A House Is Not A Home

...If we are indeed pledges for one another, then we are accountable to one another...

...There are great battles to be fought, much divisiveness to be endured, disagreeable confrontations to be met...

...they are to be encouraged and welcomed...

...Or: The Jewish Federation is the sole corporate body in Jewry which fairly claims to stand for Jewry as a whole...

...In those days, the Federations were dogmatically non-sectarian, fearful of Jewishness, which was (correctly) deemed divisive, unwilling to support Jewish educational and cultural institutions and programs, and, in general, engines of assimilation...

...We admit many modes of "being Jewish" and foster many styles and forms of Jewishness...

...Professor of Religious Studies, and the Ungerleider Distinguished Scholar of Judaic Studies at Brown University...

...It hardly matters: The Jews as a whole who care — who give, who work, who come to meetings, who send the telegrams and all the rest — they do speak, and they are heard...

...But the leaders are responsive to community opinion, even though the means for the expression of opinion are not like those in truly democratic institutions...

...Diversity is welcome...

...Those who had much earlier pointed out that hospitals consumed a disproportionate share of the communal budget, while schools starved, took no great satisfaction in the victory...

...individual opinion is given weight...

...I still believe that the Federations are all we have...

...But loyalties to Federations are loyalties to community...

...His most recent books include INVITATION TO THE TALMUD and FROM POLITICS TO PIETY...

...It is easy enough to criticize the sort of democratic procedures by which power is allocated in Federations...

...We all have our perception of the Jewish condition — our own condition — and all therefore have authentic Torah to teach to one another...

...They become in a measure community schools, and in demanding community support, they surely must ask of themselves what, in exchange, they are willing to give...

...It is time to allow the full implications of our diversity to come to the surface, specifically because of our commitment to mutual tolerance and to achieving our goals within and through — not despite — diversity...

...But when Federations became what they claimed to be, the organized Jewish community, they placed a lien against their own future, and it is time to pay it...

...They were on to other things, off to new battles...

...And that is why the next stage in the development of the Federations is to realize the communal character of Federations, centrally through establishing the principle of accountability...

...Accountability would insure that Jews and Jewish organizations who want to be counted as part of the community be prepared to operate from within the community, not outside it...

...Chief among these is the right to participate in establishing the educational and cultural ideals of the community-supported day school...

...I do not suggest that such schools have no place...

...In lectures, newspaper and magazine articles, editorials, sermons, and discussions in small groups, a great many people argued that the community needed Jewish Jewish Federations, that we could no longer hope for Jewish educational and cultural institutions to maintain Our guest columnist this month is Jacob Neusner...

...Thus, to cite just one painful example, one of growing importance: Constituent agencies of Federations sometimes engage in programs totally unrelated to the aspirations of local communities, and then demand that the Federations support and endorse whatever they do and say...

...They competed for leadership with the synagogues and other organizations, providing a more prestigious and less Jewish way onward and upward in society...

...I for one maintain the communities are healthy and strong, and evidence for that conviction lies in the capacity of the Federations, during the last twenty years, to become exactly what we, their worst (still shunned) enemies, wanted them to become and baited them into being...

...that is their power...

...Finally "the youth"' of that day (T by then was over age and out of style) came crashing against the door — and found it wide open...

...But the condition of teaching is listening and learning...

...That is why it is true that Federations stand for the community as a whole...

...The loyalties elsewhere are to institutions, to boards, programs, a particular thing...

...It would require Federations to examine, explicitly, their own values and purposes...

...All the institutional patriotisms among us are spurious by the measure of love for the Jewish people...

...But the effort to call to account the activities of organizations paid for, all or in part, by Federations, has yet to begin...

...No one asks day schools founded and maintained by the Orthodox to give up Orthodoxy...

...That is why I think it is time to take with utmost seriousness problems generated by the solutions of the earlier age...

...There were great battles to be fought, and they have been fought, over the past decade, both within the boards of Federations and in the arena of public opinion — to which, it turns out...

...These constitute a peculiar mixture of oligarchy and guided democracy...

...That is why they should be taken seriously, why public issues of policy have to be debated in the arena formed by Federation work: taxing and spending...

...They fell flat on their faces, to be covered in the detritus of their own inflated rhetoric...

...Only the Federations reach out to the generality of American Jewry and claim (and sometimes, truthfully claim) to care about the community as a whole...

...And I therefore took the Federations very seriously indeed, and still do...

...They are vital signs...

...For no one among us is the Keeper of the Holy Grail...

...There are differences of opinion within the community...

...Federations now welcome and support applications from Jewish scholarly, religious, educational, and cultural institutions and programs, and for that we should be grateful...

...We have now, by way of illustration, the case of Torah u'M'sorah Day Schools, proponents of Brooklyn Orthodoxy (as distinguished from Yeshiva University Orthodoxy), which, taking advantage of the new sympathy for Jewish education, seek — and obtain — Federation support...

...who is University Professor...

...themselves, and that it was the very condition of the community — its attenuated Jewishness, its disinterest in its own continuity, its manifest self-hatred, above all its indifference — that testified to a need which only Federations could meet...

...Now let me not be misunderstood...

...But division and difference of opinion are not to be feared...

...Children in these schools are encouraged to pursue higher learning not in ordinary colleges and universities, but in yeshivas or the like, and a youngster who chooses a joint program at Brooklyn College and a yeshiva is regarded as a special success...

...Hence accountability would require debate...

...All other corporations — synagogues, schools — concern themselves with their own programs and effect their own aspirations...

...But when Federations are asked to pick up the bill, then the community for which the Federations stand also has rights, and responsibilities...

...None is more authentic than any other...

...The college graduates who guide Federations subsidize schools whose teachers did not go to college or qualify themselves for teaching American Jewish children in any routine way...

...Once it became stylish for Federations to hear lectures on "the campus as a disaster area in Jewish life" and on the alleged (and probably dishonest) correlation between intermarriage and Hebrew teachers' salaries, why stand around and listen...

...But when non-Orthodox children go to an Orthodox day school — commonly, the only one available — and when Federations make massive subventions to these schools, the fact is that the schools are no longer what they were: the private preserve of the Orthodox alone...

...In the name of "Judaism" or "Yiddishkeit" or "Torah" or, above all, "God," they bring to local communities values that have nothing to do with the values and understandings of their financial benefactors...

...I know that Federations do not wish controversy and struggle — it's bad for the budget...

...In a word, now that the Federations do take into account the aspirations of the local communities and regard the people as something more than donors, it is time for the communities — the institutions and organizations — to become accountable to the Federations...

...they sent others to sign the peace treaty...

...Their blustery words, their pretentious radicalism about propositions already familiar and mostly beyond argument, their shrill voices and inelegant style — these obscured the simple fact that no one disagreed with them...

...They are real, important, and deeply held...

...Federations are indeed responsive...

...Our communities are diverse...

...If our communities, therefore our Federations, do not have sufficient strength and confidence to welcome difference, then we have to acknowledge our weakness, not pretend to be able to do what we cannot...

...What makes American Jewry distinctive is its openness, indeed even its chaotic democracy...

...on the contrary, they have every right to propagate their views...