Profile of an "Unaffiliated" Jew

I am fowarding this to you - some of my many teachers because I feel that you
share/might like the vision laid out in this piece. Many of you I haven't
seen or talked to in a long time, but maybe that can change. I hope this
email finds you all in good health and spirit, and that you all will have
great summers. Some of you came accross this article already, you can not
read it again (if you would like) and proceed to just having a great summer
(whether you want to or not)!

With dreams of tikkun,
Eli/George Davis

The following article appears in the Spring 2005 issue
of CAJE's journal Jewish Education News.

Profile of an "Unaffiliated" Jew
by Ben Dreyfus

When Jewish organizations talk about "unaffiliated Jews" in their 20s and 30s,
who do not belong to synagogues, they often equate this lack of affiliation
with being secular, Jewishly uneducated, and finding Judaism to be
irrelevant. Indeed, the Jewish population surveys may show a high
correlation between these traits, so this stereotype may be well-founded.
However, the ensuing discussions generally hold the underlying assumption
that if these people had more Jewish education and a stronger Jewish
identity, they would become "affiliated" with the organized Jewish community.
It is my hope that this article will challenge that assumption.

I am 25 and live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a center of Jewish
activity. I study Talmud with a friend one night a week in my living room.
On Shabbat I don't do any work or spend money. Typically, I will go to Friday
and Saturday services at one of the new independent minyanim that meet once
or twice a month, or pray with a group of people in someone's apartment, then
share a Shabbat meal in that apartment. I spend every Rosh Hashanah and
Pesach with my family in Chicago. My Jewish values are a driving force
behind my career as a teacher, my political activism, my lifestyle choices
that reduce environmental impact, and my ethical decision-making process.
Oh, and I don't belong to a synagogue, nor do most of the young adults
crowded into those apartments on Friday nights.

My two most important formative Jewish influences during childhood were my
actively Jewish immediate and extended family, and my many summers at the
Reform movement's Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute (OSRUI) camp. OSRUI does a
phenomenal job providing Jewish education and conveying excitement about
Judaism to children and adolescents, but the organized system of which it is
a part provides nowhere for graduates to go afterwards. The Jewish
programming at OSRUI is developmentally appropriate at each age, so we
progressed from 9-year-old Judaism to 10-year-old Judaism to 11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 16, 17, … and back to 9-year-old Judaism. At that point we were camp
counselors, so we were responsible around the clock for creating experiences
for others, rather than having our own experiences. Of course, being a
counselor was itself a valuable experience, and a camp focused on a
particular age range cannot be expected to provide for people of every age.
But the general expectation was that Jewish education and development ended
at age 17. After that, we were on our own, even though we were far from
being independent adults.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to continue my Jewish education in
college, both through academic courses (outside my major of physics) and
through involvement in the pluralistic and intellectual community of Harvard
Hillel. As graduation approached, I would fret about how this vibrant Jewish
community would be ending soon, and there would be nothing for me in the
Jewish world. People from my educated Reform background had three options
after college: 1) Go to rabbinical school or become some other sort of Jewish
professional. This was the option that the movement strongly
encouraged. Any time I evinced any sort of Jewish interest, the response
would be "Have you thought about becoming a rabbi?". 2) Be uninvolved with
anything Jewish for a decade or so, until it is time to send the children to
Hebrew school, then return to the Jewish community as a parent. This is, of
course, the most common. 3) Become Orthodox. This was always out of the
question for me, but I have seen so many successful products of the Reform
and Conservative movements go this route, not because they embraced the
principles of Orthodoxy (at least initially), but because it was the only way
they could find the active Jewish community that they wanted. We could not
simply join a synagogue in our 20s, because there is no place in most
of these communities for educated lay adults.

Though many synagogues have "adult education" programs, they tend to be
remedial, targeted to people who are new to Jewish learning. Once a person's
Jewish education has reached a certain point (and that point is far from
being a scholar), his/her only established role is to transmit it to others,
whether as a camp counselor, a rabbi, or a parent. The system does not know
what to do with young Jews who work in the secular world and do not have
families, and consequently tries to nudge them toward one of the roles that
are better understood. Perhaps this is why so much of the organized Jewish
community's programming for 20somethings strives to get us either to consider
a Jewish career or to meet each other, marry, and presumably have Jewish
children and send them to Hebrew school.

I believe that both of these emphases send dangerous messages. The emphasis
on marriage and children tells us that we are only valuable as a means to an
end, and not as individual human beings with dignity. The emphasis on
becoming a Jewish professional furthers the perception that the way to live a
fully Jewish life is to do it full-time, and thus those of us with secular
professions are expected to be less Jewish and to depend on the professionals
to make Judaism happen for us. To the extent that this recruiting is
successful, it widens the gap between the educated professionals and the
less-educated laity because it removes the most educated laypeople from the
pool. For years, these three options were the only choices after college,
until my generation (echoing the havurot of the 1970s, often unknowingly)
chose a fourth option: If the organized liberal Jewish community wasn't
going to create a Jewish niche for us, we would create it for ourselves.

After a year in Jerusalem working in the high-tech industry and coming up with
creative answers to the incessant question, "Where are you learning?"
(Answer: "On the bus to work"), I moved to New York and discovered a number
of fledgling independent minyanim with a core population in their 20s and
30s. These minyanim, which have sprouted up in a number of large cities, are
independent of the major movements, have no rabbis or staff, no "membership,"
and no buildings. They meet in rented church basements, in apartments, in
parks, on rooftops, and even in synagogues. (Some synagogues have welcomed
the independent minyanim into their buildings, while others have responded
with a flat no.) They are led entirely by volunteers. In fall 2002, I had a
conversation with a friend from OSRUI who was also living in New York, and we
envisioned our ideal Shabbat service. We decided to jump
on the bandwagon and start another independent minyan. (Each minyan meets
only once or twice a month, so there was no issue of competing with the
others; as long as we coordinated the dates, we were merely adding another
star to the constellation.)

We publicized the first service (held in the playroom of an apartment
building) by word of mouth and email, and 67 people showed up. Since then,
Kol Zimrah, as it was later named, has met one or two Friday nights a month,
and has grown to over 400 people on our email list. In creating Kol Zimrah,
we combined the elements we liked best from the various communities that we
have encountered. Our services adhere to the traditional structure of the
liturgy, and are heavily musical, with acoustic guitar, percussion, and
exuberant harmony. The music is a melange of Debbie Friedman, Shlomo
Carlebach, traditional nusach, and tunes we wrote last week. The service is
led by a different volunteer each time, and the leader sits among the rest of
the worshippers. There is no official siddur; everyone is encouraged to
bring his/her own. Services are often followed by a potluck Shabbat dinner
and then more singing.

Initially, we expected that Kol Zimrah would appeal to a very narrow segment
of the Jewish population, since some people would not want a service that is
entirely in Hebrew, while others would not be comfortable with musical
instruments on Shabbat. Instead, Kol Zimrah has become a more diverse
community than we could have imagined, with people from all backgrounds.
This is apparent simply by looking at what people are wearing at services:
someone in a suit will be next to someone in jeans, next to someone in a
colorful hippie garment. Though most Kol Zimrah regulars are in their 20s and
30s, we have also attracted a wider demographic, including high school
students and older adults.

Many see that Kol Zimrah participants are relatively homogeneous in age and
conclude that we choose these independent communities over
"multigenerational" synagogues because we are interested in socializing with
our own age group. This is not the reason. We are attracted to the
independent minyanim because we want to be active participants in our Jewish
life rather than passive consumers. Why, then, have these minyanim
particularly attracted single adults in their 20s and 30s? First of all, we
are particularly alienated from synagogues because they are structured around
the family (my family lives 800 miles away); the independent minyanim are
structured such that unattached individuals can feel like full members of the
community. Second, we are a transient group, living somewhere for a few
years and moving on. Synagogues tend to have a more settled membership and
an attachment to the way things have always been.

People ask me "If you know what kind of Jewish community you want, why don't
you join a synagogue and change it instead of starting your own thing?" I
respond "That will take at least 20 years, and I can't wait that long." Thus,
the question arises, if a multigenerational Jewish community were inclusive
of educated laypeople, respectful of individuals with or without families,
and open to experimentation, would it be a place for 20-and-30-something Jews
like me? Yes. I have found this community one week a year through the
National Havurah Committee (NHC), which has been holding an annual Summer
Institute since 1979. Several hundred people, from babies to senior citizens
and everyone in between, converge on a college campus for a week of Jewish
learning, prayer, singing, and community. The NHC is based on the idea that
every teacher is a student and every student is a teacher.
Any participant can sign up to teach a workshop on any topic; I taught two at
my first Institute. People of my parents' generation address me as an equal,
rather than with "I have a daughter your age." Scholars at the top of their
fields participate as civilians and go by their first names.

The NHC may represent the "alternative" Jewish community, with many of its
participants involved in independent communities like the ones I have found
in New York. However, multigenerational communities that include people in
their 20s and 30s need not be restricted to that world. I recently
participated in the first Limmud NY, an American adaptation of the popular
Limmud conference in Britain. Limmud NY was organized by just one full-time
staff member and a team of over 70 volunteers of all ages, including me and a
number of my Kol Zimrah peers. I felt that this was a true collaboration
between the "mainstream" and "alternative" Jewish communities. The NHC Summer
Institute and Limmud NY work as well as they do because they only happen once
a year.

It is easier for people who usually inhabit separate communities to come
together into a shared space when it is only for a limited time. Is it
possible to build real multigenerational Jewish communities (where people in
their 20s and 30s feel equally enfranchised) during the rest of the year?
This question remains to be answered. If the organized Jewish community wants
to become truly multigenerational in that way, it must ask some hard
questions. It must ask not merely how to market the status quo, but how to
change the status quo. It must ask where educated and interested laypeople
will fit into the big picture. While it may be easier to focus on the
majority of unaffiliated young Jews who are uneducated or uninterested and to
write off educated interested unaffiliated Jews as a negligible
minority, this approach is shortsighted. Once these Jewishly uneducated
people become educated, the community needs to have a plan to deal with its
own success, and find a niche (other than Jewish professional careers) where
they will fit. This will require a large-scale transformation of the Jewish
community. I look forward to that transformed community.