Improving The Jewish Community

...Only out of the creative spirit of individual Jews, not out of our institutions, will new answers begin to emerge...

...Moment/63...

...The process deals with public issues only, not matters in the personal-spiritual realm...

...Institutions are good at embodying and preserving the great ideals and values of the past: federations, the idea of tz'dakah and communal responsibility for the needy...

...We will survive and thrive only if millions of nameless, faceless, organizationless Jews living in 300 towns and cities throughout America feel themselves a real part of an American Jewish organism proud of its past, pulsating with life in its present, and offering an especially worthwhile future...

...It is as though they are there in their great abundance as a response to the ephemerality of being Jewish in the modern age...

...Al is Executive Vice-Chairman of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council—the coordinating body of 11 national and 108 local community relations organizations...

...The level of cooperation among the organizations within any given coordinating agency, and among the coordinating agencies, could be better...

...All right, then, I've been thinking...

...No corporate reorganization will create that spark...

...More or different Jewish organizations cannot provide that...

...pursued by our thousands of academics in the disciplines of the social sciences, history, psychiatry, philosophy and theology, together with our rabbis...

...It may seem odd that I, having spent my whole adult life in Jewish organizations (and intending to continue to do so) should expect so little of them...

...For there never has been anything like the American Jewish community— a totally voluntary community spread over an immense land, living in a free society...

...We have 11 national Jewish membership organizations that express their memberships' views on the major issues of our time, and 108 local community relations councils, and all comprise the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, a coordinating mechanism...

...American Jewry needs, more than anything else, self-definition...

...pursued in a way that makes evident to all that Judaism is alive...

...What our institutions can do is recognize those efforts that have the potential of fostering the organic growth—the communality—of American Jewry and encourage them, publicize them, make certain that our people are truly aware of them...

...Many find ways to penetrate it, ways as various as sexual love, drugs, humor, making music together, or earnest disputation...

...When, how, where do Jewish institutions in America today address the young person's pain as he struggles to find his identity, his selfhood, in a society of almost limitless lifestyle and occupational options...

...As Buber argued, Jewish teaching is not something "finished and unequivocal...

...It is no small thing to be part of a people and a religion that helps us through the trauma of death...

...But the rest of American Jewry, say 80 percent of us, need help...

...His "Report From Madrid" appeared in our January-February, 1981 issue...

...There is no body that governs over all of them, and that is the way it should be...

...How can you think that...

...But the potential for a great renewal of Jewish life in America does not reside in those institutions...

...We have a great network of community federations, which raise funds from Jews in their communities and allocate these funds to satisfy international, national and local needs, and all are part of the Council of Jewish Federations, a coordinating mechanism...

...But I am suspicious of this plethora of organizations...

...Isaiah Minkoff, Arnold Aronson, Samuel Spiegler and Walter Lurie comprised the staff of the NJCRAC when the first plan issued in 1953...

...They are our children, the children of disillusioned socialists, of small time capitalists, and they have in remarkably great profusion engaged themselves in tikun olam, in healing the world, often without realizing the connection between their heritage and their choice of occupational and/or personal direction...

...Are we shouting into a void...

...And what American Jews need is to figure out a way that helps them feel more closely attached to, more a part of, the American Jewish community without having to join any of its formal organizations...

...And what I've been thinking will not make Al—or many others—happy...

...That the results of that process—setting forth the consensus views or the majority-minority views, as the case may be—are published annually (and have been for almost thirty years) in a brilliant publication called the N.J.C.R.A.C...

...By next year, we may even have a word processor...

...Why, how, where do Jewish institutions in America today address the question of how to square our demands for privacy, our zealous protection of our own and each other's privacy—such an important value in modern Western society— with the isolation and loneliness privacy inevitably spawns...

...That lay and professional leadership of 11 national and 108 local agencies engage in that process...

...But the spark that is needed to weld together this great Jewish community of ours is a great, common undertaking, an enterprise of which all, young and old, will be a part, and that fuses the spiritual search, in which all of us in one way or another are engaged, with our identity as Jews...

...But the vast majority of American Jews are not active members of those or any organization...

...Sadly, the very existence of that process is unknown...

...Does he think I really know, but am withholding my profound master plan out of sheer perversity...

...we have budgets and programs and membership cards and copying machines...

...or the troubling and constant concerns of the relationship and mutual responsibilities between parents and children and between parents and their parents...

...He tantalizingly suggests to me that American Jewry requires fundamental reorganization, and that I have a duty to come forward and suggest how that might be done...

...We have several single issue coordinating mechanisms: The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, coordinator of and spokesman for every national organization in respect of Middle East issues, and the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, coordinator of and spokesman for a number of national and local organizations in respect of Soviet Jewry...

...Those who daily follow the rituals of our faith perhaps need no further self-definition...

...What our institutions can do, particularly our religious institutions, is find ways to sanctify— claim credit for, if you will—those emerging attributes of huge numbers of organizationless American Jews who, in their occupations, spend themselves in helping others...

...Intermarriage...

...A rabbi's sermon...

...In times of real crisis, however, it improves vastly...

...I am suspicious of all this protesting-too-much...

...What does Judaism offer to our troubled people...

...Joint Program Plan...

...What matters most—what is supremely essential—is the ongoing search, as a people...

...Only in the separate minds and souls of millions of American Jews, in their individual solitude...

...See...

...That kind of "reorganization" is not going to mean much in terms of the future health of American Jewry...

...It is rather a "gigantic process, still uncompleted, of spiritual creativity and creative response" and "we must truly will this process, all of it, from its beginnings...

...But where is the search, insofar as anything identifiably Jewish is concerned...

...it will come out of the efforts of individual Jews seeking a way to live that fuses their human spirituality and their Judaism into one...

...Of this I am certain: When a real renewal of Jewish life in America comes about, it will not arise out of our communal structure...

...We are real...

...Here is a process thought up by a handful of individuals a generation ago and nurtured by a growing number of individuals since then, that is unique to the American Jewish community, and that fosters our organic unity while respecting the right to dissent...

...Yet through its breathtaking sweep it could excite a great many younger Jews who believe that Jewish life in America is not relevant to their concerns...

...It will come from creative Jewish spirits addressing themselves to spiritual questions with which Jewish organizations do not—perhaps cannot— grapple...

...A psychologist's lecture at the local YMHA...

...No, Al is needling me because that's what he wants American Jewish leadership to be thinking about...

...Institutions, then, can preserve what is good from the past, they can sanctify what is good in the present, they can create processes by which existing individual and organizational efforts that enhance communality can be shared by Jews widely dispersed throughout a vast country, they can spot such efforts very early and fund and otherwise encourage them without coopting them—and all of this they can do without any change in our present organizational structure...

...national movements are part of the Synagogue Council of America, a coordinating mechanism...

...I do not think that American Jewry needs "reorganization"—not if that means we need more organizations or less organizations, or a merger of some organizations, or a new "umbrella" organization, or a merger of umbrella organizations...

...And when he needles me to say how that might be done, I not only feel guilty, I am also flattered...

...Jewish studies courses in universities not only do not participate in the process itself, which they should...

...About those other troubles and needs, Judaism's manifold current institutions barely speak to us at all...

...that lends an unforgettable spiritual dimension to marriage, to birth, to other rites of passage...

...A Jew should be able to define what being Jewish means to himself or herself, and why it's important to remain Jewish...

...You think Jews are disappearing...

...But analogies are irrelevant and necessarily inexact...

...I do not want to denigrate the worth of our religious institutions...

...So when he says that American Jewry requires reorganization he does not speak as just another casual observer...

...Assimilation...

...or the searing questions of sexual "morality" that plague teenagers and, increasingly, adults as well...

...TED MANN My friend, Al Chernin, needles me from time to time...

...But in its essentials, the organizational structure of American Jewry is sound...

...But just as great ideas rarely come out of a committee, so Jewish institutions cannot be counted on to produce the ideas that will give direction to a Jewish future...

...We are incorporated...

...Many organizations are part and parcel of almost every one of the above coordinating bodies...

...pursued before the very eyes of every Jew so that he will perceive that we are engaged in a spiritual search relevant to his deepest concerns...

...community relations agencies, the idea of prophetic Judaism in its most universal dimensions...

...For example, how many of our people know that several thousand Jews all over America engage, every year, in a process to determine whether we have a communal point of view on any or all of the public issues of our time—from what American policy in the Middle East should be, to urban blight, capital punishment, abortion, civil liberties, etc...

...But for many, the realization that they are most often isolated from every other human being is the beginning of their personal spiritual search...

...It resides in our people...

...But those occasions represent a small fraction of the time when Western man is spiritually troubled and in need...

...synagogues, all or part of our religious heritage, as each of the religious movements chooses to emphasize...

...The continued strength of all these institutions is absolutely essential...

...For those who are active members of Jewish organizations, the work in which they engage helps define their Jewishness, and that is good...

...moreover, that kind of reorganization will happen in the course of time anyhow, as it becomes evident that new needs, or the disappearance of old needs, require a tinkering with structure...

...Creative Jews will discover a way to make this a Jewish search, pursued by our younger Jews in their Jewish schools and in the universities' Jewish studies programs...

...The same may be said of those who devote their lives to tz'dakah, or to securing the lives of Jews in Israel, or to seeking the release of the Jews in the Soviet Union, or to Jewish community relations...

...There are of course no complete "answers" to these kinds of questions...

...We have a huge network of synagogues, serving as well as they know how the religious needs of our people, and each of these synagogues is part of some national movement, and most of these Ted Mann, the immediate past Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, is a Philadelphia attorney...

...that provides a sense of community and rhythm to our lives on Shabbat and holy days and festivals...

...Precisely how and from whom the idea emerged is unclear...

...How can we penetrate the "between," the space separating two human beings that seems to grow more and more inpenetrable as the society becomes more affluent and more jealous of its privacy...

...but the fact that the process exists is not made known to Jewish students there or anywhere...

...They had worked together intimately since 1946...

...And restructuring our corporate life is not the way...

...I could suggest analogies—like the millions of faceless, nameless Democrats (or Republicans) who do utterly nothing for their party except vote, but who would never consider changing party loyalty and whose children will follow in their footsteps...