The Jerusalem Post reports the “US Jews [are] uninterested in shul”:

Jews ranked second to last on the table of weekly worship attendance with less than one in six attending services, beating out only those who report no religious affiliation.

“This is a statistical cri de coeur from our people,” Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles told The Jerusalem Post. “If things continue as they are we will produce a generation of Jews who will be irretrievably lost.”
In a series of interviews conducted from 2002 to 2005, Gallup interviewed 11,000 adult Americans and asked, “How often do you attend church or synagogue - at least once a week, almost every week, about once a month, seldom, or never?”
Approximately 44 percent reported attending worship services weekly or almost weekly, the April 14 report stated.

…[Rabbi Gary P.] Zola noted that what the survey highlighted was the historic problem that synagogues were “not functioning in a way that is bringing in increasing numbers of American Jews that belong to the synagogue on a regular basis.”

Wolpe was less sanguine. “Judaism requires a countercultural commitment,” he argued. “If Jews do not develop a major, unshakeable passion for Jewish life and learning, observance will dwindle, as this study demonstrates. The results are a spiritual and cultural tragedy for the Jewish people and for America.”

However decline was not inevitable, Wolpe argued. “At Sinai Temple we have instituted services that draw 1,000 people on a Shabbat morning and once a month, over 1,000 young people to Friday Night Live. It is through a combination of education, music and passionate preaching and teaching. There is no single, successful formula, but the best Jewish minds of our generation need support and aid in reversing this crisis,” he said.

The bottom line is this: either S3K is an exercise in futility or we’re doing exactly what needs to be done. S3K knows that across the country there are synagogues like Sinai Temple, whose Friday Night Live service was co-created by S3K Leadership Network member Craig Taubman, and like the vital mainline Protestant churches in Dr. Diana Butler Bass’s Practicing Congregations project, which not only are not declining, but indeed are thriving. The trick is figuring out what these congregations are doing right and then learning how to translate and adapt those best practices for other synagogues to adopt. It’s not easy, and we won’t always get it right, but as Rabbi Wolpe noted, it’s the ballgame.

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