Fresh-Brewed Judaism

...On a practical level, Toward Tradition holds local town hall meetings and national conferences (including a national convention), puts out a regular journal and policy papers, and distributes press releases by email and fax—often lashing out at the liberal Jewish establishment...

...I view [Seattle] as a delightfully intriguing challenge," Lapin said...

...Jews in the Pacific Northwest have reclaimed Tu B'Shevat as a major holiday thanks in part to the efforts of the nonprofit Northwest Jewish Environmental Project (NWJEP...

...The whimsy of turning this not-so-complimentary theological reference into the name of a Jewish hiking club is wholly appropriate to the group's casual style...

...The people I know have a strong social conscience...

...The group has more than 2,000 dues-paying members and a mailing list of 11,000 people who receive its press releases and newsletters...

...11 terrorist attacks were made possible by this climate of secularization in America...

...six synagogues hosted their own Tu B'Shevat seders this year...

...For the most part, however, her experience with TWJ has not been overtly religious...

...neither did the Eastside Torah Center (a Chabad program favored by some of the area's spiritual seekers), or two of the Reform temples...

...For better or for worse," Lapin said, "many American Jewish organizations have replaced the Judaism of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as their guiding philosophy with the doctrine of secular liberalism...

...Seidenberg arrived in Seattle a few months before protesters descended on the city in November 1999 to demonstrate against the World Trade Organization (WTO), and he has been hooked on political organizing ever since...

...A secularized people forgets how to recognize evil...

...He is a cofounder of the Puget Sound Global Action Network (PSGAN), a coalition of labor, environmental, and student groups committed to social justice...

...There are more than 7,000 Seattle Jews between ages 25 and 34— that's about 19 percent of Seattle's total Jewish population—and Hashash's group strives to bring them together for pothicks, dances, and social service events...

...In the past 20 years, the Jewish population of the greater Seattle area has nearly doubled from 19,000 to 37,000—twice the growth rate of the general Seattle population...

...As with everything else in this '90s boomtown, forging a J e w i s h i d e n t i ty in Seattle has a pioneering, do-it-yourself spirit...

...Seidenberg's active participation is informed by his Jewish values, but also takes a decidedly ecumenical slant...

...As we stand overlooking Puget Sound, I strike up a conversation with Amy, one of the charter members...

...Gesturing around the cafe's faux living room, crowded with young mothers and even younger dot-commers hard at work on laptops, Hashash waxes philosophical about his adoptive city: "Seattle is not the East Coast, but we are still part of the same hurried lifestyle—we run from car to work to computer...

...The best thing about the group, in her opinion, is its openness to first-timers without much Jewish education...

...For many 20- and 30-somethings in this flagship Gen X city, Jewish life does not center around minyan...

...If you breeze into town interested in finding, say, an Israeli dancing club, there's a good chance you'll have to start your own...

...PERHAPS NO GROUP IS MORE emblematic of Seattle's ruggedly individualistic Judaism than the Wandering Jews, which organizes weekly hikes in the stunning Cascade mountains surrounding Seattle...

...Since the early 1900s, Seattle has been home to one of the nation's largest concentrations of Sephardic Jews...

...According to There are Lots of Ways to Count—A Demographic Study of the Greater Seattle Jewish Population, the metropolitan area has 19 congregations, up from 12 in 1985—the first year Microsoft Windows was sold in stores...

...Renee Cohen, assistant director of the University of Washington's H i l l e l , tells me that "local synagogues are bursting at the seams from current membership...

...They are uncomfortable with the ritual elements of religion and see me as a weird and interesting phenomenon—that guy who wants to light Shabbos candles...

...Judaism is "in" on Manhattan's Upper West Side...

...But the importance of the Microsoft network has declined as the Seattle J e w i s h community has grown larger and more established...

...Amy learned the Friday night prayers from a boyfriend she met through TWJ...

...But it's also likely that, as word of mouth spreads, the club will soon be overrun with like-minded people who just hadn't found each other yet...

...This wave of immigrants from the Iberian peninsula, fisherman from the islands of Marmara and Rhodes, in the former Ottomon Empire, were attracted to Seattle's booming fishing industry at the turn of the last century...

...T h e city also boasts five Jewish day schools and five kosher restaurants...

...On one blustery Sunday morning, I set out with The Wandering Jews (TWJ's) for an "urban hike"—a brisk six-mile loop with a convenient stop at a coffee shop...

...People, like me," she says, "who don't know Hebrew, never went to Jewish camp, and don't even know the right songs to sing at the right times...

...The overall population of the greater Seattle area has exploded in the past 20 years from 1,269,749 in 1980 to 1,737,034 in 2000, according to the latest Census data—natives refer to the newcomers with a mix of affection and irritation as "transplants"—and the Jewish community is no exception...

...And while liberal Seattle and conservative Toward Tradition may at first blush seem like an odd couple, a closer look reveals that todays Seatde is becoming something of a Jewish melting pot...

...to oppose what he describes as the stifling liberalism of America's leading Jewish organizations...

...So what is Toward Tradition doing in liberal Seattle...

...Recent press releases have attacked Hadassah, Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the U.S...

...Seidenberg and I are riding the ferry to Bainbridge Island, one of the many small islands dotting Puget Sound...

...When I ask Dan Cory, another founding member, if any of the hike leaders incorporate prayer into the outings, he gives me a quizzical look as if he's never thought of the possibility...

...13, 2001 Toward Tradition took out an ad on the New Vork Times oped page, arguing that the Sept...

...T h e emphasis is less on reclaiming an authentic past rooted in old world traditions than on finding a Judaism that feels suited to Seattle's blend of outdoorsy spirituality...

...It's just that no one has hrnnn-Vit- it n n " Jewish life in Seattle isn't all new age, tree hugging experimentation...

...Where did a young rabbi committed to progressive politics fit in...

...In one posting last December to the PSGAN email list, Seidenberg invited all "friends and comrades" to a "Hanukkah/Solstice party," and asked them to "bring instruments, menorahs, any other weird light rituals, incense, drink, etc...

...The 20- and 30-something Jews seem to be marked more than anything else by their experimental flare...

...On Nov...

...another blows a shofar outside the cafeteria during the month of Elul...

...But on the whole, the young Jewish labor organizers in Seattle are secular...

...No, not really," he says, "but we wouldn't mind...

...Young Jews around here aren't running to synagogues," Hashash tells me, "but that doesn't mean that they aren't thirsting for some land of Jewish content...

...Rabbi Daniel Lapin, who heads Toward Tradition, says many Seattle Jews are "reconnecting with [traditional] Judaism...

...This is a vibrant, growing Jewish community," says Amy Wasser-Simpson, director of planning and allocations for the Jewish Federation of Greater Seatde...

...T h e y see kids and old people there, and think one thing: boring...

...A small circle of friends started TWJ in 1995, and the group now boasts more than 500 members...

...Mercer Island, a Seattle suburb, is also home to Toward Tradition, a conservative, national educational group that promotes a faith-based approached to solving America's social ills (see sidebar, facing page...

...SOONER OR LATER, it seems," wrote Newsweek in a 1996 cover story, " S e a t t l e Reigns Everyone moves to Seattle, or thinks about it, or at least their kids do...

...Every Monday night he teaches a class on kabbalah to a circle of eager islanders, many of whom escaped the rush of the city to lead a more rural life of hiking and gardening...

...In Christian legend, the Wandering Jew is a figure who mocked Jesus on the way to the cross and is thus doomed to wander the earth until Judgment Day...

...but there's something different going on here...

...Last year, the project ran a community-wide Tu B'Shevat seder that attracted more than 400 guests...

...Starbucks taps into the need to just meet and talk, to be part of a community...

...Seattle's young Jewish community is free-spirited and still-emerging...

...Bet Alef, Seattle's meditational synagogue, did not exist when Microsoft came to town...

...We all hike here...

...The class is held in a low-slung living room with a picture window looking back across the water to the twinkling city skyline...

...Holocaust Memorial Museum...

...On this particular Sunday, about 30 people and two dogs gather to make the trek...

...With the rise of the twin powers of Starbucks and Microsoft nearly a century later, the city began attracting a new influx of young Jewish professionals to its high-tech sector...

...it includes everything from spirituality-tinged environmentalism to a New Age emphasis on kabbalah and mysticism, all with a distinctly West Coast flair...

...One current employee, David Bolnick, is well-known for being a mohel on the side...

...free markets, a strong military, and a moral public culture...

...That's the 11th commandment Thou shall hike," Lapin said...

...Lapin, an Orthodox rabbi, radio host, and author, is also the president of the Mercer Island-based Toward Tradition, a staunchly conse vatrve advocacy group of Jews and Christians who are "dedicated to fighting secular institutions that foster antkeligious bigotry, harm families, and jeopardize the future of America...

...He promptly answers his own question...

...DAVID SEIDENBERG ASKED PRECISELY THAT question when he moved to Seattle in 1999, a few years after receiving his rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York...

...Seidenberg's vision of political organizing spiked with Jewish spirituality has a forerunner in the region's Jewish environmental movement, which blends the traditional idea of stewardship over the earth with concerns about contemporary issues like global warming and commercial logging...

...she has since sewed five hnppot (Jewish wedding canopies) for friends who met their spouses in the group...

...He's been trying for the last decade...

...Hashash runs the Jewish Entertainment Network, a social group geared to 20- and 30-somethings, and we are here to talk about Seattle's burgeoning, young Jewish scene...

...What Seattle offers is a lot of [Jewish] options...

...Philanthropists and community leaders, who a few years earlier were citing reports such as Alan Dershowitz's The Vanishing American Jevi and blaming secularism for the alarming rate of intermarriage, are now pointing to New York City as a sign of religious revival...

...He even suggests that the great outdoors can help bring Seattle's conservative and liberal Jews together...

...And though it does not seem to predominate among the 20- and 30-something set, there is a healthy strain of traditional Judaism being practiced in Seattle...

...But teaching Jewish mysticism is only Seidenberg's side interest...

...Lapin, who teaches a class on Nachmonides (the Ramban) every Friday morning at his Mercer Island home (as many as 30 young people attend the class), sees in these Jewish Seattleites a "serious commitment to Torah study...

...Board member Jack Abramoff is a Washington lobbyist with strong ties to GOP House whip Tom Delay of Texas, according to the Forward...

...Toward Tradition's critics take issue with the personal attacks (in one release, it referred to Hadassah as a group of "grumpy old ladies") and argue that the organization is way out of step with American Jewry—much of which is still overwhelmingly liberal...

...It crops up in unlikely places—the nearby Cascade mountains, the city's many political protests, and, of course, its ubiquitous coffee shops...

...And yet, that's precisely what is going on across the country in New York City...

...Poems, reflections, anything...

...That includes eight Orthodox shuls, seven Reform, two Conservative, Eitz Or, the Jewish Renewal congregation, and one meditational synagogue...

...Hence America failed to take evildoers seriously, which led to the intelligence breakdown that allowed the Sept...

...Lapin wants to bring America's liberal Jewish establishment to its jerking knees," wrote Ami Eden in the June 29, 2001 Forward article...

...I sit next to Zann, a Jewish woman in her 40s with long hair, who tells me that she thinks "we'll look back on this time in Seattle as a real Jewish renaissance...

...Most of the city's young Jews "haven't been raised with a religious background," says Silja Talvi, a freelance writer based in Seattle...

...Toward Tradition has an annual budget of more than $750,000 and an array of Republican contacts (Lapin was the only rabbi at then president-elect Bush's first meeting with religious leaders in December 2000) Its editorial director, David Klinghoffer, is a former editor at the conservative National Review...

...Now why can't a J C C or a synagogue do that...

...Unlike N ew York, where the young Jewish community has a well-defined, often interconnected "in" crowd, who all went to the same schools (Ramaz, Flatbush, Columbia), hang out at the same places (Makor, Tonic, the 92nd Street Y), and are headed for the same jobs and Upper West Side coops, Seattle doesn't have the same sense of place and continuity...

...Yet, "much more than their parents' generation they are asking 'who am I? How can I reconnect with something that I have felt as alienating...

...In the early years, Microsoft employees depended on an email list called, "Jews at Microsoft" QAM) to find kosher food or a Shabbat poduck...

...That's a very typical picture," said Daniel Lapin, "but it's not accurate...

...It's no surprise, then, that Seattleite Asher Hashash suggests we meet at one of the city's 25 Starbucks...

...11 attacks," the ad stated, concluding: "a religious America is a safe America...

...According to the mission statement on its Web site, Toward Tradition, which was founded ten years ago, seeks to "advance the nation toward traditional, faith based, American principles of consti tutjonal and limited government...

...For Seattleites, many of whom migrated to the Pacific Northwest for the region's famously laid-back atmosphere, Jewish content is not strictly defined...

...As it turns out, the much-touted Jewish renaissance—not to mention the shul-as-cool phenomenon—has not yet hit the Pacific Northwest...

...Not just being Jewish—Jerry Seinfeld, lox and bagels style—but traditional Jewish observance (or at least its trappings): down-and-dirty davening, the klezmer revival, and Hasidic melodies (nigunim...

...His real energy is devoted to creating the Ma'on Study Circle, a group aimed at blending Jewish spirituality, ritual, direct action, justice, and text study...

...Fresh-Brewed Judaism LEAH PLATT Seattle is best known as the birthplace of American cappuccino culture...

...You just aren't going to be able to get hipster 28-year-olds to go to shul...

...So far," he admits, "it's just a figment of my imagination, [but] I have dreams of what the Study Circle might become...

...It may be a very liberal community but it is a very giving and warm community made up and led by very thoughtful individuals...