I just sat through an hour and a half of infuriating dialogue on Jewish identity (which I will publish to The Telegraph later this evening) that has only further concretized my belief that Jewish leadership is completely out of touch with the greater Jewish public.
Jews and Judaism are moving forward, but many of the panelists in this discussion seem obsessed with keeping us still, or worse yet, moving us backwards.
With rare exception, few of the statements expressed by the panelist seemed to convey an understanding of where we, as the next generation, stand in relationship to our Jewish identities.
They are certainly capable of parsing the data. They have no trouble spotting the trends. But the conclusions they have drawn from this data border on lunacy.
Many of them spoke as if Jewish identity is a monolith and that you’re either with them or against them. With few exceptions, they spoke about fluid identity like it’s a disease. They spoke about individuals expressing their Jewishness in their own way as ignorance and self-aggrandizement. They spoke about Western Liberal values as if they’re anti-Jewish (as opposed to a new paradigm in which to be Jewish). Worse yet, they exposed their contempt for those outside their purview, by claiming that if you are not a Jewish nationalist and if you are not committed to traditional Jewish institutions, then you are uneducated, you are naive, and you have been corrupted by the goyishe world.
In every generation we receive higher revelations of Torah, vis-a-vis the higher revelations of morality that unfold in each new age. And yet, it seems that, in the eyes of these individuals, progress threatens the continuity of the Jewish tradition. There is no acknowledgement that progress — responding and adapting to new paradigms in thought — is itself a Jewish tradition.
They cry that we are disappearing, that Jews aren’t interested in Judaism. Yet they project the impression that the Jewish tradition itself contradicts the values of modern Jewish people. Worse so, they suggest that to feel affection for and solidarity with the non-Jewish world is to abandon our commitment to our own people.
In that regard, they view Jewish social justice ventures that address non-Jewish problems (one of the fastest growing sectors in Jewish communal life) as only a means of moving Jews back towards particularism and tribalism. They do not recognize the value of that service work in-and-of-itself or the concept of service as a Jewish value itself, other than as a means to this end. They do not acknowledge our obligation to love all of G-d’s creation nor our tradition’s imperative to care for the downtrodden whether Jew or non-Jew. They do not see our commitment to the greater world as the logical extension of our tradition, but rather a recipe for our self-destruction.
They pat themselves on the back for their purported forward-thinkingness in bringing young Jewish leadership into the fold, in creating a space for these purportedly “new” forms of Jewish expression, yet they appear only to be co-opting these initiatives with the goal of advancing their unchanging agenda. Indeed, for every dollar they spend on new Jewish initiatives, they spend 10 to fortify the old guard.
I stepped to the microphone and asked (paraphrasing), “Rather than repackaging and rebranding the same old Judaism, what are Jewish institutions doing to make themselves relevant to future generations? If we have new moral revelations in every generation, why are tolerating the panelists’ characterization of Western Liberalism being as anti-Jewish?”
What I have concluded from this panel — and from the utter isolation I felt in response to my challenge to the panelists, as embodied by their avoidance of these questions and the contemptuous looks I drew from the audience members — is that it is not we who have abandoned the organized Jewish community. Rather, it is the organized Jewish community which has abandoned us.
