...21st Century Reform Jew

September 2019

I’m not a good rule follower.  I bristle against things that seem limiting, absolutist, or black and white.  I prefer gray.  Even our house is gray with varying shades, hues and tones of the already blended color.  My preference for this kind of adaptability may be why I’m a Reform Jew.  613 commandments are way more than this rebel could follow.  While kashrut and not driving on Saturday are on my “yeah, no thanks” list, I’m good with honoring my parents, not killing people, and even celebrating Shabbat.  These latter laws make sense – they orient me – to myself, to my community, to God. 

When asked the question, “what opportunities and challenges do you face by engaging in the secular world as a Jew,” I gazed at a blank screen for an eternity before trying to respond.  Struggling, I did what I always do in times like this: I changed the rules.  I changed the question. 

I’m not sure we actually live in a secular world right now – a world where activities, attitudes and behaviors have no religious or spiritual base.  In the United States religious tension is as high as any other issue that makes us different from one another – race, color, sexual identification, political leanings, and the like.  To make the “us vs them” conversations more complex, factions have chosen to solidify their “rightness” by suggesting God’s support of their respective beliefs or actions – beliefs or actions that we might once have considered “secular.”  I am amazed, for example, by how many teams Jesus supports and how many athletes he has personally led to their individual victories. 

If there’s not a secular, neutral world we’re engaging with, then we are losing hold of our grip on the clear separation between church and state.  As Jews this concerns me.  Religious freedom is one of our country’s foundational principles and a safety net for our legacy.  Years ago, I attended a presentation our rabbi emeritus gave about world religions. My takeaway all these years and 3 children later is that religion, Judaism included, helps humans answer two primary questions: why are we here and how do we make the most of it?  Our respective faiths help us explore those questions and get closer to what many of us call God.  Ultimately, through that exploration, we understand that there are many paths.

Today, however, this blending of issues with religion blurs our Founding Fathers’ bright line.  More importantly, however, it narrows the paths – the choices – that religions once helped us navigate more independently. 

As those paths narrow, so do people’s tolerance for differing viewpoints.  Gray separates back into black and white.  This lack of tolerance is one of the things that both baffles and terrifies me certainly as a person, but even more so as a Jew.  I am anxious we will forget the lessons of the Holocaust.   I am anxious that the screaming and the violence of the Middle East that once lived “over there” is coming “over here.”  I am anxious that supposed friends might one day look at my child and decide he is less than simply because he is Jewish.  I am anxious because I truly do not understand how in this day and age people can hate me just because I say the Sh’ma. 

Intolerance is at one end of the spectrum while apathy is at the other as I consider my challenges as a Jew.  I had three children for multiple reasons, but one of them was this:  one to replace me, one to replace my husband, and one to expand our Jewish people.  As I stand here today, our 12 year old is preparing for his bar mitzvah.  The 21-year old has drunk the Kool-Aid, but it’s unclear what her affiliation will be after she graduates college.  The 19-year old, well, he’s a non-believer.  Disinterested, indifferent, apathetic.  While it makes me sad on many levels, he’s not atypical.  Shoot, I actually think we have congregants who are like this – the only difference is we aren’t sad about them because they pay their commitment.   Apathy.  Lack of involvement.  Not understanding why we’re here or how we make the most out of it – that’s another challenge I think we Jews face in helping perpetuate our tribe.   

While shifting political tides, intolerance and apathy sound bleak, I’m not particularly downhearted about our prospects.   First, if history is a predictor of the future, we Jews will survive.  We may not always love the journey, but we are resilient.   In this case, I just have faith.  And that might the grayest thing I’ve ever said.

Secondly, our differences are important and these differences – in this case – our Jewishness – add to the mosaic of humanity in the most necessary of ways.   While there’s a fine line between drawing attention to ourselves and increasing the risk of anti-Semitism, there’s also a risk of being so under the radar that people just kind of forget about you.  Let me be clear:  Jews change the world.  Einstein, Jonas Salk and even Ruth Bader Ginsberg are easy to remember.  But what about Ehud Shabtai (inventor of Waze), or Michael Rosbash (2017 Nobel Prize Winner in Medicine), or Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google).  Or Mara Nathan or Michael Swanson or Michelle Krapf or the countless other members of our Jewish community who make the world a better place every single day.  Maybe the world needs to be reminded exactly how much goodness Jews bring to the color palette.  Maybe Jews have a PR opportunity to move from gray to some brighter, bolder shades so that people take notice and absolutely don’t forget who we are and why we are here – and most importantly, why they can’t – and don’t want to – live without us.

Finally, I believe that we as Reform Jews have the greatest opportunity to carry our traditions from generation to generation.  By design, we intentionally grapple with the tensions between yesterday and today, and with the pull between today and tomorrow in a way that our sisters under the chuppah of our faith may not.  We are meant to re-form ourselves in order to ensure we remain relevant and meaningful for all in our chain.  It means we grapple with things, even the things considered “most sacred:” our prayer books, our take on kippot and tallit, our melodies, our clergy, our dress code, our funding process, and yes, even the design of our sanctuary.  My mother-in-law had a needlepoint in her home that read, “There are two things you should give your children: One is roots and one is wings.”  I think that is true for our Reform movement and for Temple-Beth El in particular.   We must know where we came from, rooted strongly in tradition, in self-awareness, in clarity of who we are.  And from that position of power, we can create and reinvent how Judaism looks and is experienced for every generation by shaping new, but familiar wings that have a variety of tones, hues and shades.