The Jewish Revolution – United States Version

We haven’t lost the American Jewry yet. But we’re making our way there in our foolishness. As Jewish identity there is becoming more versatile, ours in Israel is degenerating.

At 8.30 a.m., 11th-graders gather in the high school to pray. It’s a communal prayer. Every student says something about his desires, his plans, his aspirations. The teacher lights the candle. Every student who’s speaking receives a sort of rubber ball. Here and there, you can hear a word in Hebrew. No kippot. No siddur. The rest of the students are dispersed in three or four more other groups. One is doing yoga. Another one is dealing with environmental issues. The third one — with texts from a Reform siddur. They call this a prayer. A morning prayer [“Shacharit”]. Should this occur in Israel, a coalition crisis would break out.

Welcome to the new Jewry that is growing up and blossoming in the United States. The prayer in groups took place in the Jewish high school in San Francisco, Jewish Community High School of the Bay. A Jew is one who comes from a Jewish family and, most importantly, one who feels Jewish. The criteria for who is a Jew accepted in Israel or in the Orthodox circles look, from that viewpoint, like a saga from a dark age which has now passed.

There is also Jewish content more familiar to an Israeli observer. In the first year in the high school, prayer is conducted from the prayer book. Not the Orthodox version but still siddur. It is only further on that there is an option for the prayer groups. Judaism as you want it, even if it’s not always clear what exactly is Jewish in the morning prayer there.

The Gate of Gold Synagogue serves the LGBT community center: lesbians, gays, trans- and bisexuals. What do they have to do with a synagogue? A lot, as it turns out. They feel Jewish, and for many years they have had a congregation of their own. A Jewish community for all intents and purposes, with a female and a male rabbi, with prayers and a tremendous spectrum of activities. There is no need for an unconventional sexual orientation. Straights are welcomed too, and they make up about a quarter of the community.

Andy, one of the community members, switched to pray in the adjacent synagogue, Mission Minyan, which is closer to the Orthodox version. He is thus active in both centers. This is the identification he chose for himself.

A Bliss of Sabbath

Why would anyone need a separate synagogue in the place where the “irregulars” are the mainstream and there’s nothing considered unusual about it? Well, as the female rabbi explains to us, you don’t have to be not accepted in order to practice in a framework where you and the members of your community are the majority. There are straight people, too; I’m not against them. They are welcomed, but I don’t want them to be the majority. I want a congregation where we are the majority.

A community where I feel that I set the rules. Only in such community do I feel at home. She also spoke about her Zionist identification. Not exactly such a simple cause amidst the Jews of San Francisco Bay, where there is certainly a considerable percentage of anti-Zionist Jewish activists. So why be Zionist? Because just as she and the rest of the “irregulars” have a need for a home, so too do the Jews have a similar right.

You don’t have to be a persecuted Jew in order to be entitled to a home — a community or a national one. There is also no need to discriminate against others, the “strangers,” the “straights.” In the prayer siddur of the synagogue, there are special prayers in honor of Israel, the holy and marvelous land that will charge them with positive energies, a prayer for new immigrants to Israel, additional prayers expressing Jewish pride in the land of Israel and an alternative version that includes a prayer for peace. Here we go: Zionism in the last place we expected to meet it.

The B’nai Jeshurun community is one of the largest in New York. It does not belong to any of the recognized streams. The prayer siddur resembles the Orthodox one, but the ambiance is another story. More than a thousand people arrive here for the Sabbath eve prayer. There’s no separation between men and women. At the entrance, there stood three guys who apparently completed the afternoon prayer. They looked just like other worshippers in the Israeli synagogues. A prayer with a body swing, with great intention.

One of the three was black. A Jew to all appearances. Now, that’s the thing here. A Jew is one who feels as such, whether he has passed the processes of conversion into Judaism or he is only on the way there. They don’t check. They open the door. Engage in the experience. And that was an experience. A real Sabbath bliss, elevation of the soul — it’s doubtful whether you can find anything like this in some synagogue in Israel. When a thousand of people are singing “Yedid Nefesh” or “Lekhah Dodi,” it is contagious. Almost ecstatic.

Saturday mornings the prayers are carried out in the church. A matter of cooperation on a social level, while the homeless sleep in the synagogue basement. This started when the synagogue was in repair, and the priest offered the community the opportunity to pray to the common God at his venue. The cooperation between the congregations extended in educational projects and those in the province of social justice. And at the end of Pesach, no worries, they will properly celebrate Mimuna.

No Connection to Israel

At Yeshivat Hadar in the Upper West Side, Manhattan, they learn from the sources. A yeshiva in the full sense of the word, with one difference. The studies are for both girls and boys together. Studies in the circle of friends. Studies in the name of learning, because one who goes there is searching for a Jewish identity. There is also the Hadar Community, where the prayer also creates the unknown beatitude of Sabbath. A completely Orthodox version.

All the participants look like graduates of Bnei Akiva yeshivas in Israel. A part of them have little beards, everybody is in knitted kippot. With one difference. There’s no separation. Most of the women wear colorful and special prayer shawls. Orthodox? Conservatives? They too refuse to label themselves. They don’t have an affiliation. They are Jews. They have a yeshiva and a community as well.

In the UpStart offices (no mistake: that’s how they call themselves) in San Francisco, they develop business initiatives related to the Jewish identity. One of them pioneered a project of a kind of environmental and social kashrut certification (Jewish standards association stamp) for products. The other one set up study groups that get together between once a week and once a month. They are paying participants.

The third one instituted a project helping exceptional kids. For the time, virtually all of them are Orthodox. But the thing is that they don’t create any distinctions. Everybody coming in is welcomed. This includes Reform Jews. And we must not think it’s so obvious. For in Israel, it should be reminded, this wouldn’t happen. Reformist Jews are considered worse than non-Jews. These undertakings are becoming completely business-like in America. Like a Jewish start-up.

In another location, this time in New York, multifaceted non-profit organizations are busy with “repairing the world” [tikkun olam]. It’s difficult to find there something truly Jewish, beyond the self-definition of the involved, who denominate their activities and their identity as Jewish. They are on the side of the deprived world, from Africa to Haiti, and [engaged] in other environmental issues. Israel, for this group, is less than a distant brother. A brother with whom they got a little bit fed up. A conservative, foreign and alienated one.

This group represents an expanding generation of young people that is not interested in Israel, even if they themselves have a Jewish identity. This identification has no connection to Israel. They have raised a new Babylon for themselves, in San Francisco or in New York, and Israel is not on their radar. From among these circles, some weeds have sprouted, too, gripped with a radical anti-Zionist approach, from time to time with worrisome features of anti-Semitism. Their “masters, teachers and rabbis” [admo”rs] are Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein.

My Freedom Speech

Monday evening, a Seder night [“Leil Haseder”] was held at Delancey Street. What distinguished this Seder night from all the others? There were no Jews at this one. It had taken place at a site of five-star quality, in an enchanting spot touching the waters of the San Francisco Bay. All of the partakers were criminals, some of them tough, and this is their rehabilitation project after their arrest or a substitute for their arrest. The pilot program was launched by Mimi Silbert (who will soon receive an honorary doctorate from Ben Gurion University).

There are no therapists there. No social workers. No jailers. No psychologists. The prisoners take care of themselves and make their living. They have restaurants, a laundry service, a transportation company. No drugs and no violence. Contrary to the general statistic, the percentage of those reverting to criminality from among the Delancey students and graduates is very low. We’re talking about a success story here, and similar projects have begun to pop up in the United States. They carry the same name — Delancey Street.

And why do they throw a Jewish Seder night there? Because the founder Silbert is a Jew. And she feels that this is her Jewish home and her neighborhood. And this is her Jewish enterprise. So that in one of the important ceremonies there is the reading of the Haggadah on the eve of Pesach. A different version. But the old-timers there know how to recite the key words and key sentences. Charoset. Matzah. The Four Questions [“Ma Nishtana”]. And more.

One of the most exciting components about the Delancey Seder is “My Freedom Speech,” given by two veterans. They tell their story of their exodus from slavery to freedom. They, prisoners, get there through the process of leaving for their freedom. The violence and drugs have enslaved them. Being liberated is freedom.

This sparkling clean and amazing habitat looks way too dream-like to be true. But this works. And in many senses, Pesach Seder being only one of them, this is also a Jewish story.

New Dimensions for the Jewish Experience

So what is Judaism? When Jewish students at Berkeley wander around with a cart Friday and sell challah they baked themselves, with the money designated for the struggle against hunger — that is their Judaism. This is a project which developed throughout the whole United States, headlined Challah for Hunger.

And when Jewish students in the Hillel club at UC Davis convene for prayer Friday nights, that is an experience. They have two minyanim there, one liberal and one conservative, and in both of them the female students take full part. The girls read Hebrew from the siddur, pray with devotion and impart new dimensions to the Jewish experience. That’s the Judaism of both genders.

And maybe we should say that this is Judaism. The time has come to connect to it. And we should remember one more thing: most of the Jews in general, and the young people in particular, are not a party to any specific Jewish experience. They are far from Jewish identity, the Jewish community, the Jewish synagogue. Those under discussion here are the ones who still keep in touch and keep the identity preserved. Woe to us if we lose them. And that might happen.

We, from the Israeli perspective, are accustomed to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Presidents Conference, and the rest of the senior organizations, like the American Jewish Committee, and so forth. But something’s going on in the American Jewry. The solidarity with Israel, especially in the younger generation, is diminishing. Of course, there is the Taglit-Birthright [program], a blessed project, but for the most part young Jewish people do not show any interest in Israel. And many of those who do show interest are situated from the other side of the barricade.

Please don’t blame them entirely. Please don’t blame solely the industry of lies that turns Israel into an earthly monster. It would make sense to take a look at ourselves. On one hand, a great deal of Israelis are disconnected from any Jewish deeds or Jewish identity, but in a paradoxical way Jewish identity is primarily controlled by the more conservative streams. And it should be admitted that in many fields, we’re talking about the dark streams.

We’re Frozen, They’re Evolving

It’s not that these streams do not have a right to exist. They do. They exist in the United States too. But only over there is Jewish identity blossoming. Over there, anyone desiring to be a Jew has a zillion ways to realize their identification. Over there, there is no ultra-Orthodox coercion. Over there, a Jew is also one who feels like a Jew, even if his mother is not Jewish according to the Jewish law [Halacha.] Over there, there are inter-married families, and they make up the lion’s share in the midst of the American Jews that maintain the Jewish lifestyle and feel Jewish.

Here, from the Israeli vantage point, these Jews are considered gentiles. So why would they feel any kinship with Israel? They prefer to be Jews in the new Babylon than gentiles of the forlorn Zion. We haven’t lost the Jewry of the United States yet. But we’re getting there. In our foolishness. While Jewish identity there becomes more versatile and cultivated, the Jewish identity in Israel is steadily degrading.

Over there, there is a Jewish content. Over here, it’s disappearing. The grandeur of the Jewry was that it used to be a vanguard. We’re frozen. They’re developing. It’s happening there. The Jewish message burgeons there. True, in directions where the connection to Judaism is unclear. But it seems that the evolution there causes fermentation in the Jewry and turns it into a human and ethical alternative. There. Not here.

Thus, the time for the Jewish revolution has come. There is no special need to accept the American Jewish model. There are outlying weeds there as well. But we’ve got what and from whom to learn. There is a need for a world-embracing Jewish dialogue. Over there, it works. Over there, there is a rich and variegated Jewish life. Over there, there is a revolution. It’s about a time for Babylon to have a little influence on the land of Zion and Jerusalem.

A proper disclosure: the author was a guest of San Francisco Jewish federation as part of the “Gvanim” [“shades of color”] project, and also on a lecture tour on the invitation of various bodies in the United States, including, among others, The Israel Center of the Jewish Community Federation.