Havurot: Two Views

...At the National Havurah Conference, I saw Jewishness being lived...

...For me, and for most others in my age bracket, the four days at Rutgers were an extraordinary affirmation, of family life, and of the degree to which Judaism is enriched by equality of the sexes—and a confirmation of the deprivation Judaism has suffered by relegating women to a separate and (if we are honest) subordinate role...

...The Jewishness of which he spoke, Rosenzweig added, "can be grasped through neither the writing or reading of books...

...It is too soon to say whether this effort to renew a sense of intimate fellowship in Jewish life will prove an enduring phenomenon...

...2. The havurot do not seem to be any more successful than the organized Jewish community in educating children and attracting active involvement of families...

...As one middle-aged, middle class havurah member put it, "there are two kinds of Jews, serious and non-serious...

...The fundamentally moral and authentically Jewish affirmation of the nuclear family is just not heard...

...Charles Silberman's most recent book is Criminal Violence— Criminal Justice (Random House...

...The loosely knit movement of havurot which is now at least ten years old and which just concluded its first annual conference should certainly be given its due...

...When, for example, I presented and defended an anti-elective abortion position which is virtually identical with the mainline views of rabbinic Judaism, the position came under predictable and virtually unanimous criticism as being simply inconsistent with current realities...

...Contrary to ideologues on both sides, I see no structural element of the havurot which assures their Jewish vitality, and nothing in the structure of the synagogue which assures its collapse...

...In fact, stereotypes were shattered on all sides, as people of widely (sometimes wildly) disparate backgrounds related to one another as human beings—as Jewish human beings...

...Perhaps I overstate, but I do not think so...

...Gellman: I have yet to observe a healthy Jewish life which did not accept the fundamental premise that all Jewish acts are holy...

...Or so they confessed, as they talked on Sunday about the radical change in perception that the preceding days had wrought in them...

...For if there was a common denominator to the 300-plus adults in attendance, it was the seriousness with which they take their Judaism—the seriousness with which they struggle to reconcile Judaism with modernity...

...Aside from the merits of this particular debate, the narrow range of political position and the readiness to claim Jewish authenticity for prior personal political choices seem every bit as pronounced in the ranks of havurah Judaism as they are in the pages of Commentary...

...There is here an honest and direct speaking about doing God's work in the world—a speaking which we have erroneously been taught to regard Marc Gellman, a contributing editor, last apperared in moment 18 pages ago...

...The former are concerned only with the mechanized creation of an impersonal Jewish "product...

...On the Thursday evening of the conference, Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College in New York, nearly brought the plenary session to its feet with a ringing attack on synagogue life...

...Equally important, he missed the feelings of closeness and warmth that developed among people who had been total strangers, and the changes in attitudes that those feelings engendered...

...But ultimately, the survival of Judaism depends less on the birth rate than it does on the willingness of Jews to be Jews...

...If I seem to be describing a conference different from the one Marc Gellman attended, it is because, in a sense, we attended different conferences...

...we are serious Jews...

...He characterized synagogues as "corporations of limited liability" in contradistinction to the havurot which are "communities of unlimited liability...

...What I really think is that each of us is trying to bring the Messiah, and each of us is trying to keep the Messiah away...

...The lack of family involvement noted above makes this all the more true in the current generation of havurot...

...Acceptance of this premise does not lead, as is sometimes feared, to a desiccation of authentic Jewishness but rather to a basic tolerance and openness to the rich fabric of Jewish life...

...The roster of Conference participants covered the entire spectrum of politics, life styles, and allegiances...

...My simple feeling is that there are no institutions which all the good people have created, no one way that all the good people are following...

...Over the course of the last decade, the havurah phenomenon has grown rapidly and the national conference is a confirmation of its significance as a new form of Jewish expression...

...Of the 346 people at the conference, only 35 were children...

...they have shown the importance of spirituality to the faith and life of our people...

...Would that we were all so serious...

...it has penetrated the mainstream...

...Emerging out of a general consensus among Jewish youth that organized Judaism has produced too many who have rejected the premise of openness and holy toleration, the havurot have restored more than an eclectic joy to the practice of Judaism...

...It is no longer the exclusive preserve of the counter-culture...

...Rabbi Gellman left two days early, and so missed the celebration of Shabbat, which made most participants feel part of a huge extended family...

...Of course the kind of atavism that gets chosen is distinctly more liberal than those chosen by established Jewish institutions (with the possible exception of the Reform Movement), out the dynamic is the same...

...in context, this amounted to praising with faint damn...

...More specifically, I saw a broad spectrum of Jewish human beings—singles...

...No one concerned with Jewish survival or motivated by ahavat Yisrael can fail to be moved by the seriousness and thoughtfulness with which havurah members are wrestling with these questions...

...Silberman: "What we need more than ever, or at least as much as ever, are human beings—Jewish human beings," Franz Rosenzweig wrote more than a half-century ago...

...the latter with process and community cohesiveness...

...Specifically: /. As in the organized Jewish community, there is a tendency among the havurot to sanctify political atavisms under the guise of religious truth...

...In my session on the use of improvisational dramatics as a technique for teaching midrash to children, I met five charming and bright kids, none of whom (I am fairly certain) was being Jewishly educated primarily by his or her havurah...

...The havurah movement may not be ecstatic, but it is unabashedly theist...

...Herewith, two quite differing assessments, both from participants in the conference...

...young couples with infants carried in slings...

...Its rejection leads more often than not to pious carping about those whose acts are not motivated by true belief, and whose beliefs are not true...

...Hoffman's attempt at a balanced statement led him to criticize havurot for their almost willful disregard for efficiency...

...The joy was most evident on Shabbat, especially at Havdalah, when 300 children and adults, the infants on their fathers' shoulders, joined arms in the darkness and swayed, chanted, and danced...

...For some, the struggle is principally theological—an attempt to find a basis for faith after Auschwitz, and to find a language with which to talk to God...

...It is only lived...

...Indeed the record of the havurot in this respect seems clearly more dismal than the synagogues...

...Yet, after spending a couple of days teaching midrash for adults and children, and Jewish medical ethics at the conference, I have come to the reluctant conclusion that the havurot have somehow nurtured the very sins they rail against in the organized Jewish community...

...Conversely, the extensive demands made upon active members of synagogues sometimes look very much like the "unlimited liability" Hoffman describes...

...But it is no longer premature to assess the directions it is taking...

...The early history of the first havurah, Havurat Shalom in Boston, involved the moving away from a true Jewish collective (where members had to get permission even to get a job) to a group with much more "limited liability" for its members...

...I found it quite strange that even though many congregational rabbis and some high officials of the major Jewish synagogue and social service agencies were in attendance, and also on the steering committee, the ideology of the havurot is increasingly anti-synagogue, and anti-rabbi...

...The comparison is perhaps unfair, considering the massive resources employed by synagogues, but at least it casts a shadow over the self-congratulatory sentiments that havurot provide an answer to the alienation of organized Jewish education...

...One observer summed up the feelings of a great many others when he remarked that he "loved being part of a minyan where the fathers hold jthe babies and the mothers hold the Torahs...

...For others, the struggle is mainly halachic or aggadic—an attempt to create a new Midrash that is compatible with contemporary sensibilities about the role of women and of sexuality...

...as the province of fundamentalist Christianity...

...To me, unlike Rabbi Gellman, the four days at Rutgers constituted an extraordinary affirmation of the beauty of family life—a new kind of Jewish family life, in which mothers and fathers partake equally of the joys of Jewish study and worship, as well as of parenting...

...I also heard much complaint by havurah members who are married and who have children that they feel left out and not at home in the single and childless environment of the havurot...

...For others, the struggle largely involves problems of life style: what does it mean to live Jewishly in a secular and heavily materialistic society...

...Nearly one-third belong to suburban synagogue-affiliated (and usually synagogue-initiated) havurot or to "havurah synagogues," and most members of independent havurot also appeared to be firmly rooted in the middle class...

...HAVUROT TWO VIEWS MARC GELLMAN CHARLES SILBERMAN In early July, more than 300 representatives of sundry havurot—small groupings of Jews, some operating within an institutional context, some independently—gathered for the first national havurah conference...

...What made the Conference a memorable and often moving experience was that I saw these Jewish human beings living their Jewishness with an impressive combination of seriousness, thoughtfulness, and joy...

...Where the mothers, along with the single women, read from the Torahs as well as hold them, and where they lead the davening, expound on the weekly portion, develop new rituals, create midrash, and play a variety of other roles...

...Transient institutions are being created for transient persons...

...Aside from my distress at hearing such crude vituperation from a teacher of rabbis, the analysis is simply untrue...

...In a world in which being Jewish has become an option, rather than a fate, the havurah movement has made (and on the evidence of the Rutgers conference, continues to make) a major contribution to Jewish survival...

...I arrived a day late and so may have missed the ideological posturing that troubled him...

...I have no desire to draw a balance sheet oh all this...

...middle-aged married folk, whose children are grown...

...As does Rabbi Gellman, I worry about the low birth rate among American Jews—a birth rate well below zero population growth...

...To be sure, some members of independent havurot— people with roots in radical politics and/or the counter-culture—arrived feeling suspicious, or even hostile, toward main-line institutions and their members and leaders...

...3. The havurot show every bit as much intolerance to non-havurah institutions as is shown by those institutions towards the havurot...