Rabbi Jessica Zimmerman’s posting has been sitting with me for the past four days, and her words- and the questions she asked- have come very close to identifying the feelings that lie behind my original posting that started this fascinating discussion.
I, too, have issues that “keep me up at night.” After almost thirty years in the (same) pulpit, I find myself increasingly assessing what has been the sum total of my effectiveness as a rabbi. I know that, via pastoral experiences that have spanned the tragic and the joyous, I have been a part of my members’ lives at critical junctures. The bonds created at those moments are unbreakable, and even at my most skeptical moments, I know that I have made a difference in their lives by bringing our tradition to bear on what they were experiencing, good or bad. That, actually, helps me sleep at night.
But what keeps me up is this question: outside of those critical moments where I know for sure that my intervention was important and significant, have I really changed people’s Jewish lives? Has my rabbinate- and the synagogue I lead- really made a difference?
When I was first ordained in 1981, I delivered a speech at a United Synagogue convention in Toronto that was full of the arrogance and hubris of a young rabbi. Not that I don’t think what I said was true; I do. But saying it so publicly was audacious in so many ways. It was intensely critical of the earlier generation of rabbis in the Conservative movement who had presided over the demographic expolsion of Conservative Judaism, and confused (I said) demography with religious vitality. They had four bar or bat mitvah ceremonies every Shabbat, but it had much more to do with the post-war baby boom than Conservative Judaism. Their caterers were happy, membership rosters were swelling, and so they chose not to “rock the boat” with any kind of articulation of religious responsibilities (read, hiyyuv).
I had submitted a copy of the speech to the United Synagogue leadership before the conference (as an organization of lay leaders, you can imagine that the speech went over quite well), and unbeknownst to me, they released it to the press. It became a front-page banner headline in the National Jewish Post and Opinion (in red ink, no less!), and one of the local Rabbinical Assembly regions actually had a motion advanced by some of my senior colleagues to censure me!
So, Rabbi Zimmerman, when you asked “what keeps you up at night?”. I was able to answer quite quickly. I spend a lot of (uncomfortable) time wondering whether or not, in all my rabbinic efforts to talk about hiyyuv, religious responsibility, the healthy and essential dialectic between traditional forms and practices and modernity, etc., I have really been any more effective than the generation of rabbis that I so broadly critiqued. You are asking essecntially the same question, but graciously broadening the scope. Are any of us really making a difference?
I have read all of the postings in this thread very carefully, and I hear those who would challenge me by saying that my insistence on traditional forms and concerns lies in the way of those who are the true seekers of our generation. But I guess I harbor equal concerns about alternate strategies- hence my original posting. And I fear that abandoning those traditional forms in the name of renewal may be causing us to cede the immediacy of our connection to that which is most precious in our tradition.
What I have learned from this exercise is that I have a lot to learn about the varied forms and expressions of renewal and transformation that organizations like Synagogue 3000 and STAR take, and that can only be a good thing. I am most grateful to Synagogue 3000 for providing me with this forum in which to express that which I think about 24/7, and I thank all who have shared their thoughts with me, and each other.
“…no amount of handwringing or ostrich-like desire to turn the clock back to the “good old days†(read the middle ages)..”
Although I’ve never been compared to an ostrich before, nor have I ever thought of myself as living in the middle ages, I think that, in his comment, Jordan has successfully illustrated what I was trying to say in my original posting.
I am grateful to Ron Wolfson, Steven Cohen, and Larry Hoffman for their most thoughtful and considered responses to what I wrote. Though the “teaser” for my blog accentuated the concerns that I have with the synagogue renewal movement, the truth is that I am enormously respectful of the work that it has done to bring alienated Jews into the active ranks of synagogue life, even if, in some fundamental ways, I come at the same challenge from a different place. If my original posting implied otherwise, then I am obliged to state that clearly. In very important ways, I consider you all my teachers, and my colleagues.
But here’s the thing. Maybe it’s just me, and my particular sensitivities given the upbringing of which I spoke of in my blog, but I have never felt that the synagogue renewal movement genuinely came at its work from a judgement-free perspective. No, Hayim, you and I have never had a personal conversation about the work of STAR, but for just about the past ten years or so, I’ve used a piece on the sovereign self. written by you and included in a wonderful, small paperback volume published by STAR, as an assigned text for the rabbinical and cantorial students in my senior seminar on professional skills at JTS. I obviously value your writing and thinking. But I’ve also “heard” in the tone of some of your writings an implicit assumption that the synagogue as we know it is essentially dead or dying, and needs to be re-created. ( I wish I had the text with me, but I’m not at home. Ironically, I’m at the Legacy Heritage retreat in Newark, because my synagogue’s Religious School received a grant to develop a new Shabbat-morning track for our second and third graders and their parents…. innovation!).
When my antennae pick up messages like that, messages that make me feel like the aforementioned ostrich trying to recapture the good old days of the middle ages (kind of insulting, by the way), it trips that wire in me that makes me feel hopelessly like a dinosaur, and I find that feeling distinctly and undeservedly unpleasant.
I’m not in the business of conserving for conserving’s sake; I can adapt with the best of them. Twenty years ago I risked my job to convert my synagogue to full egalitarianism, and in ways both more and less subtle I have tweaked long-established practices in our service. But I have also worked hard during my almost three decades in the same community to conserve what I considered to be of timeless value, and to teach others to love it and appreciate it as I have. No, it won’t be for everyone. Yes, there have been, and continue to be, pieces of my own synagogue that need to be “transformed,” and all of this is very much on my agenda. But I do not like the implication that “I am a large urban Conservative synagogue with a traditional (though egalitarian) main service, ergo I must be dying.” I hear you, Ron, Larry and Steve- and Hayim. It is not the agenda of STAR or Synagogue 3000 to transmit that message. But I am not the only pulpit rabbi who hears it, and on my better days, I like to think that keeping my occasionally crotchety if historic synagogue moving on down the road through major neighborhood change, the transition to egalitarianism with minimal trauma, being saddled with a building whose sanctuary architecture is at complete cross-purposes with the “ruach” that I want to create in shul… all this has been a pretty neat trick. If I’m a dinosaur, I’d like to think I’m a crafty one.
Synagogue 3000: A Concurring Dissent; Or, Of Babies and Bathwater
June 15th, 2009 at 7:12 amRabbi Jessica Zimmerman’s posting has been sitting with me for the past four days, and her words- and the questions she asked- have come very close to identifying the feelings that lie behind my original posting that started this fascinating discussion.
I, too, have issues that “keep me up at night.” After almost thirty years in the (same) pulpit, I find myself increasingly assessing what has been the sum total of my effectiveness as a rabbi. I know that, via pastoral experiences that have spanned the tragic and the joyous, I have been a part of my members’ lives at critical junctures. The bonds created at those moments are unbreakable, and even at my most skeptical moments, I know that I have made a difference in their lives by bringing our tradition to bear on what they were experiencing, good or bad. That, actually, helps me sleep at night.
But what keeps me up is this question: outside of those critical moments where I know for sure that my intervention was important and significant, have I really changed people’s Jewish lives? Has my rabbinate- and the synagogue I lead- really made a difference?
When I was first ordained in 1981, I delivered a speech at a United Synagogue convention in Toronto that was full of the arrogance and hubris of a young rabbi. Not that I don’t think what I said was true; I do. But saying it so publicly was audacious in so many ways. It was intensely critical of the earlier generation of rabbis in the Conservative movement who had presided over the demographic expolsion of Conservative Judaism, and confused (I said) demography with religious vitality. They had four bar or bat mitvah ceremonies every Shabbat, but it had much more to do with the post-war baby boom than Conservative Judaism. Their caterers were happy, membership rosters were swelling, and so they chose not to “rock the boat” with any kind of articulation of religious responsibilities (read, hiyyuv).
I had submitted a copy of the speech to the United Synagogue leadership before the conference (as an organization of lay leaders, you can imagine that the speech went over quite well), and unbeknownst to me, they released it to the press. It became a front-page banner headline in the National Jewish Post and Opinion (in red ink, no less!), and one of the local Rabbinical Assembly regions actually had a motion advanced by some of my senior colleagues to censure me!
So, Rabbi Zimmerman, when you asked “what keeps you up at night?”. I was able to answer quite quickly. I spend a lot of (uncomfortable) time wondering whether or not, in all my rabbinic efforts to talk about hiyyuv, religious responsibility, the healthy and essential dialectic between traditional forms and practices and modernity, etc., I have really been any more effective than the generation of rabbis that I so broadly critiqued. You are asking essecntially the same question, but graciously broadening the scope. Are any of us really making a difference?
I have read all of the postings in this thread very carefully, and I hear those who would challenge me by saying that my insistence on traditional forms and concerns lies in the way of those who are the true seekers of our generation. But I guess I harbor equal concerns about alternate strategies- hence my original posting. And I fear that abandoning those traditional forms in the name of renewal may be causing us to cede the immediacy of our connection to that which is most precious in our tradition.
What I have learned from this exercise is that I have a lot to learn about the varied forms and expressions of renewal and transformation that organizations like Synagogue 3000 and STAR take, and that can only be a good thing. I am most grateful to Synagogue 3000 for providing me with this forum in which to express that which I think about 24/7, and I thank all who have shared their thoughts with me, and each other.
Synagogue 3000: A Concurring Dissent; Or, Of Babies and Bathwater
June 9th, 2009 at 6:27 pm“…no amount of handwringing or ostrich-like desire to turn the clock back to the “good old days†(read the middle ages)..”
Although I’ve never been compared to an ostrich before, nor have I ever thought of myself as living in the middle ages, I think that, in his comment, Jordan has successfully illustrated what I was trying to say in my original posting.
I am grateful to Ron Wolfson, Steven Cohen, and Larry Hoffman for their most thoughtful and considered responses to what I wrote. Though the “teaser” for my blog accentuated the concerns that I have with the synagogue renewal movement, the truth is that I am enormously respectful of the work that it has done to bring alienated Jews into the active ranks of synagogue life, even if, in some fundamental ways, I come at the same challenge from a different place. If my original posting implied otherwise, then I am obliged to state that clearly. In very important ways, I consider you all my teachers, and my colleagues.
But here’s the thing. Maybe it’s just me, and my particular sensitivities given the upbringing of which I spoke of in my blog, but I have never felt that the synagogue renewal movement genuinely came at its work from a judgement-free perspective. No, Hayim, you and I have never had a personal conversation about the work of STAR, but for just about the past ten years or so, I’ve used a piece on the sovereign self. written by you and included in a wonderful, small paperback volume published by STAR, as an assigned text for the rabbinical and cantorial students in my senior seminar on professional skills at JTS. I obviously value your writing and thinking. But I’ve also “heard” in the tone of some of your writings an implicit assumption that the synagogue as we know it is essentially dead or dying, and needs to be re-created. ( I wish I had the text with me, but I’m not at home. Ironically, I’m at the Legacy Heritage retreat in Newark, because my synagogue’s Religious School received a grant to develop a new Shabbat-morning track for our second and third graders and their parents…. innovation!).
When my antennae pick up messages like that, messages that make me feel like the aforementioned ostrich trying to recapture the good old days of the middle ages (kind of insulting, by the way), it trips that wire in me that makes me feel hopelessly like a dinosaur, and I find that feeling distinctly and undeservedly unpleasant.
I’m not in the business of conserving for conserving’s sake; I can adapt with the best of them. Twenty years ago I risked my job to convert my synagogue to full egalitarianism, and in ways both more and less subtle I have tweaked long-established practices in our service. But I have also worked hard during my almost three decades in the same community to conserve what I considered to be of timeless value, and to teach others to love it and appreciate it as I have. No, it won’t be for everyone. Yes, there have been, and continue to be, pieces of my own synagogue that need to be “transformed,” and all of this is very much on my agenda. But I do not like the implication that “I am a large urban Conservative synagogue with a traditional (though egalitarian) main service, ergo I must be dying.” I hear you, Ron, Larry and Steve- and Hayim. It is not the agenda of STAR or Synagogue 3000 to transmit that message. But I am not the only pulpit rabbi who hears it, and on my better days, I like to think that keeping my occasionally crotchety if historic synagogue moving on down the road through major neighborhood change, the transition to egalitarianism with minimal trauma, being saddled with a building whose sanctuary architecture is at complete cross-purposes with the “ruach” that I want to create in shul… all this has been a pretty neat trick. If I’m a dinosaur, I’d like to think I’m a crafty one.
And not extinct yet.
Gerry Skolnik