My Story 54

The classic structure of a Jewish community had been the "Kahal System", with a Lay and Rabbinic council, that would provide for the religious and cultural needs of the people. Courts, butchers, Mikvaot, care of the sick and dying, burial of the dead, were all part of that system. Going outside the system, usually meant disconnecting from Judaism entirely. In the last few centuries, as Jews became more active in the wider society, being Jewish was more a religious, rather than an all pervasive, force. East European communities began to have synagogues centered on occupation. The shoemakers synagogue, the cattle merchants synagogue, the blacksmith's synagogue, began to replace the central city synagogue. When Jews migrated to the New World, synagogues tended to be based on national origin; the Polish, German, Lithuanian, Spanish-Portuguese, largely took the place of the tradesmen's synagogues. Now,rabbis were the heads of synagogues, rather than communities. These maintained the rites and customs of the "Old Country", and served as cultural centers, often alongside a "landsmanschaft", an organization of Jews from a particular town. I still remember as a child being taken to meetings of my grandparents' landsmanschaft. The next generation rarely felt the need for these associations. But most Orthodox synagogues continued, until about 1960, to maintain the "Old World", with sermons in Yiddish, and East European customs preserved as in a museum. The younger generation mostly did not relate to this, and often stopped coming to synagogue altogether. Orthodoxy, in some places, was just beginning to reinvent itself. That would take another decade or two. Jumping into the breach, was the Conservative movement. It had existed since the 1870s, but had not defined itself as something "different". The great exodus to suburbia of the '50s and '60s, found Jews geographically separated from each other. The Conservative movement issued an opinion, intended to be an "emergency measure", that one may use a car on Shabbat, but only to go to and from synagogue. Later, this was made standard policy. This paved the way for huge synagogues, servicing a wide geographical area. (One Orthodox rabbi quipped that American Jews had an "Edifice Complex".) Synagogues began calling themselves "Jewish Centers", reflecting a new reality of Jews associating with other Jews, as a means to reinforce identity, as much as meeting spiritual needs. Conservatism became the predominant Jewish movement in America for the next half century. (It is now the smallest). Its thrust was to enable affluent, educated Jews to maintain an American lifestyle, while still preserving the "feel", and much of the form of traditional Judaism. In the '50s and '60s, they still put out pamphlets for their members on how to keep Shabbat, Kashrut, and even "family purity" (laws of menstruation). Little by little, those Jews who sought tradition, gravitated to Orthodoxy, while those who no longer related to it, went in the direction of Reform. Conservatism saw the need to reinvent itself as well. However, different leaders took different directions. Some sought to maintain tradition, albeit with adjustments. Some sought to become "Reform Lite". Many saw the necessity and appropriateness of becoming centers for social justice, now re-dubbed "Tikkun Olam", a classical, spiritual concept of "fixing the world", now applied to liberal politics and activism of various kinds. Conservative synagogues are vastly different from one another as a result. An important figure in mid-twentieth-century Conservative Judaism was Prof. A. J. Heschel. He marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. He also had a lot to say about Modern Judaism, both positive and negative. Many idolized him. Some of his colleagues refused to speak with him. He was the last glimmer of hope for spirituality in mainstream, non-Orthodox American Jewry. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, his ideals were all but forgotten. Conservatism today is mostly pursuing a Marxist ideal, comingled with a vague notion of Jewish culture. This was the new reality I found in the American Jewish community to which I returned in 2001.