewish learning and secular knowledge, our remarkable teachers also offered access to a wider world. Even among the rabbis there was a smattering of Ph.D.’s and near-doctorates to give us a taste of a critical-academic approach to knowledge, not just a religious one. And the teachers of the secular subjects were fantastic. One of the best taught me eighth-grade English when he was barely out of college himself, before he became a poet, a professor and an important queer theorist. Given Orthodoxy’s condemnation of homosexuality, he must have made it onto the faculty through the sheer cluelessness of the administration. Lord only knows what teachers like him, visitors from the real world, made of our quirky ways. (In the book of poems about his teaching years, we students are decorously transformed into Italian-Americans.)

In allowing us, intentionally or not, to see the world and the Torah as profoundly interconnected, the school was faithful to the doctrines of its eponym, the great medieval Jewish legalist and philosopher Moses Maimonides. Easily the most extraordinary figure in post-biblical Jewish history, Maimonides taught that accurate knowledge of the world — physical and metaphysical — was, alongside studying, obeying and understanding the commandments, the one route to the ultimate summum bonum of knowing God. A life lived by these precepts can be both noble and beautiful, and I believe the best and wisest of my classmates and teachers come very close indeed to achieving it.

The Dynamics of Prohibition

For many of us, the consilience of faith and modernity that sometimes appears within the reach of modern Orthodoxy is a tantalizing prospect. But it can be undermined by the fragile fault lines between the moral substructures of the two worldviews, which can widen into deep ruptures on important matters of life and love.

One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the community who later died tragically young — addressed a school assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.

Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.

This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor’s attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated with Yeshiva University, that in violating the Sabbath to treat a non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the patient’s life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.

Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved. To accept this version of the tradition would be to accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world could not proceed in good faith.

Nothing in the subculture of modern Orthodoxy, however, brought out the tensions between tradition and modernity more vividly for a young man than the question of our relationship to sex. Modernity, and maybe the state-mandated curriculum (I have never checked), called for a day of sex ed in seventh grade. I have the feeling that the content of our sex-ed class was the same as those held in public schools in Massachusetts around the same time, with the notable exception that none of us would have occasion to deploy even the most minimal elements of the lesson plan in the foreseeable future. After the scientific bits of the lesson were over, the rabbi who was head of the school came in to the classroom to follow up with some indication of the Jewish-law perspective on these questions. It amounted to a blanket prohibition on the activities to which we had just been introduced. After marriage, some rather limited subset of them might become permissible — but only in the two weeks of the month that followed the two weeks of ritual abstinence occasioned by menstruation.

After that memorable disquisition, the question of relations between the sexes went essentially unmentioned again in our formal education. We were periodically admonished that boys and girls must not touch one another, even accidentally. Several of the most attractive girls were singled out for uncomfortable closed-door sessions in which they were instructed that their manner of dress, which already met the school’s standards for modesty, must be made more modest still so as not to distract the males around them.

Whatever their disjuncture with American culture of the 1980s, the erotics of prohibition were real to us. Once, I was called on the carpet after an anonymous informant told the administration that I had been seen holding a girl’s hand somewhere in Brookline one Sunday afternoon. The rabbi insinuated that if the girl and I were holding hands today, premarital sex must surely be right around the corner.

My Talmud teacher — the one who took the physician to task — handed me four tightly packed columns of closely reasoned rabbinic Hebrew, a responsum by the pre-eminent Orthodox decisor, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, “in the matter of a young man whose heart lures him to enter into bonds of affection with a young woman not for purposes of marriage.” Rabbi Feinstein’s legal judgment with respect to romantic love among persons too young to marry was definitive. He prohibited it absolutely, in part on the ground that it would inevitably lead to nonprocreative seminal emissions, whether intentional or unintentional.

What Feinstein lacked in romantic imagination was more than made up for by Moses Maimonides, who understood the soul pretty well. He once characterized the true love of God as all-consuming — “as though one had contracted the sickness of love.” Feinstein’s opinion directed my attention to a passage in Maimonides’s legal writings prohibiting various sorts of contact with women. The most evocative bit runs as follows: “Even to smell the perfume upon her is prohibited.” I have never been able to escape the feeling that this is a covert love poem enmeshed in the 14-volume web of dos and don’ts that is Maimonides’s Code of Law. Perfume has not smelled the same to me since.

Difference and Reconciliation

I have spent much of my own professional life focusing on the predicament of faith communities that strive to be modern while simultaneously cleaving to tradition. Consider the situation of those Christian evangelicals who want to participate actively in mainstream politics yet are committed to a biblical literalism that leads them to oppose stem-cell research and advocate intelligent design in the classroom. To some secularists, the evangelicals’ predicament seems absurd and their political movement dangerously anti-intellectual. As it happens, I favor financing stem-cell research and oppose the teaching of intelligent design or creationism as a “scientific” doctrine in public schools. Yet I nonetheless feel some sympathy for the evangelicals’ sure-to-fail attempts to stand in the way of the progress of science, and not just because I respect their concern that we consider the ethical implications of our technological prowess.

Perhaps I feel sympathy because I can recall the agonies suffered by my head of school when he stopped by our biology class to discuss the problem of creation. Following the best modern Orthodox doctrine, he pointed out that Genesis could be understood allegorically, and that the length of a day might be numbered in billions of years considering that the sun, by which our time is reckoned, was not created until the fourth such “day.” Not for him the embarrassing claim, heard sometimes among the ultra-Orthodox, that dinosaur fossils were embedded by God within the earth at the moment of creation in order to test our faith in biblical inerrancy. Natural selection was for him a scientific fact to be respected like the laws of physics — guided by God but effectuated though the workings of the natural order. Yet even he could not leave the classroom without a final caveat. “The truth is,” he said, “despite what I have just told you, I still have a hard time believing that man could be descended from monkeys.”

This same grappling with tension — and the same failure to resolve it perfectly — can be found among the many Muslims who embrace both basic liberal democratic values and orthodox Islamic faith. The literature of democratic Islam, like that of modern Orthodox Judaism, may be read as an embodiment of dialectical struggle, the unwillingness to ignore contemporary reality in constant interplay with the weight of tradition taken by them as authentic and divinely inspired. The imams I have met over the years seem, on the whole, no less sincere than the rabbis who taught me. Their commitment to their faith and to the legal tradition that comes with it seems just as heartfelt. Liberal Muslims may even have their own Joe Lieberman in the Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress.

The themes of difference and reconciliation that have preoccupied so much of my own thinking are nowhere more stark than in trying to make sense of the problem of marriage — which is also, for me, the most personal aspect of coming to terms with modern Orthodoxy. Although Jews of many denominations are uncomfortable with marriage between Jews and people of other religions, modern Orthodox condemnation is especially definitive.

The reason for the resistance to such marriages derives from Jewish law but also from the challenge of defining the borders of the modern Orthodox community in the liberal modern state. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism addresses the boundary problem with methods like exclusionary group living and deciding business disputes through privately constituted Jewish-law tribunals. For modern Orthodox Jews, who embrace citizenship and participate in the larger political community, the relationship to the liberal state is more ambivalent. The solution adopted has been to insist on the coherence of the religious community as a social community, not a political community. It is defined not so much by what people believe or say they believe (it is much safer not to ask) as by what they do.

Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish concern for continuity and self-preservation — itself only intensified by the memory of the Holocaust — marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community. Marrying a Jewish but actively nonobservant spouse would in most cases make continued belonging difficult. Gay Orthodox Jews find themselves marginalized not only because of their forbidden sexual orientation but also because within the tradition they cannot marry the partners whom they might otherwise choose. For those who choose to marry spouses of another faith, maintaining membership would become all but impossible.

Us and Them

In a few cases, modern Orthodoxy’s line-drawing has been implicated in some truly horrifying events. Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, was a modern Orthodox Jew who believed that Rabin’s peace efforts put him into the Talmudic category of one who may be freely executed because he is in the act of killing Jews. In 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 worshipers in the mosque atop the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. An American-born physician, Goldstein attended a prominent modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Brooklyn. (In a classic modern Orthodox twist, the same distinguished school has also produced two Nobel Prize winners.)

Because of the proximity of Goldstein’s background and mine, the details of his reasoning have haunted me. Goldstein committed his terrorist act on Purim, the holiday commemorating the victory of the Jews over Haman, traditionally said to be a descendant of the Amalekites. The previous Sabbath, he sat in synagogue and heard the special additional Torah portion for the day, which includes the famous injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy to remember what the Amalekites did to the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and to erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.

This commandment was followed by a further reading from the Book of Samuel. It details the first intentional and explicit genocide depicted in the Western canon: God’s directive to King Saul to kill every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and cattle. Saul fell short. He left the Amalekite king alive and spared the sheep. As a punishment for the incompleteness of the slaughter, God took the kingdom from him and his heirs and gave it to David. I can remember this portion verbatim. That Saturday, like Goldstein, I was in synagogue, too.

Of course as a matter of Jewish law, the literal force of the biblical command of genocide does not apply today. The rabbis of the Talmud, in another of their universalizing legal rulings, held that because of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s policy of population movement at the time of the First Temple, it was no longer possible to ascertain who was by descent an Amalekite. But as a schoolboy I was taught that the story of Amalek was about not just historical occurrence but cyclical recurrence: “In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.” The Jews’ enemies today are the Amalekites of old. The inquisitors, the Cossacks — Amalekites. Hitler was an Amalekite, too.

To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites. Like a Puritan seeking the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him. Commanded to settle the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without mercy or compassion, he slew them. Goldstein could see difference as well as similarity. According to one newspaper account, when he was serving in the Israeli military, he refused to treat non-Jewish patients. And his actions were not met by universal condemnation: his gravestone describes him as a saint and a martyr of the Jewish people, “Clean of hands and pure of heart.”

It would be a mistake to blame messianic modern Orthodoxy for ultranationalist terror. But when the evil comes from within your own midst, the soul searching needs to be especially intense. After the Hebron massacre, my own teacher, the late Israeli scholar and poet Ezra Fleischer — himself a paragon of modern Orthodox commitment — said that the innocent blood of the Palestinian worshipers dripped through the stones and formed tears in the eyes of the Patriarchs buried below.

Lives of Contradiction

Recently I saw my oldest school friend again, and recalling the tale of the reunion photograph, we shared a laugh over my continuing status as persona non grata. She remarked that she had never even considered sending in her news to our alumni newsletter. “But why not?” I asked. Her answer was illuminating. As someone who never took steps that would have led to her public exclusion, she felt that the school and the community of which it was a part always sought to claim her — a situation that had its own costs for her sense of autonomy.

For me, having exercised my choices differently, there is no such risk. With no danger of feeling owned, I haven’t lost the wish to be treated like any other old member. From the standpoint of the religious community, of course, the preservation of collective mores requires sanctioning someone who chooses a different way of living. But I still have my own inward sense of unalienated connection to my past. In synagogue on Purim with my children reading the Book of Esther, the beloved ancient phrases give me a sense of joy that not even Baruch Goldstein can completely take away.

It is more than a little strange, feeling fully engaged with a way of seeing the world but also, at the same time, feeling so far from it. I was discussing it just the other day with my best friend — who, naturally, went to Maimonides, too. The topic was whether we would be the same people, in essence, had we remained completely within the bosom of modern Orthodoxy. He didn’t think so. Our life choices are constitutive of who we are, and so different life choices would have made us into different people — not unrecognizably different, but palpably, measurably so.

I accepted his point as true — but for some reason I resisted the conclusion. Couldn’t the contradictory world from which we sprang be just as rich and productive as the contradictory life we actually live? Would it really, truly, have made all that much difference? Isn’t everyone’s life a mass of contradictions? My best friend just laughed.

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at Harvard University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Midrash, metaphor, and Messiah

A "Liberal Buddhist Agnostic Christian"(did I get that right, Scott?) of my online acquaintance has posted a discussion about midrash (and how it might affect understandings of the New Testament) on some messageboards I frequent. In the ensuing discussion, I added the following in response to a more traditional Christian's post:

A quick thought from a Jew, not a Christian:

Understanding some of the gospel accounts midrashically can add to our common Scriptural ground, where you & I "agree to disagree" about Jesus as the son of God/a divine member of the Trinity vs. as a gifted human teacher. I have no particular stake in persuading you that Jesus did not, say, turn water into wine, walk on water, raise Lazarus from the dead -- just as I have no particular stake in persuading some Orthodox Jews that the Torah we have is not the product of God's dictation to Moses on Mount Sinai, or that Abraham and Sarah observed the Jewish dietary laws and other elements of halakhah (Jewish law) long before they were revealed at Sinai [which is a story contained in Jewish midrash]. But if I don't believe those things, a midrashic understanding of them gives us some common basis on which we can discuss them as having spiritual significance, rather than my saying "well, I don't believe that's literally true, so it's false/nonsense/'a lie.'" My main academic background is in literary interpretation (and in Jewish Studies: so I do read Hebrew, some Greek, and a little Aramaic [at this point], as well as Yiddish, Spanish, French, some German, and can make my way with Italian and some medieval/simpler Latin) -- most of the texts I love and that say, to me, "true" things about the world, are fiction or poetry: their facts are not always literally true (even real experiences put into a poem or story may be altered in some way), but that doesn't mean that they're false. Plato thought this was the case (poets are liars, so they get banished from his Republic) -- but I disagree. :)

That said, since I'm NOT a scholar of the New Testament I can't speak definitively without more research, but I suspect that at least some of Jesus's followers and those who wrote down or transmitted the Gospel accounts did in fact believe in a more "literal" understanding of what we see there: that Jesus really did turn water into wine, or heal the sick. Some people believe in various kinds of miraculous occurrences today: faith healing, miraculous rescue, divine apparitions in everyday objects, etc. Schmoo and I may see such things more metaphorically, but that doesn't mean there aren't others that do take them literally. But our willingness to see them as important -- rather than saying, as a pure logical rationalist might, that such stories only show the folly of believers and how duped they are -- means that we can share in a common love and exploration of these religious texts and traditions with you.

The New Testament is not part of my religious tradition, except inasmuch as it grows out of it -- it is, however, part of my cultural and literary heritage as part of the Western world, and I treasure it for both of these aspects.

Shalom,

MiriyaB

May God bless and keep you...

There's a discussion going on over at the Shefa Network about Birkat Kohanim. Here's the 2 cents' worth I had to contribute:

For what it's worth, until 1991 (my first year of college) I had never been in a shul where Birkat Kohanim occurred at any point--and these were all shuls that DID give Kohen & Levi aliyot, not rishon & sheni.

At the student-led egalitarian Conservative high holiday services my roommate and I went to, she was apparently the only person (male or female) whose father was a kohen and so could perform Birkat Kohanim. Her parents had not been observant Jews and had raised her without much of a religious upbringing, but she had become far more interested in traditional Judaism and had in fact been keeping kosher since 10th grade (telling her parents she was becoming vegetarian, since bad blood between them & an Orthodox relative made her reluctant to thrust her new observance in their faces). In this case, the tradition of having the person pronouncing the blessing be "fed" it word by word had exactly the desired effect: having never performed this ritual before -- indeed, probably never having seen it performed before either -- she was able to convey this blessing to all of us, without concern about whether she would remember all of the words. It was a wonderful moment.

Since then, I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen birkat kohanim done in any shul of any sort*, but in many of those places it had been added to the practices of the shul or minyan relatively recently, having either never been done or not done within memory of anyone there.

Me, I can take it or leave it -- as with kohen-levi aliyot vs. rishon-sheni -- as long as all those whose fathers are kohanim or levi'im (i.e., including b'not kohen/levi) have these ritual roles/honors extended to them regardless of gender.

But I concur in the understanding that several have voiced here that birkat kohanim, which is extended through but not on behalf of the kohanim, need not be anathema in a shul that dispenses with kohen/levi aliyot -- as well as in thinking that other ways of conveying this blessing may also be valuable in making the members of the congregation feel the impact of receiving this blessing in some way that is more striking or immediate than its recitation by the shaliach as part of ordinary Amidah repetition.

* Those occasions were:

• Rosh Hashanah at an egalitarian Conservative syagogue in Albany, NY (done by both women and men whose fathers are kohanim);
• a Sukkot service of traditional egalitarian Conservative minyan members in a friend's backyard in Washington DC (both men and women whose fathers are kohanim -- though I heard some grumbling/challenging from some traditionalist men re: having a bat kohen up there);
• high holiday services at a Conservative synagogue in Maryland (egalitarian shul, though only men were up there; according to one authority I asked afterwards, b'not kohen are also allowed to do so -- but I heard from others that at some point in the past a bat kohen had done so & then been given some grief about it);
• chag services at Young Israel in Manhattan (Orthodox, not egalitarian, so only men);
• Pesach services at a Chabah shul in Cleveland (ditto).
  

The Continuity of Discontinuity

That's the title of Steve M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kaplan's study on "How Young Jews Are Connecting, Creating, and Organizing Their Own Jewish Lives," which I just read about in Kaplan's JTA op-ed. Maybe now the institutional Jewish Community machers will Get It:

Rather than concluding that these new endeavors are weak or competing versions of existing institutions, we will do better to understand them as expressing an alternative vision of what Jewish communities can look like and how they can serve the needs of their members.

One hundred years ago, young immigrants and allrightniks built the American Jewish infrastructure that we have today -- from both AJCs to the landsmanshaften to nightclubs and shuls with pools. Now we are seeing smaller, more localized but no less provocative efforts to rejuvenate, engage, practice and live Jewish lives organized on their own terms by people younger than 40.

In cities across the country they are creating their own minyanim instead of joining synagogues; they are writing and publishing their own journals instead of just subscribing to existing ones; they are playing their own music, putting out records and producing their own concerts. They are hosting salons and movie screenings. They are involved in the creation of Jewish life that is thoughtful, popular and exists largely on the margins of mainstream Jewish organizational life.

These new endeavors do not look like their predecessors because they are responding to the perception that the offerings of synagogues, federations and JCCs are simply too narrow and do not adequately address the diverse needs of American Jews.

This translates also into practice, as the organizations typically resist anything hierarchical, denominational, exclusionary or judgmental. This resistance is partially a critique of mainstream Jewish organizations and partially an expression of deeply held beliefs in pluralism, as well as an understanding of the fluidity of identity in general.

These are some of the lessons that Steven M. Cohen and I address in "The Continuity of Discontinuity," our newly published study on this phenomenon. In the study we explore the ways in which these new organizations represent a response to institutional Jewish life by offering a variety of responses to it.

The organizations we highlight -- and there are many more across the country -- are the result of creative, thoughtful, dissatisfied people who had no desire to join committees, take over sisterhoods or participate in the young leadership branch of local or national communal organizations. But they understood that the landscape of Jewish life could sustain a greater diversity of organizations and experiences.

Today there is much communal anxiety over the behaviors, attitudes and activities of American Jews between 18 and 35. Members of that age cohort are not following their elders into the halls of existing institutions, which could threaten these institutions.

But what we are seeing is not the loss of Jewish practice in North America. We are seeing young people who want to build something new that follows a different vision of what an institution can be and that will cater in a different way to the needs of American Jews for meaningful Jewish engagement.

You can download the study here -- I've done so but haven't read it yet.
Also downloaded but just glanced at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research's new report "Jews in Britain: A Snapshot from the 2001 Census", for those of you who like yer stats... it's been briefly blogged over here at JOI (and no doubt elsewhere, but, y'know, these are the only ones of which the news has come to Hahvahd/There may be many others but they haven't been discaaahvahd).

On My Soapbox Again...

Question asked on WeirdJews (a LiveJournal group) hit on my Pet Peeve #143:
otherwise egalitarian Jews not using both parents' names in their Hebrew names for No Particular Reason. So here's what I wrote:

Why not both parents' names?

If I were calling you up as gabbai, I'd love to call you up as Chaya bat Yehudit v'Nachum -- or, for those times when you're in need of a mi-shebeirach, to wish you a speedy recovery as same.

In an egalitarian context, there is -- to my mind -- no compelling reason to be only your father's daughter in ritual contexts & only your mother's daughter when in need of healing/divine mercy. I understand that there are those who find it meaningful to perpetuate this distinction between using ben/bat father's name in pretty much all "official" Hebrew name contexts and ben/bat mother's name in prayers for healing... but to me, the latter is just a small sop offered in a context that otherwise was seldom giving women their due.

But, as said above, there's not necessarily any reason for anyone to be "weirded out" by your having previously given your name as Chaya bat Judit, because you could be giving it that way because:

1) your mother is Jewish, your father is not, and it's in a context where you find it appropriate to include the former and not the latter, as would be the traditional practice (unlike sirleebutler choosing to use both*)
--this is what I do in my usual Conservative shuls/minyanim, and the way my name appears on the ketubah, because my father is not Jewish -- Rivkah Leah bat Yehudit Sarah

2) you are a farbrente feminist and hoping to add a few specks of sand on one side of the balance, weighed against hundreds of years of men coming up for aliyot with dad's-names-only + plenty of men and women even in egal contexts continuing to only give dad pride of place in these Official Name non-mishebeirach contexts (not my reason for doing it, as said above -- but I wouldn't mind anyway if people thought it was my reason, b/c I'd be sympathetic to it on some level!)

3) it's not their business, but because of whatever set of circumstances you do not wish to use your father's name (absent; abusive; birth father not in your life ... I know of someone who uses his father & stepmother's names, rather than father + late mother's name: she died when he was tiny and his stepmother is, in his life & community, his mom).

*English names are fine. In some contexts where it seems not inappropriate to include the name of my father, who raised me as a Jew, I add "v'Danny" (that's his given name--not Daniel--so I have no intention of improving on what his parents gave him or trying to disguise the non-standard aspects by Judaising/Hebraicizing it for him). Another Rivkah Leah I know is "bat Charles v'Edith."

Jews for centuries--indeed, millenia!--have used names that come from the cultures & languages that surround them: female Jews particularly had these kinds of names. Think of all the women from the Old Country whose names are Yiddish and not Hebrew-derived: Shayna, Golda, Toybe, Glikl, Perl, Rayzl, Feyge, Yente/Yentl [actually cognate with "gentle"--in the sense of noble/highborn: one from the Romance-language rather than Germanic component of Yiddish])... and, among the Sefardim, names like Reyna/Reina...as well as men's names like Sender (from Alexander) and Hirsh/Hershl, Berl, etc....

Now, I'm not saying that there's no reason to have or create Jewish/Hebrew name for yourself if you don't have one and want one other than YourName ben/bat Dad'sName v'/[or] Mom'sName. But it infuriates me that some Hebrew-chauvinist rabbis & educators have told Jews with Perfectly Good Non-Hebrew Jewish (usually Yiddish) names that they should have a "real," i.e. Hebrew, name & give them one. Fer cry-yay, if yer great-grandma was named Golde, most of the time it wasn't the case that her "real"/Hebrew name was Zahava (which is really a Modern Hebrew creation rather than a traditional name, as far as I can tell--just from translating the Yiddish name). If you want to be Zahava, fine--but don't let anyone tell you these other names aren't Jewish.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: any name a Jew has is a Jewish name.

Think about some of the Hellenistic rabbinic/commentator names: Kalonymos ben Kalonymos? That's not Hebrew or Aramaic, that's Greek!

[/rant]

My 15 minutes of fame last Shabbat/final days of Pesach: "Hey, I saw you in the Washington Jewish Week!" The print version even had my smiling face on the final jump page (a photo Mike had taken!), but the online article about adult children of intermarriage can be found there, without the photos. Also, alas, without the list of resources that were in the print edition that I thought were interesting & valuable. Ah well!

For those of you who don't want to hunt it up, here it is! (With some MiriyaB editorial comments...)

4/4/2007 8:59:00 PM

Making 'halves' whole Adult children of intermarrieds carve out their own niche by Sue Fishkoff and Richard Greenberg Aaron Hirsch considers himself "half-Jewish." He grew up in a secular household in Chevy Chase, the son of a Catholic mother and a German Jewish father. Hirsch, 39, is engaged to marry a woman he describes as "part Muslim" in a nonreligious ceremony. Rebecca Boggs' mother is Jewish. Her father was raised as a Protestant by his Cuban Catholic mother and his Protestant Scotch Irish father. [Neatly eliding the question of what religious tag to put on my father today: not Jewish, but not a practicing Christian; someone who believes there is one God...doubtless it's easier to stick to relating family religious streams than to affix theological labels [deist? universalist?]) Boggs, 33, grew up in Arlington, was raised as a Jew [and bat mitzvahed at Arlington-Fairfax Jewish Congregation, now called Etz Chayim], married a convert to Judaism, and they now live as committed Conservative Jews in Washington, D.C., members of Adas Israel Congregation. [I was always a Conservative Jew, and intellectually "committed" to it--much more observant & involved now, but my basic community and ideology have changed very little -- which is why I don't see myself as any kind of ba'alat tshuvah abandoning my old bad ways...] Robin Margolis had a devout Christian upbringing. Her father was an Episcopalian naval officer from an aristocratic Midwestern banking family. Her mother? She, too, was proudly Christian and had the lineage to prove it. Or so it seemed. Margolis was in her 30s when she found out her late mother was Jewish. It was 1984 and she was cleaning out her mother's closet when she found a bag of old documents. The woman she knew as Phyllis Miles was born Phyllis Margolis, and had spent decades running away from her religious and ethnic background. "It was pretty staggering," says Margolis, now 56, who wholeheartedly embraced her Jewishness once she made that startling discovery about her mother. In fact, the Takoma Park resident is now studying for admission to a rabbinic program. The tales told by Margolis, Hirsch and Boggs exemplify the complexity and diversity of a growing, but sometimes overlooked, subgroup the adult children of intermarried parents whom Margolis calls a collective "mystery wrapped in an enigma." [Nice nod to Churchill on Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma"--a quote I'd known, but not its conclusion: "--but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." So I would ask: what is the key for us as adult children of intermarriage? Jewish interest? A sense that we are free and welcome to engage in Jewish communal life without disowning other parts of our families or ourselves?] In many instances, their lives are emotionally complex, the result of growing up with parents from vastly different backgrounds. Even those raised unequivocally as Jews have an entire side of their family that is not Jewish. Although communal outreach to intermarried couples is burgeoning, some of their adult offspring have struggled to find their place in the Jewish community. Hence, in September 2005, Margolis founded The Half-Jewish Network (www.half-jewish.net), an online support group for anyone with a Jewish parent, whether they identify as Jewish, Christian or something else. "I don't push anything," she says. "All I can do is offer them warmth and welcome." According to the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Survey, 360,000 Americans aged 18 to 29 have intermarried parents. Drawing from that rapidly expanding pool, Margolis' organization now has about 150 members, and that number is growing at a rate of about three per week. She figures she'll have 1,000 to 2,000 members in two years. Although communal outreach tends to focus on intermarried couples rather than their adult children, "there is a light at the end of the tunnel" for the second generation, Margolis says. "Many Jewish organizations are showing an extreme interest in unwrapping the mystery, which makes me very happy." Unfortunately, few of them are in the Washington area, according to Margolis. Margolis says she was often greeted with, at best, "chilly politeness" when she went synagogue shopping in the 1980s and early 1990s. "I felt like I was banging my head against the wall," she adds, explaining that she carved out her own institutional path by founding a Jewish Renewal women's chavurah in 1992 that served the entire Washington area. She disbanded it in 2006 in order to devote more time to helping children of the intermarried. Jewish outreach to intermarried families, no matter the denomination, is predicated on the hope that the children will be raised as Jews. Experts stress the importance of giving such children a good Jewish education, as research shows that this makes them much likelier to become committed Jewish adults. But it's no guarantee. Children ultimately choose their own path, despite their parents' carefully laid plans. Siblings from one family, raised the same way by intermarried parents, sometimes make different religious choices. [Or sometimes pretty same-y ones. I'd be astounded if my brothers and I ever diverged in paths as much as the other siblings described below.] Margolis' three younger brothers are all "sincere, committed Christians" following the Protestant faith in which they were raised. One is even a minister. None chose their sister's Jewish path. As for Boggs, her two brothers both had bar mitzvah ceremonies [Dad e-mailed me: "I note that it refers to your brothers' bar mitzvahs but not to your bat"], and one of them is engaged to marry a non-Jew. [Mom e-mailed me: "[your brother] told me that he and [his fiancee] plan to raise their kids Jewish"] Hirsch has a younger brother who identifies more as a Christian than a Jew. As for Hirsch himself, Judaism has virtually no religious impact on him. But his Jewish cultural background bubbles up and insinuates itself into his life from time to time for example, when he encounters anti-Semitism. "Maybe there's a lot more going on inside me than I thought," he says after recounting two such incidents. For many children of intermarried parents, choosing a religion can smack of favoring one parent over the other, with attendant feelings of guilt, anger and abandonment. That's particularly true, and hurtful, when parents divorce. Marty Wasserman converted to Judaism after her divorce two decades ago in Santa Fe, N.M., and began raising her two children, Max and Meredith Murray, as Jews. Max, now a 26-year-old officer in the Coast Guard stationed in Baltimore, dropped out of Hebrew school after a year, saying he didn't bond with the other kids. He ended up spending most of his teenage years with his Catholic father. He attended a Catholic high school, chose Catholic University and today considers himself Catholic. Meredith Murray, now 24, stayed with her mother, had a bat mitzvah ceremony in Israel and flourished in Hebrew school, where she made her closest friends. Like her brother, she went to Catholic high school, but unlike him, she always felt Jewish. She stood back when the other students took communion or intoned Christian prayers, even when it embarrassed her to be singled out. A District resident, she, like her mother, identifies today as Jewish and goes to synagogue sporadically. Her boyfriend, Dan, is not Jewish. She took him to a Passover seder last year at the home of a Conservative friend, who went on and on about the Jews as the chosen people. Murray was embarrassed. "I remember apologizing to Dan when we left, saying not all Jews are that closed," she says. "I was so disgusted. I'm not sure they knew Dan isn't Jewish. It was this whole attitude of arrogance, that we are the chosen people. It was the first time I felt ashamed. It's not what I associate with Judaism. I don't believe a certain people are chosen, or superior." She expects to marry her boyfriend, and they discuss how they'll raise their children. "Dan feels strongly about not forcing kids to go to one church or another," she says, "but he wants to expose them to all different religions. I think he's thinking academically." He's very open, she adds, saying that "I'm sure if I said I want them to go to Hebrew school and temple, he wouldn't object. I really like the social aspect of religion, letting kids be part of something, giving them a structure. I also believe you can become a spiritual person outside the walls of a church or temple." In contrast to some adult children of intermarrieds, Boggs says she has rarely felt stigmatized although she has received double-takes when her name and "Jewish" are mentioned in the same sentence. "I tell them," she says, "that any name a Jew has is a Jewish name." [Dad wrote that he especially enjoyed this line.] Intermarriage, she adds, "doesn't necessarily lead to assimilation. There is a place for the children of the intermarried. There is a place for you, even if not all of your relatives are Jewish." Sue Fishkoff writes for JTA News and Features; Richard Greenberg is WJW associate editor.