Keeping faith is key to continuity
JONATHAN S. TOBIN
Connecticut Jewish Ledger
Just when you thought informed American Jews were prepared to address the demographic crisis facing our community, the New York Times reports it was all just a lot of bunk. Or so Jewish author J.J. Goldberg would have us believe.
On the Times' Sunday Op-Ed page on Aug. 3, Goldberg wrote that the famous 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, which finally woke up the organized Jewish community to the continuity crisis, was so flawed that we should ignore its conclusions. He thinks the 52 percent figure for intermarriage is exaggerated. Through a convoluted formula, he has managed to lower the number to 38 percent. He also thinks the rate is declining, rather than heading steadily skyward as every other indicator has shown for decades.
Goldberg is upset about implications of the communal decision to take the future seriously and act accordingly. He is scared that American Jews will actually start, as he put it, to "turn inward," and "return to roots." Thus, his negative take on Jewish day schools in the Times piece.
In one sense, Goldberg is right. It isn't so much intermarriage that is the problem. Our dilemma has been the drift toward creating a community that values inclusion (a positive value in and of itself) above everything else. If our goal is a Jewish world which devalues those things which separate us from others and makes us special, it doesn't matter how many Jews are intermarrying (and I believe the NJPS survey more than I do Goldberg). The result is the same: a sterile American Jewry which will have lost its sense of purpose and its reason to exist.
Fortunately, this debate is not confined to newspaper columns. It has been a good year for Jewish books dealing with this question. The book that got the most play was the ubiquitous Alan Dershowitz's "The Vanishing American Jew" (Little, Brown). Dershowitz gets part of the answer right, believing that our priority must be to educate ourselves about Judaism and our heritage. But he is wrong when he says that American Jews only have to be like Alan to succeed: an educated and committed Jew who doesn't really believe in Judaism as a religion. Unfortunately, the concept that a people can survive by concentrating their efforts on learning about something they don't believe in is the sort of idea that only a Harvard intellectual would be stupid enough to espouse.
The answer to Dershowitz's dead-end Judaism comes in a slim volume of prose that didn't get a fraction of the media attention that he received as the defender of O.J. and Claus von Bulow. But it is probably one of the most important Jewish books you could read this year.
Elliot Abrams' "Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America" (The Free Press) is a brilliant analysis of the continuity crisis and other important Jewish issues.
Abrams, who served as an assistant secretary of state during the Reagan administration, eloquently states the dilemma of every Jewish parent: "My wife and I want our children to identify as Jews, marry Jews, and raise their own children as Jews, but at the same time we want them to move freely in this open society." His answer is simple: "We try to convey to them the faith that we share ... We teach them what we believe: that the covenant of Abraham abides today and that they have been blessed to be born into it."
Echoing the Babylonian Jewish sage Saadia Gaon, Abrams tells us, "Jews are a people only by virtue of their Torah. They will decline if they are driven by fear of their neighbors, fear of their own traditions, and fear of the distinct identity that their covenant imposes on them as an article of faith. They will survive if they cling to their Torah. It - and it alone - is ... a tree of life."
Wise advice. Though The Times may publish Goldberg's vision of Jewish life, let's hope that Elliot Abrams gets the last word.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.
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