EDITORIAL&OPINIONS
Tikkun Olam May Feel Good but It Doesn’t Build Community JOEL ALPERSON
t least a portion of my hometown of Omaha, Neb., may well be under water soon. Pumps are in place at various locations, including at a nuclear power plant not far from town. The Missouri River, which borders our city, has risen to dangerous levels. Some Omaha residents have taken to sandbagging to help reinforce critical locations along the river. This potential disaster mirrors the serious challenge facing the non-Orthodox Jewish world. Non-Orthodox Judaism is confronted by rising levels of secularism that almost always lead to assimilation — a trend that could eventually render Reform and Conservative Judaism irrelevant in North America. NonOrthodox Jews’ discontent with and resulting departure from Jewish life, left alone, stands to bring Reform and Conservative Judaism to a state of obsolescence. This prediction is not new. From studies about high interfaith rates to growing assimilation, we should know by now that the non-Orthodox way of life is failing by every metric we have at our disposal. (I am not Orthodox, by the way.) Some may not like reading these words and others may be angered by them, but like the flood facing Omaha, it’s hard to ignore what one sees. This distancing from Jewish religious (i.e., Godbased) ritual experiences leads to a distancing from Jewish purpose. So Jews try to find their Judaic meaning in social causes (immigration reform, environmentalism, women’s rights). Putting aside the merit of these issues, let’s be honest: These tikkun olam pur-
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suits might feel good and even do some good, but they do little to build Jewish communities. We’re losing Jews too quickly to think that we can afford to continue as we are. If Jews prioritize these social efforts over religious practices, we’ll have to acknowledge that we have substituted all these secular causes for Judaism. We might insist that tikkun olam and social justice are central to our Jewish way of life, but they are taking the place of serious Jewish education and practice. Those are the tools employed by the Orthodox against the rising tides of assimilation. I watch with sadness as the seminaries of our nonOrthodox movements lay off employees and close programs. National non-Orthodox day school attendance represents only a small percentage of Jewish children in the United States. And it’s not because the economy is bad — the trends were in place long before. Orthodox Jews, for whatever disagreements many non-Orthodox Jews have with them, have grown in number, and not only by sheltering themselves in haredi communities. The Modern Orthodox largely swim in the same secular waters as other Jews: They own TVs, use the Internet and attend secular universities. But they also hold to a religious discipline that they
Getting Birthright Wrong: There’s Nothing Sinister About It PHILIP GETZ n mid-June, The Nation published an article by a young alumna of Birthright Israel, the organization that since 1999 has sent 260,000 young Diaspora Jews (including this writer) on free 10day tours of the Jewish state. In “The Romance of Birthright Israel,” Kiera Feldman, a 2008 graduate of Brown, marshals anecdotal evidence and a sprinkling of recent critical literature to capture what she sees as Birthright’s hidden agenda to breed the next generation of Zionists. Feldman paints her all-expenses-paid trip as a patronizing affair of which her only positive memory is hooking up with her crush in a “fake Bedouin tent.” Yet even this memory is marred by the feeling of having succumbed to Birthright’s sinister agenda: “pumping out not only Jewish baby-makers but defenders of Israel.” And in Feldman’s view, her peers took the bait. Exhausted by their emotionally charged encounters with the Western Wall and Yad Vashem, overstimulated by a visit to the Mount Herzl military cemetery, most fail to see through Birthright’s ma-
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nipulative designs. Despite the participants’ “self-described liberal” dispositions, too many of them, Feldman reports, “became convinced on the trip of the necessity of a Jewish state ‘to protect Judaism.’ ” Does Birthright have such an agenda? The question is almost too silly to entertain. Feldman herself notes that Birthright was created in an effort “to plug the dam of assimilation” and respond to the Diaspora’s “crisis of continuity” characterized “not only by intermarriage but by the weakening of Jewish communal ties such as synagogue membership and a waning attachment to Israel.” (She seems not to realize that the first phrase is a direct quote from Birthright’s cofounder, Michael Steinhardt.) But Feldman’s main problem with Birthright is that “what began as an identity booster has become an ideology machine” — although she doesn’t explain when the alleged transformation occurred. The fact is that Birthright today is no less and no more Zionist than it was in 1999. Its trips are administered by a variety of organizations, many of which, by
believe is life-improving. They observe Shabbat and the holidays, and they study Jewish texts in far greater numbers than non-Orthodox Jews. They are more likely to have children, and their children are far more likely to marry Jews and make Jewish homes. Judaism teaches us how to be better friends, husbands, wives and philanthropists. It tells us how to help the weak and when to fight evil. It is the discipline of leading a traditional Jewish life that also reminds us how best to engage in repairing the world. Ironically, by overemphasizing tikkun olam we could ultimately, through lack of Jewish knowledge and experience, lose the very impetus that put us in the tikkun olam business in the first place. Must every Jew become Orthodox to live a meaningful life? Clearly not. There are great numbers of committed non-Orthodox Jews. But as a community, at least for now, we’ll be severely weakened if we don’t acknowledge that we must repair ourselves far more urgently than we must repair the world. ◆ Joel Alperson is past national campaign chair for United Jewish Communities. His views do not necessarily represent those of the Jewish Federations of North America.
Feldman’s own admission, espouse widely divergent ideologies: “from secular to Orthodox, from outdoorsy to LGBTfriendly.” Which of these ideologies is Birthright secretly pushing? The only interesting aspect of Feldman’s article is how it encapsulates, at its extreme, the syndrome that Birthright was created to combat. Without a trace of irony, she asserts that the “free trip is framed as a ‘gift’ from philanthropists, Jewish federations, and the state of Israel.” Framed as a gift? It takes an unseemly combination of hip disengagement with things Jewish, along with a self-righteous sense of entitlement, to view a free trip to Israel as anything other than a gift. Feldman has exploited this gift in a petulant debunking for The Nation made possible by the same philanthropists whom she accuses of putting one over on her. And this, mutatis mutandis, is what Birthright has been up against from the start. Feldman’s refusal to view Israel outside the lens of her established political viewpoint prevents her from internalizing the least controversial truths. “ ‘Welcome home’ is a predominant message,” she writes, “a reference to the promise of instant Israeli citizenship for Diaspora Jews under the 1950 Law of Return.” No, it’s not. It’s a statement informed by thousands of years of tradition. Only
JEWISH EXPONENT
someone who views Israel essentially in terms of the Palestinian call for a right of return could interpret it as anything else. But the fact that Feldman did compels us to ask: How successful can Birthright actually be in changing the trajectory of Jewish communal life in the Diaspora? The final results will not be in until a generation from now. But it is already clear that Birthright has, in fact, been a game changer in the Jewish lives of many of its participants, with its alumni 51 percent more likely than their non-alumni counterparts to marry Jewish partners, and 35 percent more likely to view raising their children Jewish as important. In the next generation, will a higher percentage of young Jewish Americans be committed to Jewish continuity and feel strongly connected to the state of Israel? Part of the answer depends on whether organized Jewry can provide the resources necessary for Birthright alumni to capitalize on their enthusiasm upon their return. But the prospects now are better than even — which is more than appeared likely a decade ago. ◆ Philip Getz, who grew up in Lower Merion, is assistant editor of the Jewish Review of Books. This article originally appeared on JewishIdeasDaily.com and is reprinted with permission.
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