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What I did on my summer vacation or actually on my sabbatical?

Rabbi Michael Strassfeld

The six month sabbatical that I recently took provided a number of opportunities to explore several interestsof mine, including papercutting and paper engineering, as well as pursuing the contactingof old synagogues for more signs and ephemera for my collection. The sabbatical also allowed me to travel. It was an opportunity to refresh, to reflect and to think. During these High Holidays I want to share with you some of those journeys and explorations.

Since I work every Shabbat, I rarely get to see other synagogue Shabbat services. Being on sabbatical allowed Joy and me to visit a number of synagogues on Shabbat. Some were as far away as Paris or LA; some were as close as Bnai Jeshurun and Hadar. However, I want to begin with a visit to Dorchester, Massachusetts, where I grew up.

Cong. Agudath Israelwas located in the old Jewish neighborhood of Boston and my father was the rabbi. It was an orthodox synagogue in a completely Jewish community that was beginning to change even when I was living there. By the late 60's, the synagogue became a church. Today, it is a Seventh Day Adventist church whose congregants are from Haiti. We had spent Shabbat in Boston visiting friends and family. Saturday night, we went to Dorchesterto meet with one of the ministers to see whether they would be willing to part with some of the Jewish remnants of the old ark. Together with Joy’s brother and sister-in-law, we arrived at the church, surprised to find the place bustling on a Saturday night. People of all ages were milling about. Lots of teenagers were dressed in their Sabbath best. The minister was in a meeting so we waited in the vestibule to the sanctuary. People kept on welcoming us and asking if they could be of help. When we asked what was going on in the sanctuary, we were told that there was a lecture accompanied by slides about healthy eating. That talk, as well as most of the conversation, was in Creole. While the trip was unsuccessful in its original purpose, we reflected on the experience. It struck us that if we could go back in time to the 1920's, when the synagogue had been founded by Russian Jews, how similar it would be to this church in 2010. It was a gathering place for immigrants who still spoke their original language. They wereconcerned both about fitting in to the new country, and teaching their children the old customs and practices. I am sure there would have been practical ways the synagogue helped its members then, whether it was with free loan societies, lectures on hygiene and health, classes in English or, most of all, with informal teaching and modeling by those who had arrived earlier in this new country. They still would have been concerned with what was happening in the old country; back then it was persecutions by the Bolsheviks; now it was the devastation by the earthquake in Haiti (Their senior minister was in Haiti during our visit).

At the beginning of the story of American Jewry, synagogues served as social centers, places of familiarity, and aids to acculturation to those making the challenging trip from the Old world to the New. Later in the 1950's with the move to suburbia, synagogues became the physical symbol that we had successful made that passage. We were now Americans, fluent in English, professionally successful, with great pride in our sons who had really made it as lawyers and doctors. There was a synagogue building boom in the 1950's and those synagogues often looked remarkably similar to the neighboring churches as we took our place in the triumvirate of American religious life:Protestant-Catholic-Jew. We also wanted our clergy and our services to look like the church next door. No longer helping the acculturation of immigrants, the synagogues became focused on children—Hebrew schools, bnai mitzvah, and youth groups were central to synagogue life. Brotherhood and sisterhood served as social groupings for those suburban Jews—most of whose friends remained Jewish despite no longer living in the highly ethnic urban neighborhoods that Jewish immigrants first came to.

Beginning in the late 60’s, this picture of synagogue life began to change. Perhaps it was the Six Day War, when Israel became more prominent in the psyche of American Jews. At the same time, Federations surpassed synagogues as the central address of American Jewry and the efforts to support Israeland Soviet Jewry shifted our focus abroad. For awhile American Jewry seemed to thrive both here at home and had powerful effect abroad. Yet toward the end of the 20th century things changed once again. With the "freeing" of Soviet Jewry and with Israel no longer a country dependant on the generosity of American Jews, the old federation model seemed to lose force. As both external and internal conflicts continued, the sense of connection to Israel seemed less powerful than it once was. American Jewry began to turn inward just as the statistics about intermarriage and affiliation raised questions about the future of the American Jewish community.

And the synagogue? As the focus turned inward, questions were asked about the effectiveness of the essential aspects of synagogue life. Were Hebrew schools successful or just adequate? Could services be engaging? Lots of the old key components like brotherhood/sisterhood or youth groups faded away from many synagogues ---mostly because of societal changes—more women working, --the importance of afterschool activities for college applications trumping being a member of USY. One could argue that amore subtle aspect of the synagogue was changing as well as people no longer felt the same need to socialize mostly with Jews as they became ever more a part of their diverse neighborhoods.

Where are we now? We hear much these days about the potential demise of the American Jewish community. Many have drifted away. Jewish continuity seems uncertain. Why? Because we live in this extraordinary society, where the daughter of an American president can marry a Jew wearing a tallit while standing under the huppa.

Chelsea Clinton’s recent wedding to Marc Medvinskydemonstrated all the possibilities and the challenges of living in America.

To summarize this story succinctly, before the modern period, Jews lived in Judaism, not in Poland or France, but in Judaism. Today we live in America and I would suggest increasingly we live in a global world. We get computer advice from technicians in India. We have no idea where the fruit and vegetables we eat come from, and I believe we will increasingly work with colleagues not in a room across the hall but across the globe. In this increasingly global world, ethnicity, people hood and even perhaps nationalism seem to be receding as markers of individual identity. How shall Judaism respond?

What is clear to me is that the way Judaism has responded will not be successful moving forward. The old answers and the old markers are mistakes. The solution is not just to market them better. Yet there are those who would argue the opposite, the old tried and true ways still do work. They would point to fundamentalists in general and to Orthodox Judaism in specific as examples of success.

I do think there are broadly two responses to this global society. Those who embrace it and those who reject it. Of course, there are those who try to straddle the divide, but I don't think it is accidental that Conservative Judaism and Modern orthodoxy both who try to straddle the divide are the two religious movements most in decline in American Judaism. But whether you agree with that analysis, which is worthy of future conversation in and of itself, I would posit that you, the people in this room have embraced modernity rather than rejected it. Why? If at first Jews embraced modernity because of the economic opportunity it offered, we now embrace it for such values as freedom, egalitarianism and inclusivity. While an Orthodox rabbi in Teaneck recently condemned "those who seek to infiltrate the Torah with the three pillars of modern Western life—feminism, egalitarianism, and humanism” because they …“corrupt the Torah, cheapen the word of God," in contrast, we embrace those three pillars and much more, because, in fact, we believe they elevate Torah and the word of God

I think that the liberal Jewish community has been distracted in these last decades by trying to figure out how to get liberal Jews to practice more of the tradition. The thinking has gone like this: If only we were more like the Orthodox then we can solve the question of Jewish continuity. I say distracted because I think we are using the wrong paradigms---the question we need to be grappling with is how Judaism, which has lived for 2,000 years as a persecuted minority culture,will figure out how to live in this open global society. A few years ago, I spoke about how the dualistic rabbinic view of the world---pure/impure; kosher/treif; men/woman; Jews/non-Jews—is challenged, not just because we might not want to say that women or non-Jews are less than their pairs but because we see the world in a more unitive, less boundared manner.

Today I want to focus not on such broad ideas but rather on what I hope will be the central institution in the renewal of Judaism in this new world of the 21st century---the synagogue.But to be blunt, getting from here to there will not be easy. We are at a moment of great change and challenge. This is not however the first time in Jewish history Judaism has faced such a challenge. When the Templewas destroyed in 70CE, biblical Judaism came to an end, replaced by what we now refer to as rabbinic Judaism. As much as rabbinic Judaism viewed itself as standing on the shoulders of the preceding biblical Judaism, the fact is that it changed Judaism in significant and far reaching ways. If a biblical Jew had been transported to a 5th century Babylonian Jewish home, he would have been unfamiliar with what was going on Jewishly. As he sat down for Shabbat dinner, the rituals would have looked strange to him. Lighting candles?Saying kiddush? Separate dishes for meat and dairy? He would be completely lost.

The central institution of biblical Judaism—the Temple—was gone as well and with it went sacrifices, a ritual of atonement, and priestly leadership. The rabbis adopted the synagogue as a replacement for the Temple. In so doing, they took aspects of the Temple into the synagogue so there would be some continuity, some familiarity. For example, they placed a ner tamid, an eternal light, above the ark to remind us of the menorah that burned all the time in the Temple. Other things were purposefully transformed. The elaborate garments the priests wore became the dressings for the Torah scrolls in order to emphasize that Torah, not the priests, was the authority for rabbinic Judaism. Much was invented from scratch, including the liturgy, its customs and structure. The rabbis substituted prayer and liturgy for the sacrificial cult. Prayer services have been central to Judaism for the last two millennium.

You can just picture the first synagogue board meetings following the Temple’s destruction, where discussions were being held about whether to continue the sacrificial cult. “But how can we eliminate sacrifices? We have always had them. God wants them!” “How can we continue the practice? We have no Temple. We have no more priests. It’s over. We have to move on.” We know that there were those who wanted to continue the sacrificial cult even after the destruction of the second Temple. That would have been a different model –to have sacrifices in synagogues or on local altars. Rabbinic Judaism rejected that option.

Since then the synagogue has taken many forms in Jewish history. The form we experience now is an American invention that is influenced by the forms of the Protestant church. Yet as I said earlier much has changed. For the last few decades, the Jewish community has talked about how to improve the synagogue and its functioning. But what if its forms are outdated beyond redeeming

While we are not at a cataclysmic moment as 70CE when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jewish people lost their entire way of life, I believe that we are in fact at a turning point nonetheless. The institutions that have worked so well for us, acculturating us to America, helping us both carry our traditions from the past and assimilate into American life—those institutions are on life support. They are wearing out, in some cases they have simply done what they needed to do and now they have outlived their usefulness.

In some ways, my sabbatical projects were connected in ways I had not immediately seen. As I was collecting signs of the Jewish past that told the story of Jewish acculturation to America, I was searching the synagogues and minyanim of the Jewish present, hoping to see signs of what would be carried forward and what needs to be left behind. Ironically, this is the very process of paper cutting—removing parts of paper in order to see something else more clearly. All three enterprises coming together.

So what did I find in my journey to other synagogues during the sabbatical? After all, I chose synagogues that have a reputation for being successful or innovative. Much has been said about the new minyanim of people in their 20's. Attending a number of those, I discovered that some were just as dull and boring as any synagogue service, but others were moving. The best services whatever the age of the attendees have one common factor---energy. Whether it was a lively reform service accompanied by a band in Paris packed with 300 people of all ages or a minyan in DC of 20 somethings, there was an enthusiasm that was conveyed mostly by music. With or without instruments, the singing was communal and energetic. The music was a mixture of Carlebach and newer composers. In Paris, some of the music was original composed by the band. But as much as I enjoyed those services,and while energy is better than notit is not enough of an answer for me. And apparently it isn’t a good enough one for the majority of Jews, who choose not to attend them.

Maybe instead of making our synagogue friendlier, less expensive, offer more of this program, less of that one, more staff or less staff---maybe we need a different model altogether, maybe synagogues as synagogues don't work in this open society. That is why this year I have asked the leadership of SAJ to initiate a community conversation about our synagogue. We want each of you to answer these questions and share those answers with each other:

For those of you who belonged to other synagogues, what have been your individual experiences in synagogues in your past—the one you grew up in---the ones you belonged to before this one? Most of all --What do you want from a synagogue? Or perhaps, more basically, what is it that you might need for your spiritual life that a synagogue could offer you?

We will begin this conversation tomorrow when three members of the community will explore these questions during services. The conversation will continue on Shabbat Oct. 23rd when Prof Larry Hoffman will speak during services and then again after Kiddush, giving us a picture of the contemporary synagogue and helping shape our vision for our future as a community. Larry is the author of several books on liturgy and synagogues, co-founder of the Synagogue 3000 project and is professor at HebrewUnionCollege here in New York.

The conversation will continue throughout the year with other opportunities to learn about synagogues and communities and most of all with community discussions. The discussions will loosely be based on the community conversations we had about the question of matrilineal descent. When I mentioned this plan to a member of the congregation, he questioned whether people would participate in adequate numbers. After all, the issue of who is a Jewtouches many peoples’ lives and is a critical question; when we discussed patrilineal over 100 SAJers participated. Isn't the question of what is a synagogue rather broad and vague? I suggested that as important as the patrilineal conversation was, that this question is actually more important. It raises the most fundamental questions about Judaism and about synagogues and ultimately about this synagogue. My expectation is that this open conversation will be a prelude to a process that will lead to specific recommendations about how we want to actualize our visions and goals. Why does this matter so much? I believe that the synagogue or its replacement will remain the central vehicle for people's Jewish lives---not fraternal organizations, not federations,not klezmer concerts, not minyanim nor even JCC's. WHY?

We are the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. When Mordecai Kaplan, our founder looked out over the Jewish landscape in 1922 and saw what was broken in the Jewish world, he advocated for what he saw was necessary. This included proclaiming a radical truth about the nature of God and beginning the long journey toward the equality of women in liberal Judaism. Now, in our time we must look at ourselves and ask these fundamental questions about our Judaism and about SAJ.