Beth Zasloff
November 21, 2008
Talk for Congregation Beth Israel, North Adams, MA
Shabbat Shalom. I am here to speak about the book I co-authored with Edgar Bronfman, Hope, Not Fear: A Path to Jewish Renaissance.
First, a brief explanation. My position as co-author is somewhat unusual—usually a co-author is de-emphasized, if acknowledged at all. But it was important to Edgar (which is what he usually asks people to call him) to underline the collaborative nature of the writing process for this book, and part of his choice in writing it with someone younger was to have the perspective of a different generation.
So I thought it would make sense, in my first appearance on my own, to present both the ideas in the book and my experience writing it using a time honored structure: the compare and contrast essay. How I am similar to and different from Edgar Bronfman.
Some differences. Edgar Bronfman is a billionaire philanthropist. He is the former CEO of Seagram, and until last year, longtime President of the World Jewish Congress. He is known for advocating for the release of Soviet Jews and for battling Swiss banks to win restitution for Holocaust victims whose assets they had held. He is the chairman of Hillel: the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, and is one of a small group of Jewish philanthropists who have invested tremendous energy and money in working to foster what Edgar calls a renaissance in Jewish life.
I am a writer and teacher of modest means. Before embarking on this book I taught as an adjunct professor at NYU and led writing workshops in New York City public schools. I live in Brooklyn.
Similarities: We both have spent part of our lives in Williamstown. Edgar was a student at Williams College. I spent childhood summers in Williamstown and my parents, Joe and Tela, who arranged this event, live there now.
More similarities: Edgar and I are both drawn to the Jewish tradition of text study. I first encountered this on the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel, the program that also led to my working on this book. It is a five-week summer program in which 26 high school seniors from different Jewish backgrounds spend 5 weeks traveling and studying in Israel. We studied using the chevrutah method, where you pore over the language of a text and explore interpretations with a study partner, in a room filled with others doing the same thing. It was a revelation to me that this kind of study was such an important part of the Jewish tradition, and it made me want to learn more.
Edgar Bronfman centers his own Jewish practice around study of text. He holds study sessions at his office every Thursday afternoon, that are led by a different rabbi or scholar each week and usually include his foundation’s staff and others who work in the Jewish community. As he describes, he didn’t begin to learn about Judaism until he was in his sixties, even though he was, of course, tremendously active on behalf of the Jewish people throughout his adulthood. He describes his own fascination and pride when he first began to learn about the Talmud. In the story he tells, it started on a plane back from the Soviet Union, when Israel Singer, the Orthodox rabbi who was Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress, described the daily portion of Talmud he was reading. The text builds on a line from the Torah that says that if an ox puts down three people, you have to kill the ox. But it doesn’t say what to do with the remains of the ox. The Talmud takes three or four pages to tell you how to distribute it. At first, as Edgar describes, this all seemed terribly arcane, but then he realized that what they were talking about was justice. Not justice as an abstract principle, or something up above and divine, but a justice that is practical and earthly.
The idea of finding new meaning in Jewish texts and traditions is central to Hope, Not Fear. The book argues that Judaism has so much to offer, but that too many people just don’t know enough. This is partly due to the roots of the American Jewish community and the relatively low priority it has placed on Jewish education. To quote from the book,
When the great mass of Jews immigrated to the United States and Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they didn’t come in order to be better Jews. They came in search of a better life, eager to leave behind the poverty and anti-Semitism in those areas of Eastern Europe where Jews were permitted to settle. It was most important to speak English, support their families and give their children a good education. The rallying cry was not “Be Jewish,” but “Be somebody!”
Jewish identity, for these immigrants, was not something that had to be learned or strengthened. It was a condition of life, defined by their experience of anti-Semitism and separation from the larger society. They didn’t worry about whether their children would remain Jewish. They assumed that like them, the next generation would simply have no choice in the matter; North American society would not accept them other than as Jews. So while they taught their children to fight for the rights of the Jewish people—and of all humanity—to live in freedom, they taught them little of the texts, history, and traditions of Judaism.
The next part of the story is that American Jews found more success and acceptance than their grandparents considered possible, and that now the problem is not anti-Semitism but assimilation. Judaism, as Edgar often says, has become a choice, not a condition of life, and if people are going to choose to be active as Jews and pass Judaism onto the next generation, they have to learn something about Judaism.
This brings me to another difference between Edgar Bronfman and me. It is subtle, but I think important in talking about generational differences. This is our initial reaction to the 1991 National Jewish Population Survey, which is what spurred much of the fear that the American Jewish community will marry itself into extinction. The survey reported that over half of American Jews were marrying non-Jews, and that only in a third of those cases would the children be raised Jewish. Edgar, like many Jewish communal leaders, was highly concerned by the numbers when he first became aware of them. It was then that he decided to get involved with Jewish education on a large scale, and become a leader at Hillel at a crucial moment of its transformation.
I was in college when the statistics came out, and my first job when I graduated was at a Jewish organization. I became aware of the degree to which the Jewish community was absorbed with the question of how to “get” the Jewish young people. In particular, how to get them to marry each other. I found this all pretty alienating. I was tired of the way Jewish institutions seemed to be breathing down your neck trying to shape your identity. I certainly didn’t want Judaism to die out. But I wasn’t going to make decisions about who I spent time with or what I did because of guilt or fear for Jewish survival.
Now, another similarity, or perhaps convergence:
When I was first offered the opportunity to work on this book, I was afraid that that I would be writing the kind of rhetoric I had grown so tired of. But I found, in writing with Edgar, that what he was trying to accomplish was different. There is still the concern for keeping Judaism alive. But it’s not so much about trying to shape young Jews in a particular image or to get them to join Jewish organizations. The idea is to make Jewish learning and culture widely available, so that people can discover it for themselves, and bring new creativity and energy to Jewish life. This is the mission of organizations like Hillel and the Bronfman Youth Fellowships. They offer substantive programming but don’t push one version of Judaism, so that people can find a variety of paths—which for some might have more to do with religious observance and for others with study or culture.
The other element I found appealing as I began to work with Edgar was his attitude toward intermarriage. He takes the position that intermarriage is a fact of life in a welcoming society, and that efforts to discourage it are misguided and counterproductive. To quote from the book, “Intermarriage is often blamed for the decline in Judaism and in the Jewish population in North America. But the problem is not that Jews are falling in love with non-Jews, but that they aren’t falling in love with Judaism.” His focus is on building a Jewish community that is welcoming, joyful, and educated, so that people will see the value in bringing Judaism into their lives and passing it on to their children.
Another generational difference: relationship to the State of Israel. This is not something that we discuss extensively in the book, but it’s on my mind lately and as Rabbi Goldwasser has told me, on the minds of this congregation.
Edgar was born in 1929. He remembers the Holocaust, the founding of the State of Israel, and the Israeli victory in the 1967 war. He has known all Israeli presidents. He has never wanted to live in Israel, but his sense of connection to and loyalty to Israel is very powerful, even as he has also been a vocal critic of Israeli policies.
I was born in 1973. I was active in the youth movement Young Judaea in high school and learned leadership skills and a lot about Israel, but there was always some confusion about what Zionism was supposed to mean. This confusion has continued for me, and I am still unsure about my own relationship to Israel and how I will talk about it with my children.
In college I spent a semester living in Jerusalem, and had a wonderful experience. It was an intensely, endlessly interesting place where everyone you met had a story that crossed nations and languages, where people were constantly challenging you about who you were and what you believed. I studied Jewish texts at Pardes Institute and lived with a secular Israeli roommate who had one sister who was married to a Palestinian and one to a man who was Orthodox. (Her father, a former member of parliament, had more issues with the Orthodox marriage.)
But now when I look back on that time I wonder that I was not more politically engaged, more attuned to the untenable situation of the occupation. My experience of Israel on the Bronfman Youth Fellowships and then again in college was as the crucible in which an American Jewish identity is formed. It is very effective in this role, and the program Birthright Israel (another initiative to which Mr. Bronfman contributes) has had great success in getting young Jews excited about Judaism.
But it also seems increasingly urgent to me that American Jews learn about what Palestinians experience. I tried to do this on my last trip to Israel, when I went with my family. We had a wonderful time exploring Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and climbing Masada and the many stairs in the city of Tsfat with our two year old. I also spent a day with an Israeli friend with a group called Machsom Watch, which sends observers to the army checkpoints that have proliferated especially since the second intifada. They observe and sometimes intercede of behalf of people whose rights are being violated. The day I went was a routine one, with young women made late for their exams at the local university, bags searched at gunpoint, and long lines. My strongest impression was of the way the army disrupts Palestinian daily life and sows resentment and hate. I would like to see a more open conversation about this among American Jews.
I’ve gotten away from similarities and differences here. Back to some easy ones: Edgar has seven children and twenty-one grandchildren. He writes in the last chapter of the book, “My only regret in life is not having given a Jewish home to my children. I have been making up for it ever since.”
I am at the other end of the childrearing spectrum, with two daughters, ages 4 and 18 months. Both were born while I was working on this book. So in a sense I have felt like both author and audience. The questions of how to pass on Judaism, how to make it joyful, what to teach and why, become very practical when you have a four year old asking you questions and watching your every move. I do know that it takes creativity and effort, and finding support among friends, family, and Jewish institutions that are doing the right thing. Thank you to Rabbi Goldwasser for welcoming me here tonight in this vital community. Thank you to my parents for making this event happen. Now I’d like to open this up to questions and discussion.
