The Price of a Thin Judaism

A reckoning

Publicity photo from ‘Quiz ‘Em (My wife is second from right)

A reader who knows my thinking on a variety of subjects - sent me a Substack essay with the comment, “Your sort of stuff!!!”

How well he knows me. It is yet another voice of sanity from within the heterodox rabbinate that, I’m afraid, will largely go unheeded.

Conservative Rabbi Steven Abraham has written a hard-hitting critique about what is wrong with heterodox movements. It is a critique I could have written myself and, in fact, have expressed many times over the years. In short, he excoriates his own movement for missing the boat on Jewish education. Focusing too much on Tikkun Olam while neglecting the Torah and its demands.

An example of what I mean is found in the following excerpt:

You cannot balance tradition and modernity when your students know only modernity. You cannot teach historical Judaism to children who have no history. You cannot cultivate halakhic seriousness while presenting mitzvot as folkways, charming when convenient and disposable when they ask something of us. If we are honest, we too have bent to the cultural wind, lowering our expectations and apologizing for the severity of the covenant. But a Judaism that exists to ratify a secular political platform will be discarded the moment its usefulness ends. Why rise early on Shabbat to wrestle with a text three thousand years old if its conclusion merely echoes an op-ed one could have read in bed?

I have to say that the values he champions are the very same values that I - and any knowledgeable Orthodox Jew - would champion. Had he not identified himself as a Conservative rabbi, I might have assumed he was Orthodox, - as another excerpt also indicates:

It is a fine thing to care about the world, but Jews must first know their own. Our children need to know more about Yom Kippur than they know about Ramadan. They need to feel the moral drama of the machzor before they are asked to master every other tradition: why Kol Nidre still trembles, why Neilah feels like the gates of heaven swinging shut, why Jews fast not because suffering is holy but because return is possible...

What our children need first is their own inheritance: Hebrew on their tongues and Jewish memory in their bones, Israel in their consciousness, mitzvot in their hands, a people in their hearts. They need the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, the arguments of the Talmud, the grief of Tisha B’Av, the joy of Simchat Torah, and the terrifying intimacy of standing before God on the Day of Atonement. Then, yes, teach them about their neighbors with seriousness and respect—but teach them as Jews, from somewhere, with enough literacy that encounter becomes dialogue rather than dissolution.

Honestly, I could not have said it better myself.

Imagine what the Conservative movement might have accomplished had it implemented from the very beginning - an educational system that consistently taught these values and the importance of living them. One that encouraged serious Jewish education from kindergarten through high school. In other words, an educational system like our Orthodox one.

It is probably true that many Conservative Jews would still have chosen to send their children to public schools or, if they could afford it, to elite private college-preparatory schools. But it is also likely that a substantial number would have chosen instead to educate their children in the Jewish heritage of their parents or grandparents and pass it on to the next generation. Or at least convinced to try it out.

Orthodoxy once faced similar challenges. Parochial schools were not always the obvious choice they are today. Detroit’s Beth Yehudah. the school I attended, struggled to persuade parents to enroll their children. Many Orthodox parents wanted their children to receive an education comparable to that offered by good public schools so they could pursue successful professional careers. They were less concerned about their children’s spiritual development than we are today.

The founding rabbis of my school went to great lengths to convince parents that they could have both: an excellent secular education and a first-rate Jewish one.

An interesting anecdote that demonstrates the lengths those those rabbis went to is the following. Beth Yehudah’s girls high school (Beth Jacob) participated in the local television quiz show Quiz ‘Em, which pitted students from different schools against one another in an academic competition. My wife (16 at the time) was chosen by her teachers to be one of the contestants, along with three other girls, against Mumford High, one of the leading public schools of the day. And guess what? Her school won.

That victory became a powerful recruiting tool for parents who were worried about academic quality. It demonstrated that a day school could excel in both Judaic and secular studies.

Had the Conservative movement been as committed to these educational values as Rabbi Abraham clearly is, and as dedicated as those Beth Yehudah rabbis, American Jewry might look very different today. Sadly, Conservative parochial schools arrived too late and, in many cases, became too expensive for large numbers of families. Even where they existed, they often failed to instill the depth of Jewish commitment and literacy that Rabbi Abraham now advocates.

I sympathize with Rabbi Abraham and wholeheartedly agree with his message. I am not entirely sure whether his theological beliefs align with mine. I say this because Conservative Judaism today accepts as legitimate the conclusions of modern biblical criticism. That the Torah was not written by Moshe at God’s direction but was instead compiled over time by multiple authors. I do not know Rabbi Abraham’s personal views on that issue.

Leaving theology aside, however, what he advocates - and what he laments is not being taught - is, for the most part, exactly what Orthodox Judaism has been teaching for generations in parochial schools in major cities throughout the country. We have built institutions around those ideals and have been doing so for decades.

That, more than anything else, explains our relative success and their continuing decline. As much as I sympathize with Rabbi Abraham, I think it’s probably too late for any significant change.