Tuesday, October 8, 2013

LINKS TO PEW SURVEY ON AMERICAN JEWS

LINKS TO PEW SURVEY ON AMERICAN JEWS

The following resources are available for the interested reader to study the Pew Survey on American Jews and the discussion of it in the contemporary media.

Online view of the Pew Survey on American Jews is available at:

A download of the full report (214 pages) is available at:

An overview of the report (20 pages) is available at:

New York Times coverage is available at:

See also Ross Douthat’s comparison with Pope Francis at:

Jerusalem Post coverage is available at:

Analysis by The Jewish Forward is available at:


and (by J. J. Goldberg) at:

Read the analysis by Chancellor Arnold Eisen of the Jewish Theological Seminary at:

Rabbi Rabbi Joshua Hammerman’s reflections and analysis at:

and:

Rabbi Benjamin Blech’s take is found at:

Religion Dispatches roundtable discussion at:


A take by “Jews and Social Justice” can be found at:

Sunday, July 14, 2013

TO BREAK THE FREEZE (by Amia Lieblich)


I am devoting this blog to my translation of Margie's cousin Amia Lieblich's article on July 12, 2013 in "Musaf Shabbat," the Friday supplement of the Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonot.  — Len Levin



TO BREAK THE FREEZE
By Amia Lieblich

Beit Ha-Shittah, a veteran secular kibbutz, which houses the Archive of the Holidays, the splendid project of Aryeh Ben Gurion, marks Tisha B'Av through a meeting of its members, where they read the Book of Lamentations, and afterwards it is their custom to hold a lecture or participatory discussion on a topic related somehow to the theme of the day. Kibbutz Beit Ha-Shittah, which was the basis of my book Kibbutz Makom, is one of the places dearest to my heart in the Land of Israel. Once in 2005 I was visiting the kibbutz on Tisha B'Av. We were then discussing the upcoming evacuation from the Gaza Strip, and the prevalent anxiety that this might precipitate a civil war in our midst. This year I was invited to lead a discussion on my book In Spite of It All: The Story of a Binational Village.

The book presents the story of the residents, comprising Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens, who live together in the community Neve Shalom / Wahat Al-Salam (http://nswas.org/). As with many of my books, this is a description of a particular community from the diverse viewpoints of its members—who am I, how did I come to be precisely in this community, how does my life unfold in this place, and what do I envision for the future—these were the focuses of the narrative. The Jews told primarily of the ideological motivations that brought them, as proponents of peace, to try to implement feasible harmonious relations between Jews and Arabs in everyday life, and to educate their children in a bi-national and bi-linguistic environment. The Arabs told primarily stories of uprooting and refugee status that led them to seek a plot of land and a home in which they would feel secure and would be able to offer non-racist and non-oppressive surroundings to their children. Indeed, the lives of all these people have been conducted in this cooperative community for nearly the past 40 years. They all spoke of the hope and disappointment that accompany their lives, when they attempt to realize values of equality and mutual acceptance amidst a climate that is generally apathetic and sometimes hostile, through periods of quiescence and fighting in our region. They spoke also of Bruno Hussar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Hussar), the founder of the community, a priest who was a converted Jew, by virtue of whose stubbornness the community came into existence against the odds.

When I reflect on the fate of my book Against the Odds and Tisha B'Av 2013, some thoughts occur to me. I think of the freeze into which the peace process in our area has been immersed since Rabin's assassination, and I immediately recall the baseless hatred which as is well known was considered one of the causes of the destruction of the Second Temple. This freeze has been especially profound, in my view, in recent years, the period of Netanyahu's administration. Every discussion of contact between us and our Arab neighbors is nipped in the bud, as the ball is passed immediately to the other's court, who is then blamed for not making it possible. I am not a political expert, and I cannot enter into an analysis of the complex political situation in our region. We are blessed with the prosperity that has fallen to our lot—especially for the inhabitants of the large cities—in the interval between one rocket fire and the next, or between one revenge foray and the next. If social justice is a higher aspiration than business as usual, it nevertheless fails to generate any urgency. It is hard for us to stand in the breach in the face of frightening manifestations of racism, and we try to change the channel to business as usual. From time to time there arise prophets of doom who warn us what lies in store for us in this land if we do not change our course. Sometimes we hear of individuals who have left Israel, including our own children, the salt of the earth, because they do not want to take part in an occupying, unjust society. But the prevailing mood is that in both the political and social spheres, "the dogs bark but the caravan moves on."

Given this reality, I think on this Tisha B'Av about my book In Spite of It All, a book whose appearance was hushed up almost entirely by the media, who are tired of discussion about "the situation." More than this, I am thinking about this small, lovely community, Neve Shalom / Wahat Al-Salam, in which only 50 families reside, who are crazy for peace. They do not talk peace, they do not demonstrate for peace, but they live peace. In my view they bring us the news that can avert the destruction, if we only listen to it. They are a beacon of hope for us all. They do not say that it is easy, they speak openly about crises and anger, even occasional despair. The journalists descend on them when they have their troubles, but ignore their flourishing existence all the rest of the year. But in spite of it all, this is a flourishing place, living, kicking and enduring.


I will conclude with two excerpts from my book In Spite of It All. First, from the words of Maram, a Palestinian woman member of the community, who has a doctorate and does research on bereavement in the Palestinian community. She describes a trip to arrange an interview on Yom Ha-Zikkaron (Israeli Memorial Day), when she is listening on the way to the sad songs on the radio, and says, "Ya, Allah! What is happening on both sides! It is the same thing. At the end of the day I found myself hugging Palestinian mothers. It is the same pain. Bereavement is bereavement is bereavement." Afterwards she spoke of her grandfather, who was a landowner in the village Sidni Alli that was conquered in 1948 and is now part of Hertzliya. He was not bitter about being rendered a refugee in his homeland. He said to her: "Hatred eats you up from within. Hatred is an enemy that you turn against yourself, not against someone else. I do not hate. Terrible things were done by the Jews but we also have responsibility for what happened in 1948."  As a counterpart to this, Dafna, a Jewish therapist, says: "Here we have a true attempt to live a common life, to build bridges with each other in our midst. But we are coming from such different places, with different languages—not just Hebrew versus Arabic, but different internal and external dialogues. Perhaps we have planted a seed, or Bruno Hussar has planted seeds, and I adopt his compassionate view and say—we must take the time to wonder, to err, to fall, and to get up."

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Is the “Halakhic Authenticity” of Conservative Judaism a Broken Myth?


Is the “Halakhic Authenticity” of Conservative Judaism a Broken Myth?
By Leonard Levin

  • NOTE:  The following article is included in the book Personal Theology: Essays in Honor of Neil Gillman, edited by William Plevan, published by Academic Studies Press.  A hardcopy of this book may be ordered at: Academic Studies Press: Personal Theology (Order Book) .



Our teacher Rabbi Neil Gillman raised many eyebrows and provoked many rebuttals in December, 2005 at the United Synagogue convention by his pronouncement that Conservative Judaism can no longer in good conscience call itself a halakhic movement.  He argued from the “death of a thousand qualifications”:  that by retreating successively from one recognized position after another, and failing to train an observant laity, Conservative Judaism has demonstrated that its purported commitment to “halakhah” does not really bind it to any positive, specifiable content.

Rabbi Gillman had the option, of course, given his repertoire of theological concepts, to say instead that for Conservative Judaism, commitment to halakhah was a “broken myth,” i.e. a meaning-giving narrative that rises phoenix-like to give one a sense of meaning no matter what the disqualifying evidence.  Saying that would not have been nearly as controversial, and so (I am guessing) would not have been as successful in provoking discussion and debate on the identity and direction of Conservative Judaism, which was presumably his purpose and was better served by the remarks he actually delivered.

A year after Rabbi Gillman’s remarks, further events fortified his claim.  Indeed, Rabbi Gillman’s long-time intellectual sparring partner, Rabbi Joel Roth, seemed to second Rabbi Gillman’s motion, coming from the opposite end of the Conservative ideological spectrum, by resigning from the Rabbinical Assembly Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards (CJLS) after its approval of the Dorff-Nevins-Reisner paper on homosexuality.  For Rabbi Roth, this action proved that indeed Conservative Judaism could no longer lay claim to halakhic authenticity.

Yet in Winter-Spring 2006, the journal Conservative Judaism had published a double issue, “The Aggadah of the Conservative Movement.”  Apart from Rabbi Gillman’s contribution (an expanded and revised version of his USCJ address), nearly every piece was devoted to affirming that halakhah indeed had a central role to play in Conservative Judaism’s self-definition, thus supporting the “broken myth” hypothesis.

My own position on this matter goes back many years.  Growing up in a Conservative congregation and attending Camp Ramah, I developed a strong sense as a Conservative Jew that has never left me.  I derived some pride from the fact that my uncle, Rabbi Max Routtenberg, had been at one time the chairman of the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards.  In my teen years I spent a good deal of time studying the 1950 Conservative responsa on Shabbat driving and use of electricity, which I found in Rabbi Mordecai Waxman’s book Tradition and Change.  They impressed me at the time (though I had little basis for comparison) with their careful attention both to technical halakhic argumentation and to broad sociological analysis to supply the context for the decisions—features which have ever since impressed me as characteristic of the best Conservative efforts in this area.  They left me with a vision of progressive halakhic method which remains to this day a central part of my conception of what Conservative Judaism ought to be—my own “myth,” if you will, that still sustains me.  My current paper seeks to unpack the broader implications of that vision.

General Reflections

In the aftermath of the 2006 CJLS decision to pass both the Roth and Dorff-Reisner-Nevins responsa on homosexuality by bare majority votes (13 votes each), a study (directed by Steven M. Cohen) was commissioned by the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Rabbinical Assembly, and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism to poll Conservative Jewish “leaders and activists” as to their views on this and related issues and their personal Jewish practice.  Those polled included clergy, professional leaders, lay leaders, and “others.”  I focus here on the findings of the poll concerning personal practice, especially among the “lay leaders” and the “others,” which I suggest may be taken as one significant index of the practical success of Conservative Jewish halakhic innovations and educational efforts:

  • 65% of “lay leaders” and 73% of “other” respondents keep kosher at home.  Of these groups, 45% and 65% respectively refrain from eating non-kosher meat out of the house, but 90% will eat fish prepared in non-kosher restaurants.
  • Over 80% of the “lay leaders” attend Shabbat services at least 3 times a month.  While slightly under half (43% of lay leaders and 49% of “others”) refrain from shopping on Shabbat, the vast majority (89% and 69%) will drive to shul on Shabbat.  By inference, it appears that the numbers of lay leaders and “other respondents” who drive but do not shop (thus in some sense reflecting the ideal liberal-Conservative Jewish practice) are 32% and 18% respectively.
  • 33% of the lay respondents say daily prayers “at least 3 times a week.”  (What an oddly significant formulation of this crucial issue!)


While these figures are doubtless deplorable when judged from a standard of 100% compliance (bearing in mind, too, that the respondents are a select group, presumably much more committed than the “average” Conservative laity), they also are sharply different from the “null hypothesis” that would predict that Jewish law, and particularly Conservative Jewish legal decisions (such as the stands on driving-to-shul and eating-fish-out) have no effect whatsoever on contemporary practice.  Instead, they depict a muddle, which is pretty standard for assessments of Conservative Jewish ideology and practice generally.

Before rushing to judgment and conclusions, let me raise a few analogies and general considerations:

  • How many taxpayers are 100% compliant with paying all the taxes that a strict reading of the tax code would require?
  • How many automobile drivers are 100% compliant with the speed laws and traffic controls (traffic lights and stop signs)?
  •  How many players of board games (such as Scrabble and Monopoly) adhere strictly to all the rules of those games (incl. no abbrs., Proper Names or Yinglish)?
  •  How many practitioners of amateur music (including everything from classical chamber music and jam-sessions to singing popular songs in the car and the shower) are 100% compliant with the “official” original scores of the music that they so often freely appropriate and adapt to their imperfect memories and creative impulses?
  •  Is the notion of Sinaitic (or divine) revelation applicable to any of the analogies I have just listed?
  •  Is the broader notion of a divine will operative in the general order and structure of society entirely irrelevant to these cases (for instance, would the loss of a human life, due to speed-limit infraction, be any the less a diminution of the “divine image?  Is the etymology of “music” [< “muse”] perhaps testimony to the divine spirit that animates it?)
  • Would the array of activities described here (public finances, public transportation, games, music) be significantly affected if their respective codes were – instead of being honored in the breach – abolished entirely?  (You bet!)
  •  Must we, because of the infractions in all the areas listed (and many others), entirely forfeit our conceit to being, by and large, a “law-abiding society”?  (I should hope not!)

A few corrections of commonplace misconceptions may be gleaned from these considerations:
  • Law does not have to be mirrored perfectly in social reality to be an effective constitutive element of that reality.  Though the “underground economy” of untaxed earnings is indeed enormous, the amount of earnings on which taxes are paid is many times greater – enough to support the activities of all the federal, state and local governments.
  •  Even when “honored in the breach,” law can be an effective and essential constraint on behavior.  A 55-MPH speed limit may not get many motorists to drive under 55 MPH, but it may deter a majority from exceeding 65 MPH, and even this imperfect deterrent (when backed up by spot enforcement) can save many lives.[1]
  • Many social practices are simply inconceivable without law.  Even if Scrabble rules may be frequently broken, without a general pattern of rule-observance from which these deviations occur there would be no Scrabble (and the same applies to Shabbat, family ties, economic life, and most forms of social existence).
  •  Though the specifics of most laws are indisputably human-devised, all law operates within constraints that are beyond human ability to change, and that from a religious perspective may thus be viewed as God-given.  Among these are:

o   The dependence of human beings on the natural order;
o   The interdependence of human beings on one another;
o   The correlation of rights and obligations (for social services to be provided, someone must pay taxes);
o   The inherent tradeoff of rules and freedom (for Scrabble or music or Shabbat to be possible at all, I must restrict my spontaneity and channel my behavior within predefined limits);
o   The givenness of social institutions and their history as facts that are formative of my identity and the necessary starting-point of any socially-meaningful behavior (I mythically “went out of Egypt,” therefore I carry the lessons of that experience in my dealings with the oppressed, etc.);
o   The embedding of the entire human project within the larger natural history of life and the universe (viewed religiously as God’s creation), with whatever implications of purposiveness and responsibility we derive from that perspective.

What Is Broken?

It is not hard to see in the traditional Jewish account of the Sinaitic revelation of Torah a classic case of what Peter Berger (building on Emile Durkheim) described as a projection of the social order on the cosmos.[2]  According to this view, the legal-social institutions of ancient Israelite society and rabbinic-medieval Jewish society constitute a social fact to those respective societies, confronting the individual as an objective reality.  The objectivity and necessity of that reality were mythically expressed in the story that God revealed the essential rules governing that society (in more or less detail depending on one’s interpretation) in the Sinaitic theophany.  In that theophany (declares the Deuteronomist, in mythic terms that stretched literal credence even in ancient times), the unborn as well as the living were present.  (Not just the unborn persons, but the as-yet-not-conceived rules and ordinances of future legislation—mountains hanging by a hair—as many a rabbinic aggadah expresses!)  An apt parallel would be to declare that in 1620, the 300,000,000 presently-living Americans crossed the Atlantic within the confines of the good ship Mayflower and landed all together on Plymouth Rock, a fact which they now recollect and celebrate every November on Thanksgiving Day.  (In every generation, each American must see him/herself as if s/he personally crossed on the Mayflower!  And we have not made allowance for the percentage of non-compliance with this ritual.)  Yet it is precisely such a counterfactual narrative that expresses poetically a part of the essence of being Jewish or being American that can hardly be expressed otherwise at all, and certainly not so powerfully and concisely.

But as Rabbi Gillman has taught us (in the name of Paul Tillich, but in his own initimitable way), such a myth, when brought out into the light of day, tends to be rationalized and concretized from a mythic to a literal formulation, and exposed at the same time to falsification.  In that literal formulation, “God revealed these laws” becomes a separate action and transcendent ground of the imperative status of the laws....  

[For the continuation of this article, purchase the book, Personal Theology: Essays in Honor of Neil Gillman, edited by William Plevan, published by Academic Studies Press, or contact the author of the article at Reblen@aol.com. ]



[1] The instance of driving 60 MPH in a 55 MPH zone provides a striking analogy to the halakhic category of patur aval asur—“exempt [from punishment] but still forbidden”!
[2] See Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy, Chapter 1.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Eulogy: Hadassah R. Levin (1921–2013)

Eulogy: Hadassah R. Levin
(May 14, 1921 – February 9, 2013)



I want to express today a little bit of the feelings of gratitude that I feel toward my mother, Hadassah Ruth Routtenberg Levin.


She was the youngest of five children of Harry David (Tzvi David) Routtenberg and Dora Garmaise Routtenberg.  She was one of 45 first cousins of the Routtenberg-Garmaise clan in Montreal, Canada.  She would count her cousins' names to put herself to sleep.


Her siblings included Rabbi Hyman Routtenberg, Rabbi Max Routtenberg, Connie Chodos, and Horace (Sonny) Routtenberg.

She grew up in Montreal, graduating Strathcona Academy in 1938.  On a visit to her brother Max in Reading, PA she met Emanuel (Manny) Levin, whom she married on August 10, 1941.  After a few years in Reading and Harrisburg they settled in Philadelphia where they lived for the rest of their lives (not counting travel).  I was born in 1946 and my brothers Joseph and Victor in 1948.


After seeing her family through school, she went back to school herself in the mid-1960s, getting her BA in Sociology at Temple University and her MSW at Bryn Mawr.  She worked at Phildadelphia Family Service until her semi-retirement around 1990, after which she continued for a while longer in private practice.  After living for 47 years on Rodgers Road in Elkins Park, she moved in to Martins Run in 2003, where she was active in many committees (including welcoming and para-chaplaincy) until her decline in the last few years.  Her last illness (pneumonia) was brief.



It will take me a long time for my feelings to sort out.  There are feelings of loss and feelings of gratitude, mingled like currents of warm and cool water on the bay in Cape Cod where Mother visited us one summer, when she rented a cottage and I used to lead a bike caravan with our children David and Rachel to ride up to visit her.  This memory mingles with the times she would take my brothers Vic and Joe and me to Brant Beach on Long Beach Island, NJ to spend a couple of weeks during the summers when we were small and lived in Overbrook Park (Philadelphia).  We still have those soundless 8-millimeter home movies—long since converted to digital—of her looking so young in her bathing suit, and us little boys playing in the sand.


The warm and the cool.  The feelings of loss and the feelings of gratitude.


Let me focus on the gratitude.


This came to me yesterday in the car when my daughter Rachel observed wisely that one of my mother’s greatest achievements was in helping me become the person I became.  (This goes of course for all three of her children, but my daughter had me in mind because that’s the one closest to her experience.)


That is to focus on my mother’s role as educator of her children.

I am still trying to figure out exactly how she did it, but I think part of the key was her striking the right balance—at least for me (I suppose I can speak only for myself) of a lot of contradictory elements.


There was first of all the balance of directiveness versus letting things take their course.  She would introduce things to me then sit back while I made of them what I would.  

At some point a piano appeared in our house.  It sat there for a while, then I started tinkering with it, and pretty soon she had arranged for me to take piano lessons from her friend Rose Berman up the block.  I was seven years old at the time.   From that point on, the music increased in our house until all three of us boys were playing musical instruments, in solo or in combination with each other, from the time we started for as long as we were in the house, and longer. 

Or the Bible.  I wish I could ask her now, how it came about that I started reading the Bible and immersing myself in its stories as a young boy, starting the religious obsession that eventually landed me in rabbinical school.  But I am sure the Bible wouldn’t have been there if it hadn’t been for her.  And I always found her a willing partner in conversations about God, Judaism, and the meaning of life.
 
I learned much later that her own feelings about Judaism and religion had a lot of ambivalence over the years.  She came from a religious family in Montreal.  Two of her brothers were rabbis.  She and her sister were the rebels against religion in the family, in their small way.  She once said she kept kosher originally for the sake of her parents, then for the sake of her children (especially for me, the religious fanatic when I was an adolescent, going to Camp Ramah and Akiba Academy of my personal choice).  But I think she modestly understated her own religious identification.  When her kids were grown and out of the house she studied Buber and religious existentialism with Maurice Friedman (while studying for her BA at Temple, prior to her MSW at Bryn Mawr), and was a devoted participant in the Beth Sholom choir.  Looking back, I think there was a bit of benevolent cunning about her, as she planted the seeds then watched them sprout.


Or maybe there was another balancing act here — the balance between Jewishness and mentshlichkeit.  In her own family of origin she rebelled against the strictness of Orthodox Jewish observance and wanted to be more a part of the general culture of the 1930s, of swing and big bands, social parties and political parties, movies and romance.  At times she thought I was too one-sidedly devoted to intellectual and Jewish pursuits, and encouraged me to play outside more, to take care of my physical wellbeing and appearance.  


I felt my own pursuit of excellence was a legacy from both my parents.  They both valued intellectual achievement.  They both had high standards.  But especially from my mother I got the message not to be too one-sided, to have time to relax and enjoy life.  She knew how to have fun, and I think I learned from her that excelling in what you do, but remembering also to have fun doing it, are equally important.


There is a lot more that I learned from her, but this is enough to try to digest for right now.


Thank you, Mother, for everything you have given me.