Brutal honesty is the hallmark of truth. Brutal honesty
means that no matter how much the truth hurts, it is still the truth. Sugar coating
it only makes the truth confusing and misleading. In the case of Heterodoxy's
future the truth cannot be more brutal.
To put it the way Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein does:
Ten years ago, Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm was interviewed about the future of non-Orthodox Judaism. “With a heavy heart, we will soon say Kaddish on the Reform and Conservative movements.”1 If that interview alerted the world to a patient in critical condition, then Jack Wertheimer’s The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice Their Religion Today is a description of its hospice care.
This is the opening paragraph of Rabbi Adlerstein’s review
of the book in Jewish Action.
There are really no surprises. Just more details
underscoring the demise of what was once thought to be the future of Judaism in
America. Heterodox thinkers truly believed that by compromising or jettisoning religious
practices for purposes of conforming to an American ethos - it would enable Jews
to fully participate in the great American experience and achieve material success
unfettered by religious restrictions Thus putting American Jews on equal
footing with the rest of America. They could be ‘a Jew in the home and a man in
the street!’ That was pretty much the way Reform Judaism functioned.
Conservative Judaism was a bit more ‘conservative’ about
religious practice. But ultimately they had the same goal of being ‘a Jew in the home and a man in the street!’. While only tampering
with a few religious practices (albeit a key one in the case of Shabbos) they
at least held on to the idea that religious practice was integral to Judaism.
That hasn’t worked out to well for them either. Because once
you open the floodgates… you know what happens. Conservative Jews have over the
years almost completely abandoned the key religious practice of observing
Shabbos. And over time have eventually dropped almost all other religious practices. Which for
the most part was all but ignored by
their pulpit rabbis. Which brings us to this sad day in American Jewish history.
To illustrate let me excerpt one example of many described by Rabbi Adlerstein of
where we are at today in Heterodoxy:
In a chapter on finding meaning in Judaism, we learn that outside of Orthodoxy, “congregants struggle to believe in a God Who hears and answers prayers, and is actively involved in the fate of individual humans…
One Conservative rabbi titled a High Holiday sermon, “Why Jews Should Not Believe in God,” and told his congregants that the images of God in our Torah that they cannot buy into should be upgraded to a kind of “container to hold our experience of life that is unnamable” (p. 31). A Reform rabbi who polled his congregants the day after Yom Kippur came to the conclusion that, “For them . . . God is a presence or power . . . not so much ‘above’ us in heaven as . . . ‘beside’ us or ‘within’ us . . . [Who] ‘acts’ when we act with God’s attributes, such as love, kindness, and justice” (p. 32). The replacing of the traditional belief in God with something else has led many rabbis “to sanctify the preexisting social and ideological commitments of their congregants by figuratively blessing them as somehow Jewish” (p. 39).
Need I say more?
That so many of us are ‘dying’ as Jews in America is the
brutal truth. It should not really give us any solace that Orthodoxy is
thriving while the rest of American Jewry is disappearing. If Orthodox Jews are
10% of the Jewish population - the ratio of 1 Jew out of 10 surviving is tragic
beyond description.
This is not to say we can’t have pride in Orthodoxy being so
successful in perpetuating Judaism. We should. In fact Professor Wertheimer has
often expressed his admiration for us and understands why we thrive while his
own denomination is failing. Being proud of ‘being right’ does not make up for
the enormous tragedy of loss American Jewry is about to experience. Except
for the heroic efforts by Kiruv organization (whose success is minuscule in
comparison to huge numbers that are leaving) - the end is near.
If it were not for the fact that the data was collected and
analyzed by Professor Jack Wertheimer, one of the most respected thinkers in
the Conservative Movement - it would be a lot easier to dismiss it as anti heterodox
propaganda. But it is highly unlikely that a leading thinker of a movement will
predict its demise if that weren't the truth. It therefore may very well be the time to say Kaddish on
Heterodoxy as predicted by Rabbi Dr. Lamm.
In case there is any doubt about this heartbreaking
prognosis one need not even read the Professor’s book. Rabbi Adlerstein’s
review is filled with pertinent excerpts and makes the case very
well.
We should not be ‘slapping ourselves on the belly’ sated with our own accomplishments, looking at all this and saying, ‘Aha! See? I told
you so.’ Instead of being in any way triumphalist we should be shedding a great many
tears over this tragic loss.
