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| Photo for Quiz ‘Em (My wife is 2nd from right) |
How well he knows me. It is yet another voice of sanity from
within the heterodox rabbinate that, I’m afraid, will largely go unheeded.
Conservative Rabbi Steven Abraham has written a hard-hitting
critique about what is wrong with heterodox movements. It is a critique I could
have written myself and, in fact, have expressed many times over the years. In
short, he excoriates his own movement for missing the boat on Jewish education.
Focusing too much on Tikkun Olam while neglecting the Torah
and its demands.
An example of what I mean is found in the following excerpt:
You cannot balance tradition and modernity when your students know only modernity. You cannot teach historical Judaism to children who have no history. You cannot cultivate halakhic seriousness while presenting mitzvot as folkways, charming when convenient and disposable when they ask something of us. If we are honest, we too have bent to the cultural wind, lowering our expectations and apologizing for the severity of the covenant. But a Judaism that exists to ratify a secular political platform will be discarded the moment its usefulness ends. Why rise early on Shabbat to wrestle with a text three thousand years old if its conclusion merely echoes an op-ed one could have read in bed?
I have to say that the values he champions are the very same
values that I - and any knowledgeable Orthodox Jew - would champion. Had he not
identified himself as a Conservative rabbi, I might have assumed he was
Orthodox, - as another excerpt also indicates:
It is a fine thing to care about the world, but Jews must first know their own. Our children need to know more about Yom Kippur than they know about Ramadan. They need to feel the moral drama of the machzor before they are asked to master every other tradition: why Kol Nidre still trembles, why Neilah feels like the gates of heaven swinging shut, why Jews fast not because suffering is holy but because return is possible...
What our children need first is their own inheritance: Hebrew on their tongues and Jewish memory in their bones, Israel in their consciousness, mitzvot in their hands, a people in their hearts. They need the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, the arguments of the Talmud, the grief of Tisha B’Av, the joy of Simchat Torah, and the terrifying intimacy of standing before God on the Day of Atonement. Then, yes, teach them about their neighbors with seriousness and respect—but teach them as Jews, from somewhere, with enough literacy that encounter becomes dialogue rather than dissolution.
Honestly, I could not have said it better myself.
Imagine what the Conservative movement might have
accomplished had it implemented from the very beginning - an educational system
that consistently taught these values and the importance of living them. One
that encouraged serious Jewish education from kindergarten through high school.
In other words, an educational system like our Orthodox one.
It is probably true that many Conservative Jews would still
have chosen to send their children to public schools or, if they could afford
it, to elite private college-preparatory schools. But it is also likely that a
substantial number would have chosen instead to educate their children in the
Jewish heritage of their parents or grandparents and pass it on to the next
generation. Or at least convinced to try it out.
Orthodoxy once faced similar challenges…
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