Cookies and herring awaited attendees at a Manhattan “Jewish Reconstructionist” congregation’s election night watch party. Only two people showed up. And one was a reporter.
That turnout is emblematic of something that has been noted of late by two respected writers who have both sounded an alarm about the American Jewish community. Their concern isn’t about its physical safety but rather its future.
Elliott Abrams, the veteran foreign policy official who served Presidents Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump and is currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, published “If You Will It: Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood for the 21st Century.”
Observing that, according to the 2020 Pew survey, of the 2.4 million children growing up in homes with at least one Jewish parent, only half are being raised exclusively as Jews, he writes, “We [Jews] are a fantastically successful community if viewed as just another ethnic group or just another immigrant group.” But, he concludes, “as Jews, we’re not doing very well.”
Back in 1997, Mr. Abrams had decided, as he put it recently, that “the real answer for Jewish vitality and survival was Judaism, the religion.” Alas, he laments, while he still believes that is true, he claims that “it’s just not practical” for most American Jews to embrace Jewish observance.
A bit earlier came the publication of “Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life,” by journalist Joshua Leifer. It likewise surveys the American Jewish landscape and likewise finds it largely barren.
Mr. Leifer quotes famed Jewish writer Herman Wouk’s prediction in 1959 that “There will be no death camps in the United States. The threat of Jewish oblivion is different. It is the threat of pleasantly vanishing down a broad highway at the wheel of a high-powered station wagon, with the golf clubs in the back.”
Mr. Leifer acknowledges the prescience of that forecast, and describes what he feels is the inadequacy of the various expressions of Jewishness in our time—the “dying establishment,” the “neo-Reform” and the “prophetic protest” segments of the community.
And, finally, he writes of “separatist Orthodoxy,” admitting, like Mr. Abrams, that it represents the most assured path to a true American Jewish future.
“Chareidi Judaism,” he asserts, “constitutes perhaps the strongest and most viable alternative to the now fading American Jewish consensus. Orthodoxy will thrive long after the old mainstream institutions fade away.”
He sees the countercultural nature of the Orthodox world largely as a feature, not a bug.
“Mainstream American ideology,” he writes, “puts the individual at the center; for the Orthodox Jew, the center of life is Torah and, consequently, obligations to G-d, family, and community.”
“For now,” he concludes, “Orthodoxy remains the only living Jewish alternative to liberal capitalist culture on offer.”
All that said, though, the writer is not (yet) willing to embrace an Orthodox identity, as he is committed to social and political ideals shunned by most chareidim. All the same, he has embraced elements of observance.
“After years of excuses and half measures…,” he writes, “I began to keep the Sabbath and all other holy days in strict accordance with Jewish law, don tefillin each morning, and wear a kippah… I have also been lucky that I found a partner to walk with me in a shared life lived with commanded-ness at its core.”
Which indicates that Mr. Abrams’ assumption that “it’s just not practical” for most American Jews to embrace Jewish observance is unduly fatalistic and inexcusably disparaging.
Is it really preposterous to think that things like shemiras Shabbos or keeping kosher or davening or making brachos are doable for any American Jew? Or to imagine that Jews currently far from any Jewish observance might be stimulated to change their lives?
Of course it isn’t, as is evident from the countless Jews who were raised with limited or no Jewish observance but have come to it, through myriad kiruv efforts and “community kollelim” or phone-study programs, or any of a wealth of other contemporary resources.
It’s no time for hand-wringing over the state of the American Jewish community. It’s a time for calling on it to embrace what has defined Jewish communities, and Judaism, from time immemorial.
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