A threat to future of liberal Judaism

Something is rotten in the state of liberalism, and it threatens the future of progressive Judaism.

Jews who call themselves “liberal” join organizations seeking to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel in disproportionate numbers. They lead the attack against Israel with a ferocity normally reserved for the world’s worst regimes. Their antipathy even leads them to join groups with anti-Semitic tendencies.

Many liberal Jews are uncomfortable with Jewish particularism, asserting that it is an illiberal idea whose time has passed. While there was always a healthy tension in Jewish thought between the centrality of Jewish peoplehood and Jewish interaction with, and obligations to, the world at large, it is increasingly difficult for liberal Jews today to accept that Jewish distinctiveness is a core Jewish value, or even a contemporary social good.  Thus, liberal Jews are abandoning their identity in accelerating and unsustainable numbers.

According to a Pew study published in August, nearly half of American Jews prefer not to identify with organized religion. If we do not reverse these trends, Reform Judaism two generations from now will be a shadow of what it is today.

Michael Chabon’s commencement address last spring at the [Reform] Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion addressed these issues directly. Before a sanctuary filled with newly minted or soon-to-be Reform rabbis, cantors, educators and other Jewish professionals and their families, Chabon told these future leaders of Reform Judaism that since the last of his children’s bnai mitzvah, his retreat from religious practice has been near total. He contended that Judaism, like every other religion, is one giant interlocking system of division intended to enforce the division between, among other things, Jews and non-Jews.

Chabon touched upon the very heart of Jewish distinctiveness and peoplehood.

“An endogamous marriage is a ghetto of two,” he said. “I want [my children] to marry into the tribe that prizes learning, inquiry, skepticism, openness to new ideas. I want my children to marry into the tribe that enshrines equality before the law and freedom of conscience and human rights. … There will be plenty of potential partners for my children to choose — a fair number [of whom] are even likely to be Jews.”

Such is the wounded state of Jewish liberalism today that in response, Chabon received a rousing ovation from most (but not all) of the crowd of students about to embark on their first full-time positions in Reform synagogues, supported by many of their professional mentors.

Under what theory of liberalism are we required to discard attachments and loyalties to Jews? What is this new Jewish progressivism that asserts that the acceptance of others requires the negation of self? Is a marriage between two Catholics, Hindus, Muslims or Universalists illiberal? Is a marriage between two indigenous Australians, eager to preserve Aboriginal civilization, illiberal?

Do liberals believe in diversity, in a pluralism of communities? Do we believe in the dignity of human difference? Or do we believe in diversity for everyone but Jews?

We liberal Jews never seem to speak about Jewish solidarity anymore. We speak about our obligations to the world with profound conviction and eloquence, but never seem to speak about our obligations to Jews. Thus, for many Reform Jews, tikkun olam implies everyone in the world except Jews. It is rare to meet an American Reform youth or activist who considers tikkun olam to include the obligation to assist, say, impoverished Jews in Israel or the former Soviet Union. A Reform tikkun olam mission would more likely travel to a poor African village than a soup kitchen for Jews in Ukraine.

The irony is that the very concept of prophetic values emerged from the Hebrew prophets, who were fierce particularists. At no time did they abandon the Jewish particular in favor of the universal. To the contrary, the universal was a function, a product, of the particular. The impetus and urgency of prophetic morality was an outcome of the centrality of the Jewish people, not its negation.

The growing inclination among liberal Jews to de-emphasize Jewish distinctiveness is the gravest threat to the future of liberal Judaism. For what are the prospects of the continuity of the people if the people are not committed to its own continuity — and does not even agree that it is a legitimate objective?

It is the will to Jewish distinctiveness that ensures Jewish distinctiveness. It is the will to continue that has led to continuity. There is a ferocity to Jewish survival instincts, an indomitable sense of Jewish destiny. When these are lost, the future is lost.

In the modern world, those who are not committed to Jewish survival will not survive as Jews.

Ammiel Hirsch is senior spiritual leader at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a Reform congregation on the Upper West Side. This op-ed is adapted from his 2018 Yom Kippur sermon, “From the Ghetto.”