Judaism's Beating Heart

By Rabbi Stanley Davids

This has been a fascinating exercise.  I don't really have any idea about who might be reading these comments by my colleague and teacher, Rabbi Richard Levy and me – but I am grateful for having been forced into thinking far more honestly about what I really believe with regard to the topography of 21 ^st century Jewish life.  And for this I am grateful.

It is hard to separate between a painful honesty and a misguided cynicism.  I am in awe of what some would call the miracle of Jewish survival.   ANU ADAYIN OMDIM....we Jews are still standing, creatively, dynamically – while other civilizations that grew up around us and at times sorely oppressed us have become fascinating entries in musty history texts.   But, as the disclaimer goes, prior success offers no guarantee as to future performance.  There are no inherent guarantees, no unbreakable promises and no absolute certainties that our people can forever sidestep the pathways leading to our disappearance.

In a complex world, guided as much by natural law as by chaos theory, survival will always involve elements of chance and of inadvertence.   But survival must also logically demand of us carefully devised tactical and strategic responses to constantly changing conditions.  AYN SOMCHIN AL HA-NES.   We are forbidden to rely upon miracles to do that which lies within our grasp to achieve.  We need to look around us, to see what is real, to try to understand long and short-term trends and to strip away both the seductive comforts of wishful thinking and the self-satisfying prognostications of doomsayers.

I find little comfort in Rabbi Levy's citation of the possible rise in the level of Jewish home observances.  On the contrary: I see all around me, by all available measures, the weakening of our people in America as a K'LAL, a whole, as a community that finds its greatest strength in its interdependence.   David Hartman over and over again reminds us that far more important than seeking for the literal voice of God behind our Mitzvoth is the understanding that those Mitzvoth – which by their very nature demand the presence of   a participating community – are the ultimate guarantors of Jewish survival.  They are sacred and they sanctify us, because they are the literal tools of our meaningful continuity.   We can't make it long-term if we are not participants in a rich, supportive community.

The CCAR has adopted by a clear majority Mishkan Tefila as the prayer book of our Movement.  I hope that this might mean that the overwhelming majority of our congregants will, within the next 5-7 years, actually be worshipping from that text.   But I doubt that such will be the case, as the creativity and the needs of many individual congregations, their volunteer and clergy leaders, will result in ever-increasing diversity in our core liturgical texts.   I am sorry that I cannot follow Rabbi Levy's suggestion that we leave it just to the statisticians to measure where we are falling short – the data speak increasingly of the individuation, the personalization, the internalization of American Jewish identities – and we will not help ourselves by denying and failing to respond to where such realities are likely to lead.

I believe that we have reached a time in which for the vast majority of American Jews our capacity for Jewish self-expression has been hobbled by virtue of our enormous success in becoming full and active participants in the richly vibrant secular American community.   We have attained to levels of acceptance that our grandparents could barely have dreamed about.  The glass ceilings have almost totally disappeared.   We can choose to work wherever our talents and interests might lead us.  We can choose to shape our religious lives according to how we perceive our personal needs and capacities.   And the choices being made do not seem to be tending in healthy directions.

Israel is the one major Jewish center on earth where it is easily possible to live fully and completely within a variety of nurturing, richly divergent Jewish communities.   By living in Israel most of the year, I have become painfully aware of the great distance that exists between our liberal Zionist dream of Israel as L'OR   GOYIM, a light unto the nations, and the rudeness, the actual poverty, the ethnic tensions, the racism, the arrogance and the political corruption that are all too easily encountered.   I know of the physical threats, the real threats posed by Hamas, by Iran and by Israeli drivers.

But I also know of Israel's unparalleled teachers and academic institutions (including HUC) devoted to continuing the process of maintaining lively Jewish communities through interpretive encounters with our vast library of sacred texts.   I meet astonishingly daring Orthodox Jews seeking through a burgeoning variety of settings to combat the devastating obscurantism of so many of their peers.   I regularly encounter the sights, sounds and delicious odors of Shabbat and Yom Tov just by walking the streets of Jerusalem.  I study with American young people who are wide-eyed with astonishment as to what it might mean for them to be able to live in a setting within which their culture, their heritage and their traditions are struggling to deal justly and compassionately with some of the thorniest problems of our day.

I have the privilege of working with some of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism's leadership and I am in awe of their willingness to stand firm against both overt discrimination and profound disinterest – and to successfully tend to the flowering of our vision of a pluralistic, democratic Jewish State.   The centrality of Israel is not predetermined by Zionist philosophies – but rather it is made manifest by those Jewish communities that are capable of flourishing in Israel and no where else on earth right now.

The North American Jewish community and the Israeli Jewish communities must quickly learn to love and to appreciate each other, for their mutual benefit.   We need to build relationships that allow us to be strengthened by each other's successes.  We need to feel an unbreakable responsibility for each other, a concern that will never allow us to bring injury to the other.   The beating heart of the world Jewish community is clearly to be found, just as Ahad Ha'Am had predicted, in Israel.  But just as clearly we know that no heart can survive without its limbs and no limbs can survive without their heart.   Israel and the Diaspora – one and indivisible.