When it comes to unity, are local Jews talking about the same thing?

SHANNON LEVITT | STAFF WRITER

Dozens of hands shot up last Tuesday night the moment Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz opened the floor to audience questions. In person and on Zoom, roughly 100 people attended Valley Beit Midrash’s (VBM) panel “Can the Phoenix/Scottsdale Community be United?”

With so many raised hands, Yanklowitz resorted to asking for a rapid-fire round of questions before he had to cut them off, allowing the panelists a brief chance to answer before making a final statement.

By that point, the panel — charged with talking about what divides Jews and what, if anything, can be done — had lasted nearly two hours, but it was clear that people had more to say. Three decades after the famed English Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks called the notion of Jewish unity “deceptively simple” and suggested the idea was more “a myth, perhaps, rather than a reality,” in his book “One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity,” the possibility of unifying Jews still draws a crowd.

Between those who attended the event and the people who have since watched the recording on VBM’s YouTube and other social media channels, Jews are expressing a hunger to hear more on this topic, which was VBM’s main goal.

In 1993, Sacks wrote specifically about schisms in Judaism brought on by modernity, between Reform and Orthodox, religious and secular, Israel and the Diaspora.

Yanklowitz, VBM’s president and dean, suggested

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