What’s your Jewish volume?
[UPDATE (June 22, 2007): In search of a cool summer full of meaningful Jewish experiences, Rabbi Judy Chessin of Temple Beth Or in Dayton, OH, notes that when you turn up your Jewish volume, you get your heir-conditioning at full blast....]
As of today, I’ve decided to stop using the words affiliated and unaffiliated as general descriptors. In a world of multiple and episodic connections, they just don’t mean anything anymore.
Instead of asking whether someone is affiliated or unaffiliated, I propose to ask what his/her “Jewish volume” is. Conceptually I link the notion of “volume” to the idea of “minimalist” and “maximalist” manifestations of religion (see Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion after September 11 (2002). The idea is that if your Jewish volume is high, then Judaism really is a significant part of many aspects of your life; if your Jewish volume is low, then it isn’t. Midrange volume could mean that Judaism either is a small part of many aspects of your life, or a large part of one or two aspects. In other words, it’s not the either-or proposition that “affiliated-unaffiliated” suggests.
More importantly, you can turn the volume up or down at different points without shutting the system down completely. Life-cycle, significant personal or historical events (planned or unplanned), and other factors can affect Jewish volume. Not to mention the reality that people change the station/change the tune — all the time, again without turning off the radio entirely.
An an “outreach” invitation, as such, isn’t some futile quest to transform an “unaffiliated” Jew into an “affiliated” one. It’s an invitation — “Turn up your Jewish volume!”, perhaps, or “What’s your Jewish tune?”. (This has the happy the advantage of riffing on the iPod phenom, too.)
Here’s how I would apply it to myself. At the moment, on a scale of 1 to 10, my Jewish volume is somewhere between 11 and 12. When I was 13, it was around 9; it dropped to about 3 while I was in college, and was between 4 and 5 for most of my 20s.
So …what’s your Jewish volume?
April 27th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
My Jewish volume is turned up to 9 or so, these days, and I don’t anticipate it dropping. (Something about enrolling in rabbinic school…
I like the volume metaphor. It gives me the sense that though my dial has moved around, over the last fifteen years or so, I’ve consistently been engaged in Jewishness — it’s not like one ever stops having a dial, right?
April 28th, 2006 at 12:00 am
May 5th, 2006 at 9:46 am
i like the idea of moving away from affiliated/unaffiliated. its a troublesome bianary. i see a pair of problems with “volume”
*it’s linear
*it is unclear how one would use the scale to describe oneself. it is fairly clear how tied one is to jewish institutions. though it might not be clear to other people it is a reasonably uncontentious fact and knowable. once you get into how people feel measurment is quite difficult. many people with low levels of religiosity likely rate their jewish volumes ahead of folks with higher degrees of religioisty and vice versa. this is not inherently problematic. it seems that in general people, especially funder, are more interested in jewish behavior than identity. ID is important insofar as it influences behavior but not as important by itself.
all this to say, mazal tov on beating back the beast of affiliation/non-affiliation.
May 11th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
I like that “volume” concept. May I link this post for the ProgFatihBlogCarn? (I’m at http://knockingfrominside.blogspot.com/ since you probably don’t know me)
May 12th, 2006 at 8:08 am
I think I’m all logged in now… May I link this post for the ProgFaithBlogCarn this weekend?
May 14th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
May 25th, 2006 at 9:20 am
I’m all for metaphors! The problem with this one is that it doesn’t work so well. In the audio world its usually a bad thing when you have the volume turned all the way up. It generally causes distortion, has the potential for causing hearing loss and all other kinds of bad things. Actually, the metaphor works better for those Jews who would suggest too much Jewish activity could cause a person to stop listening to non-Jews or non-Jewish ideas. The volume metaphor would suggest that having a high Jewish volume gives you a distorted outlook on reality. I agree that “affiliation” has lots of problems, but “volume” has some problems of its own. Shai Gluskin
June 12th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
December 29th, 2006 at 5:16 am
July 28th, 2007 at 6:39 pm