Strategies of Response

One strategy of response to all these changes has been an appeal to exclusivity as the best strategy for maintaining a viable Jewish community. Various authors have advocated swimming against the tide with respect to intermarriage, or concentrating our efforts on those already unequivocally in the fold, to deepen their connections.

I have two problems with this tack as a universal strategy. First, I have observed that such approaches tend to be formulated by deeply-embedded Jews. By this token, I think they are likely to be limited in their impact to those already within the inner circles to Jewish participation or very close to them. By way of illustration, consider this: If I were asked to guess, I would bet that most of the people reading this journal gave tzedakah to one or more Jewish causes in the past year, belong to a synagogue or havurah, are currently engaged in some kind of Jewish study, whether formal or informal, and celebrated Shabbat in some way this past week, just to take a few indicators of Jewish connection. You --- we --- are a group of insiders, not typical of American Jewry at large. That something seems self-evident to us is no guarantee of wider applicability or success.

I also believe --- perhaps a heresy in a journal like this one --- that few Jews outside of those who are already denominationally or politically committed drive their lives by ideology or will change their lives because of it. Rather, for most people, ideology comes later, if at all. It articulates and justifies life choices already made. But for Jews whose ethnicity is only symbolic and who live outside the orbits of Jewish neighborhoods and Jewish institutions, the lived experience of their identity is not compelling, so ideology doesn't (yet) make sense.

I suggest instead a strategy of multiplicity. Institutions and individuals located in different sectors of Jewish life need to approach the Jews they know and can connect with in different ways. I may prefer Torah study, or lively davvening with communal singing, or social action projects with an underlay of prophetic teaching, but I don't believe the evidence is there to support any approach exclusively. And our Jews certainly aren't in any one place, psychologically or sociologically, to be so approached. New patterns of communal participation must he nurtured, and we don't yet know what all of them are, so I am betting on variety: strategies to continue to nourish the core, yes, but also much more.

This is a double-barreled effort, aimed at both kinds of community --- of experience and of institutions --- at the same time. For this to work, the American Jewish polity must develop different institutional structures. Given the new geographic scatter, they will need to be localized and/or decentralized. The synagogue, given its historically local focus, can play a key role. But it must be a synagogue different from the old large-suburban culture-mall variety, a synagogue that can foster the sense of community, in its micro-meaning, among its members. Our Jewish communal professionals, including but not limited to rabbis, will need to understand life-cycle development, adult learning theory and practice, community organizing, and group facilitation, along with Torah and Jewish practice. And all our institutions will have to support each other in all this variety, and stop seeing differences as threat.

The old melting-pot antagonism between universalism and particularism is passe in the climate of ethnic options. The choice is no longer between being a ``normal American'' and a ``committed Jew.'' The new American opposite of ``total committed'' is not ``normal,'' but ``normal enough.'' American life, reflecting these new American conceptions of ethnicity, allows Jews to be different in important ways from other Americans --- and still be in the mainstream.

Most Jews are going to stay in that mainstream. The organized Jewish community needs to meet them where they are, in authentic ways. It remains to be seen if we can create a powerful enough sense --- and expressed reality --- of Jewish connectedness for Jewish identity to have more than a decorative claim on the lives of most American Jews.

Sherry Israel, a social psychologist, is Associate Professor in the Hornstein Program of Jewish communal Service, Brandeis University; and founder and active member of the Newton Center Minyan.