Wanted: Dead or Alive

...Instead, we raised issues of material and mass, issues to which we had nothing special to contribute...

...Long before there was a Jewish state, there was the idea of a Jewish state, and there would never have been a Jewish state without that idea...

...How is it that we were so very successful...

...And that is why the work of my generation is now over...

...And when we chose to play on alien turf, we added only another layer of veneer to the House of Israel in America, a house that has still no solid foundation...

...By and large, the things we wanted to make happen have happened, and the young see us as finished...

...The future of American Jewry will be decided, for better or worse, by the ideas that American Jews have and come to have regarding their future...

...I was, for example, one of the only people I knew who voted for Roosevelt in 1944 (as a sixth grader), which was a very Jewish thing to do in West Hartford (except when it was a very Irish thing to do...

...To be built from what...

...The new war is to shape an idea, not a shared consensus, but a consensus worth sharing...

...What I really wanted to be and to become, of course, was a Jew...

...What, after all, were the foci of the reforms we proposed and effected...

...We knew about that from our grandparents, who had remained too European ever to become Americans...

...Where were the people...

...And now we have learned that organizing an institution in one way rather than in another is not the answer...

...Did not the State of Israel begin in the minds of dissatisfied intellectuals...

...But I must have sensed that for our generation, being Jewish would require a special kind of effort and commitment...

...Paradoxes all the time...

...They will merely twitch, pretending life...

...We were intellectuals out to reshape the world we loved, the Jewish world, but we neglected our own gifts of intellect and heart, our own vocabulary...

...But ideas do move people...

...We were just a bit early on the scene...

...Yet the words are no longer obvious...

...For them, being Jewish is much less a given, a fixed condition, than it was to us, just as it was less a given to us than it had been for our parents, less to our parents than to our grandparents...

...They did not know how to ask the question, and we did not hear the question they did not ask, the only question we might have been able to answer with some authority...

...We knew how few we were, and we knew how different we were from our grandparents, how far removed from the manifest wellsprings of faith and commitment and culture, and we could not imagine what a Jewish future might be built upon, from what new springs it would draw its strength...

...There being no longer a sustaining environment, it would wither...

...An idea: mostly talk—but what a conversation, and what an impact...

...Vision takes precedence...

...There is simply no corpus of intellectually consequential ideas about what it means to be a Jew, here and now, in this time and in this place, to which Jewry today has access...

...They looked to us for ideas...

...I never saw a sukkah...

...We wanted the federations to spend their money on consequential things, Jewish things...

...So they did...

...Either become Jewish, really Jewish, whatever that might come to mean, be made to mean, or stop bothering, stop insisting on the difference, stop insisting even on survival...

...We led them to believe that in their distance from the life of the Jewish intellect, from Jewish ideas, in their remove from the soul of Judaism, they could and should do those things that would secure a worthy Jewish present and a viable vision of a Jewish future...

...And that foundation does not take dollars...

...I grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut, a suburb of Hartford, when only a few Jews lived there...

...Lost our nerve, our sense of self...

...How embarrassing to have to write these words...

...The seductive attraction of high office subverts the far greater power that intellectuals who do not deny themselves might exercise...

...So they did...

...They had power, and we imagined ourselves impotent...

...So it did...

...Nor will it be settled by raising another billion dollars for the State of Israel, nor even a billion for Jewish education and culture...

...We wanted the synagogues to organize themselves in ways that related to the individual and his needs, in this time, in this place, to permit the formation of groups where people would not feel lost...

...Not so Jewish that you stop being an American...

...About sex, they are wrong...

...The educated heart is what creates and shapes our energies to act...

...We pretended to think, and some of us even came to think, that there is something more important than ideas...

...And I think they are right...

...I am saying only that those choices are no longer the choices that need making, and it is disheartening to encounter so many, third and fourth generation alike, who persist in fighting yesterday's wars...

...My own three "projects" were the reform of federations, the formation of havurot and the development of Jewish studies in universities...

...We behaved like directors of agencies: asked for money, competed for money...

...I recall that one day, when I was in the ninth grade, I was walking along Farm-ington Avenue when a terrible thought occurred to me...

...I remember, for instance, my earliest writings on the budgets of Jewish federations, published in my father's newspaper (the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, which we subsequently sold...

...It is time now to place a foundation under that building...

...We got it all...

...They had to do with the spending of money, the building of institutions, the ordering of priorities...

...we answered other questions, questions whose answers were already known, questions that mattered but that did not require us to answer them...

...And now we have learned that money is not the answer...

...And now we have learned that our salvation does not lie in the East...

...They became undifferentiated Americans, to everyone except themselves...

...They had as much good will as we and as much constructive purpose...

...Our disappointments derive from other sources, not from our failure but from our success...

...Our victory in those wars makes possible a new war...

...We wanted the community to focus its attention on the great cultural resource represented by the State of Israel, to pay attention, as it had not adequately in the 1940's and 1950's, to the political requirements of Zionism...

...We of the third generation built a building, and that was an important thing to do...

...I analyzed the budgets of the Federation from year to year, and wondered in print what was Jewish about them or it...

...As, perhaps they were—for a time...

...That is what we wanted to know, and there was no answer save as we ourselves, we few, were ready to be the people, to provide the models...

...and second, I wondered whether it would be done at all for very much longer...

...Heschel's public power was vastly greater in the 1960's than it had been in the 1950's...

...If theology and ideology for contemporary Jewry were merely what people pretend—a conventional apologetic, a ritual of excuses—it might not matter...

...They have available to them a Jewish education far richer than we had...

...we eagerly invaded theirs...

...I agree with Hertzberg, but I also think that we, who are no longer alive, are not the ones to do the things that now want doing or even to say very much about what those things might be...

...Ideas come first...

...But it was only when I turned twenty-one and applied for my first passport that I discovered that my name, my only name, the name bestowed upon me at birth and hidden from me for more than two decades, was not Jackie, was not Jack, was, in fact, Jacob...

...It will be settled by what the fourth generation manages to achieve by way of a set of ideas...

...So there is the advice...

...Those few of us who thought about being Jewish, who were part of the generation that was too young for the Second World War, too old for Vietnam, that missed Korea by virtue of student deferments, that seemed stuck in the cracks between great historical events, we worried about the Jewish future...

...As well as a growing number of converts to Judaism...

...About being alive, they have a point...

...It takes words, and ideas...

...I remember, about being Jewish, only two things: first, I thought it was something to do only in private...

...Pretended to sophistication...

...As well as an intermarriage rate larger than we imagined we could bear...

...But to make that work, to make it last, to make it possible for our children to step easily into a living community, we had to develop a public agenda as well...

...Years later, it is what those who knew me then most remember: "He was the one who wanted to become a rabbi...

...We took seriously what we were not and apologized for what we were...

...The world of our children is paradoxically different from our own...

...The federations have now become principal vehicles of Jewish expression and continuity...

...That was the day I decided to become a rabbi, a decision I promptly shared with the whole world...

...And when intellectuals are responsible for events, it is because they develop ideas that are compelling, not because they aspire to positions of power...

...Specifically, we could not know and did not guess that most of our friends, the ones who did not know and did not care, the ones who were busy "waspifying" themselves, would one day marry Jews and join synagogues and temples and choose to live near other Jews and care about Israel and all the rest: that they would want to be Jews...

...That has yet to be done...

...Ah, there was so much that we wanted...

...I remember how shocked I was, when I came to Oxford, to meet young Jews of intellectual distinction who knew the grace after meals—yes, the birkat hamazon— and said it...

...In this context, let those with ideas remain true to their hearts, their minds, their intellects...

...It is for the living to name those things and to do them, because the things that are to be done, whatever they are, will have to respond to the agenda of need of a generation that was framed by different experiences from our own and is defined by different needs...

...And to win that war, too, intellectuals will have to stick to their lasts...

...We won the fight Think about it: if there was an "organized Jewish community" back when I was growing up, it was so remote that we never heard about it...

...And when we found those places, we used them to try to expand the Jewish possibility, to make the entire community a congenial place for our Jewish aspirations...

...They, too, understood what needed to be done, and they did it...

...The ideas the rabbis preach must come from somewhere...

...Our parents tried to overcome the alienness, and succeeded...

...We were right to want it...

...It had to become a vocation, because, left to flourish in a less explicit environment, it would not flourish at all...

...without ideas, people will not move...

...We are a people to whom a book is an event, a rare insight, an occasion for celebration...

...What people think really matters...

...So here I am, about to pass the torch...

...And we got it...

...The community is in the hands of practical and effective and intelligent people, both lay and professional...

...What we should have known all along, but are only now coming to see, is that neither money nor organization can secure our future...

...They start in our minds, not in our bellies (pace the Communists and the federations alike), not in our bank accounts...

...Those of us who knew from early on that the Jews were supposed to last, who wanted the Jewish connection to survive, were, as I have said, few in number...

...But at the very same time, the crafting of Jewish lives, of a Jewish life, is no longer the laborious, idiosyncratic effort it was for us...

...What we accomplished was in response to our own agenda, an agenda that grew out of our own distinctive experience as the third generation...

...I cannot blame him, but I think we would be better off today had he pursued, in his last years, those lines of thought and modes of reflection which in a few brief years yielded Man Is Not Alone and God in Search of Man...

...we were right to get it...

...We had to force the Jewish community to resolve its own ambivalence in order, I suppose, so that we could resolve ours...

...In towns such as ours, federations did not yet exist or, if they did, scarcely thought of themselves as anything more than welfare agencies for the distressed...

...My generation—the third generation of American Jewry—began somewhere, cared and dreamed and worried about some things, and is now finished...

...The Jewish community center was inaccessible, had no program that I can remember hearing of...

...In our day, that meant finding others who shared that most peculiar wish—in seminaries, in youth movements, in a few other scattered places...

...And we, in our turn, became for a time what our parents wanted us to be— undifferentiated Americans, to everyone, ourselves included...

...I do not see that there is much for "the organized Jewish community" to do these days except not to block or to blight the things that still-unheard-of-names will soon be proposing, perhaps even demanding...

...In our house, everything vulgar and tasteless was "European...

...But it was a different kind of power, and it yielded different products, and all of them have now evaporated...

...Jacob Neusner, a contributing editor of moment, is University Professor, Professor of Religious Studies and the Ungerleider Distinguished Scholar of Religious Studies at Brown University...

...Later on, our group—for we became a kind of group—we few— went on to ask what was Jewish about Jewish community centers, and again, we found remarkably few answers...

...The mystery of the third generation: Jewish but not too Jewish...

...So we lost our voice...

...She called me Jackie, until my voice deepened and she switched to Jack...

...and Jewish studies in universities, both quantitatively and qualitatively, have achieved distinction...

...Was it not shaped by first class minds...

...And I was one of the only people I knew who was aware that something of great importance was happening in 1948...

...So it is with the great movements of every age...

...When I was at Harvard, the few observant Jews, almost all the sons of rabbis, were curiosities...

...Do not be other than what you are...

...And offered nothing of what we knew...

...And we talked to them of money and how to spend it...

...the policies expressed in federation meetings have to begin with someone...

...We were too enamored with the trappings...

...There were few camps of Jewish content (though I went to a camp where everyone was Jewish), no youth movements to speak of (except for misfits...

...His monumental intellectual achievements of that period received no hearing either then or later...

...One had to set out to discover Judaism and self-consciously to make a Jew of oneself, because we had neither encountered it nor been invited, nor, perhaps, even permitted to encounter it as we grew up...

...I am inclined to be hopeful, for that is my nature, but I am also mindful of Arthur Hertzberg's warning: "There is more passion for Jerusalem and more loyalty to Judaism in the American Jewish community today than we shall have in a decade, if we do not do some radical things now...

...The thing we wanted most was to be part of a community that would share our concern for "being Jewish," whatever that might mean...

...Schools, summer camps, youth programs, and, of course, the State of Israel—a set of educational resources that is rich beyond anything we dreamed of...

...Chiefly, we came to the community with what it already was coming to know...

...But what we wanted and needed and achieved, we wanted and needed for ourselves, not for those to come...

...And then I would be the last Jew on earth—or, at least, on Farmington Avenue in West Hartford...

...I think, for example, of Abraham Heschel, who in the late 1950's laid forth an intellectual heritage still not adequately interpreted or understood...

...They drew on what they had: money and organizational skill...

...Even without us, the passionate reformers of the 1950's and 1960's, the things that we like to think we had a hand in making happen would have happened...

...I came, please understand, from a very Jewish—though not at all Judaic—family, so I was one of those who cared about being Jewish...

...They are not obvious to the formers and shapers of Jewry because we, who formed the corpus of ideas, of theology and ideology, over the last thirty years, behaved as if they were secondary, and actions primary...

...The plain fact is that the future of American Jewry will not be decided by the synagogues, the federations, the centers, the day schools, the hospitals, the American Jewish Committees and the Anti-Defamation Leagues...

...My mother, a matriarch of the second generation, was proud of not having been born in "Europe," which was less a place than a state of mind...

...For the third generation, for the generation that married Jewish but did not know why, that wanted Jewish but did not know how, we provided the structure of organizations and the intellectual underpinnings which today serve as the foundation of organized Jewry in this country...

...We all got sucked into the value system of the organized community, as it existed in our day...

...I never knew about the shabbat...

...What we should have known all along, but are only now coming to see, is that neither money nor organization can secure our future...

...We, who spend our lives in classrooms and in libraries, in studies, pulpits, editorial offices, the places where intellectuals do their work, learned a whole new vocabulary, chose to play on alien turf...

...Just as the young cannot imagine that their parents enjoy, or even know about, sex, so they cannot comprehend that their parents are alive in the same way in which they are alive...

...Was it not born as an idea...

...havurot multiply and are fruitful...

...So when they invited us to join them, that is exactly what we did, forgetting that if all we had to offer was a pale imitation of the resources they already had, they would not have wanted or needed to invite us...

...Accordingly, we approached the community back in the late 1940's and early 1950's with a very peculiar set of demands...

...The important thing to remember is that we were not frustrated in the pursuit of our goals...

...We did not invite the shapers and movers to our turf...

...But first, as they say, a word of advice, from the rocking chair to the runner...

...Most of the Jewish kids I knew were not much interested in being Jewish and did a very good job of adjusting their appearance and behavior to match their lack of interest...

...They might have taken a bit longer, but they would have happened...

...We wanted more attention to be paid the State of Israel than was paid back then, before the earthquakes and revolutions that transfixed the entire community...

...A time would come, I realized, when the rabbi of our (Reform) temple would be dead, and my father, too, would die...

...where were the models...

...Don't make the mistakes that I, or others like me, made...

...It was during the 1960's that he became a public figure and gained a vast and impressive hearing—but that was not for his distinctive intellectual contribution...

...A Jewish community...

...Paradoxes that will not be resolved until the fourth generation matures...

...I am not saying that we were wrong to make the choices that we made...