Where Would Darwin Daven?
This article by conversation partner Joshua Avedon appeared in The Forward
Depending upon your perspective, Jewish spiritual communities are either calcifying into pillars of salt, or experiencing a renaissance unlike anything since the havurah movement of the early 1970s.
The view from 30,000 feet is one of institutional religious Judaism, where membership in synagogues (at least in the non-Orthodox world) is both aging and diminishing. These synagogues are frequently failing to attract 20- and 30-somethings, which means their lifeline to the future is starting to fray. But the view from the street is that the growth of independent minyans and new spiritual communities is exploding, and is largely fed by that same demographic that is missing from many synagogues. If the mainstream Jewish community doesn"t get hip to what is driving the new start-ups soon, a whole parallel universe of Jewish communal life might just rise up and make the old structures irrelevant.
The Jewish emergent-community phenomenon is just beginning to coalesce — but one could argue that we are not seeing something brand new, but rather that these communities exhibit characteristics of what has always been compelling about organic Jewish community through the ages, distilled to its essence. Perhaps there was a similar blossoming of micro-communities after the Romans wrecked the Temple as rabbinic Judaism began to take hold. While an inherent critique of institutional Judaism fuels many of the upstart Jewish communities, from an evolutionary standpoint the whole Jewish religious ecosystem stands to benefit from their emergence.
One evolutionary theory holds that species go through periodic bursts of rapid adaptation in between long stretches of relative calm. We are now experiencing such a time of religious flowering across movements and faiths.
Some leading thinkers from the mainstream Jewish world have argued that the emergent phenomenon is a fringe development at best — and, at least in terms of the numbers of individuals involved, that is true. Synagogues are still the central institution of Jewish life, and the place where the vast majority of those searching for a Jewish spiritual community go. There"s also the argument that the new communities aren"t sustainable and that, in any case, they aren"t true synagogues. Last year"s study of the participants of these communities sponsored by the S3K Synagogue Studies Institute and Mechon Hadar may indicate otherwise. Many of the emergent communities may eschew the “synagogue” label, but some are evolving to create a complete synagogue environment nonetheless.
The important distinction is not about nomenclature, but about inner nature. Many shul-goers would agree that there are plenty of synagogues that fail to be sacred communities. But we should also recognize that there are Jewish sacred communities that aren"t exactly synagogues.
Mainstream synagogues aren"t dinosaurs, but they do suffer from the kind of complacency and inbreeding typical of geographically isolated species. In the Galapagos Islands, which is famous for its secluded fauna, there is a species of bird called the blue-footed booby that has no fight-or-flight instinct at all. You can walk up to one, pick it up, poke it and prod it without the bird trying to escape or even reacting at all. The blue-footed booby simply has no experience with the idea of another animal being a threat.
Imagine what would happen if the ocean lowered enough to create a land bridge to the mainland. The boobies would have no skills to deal with the oncoming predators and get eaten for lunch. Synagogues today may be facing a similar challenge.
There may not be anything wrong with the underlying genome of synagogues, but too many are stuck with what synagogue revitalization expert Ron Wolfson calls “revolving-door membership.” Parents join when their first child hits school age and then disappear after their last child becomes a bar or bat mitzvah. That might be good for business, but it"s not so great for building community. It"s the Jewish communal equivalent of a cushy island with plenty of vegetation and no predators.
But in the past few years a land bridge has emerged. On the other side of the bridge are alternate spiritual paths, a plethora of weekend entertainment options, online social networks, affinity groups based upon love for your local sports team and a whole lot of other competition. The emergents seem to be the equivalent of a highly adaptive strain of Jewish blue-footed boobies, one that has learned quickly to evolve to suit the new environment. They actually thrive in the more competitive milieu — and are succeeding at what many established synagogues fail to do: create intentional sacred communities that are both sustaining and sustainable. If we could isolate the meme for that (a meme being the cultural equivalent of a gene) and splice that dynamism into the cultural DNA of all the other shuls that need help, we would be a long way toward making all synagogues great.
Or perhaps the memes that permit the emergents to thrive are just dormant in the Galapa-gogues but are being expressed in the new communities due to some kind of hybrid vigor between the emergents and modern culture. And perhaps those dormant memes can be reactivated in the mainstream synagogues so they too can flourish in the new land-bridge scenario.
Some emergent communities may just be interesting experiments. But enough of the emergent communities have failed and enough have survived so that we can observe vigorous cultural selection in action. Emergents show the kind of adaptability and innovation that are hallmarks of a survivor genus. But since they share their basic DNA with Synagogus Mainstreamus they can (and should) interbreed. That kind of cross-pollination can only benefit both the established shuls and Synagogus Emergentus. We are living in a time of increasing bio-diversity in the Jewish eco-system — and witnessing the emergence of a 21st-century Jewish life that is the next stage in Judaism"s evolution. We should celebrate this fecundity and do our best to assure that all forms of spiritual community are fruitful and multiply.
Joshua Avedon is COO and director of strategic initiatives for Jumpstart: A Thinkubator for Sustainable Jewish Innovation. He is also one of the founders of IKAR, an emergent spiritual community in Los Angeles.
December 26th, 2008 at 10:54 am
What stands out here is your vantage point, which you describe as “the view from 30,000 feet,†and “the view from the street.†Distant objectivity is perfectly applicable for studying microbes or genes, not social entities like synagogues. That’s why we retired armchair anthropologists like James Frazer and Herbert Spencer. It is not that Frazer and Spenser didn’t have a lot of good things to say, but their generalizations ignored the uniqueness of the Ashanti, or Nuer, or Ndembu or some other culture where anthropologists had to live among to appreciate. In our criticism of synagogues, we should not lump them all together as if they share the same disease. Nor should we imagine that there is only one cure, in this case, a heavy dose of emergent-cy. For that matter, there are lots of different emergents too, and they too should be approached as if we were anthropologists in the field, describing what we see rather than passing summary judgment (positively or negatively) on them all.
I say this as a co-founder of Synagogue 3000, which has been ultra-critical of synagogue dysfunction; and as the author of a book whose very title (Rethinking Synagogues) provides my own judgment on how too many synagogues think poorly (or even not at all) about what they do and are. But I also know that more and more synagogues are indeed thinking differently, and are hardly what your view from above or from outside imagine.
Take, for instance, just the synagogues within just ten miles of where I live. I spent last night with a rabbi who is writing a combination of Jewish-gospel-jazz to rescue his Reform synagogue’s worship from the doldrums. I am consulting with another that has several thirty-somethings on its board and is undergoing a thorough self-evaluation. Another synagogue not far away has built everything it does around the concept of brit (covenant), so that all conversations begin with the question of how the topic under investigation falls within the congregation’s covenant with each other and with God.
And look at Synagogue 3000’s Next Dor initiative (it’s on our website). We asked synagogues to do the next right thing: to engage the Next Generation without regard to their becoming members – just because that is what Jewish responsibility demands. It would cost some money, of course, because even though we will seek out grant support, synagogues have to budget their own money too – money that is raised in today’s terrible economic climate, mind you, where synagogues have to cut back, if anything, not expand. Far from having to seek them out, we have more synagogues than we can deal with asking to be a part of this, even though (I repeat) there is nothing in it for the synagogues, since they are not looking for new dues-paying members.
Another thing: real people do not live day by day as revolutionaries or reactionaries. Mostly we take care of those we love, try to make a living, have some fun, and go about our business. At critical moments, we have or adopt children, lose parents, get sick, get fired, get over things, and get on with our lives. We should not be cavalier about what even not-so-spectacular synagogues do for people at moments like these. Ordinary as they may seem from 30,000 feet in the air, they serve the real people we are, usually well.
If I do not typecast synagogues, I also do not lump together alternatives as “an emergent phenomenon,†say, or as any other single nomenclature for what may be a lot of things, some of them more like synagogues (at least, like some synagogues) than not. We are better off picturing our time in history as a creative moment of coalescing community, some in synagogue buildings, some outside of them, and some both inside and outside, depending on the moment. Some overlap with others; some have no obvious group boundaries; some are temporary, others permanent; some specialize, others are more general. The field is open and not finished expanding.
It is grossly unfair to say, “Jewish spiritual communities are either calcifying into pillars of salt, or experiencing a renaissance unlike anything since the havurah movement of the early 1970s.†Reality is too messy to be captured in “either/ors.†Most of our communities are neither on top nor at the bottom of the world. We are all just feeling our way into tomorrow.
January 3rd, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Larry,
I think we actually agree more than not, and certainly I know the view from 30,000 feet blurs distinctions and misses a lot of interesting detail. I also don’t think there is one prescription for “fixing†synagogues, and I’m not even sure that thinking of them as being broken is a helpful approach (I’m pretty sure we agree about that). But I do think spiritual communities of all shapes and sizes are facing a set of challenges today that requires some kind of thoughtful response if the goal is more than to merely survive. Two of the lessons I learned from S3K are that there is nothing wrong with synagogues that can’t be fixed by what is right about them, and that in searching for solutions we need to extend our comfort zone to look for ideas where we might least expect them. And that means mega-churches, Disney, Darwin, Open source software, Starbucks and Jewish or Christian emergents are all fair game for inspiration.
The reason why I leaned on the genetics metaphor is because I think it’s a more useful construct than problem/fix or disease/cure. If synagogues and emergent communities are two species of a genus of spiritual communities, then there must be some Gaia-like macro-organism that lives and breathes at an entirely different level. We are all part of that fluid evolving system from which the future is bubbling up. I thoroughly agree that we are in a “creative moment of coalescing community.†That’s why I’m in favor of cross-pollination and inter-breeding, because I think that will lead to greater diversity and a stronger chance for everyone’s success. It sounds like that is what NextDor is all about – since it seems to combine the strength, roots and organization of synagogues with some of the ideas, values and approaches of the emergents (and I’m sure many other inputs as well).
I’m the last person who would want to pigeon-hole synagogues, emergents or any other paradigm for building community, and I’m very aware that labels are often as distracting as useful. When I was thinking about the view from 30,000 feet, I was actually mentally footnoting the study Steven Cohen wrote as an S3K Report (Membership and Motives: Who Joins American Jewish Congregations and Why). And when I was talking about the view from the street I was thinking of last year’s S3K/Mechon Hadar study of emergent communities and their participants (Preliminary findings from the 2007 Spiritual Communities Study). Neither of these studies can tell the whole story about the state of the Jewish spiritual ecosystem, but taken together they do form two very interesting, and very different views of that landscape. My point wasn’t that either viewpoint is “correct†– but merely that whatever your perspective, we all have something to learn from each other.
January 5th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Shalom All,
Below is a link to Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s latest blog entry secifically about this article.
Kol Tuv,
Jordan
http://rabbirami.blogspot.com/2009/01/where-would-darwin-davven.html