Unkosher Jesus- Red Meat Commentary With a Side of Cheese: Arthur Blecher and The New American Judaism

DID YOU KNOW?...

The American Jewish community is in imminent danger of extinction?
Judaism, as it is practiced today, is a religious faith tradition that extends back 4,000 years?
The shtetl of Old World Europe was an idyllic Jewish utopia of shared faith practices, community values and ethnic pride?
The Jewish people and Judaism as a faith tradition have never entertained any supernatural notions such as angels, demons, Heaven and Hell the way that Christians and others do.
American Jewish denominations are authoritative forms of Judaism?
Rabbis are the official leaders of Jewish congregations, as they have been throughout Jewish history?

If you know or otherwise believe these statements, it is likely that you are an American Jew, and even more likely that you are an observant American Jew who is a member in good standing of an Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist synagogue. If you know or otherwise believe these statements, it is less likely, but still possible, that you are a non-Jew who is still familiar with these statements and accept them as fact. Both of you have one thing in common: you have been on the receiving end of an intensive campaign conceived of and executed by the mainstream Jewish denominations to motivate American Jews to strictly adhere to traditional Jewish practices. Oh, and you have one other thing in common: you're both wrong to believe that any of these six statements is a truthful representation of fact.

This is the central premise of Rabbi Arthur Blecher's new book, The New American Judaism: The Way Forward on Challenging Issues from Intermarriage to Jewish Identity. His book is an revolutionary thunderbolt, issued as a direct challenge to the authority of American denominational Judaism, for it strives to expand the ways in which Jewish identity can be expressed and seeks to bestow full Jewish status upon intermarried and other apostate Jews.

As a rabbi and psychotherapist, Rabbi Blecher (aka, "The Unorthodox Rabbi") has had the opportunity to interact with and counsel many interfaith couples in Washington, DC over the past twenty-five years. Because the choice to marry a non-Jew is actively discouraged by denominational Judaism, Rabbi Blecher has also been called upon to provide counsel to Jewish parents whose children had chosen a non-Jewish spouse and for which they were experience intense emotions of conflict and guilt. He relates one such interaction with distraught parents whose rabbi had recently delivered a sermon excoriating the choice to intermarry:

"There is nothing unusual about a rabbi using guilt and fear to promote attendance at services and classes. Clerics do this sort of thing all the time, and so have I. But when a rabbi invokes the Holocaust- that is pulling out the heavy artillery. Here in my office was the same pattern I have seen in almost everything I have read in English about the Jewish religion. We were talking about Judaism in terms of continuity, authenticity and survival. As I looked at the faces and postures of this couple, as I listened to the intonations of their voices, I instinctively knew that something is amiss with how my colleagues and I go about our jobs as religious leaders. How can a community thrive based upon a discourse of anxiety and guilt and on members who feel defeated and hopeless?"

This insight sparked Rabbi Blecher's journey to re-examine what he himself had once considered to be true about American Judaism and to re-evaluate these beliefs in light of the fact that the American Jewish population is far more diverse than the mainstream denominations are willing to allow or even acknowledge. Blecher sees an American Jewish community that has organized itself around principles that applied to the trauma of displacement experienced by Jewish immigrant communities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but which no longer have any utility for modern American Jews. The organizing principles of Authenticity, Continuity and Survival became the cornerstones of American Judaism, and have remained firmly entrenched within the community's organizational bedrock, unchallenged by anyone in a position of leadership.

Until now. Rabbi Blecher's empathy for intermarried Jews and the anguish they experience has spurred him to examine and directly challenge what he labels as the one Great Myth of American Judaism: "intermarriage is an enemy destroying the Jewish people." The Great Myth of the Evil of Intermarriage has grown out of six separate myths, which he meticulously deconstructs. A cursory synopsis of this deconstruction is provided below:

Myth #1: American Judaism is Teetering On Extinction
"The myth that Judaism and Jewish identity are endangered in America was born from the trauma of cultural dislocation a century ago. The myth lives on in part because Jewish institutions believe they are essential to the preservation of Judaism in America; and the greater the peril, the more important their role."

In this one sentence, Blecher takes direct aim at scare-mongering as a self-serving tactic used on a daily basis by denominational Judaism. It is a tactic that does not hold up under close scrutiny. Using select statistics, as represented by the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), denominational leaders can certainly give the impression that Jewish numbers are declining in America. The 2000-2001 NJPS Report put the American Jewish population at 5.2 million, a decline from its 1990 finding of 5.5 million.

Myth-Buster: Rabbi Blecher counters that the NJPS under-counts Jewish Americans by relying exclusively upon denominational affiliation and a rigid definition of who "counts" as Jewish. As Blecher states, "Jewishness is happening in new places that do not fit the old categories." These include partial Jews raised in interfaith households, people who still claim a Jewish identity even if the American Jewish denominations will not claim them. It also includes virtual online Jewish communities and information centers such as:

Ladino Komunita

The Jewish Encyclopedia

A Torah Infertility Medium of Exchange (ATIME.org)

Myth #2: Judaism is a 4,000 Year-Old Religion
American Rabbis worked to reassure immigrant Jews that the forms and practices of American Judaism are grounded in those stretching back to the dawn of Jewish civilization. Such reassurances enabled and enables the American rabbinate to offer a liturgical product that provides both Continuity and Authenticity, the cornerstones of the Jewish fortress of Survival.

Myth-Buster: Not quite, says Rabbi Blecher. Throughout its history, Judaism and its practice has gone through important transformations from within, oftentimes in response to influences from outside the Jewish community. For starters, he is able to delineate the epochal events that would transform the Judaism that followed each of these:

The first Kingdom until the Babylonian conquest of Judea in 586 BCE: practices such as shabbat dinner and lighting candles came into existence during the exile period.
The return from exile and the second kingdom through the year 70 of the Common Era.
The era of rabbinic academies (rabbinic Judaism), which lasted until the Middle Ages.
Diaspora Judaism, which was centered primarily in Eastern Europe, and which lasted until the era of Denominational Judaism, which commenced in the twentieth century United States.

Jewish civilization has seen many different iterations of itself throughout its 4,000 year history. The Judaism that is practiced today is not the Judaism of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the Hebrew Prophets. And that's OK.

Myth #3: The Shtetl = Jewish Paradise Lost
Twentieth century America Jewish leaders have mythologized the Old World village known affectionately as the shtetl. At least it is known affectionately by those who have never had to live in a shtetl. The word shtetl is innocuous enough: it means "town" in Yiddish. As a word, though, it carries a great deal of symbolic and nostalgic weight among Jews who idealize what it represents. In the popular literature on the subject, the shtetl is held up as an idyllic, timeless community of Jews who live in perfect harmony, each knowing his or her role in the community, all bonded by their adherence to Orthodox Jewish rituals and practices. Blecher quotes from The Earth is the Lord's: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe, written in 1949 by theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel:

But the Jews all sang: the student over the Talmud, the tailor while sewing a pair of trousers, the cobbler while mending tattered shoes, and the preacher while delivering a sermon... The stomachs were empty, the houses were barren, but the minds were crammed with the riches of Torah... Mothers at the cradle crooned: "My little child, close your eyes; if God will, you'll be a rabbi"... (p. 77).

Tevye sings "Tradition" (Fiddler on the Roof)

Myth-Buster: "Writers who idealize the shtetl are highly selective in what they talk about. Their descriptions of the devout husbands and their devoted, long-suffering wives are amplified by intense nostalgia, in contrast to their silence about the other Jews who lived in the shtetl (p. 83)." These "other Jews" included adults who did not marry, married adults without children or who had divorced, homosexual members of the community, and others who lives did not conform with the rigid expectations of Orthodoxy in an enclosed community (which, by the way, was not always so enclosed or even small). The propagation of this myth causes American Jews to idealize and pine for a community that did not actually exist. This in turn gives rise to the unreasonable expectation that such a community could and should exist here in the United States.

Myth #4: Jews Have Always Been a Reasonable, Rational People, Traits That Have Always Been Reflected in Judaism
Modern Judaism does not teach the belief in Heaven or Hell, or in supernatural beings such as angels and demons, or even a Devil. However, modern Jews are led to believe that it was ever thus, as this notion of historic Judaism was in keeping with the rationalist bent of the founders of denominational Judaism. In order for rationality and reason to be accepted as contributing to Continuity and Authenticity, it became necessary to whitewash certain supernatural elements from Jewish history.

Myth-Buster: The need to "protect" American Jews from the fact that their forebears held supernatural beliefs does not exist now, if it ever did. Rabbi Blecher proposes a four-step plan to shed this habit and set the record straight by simply explaining that:

Jews used to believe in Heaven and Hell, but they no longer do.
Jews used to believe in Satan, but they no longer do.
Jews used to believe in magic and divination, but they no longer do.
American Judaism prefers to understand the world rationally and scientifically. (p. 117)

Myth #5: American Jewish Denominations are Authoritative Forms of Judaism
The four American Jewish denominations- Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist- are the authoritative versions of Jewish practice. Smaller, independent communities and fellowships such as minyans, havurot, the Society for Humanistic Judaism and others are merely offshoots of the main four branches.

Myth-Buster: While it is in the best interests of the four principal denominations to be seen and thought of as Judaism's authoritative forms, the fact is that all four of these do not meet the needs of partial/duel-identity Jews and intermarried Jews. For starters, none of the denominations will acknowledge the Jewish identity of any such congregant (and will simultaneously decry the "shrinking" Jewish population). Congregants who are partial/duel-identity Jews and those who are married to a non-Jewish spouse are provided with limited services and status at best. The "purity" model of denominational Judaism does not work in a world where more and more Jews are marrying non-Jews and/or pursuing an interest in other faith traditions in addition to his or her original Jewish heritage. It is not realistic. And those who need Judaic forms that are realistic are looking elsewhere.

Myth #6: Rabbis are the Official Leaders of Jewish Congregations
"Today every Jewish denomination assumes that each of its member congregations is led by one of the denomination's rabbis, and conversely, Americans assume that every rabbi has a congregation. Thus denominational congregations are 'rabbi-centric.'" (p. 149)

Myth-Buster: "This is a radical departure from Old World Jewish practice where the rabbi was not necessarily associated with a congregation, and not every synagogue had a rabbi. The functions of the synagogue and the duties of the rabbi were independent of each other; communities had their rabbis, and communities had their synagogues." (p. 149)

Again, each denominational organization controls their member synagogues to the extent that each rabbi who is considered for a position must be capable of demonstrating fealty to all of the teachings of the denomination- he or she is not an independent actor, as had been the case for rabbis during the centuries leading up to denominational Judaism. This, Blecher contends, is harmful to Jewish congregants, and thus harmful to Judaism itself:

"The harm is that when rabbis- whether by intention or by instinct- make inaccurate claims about the historical facts of Jewish civilization, we undermine our own position in the community. Our ability to serve new generations of American Jews requires us to give up our claims to ancient authority and to accept the fact that our professional role is a modern American creation." (pp. 160-161)

Having exhaustively researched and deconstructed these myths, Blecher's work sets its sights upon building a new American Judaism. Intermarriage is the one important issue at the heart of this goal, as Blecher sees Judaism's response to this phenomenon as critical to the success of any such endeavor. Currently, in order for an intermarried couple to be recognized by their denomination, the non-Jewish partner must at least agree to help raise the couple's children in an exclusively Jewish home, if not convert to Judaism outright. But Blecher cites data that show that at least 30 percent of intermarried couples do in fact raise their children exclusively as Jews, sometimes regardless of whether the non-Jewish spouse convert to Judaism or not.

However, his larger point is that it is completely good and valid to acknowledge the Jewish identity of any Jewish child being raised under different circumstances, in homes that are not exclusively Jewish. American Jewish denominations are completely closing the door on couples and their children for choices that are made today, thus forever forfeiting the benefits they might have accrued from decisions made later in life- for a duel-identity Jew to fully identify as Jewish, for a non-Jewish spouse to convert. The current denominational modus operandi denigrates the choices made by people with mixed-Jewish ancestry. To the extent that they choose to identify as Jewish, Blecher contends that the denominations should encourage this decision rather than cast someone out of the community for being less than 100 percent Jewish.

I have written on the topic of interfaith and duel identity issues here, here and here. In one of the posts I wrote, "It is no irreverence or betrayal to participate fully in the rituals and sacraments of faith traditions different than one's own. Quite to the contrary, Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh sees this as a means to deepening and strengthening one's own spirituality. Exploring the truths taught by many faiths and partaking of the rituals and teachings of other faith traditions s a way of honoring the best values of one's own faith tradition." As such, I truly value Rabbi Blecher's message of expanding the meaning of identity and appreciate the courage it took for him to publish a book that directly challenges the foundational assumptions of the majority of his Jewish contemporaries. The New American Judaism is a rich resource for both the Jewish and the interfaith community, and reverberates with a message of hope and optimism for interfaith couples and other non-traditional Jews.

His work will likely be received with hostility and suspicion by American Jews who remain deeply invested in the perpetuation of the myths he outlines in his book. For those with an open mind, though, The New American Judaism could and should be viewed as a work of creative destruction, an opportunity for American Jews to re-examine those beliefs they hold to be near and true as a means to enriching and strengthening Jewish civilization, to expanding the meaning of identity and community:

"Disassembling myths removes their power to generate apprehension and despair. At the same time, myths endow life with meaning. I believe that recognizing myths for what they are does not diminish their power to capture the imagination or enliven the soul; rather, it provides a way forward. I have written this book with the firm conviction that clearing away myths will reveal a new American Jewish religion whose vitality and diversity far exceed the ability of any institution to contain or any rabbi to define. I offer these pages in the hope they will serve as the beginning of a conversation." So, let's talk. Shalom.

- Doug L.

FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:

Question What You Know about Judaism