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.

March 24, 2005

March 24, 2005OP-ED COLUMNIST
George W. to George W.By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
If all the stories about the abuse of prisoners of war by American soldiers and C.I.A. agents, surely none was more troubling and important than the March 16 report by my Times colleagues Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt that at least 26 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 - in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide.
You have to stop and think about this: We killed 26 of our prisoners of war. In 18 cases, people have been recommended for prosecution or action by their supervising agencies, and eight other cases are still under investigation. That is simply appalling. Only one of the deaths occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, reported Jehl and Schmitt - "showing how broadly the most violent abuses extended beyond those prison walls and contradicting early impressions that the wrongdoing was confined to a handful of members of the military police on the prison's night shift."
Yes, I know war is hell and ugliness abounds in every corner. I also understand that in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, we are up against a vicious enemy, which, if it had the power, would do great harm to our country. You do not deal with such people with kid gloves. But killing prisoners of war, presumably in the act of torture, is an inexcusable outrage. The fact that Congress has just shrugged this off, and no senior official or officer has been fired, is a travesty. This administration is for "ownership" of everything except responsibility.
President Bush just appointed Karen Hughes, his former media adviser, to head up yet another U.S. campaign to improve America's image in the Arab world. I have a suggestion: Just find out who were the cabinet, C.I.A. and military officers on whose watch these 26 homicides occurred and fire them. That will do more to improve America's image in the Arab-Muslim world than any ad campaign, which will be useless if this sort of prisoner abuse is shrugged off. Republicans in Congress went into overdrive to protect the sanctity of Terri Schiavo's life. But they were mute when it came to the sanctity of life for prisoners in our custody. Such hypocrisy is not going to win any P.R. battles.
By coincidence, while following this prisoner abuse story, I've been reading "Washington's Crossing," the outstanding book by the Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer about how George Washington and his troops rescued the American Revolution after British forces and German Hessian mercenaries had routed them in the early battles around New Jersey.
What is particularly moving is one of Mr. Fischer's concluding sections, "An American Way of War," in which he contrasts how Washington dealt with prisoners of war with how the British and Hessian forces did: "According to the 'the laws' of European war, quarter was the privilege of being allowed to surrender and to become a prisoner. By custom and tradition, soldiers in Europe believed that they had a right to extend quarter or deny it. ... In these 'laws of war,' no captive had an inalienable right to be taken prisoner, or even to life itself."
American attitudes were very different. "With some exceptions, American leaders believed that quarter should be extended to all combatants as a matter of right. ... Americans were outraged when quarter was denied to their soldiers." In one egregious incident, at the battle at Drake's Farm, British troops murdered all seven of Washington's soldiers who had surrendered, crushing their brains with muskets.
"The Americans recovered the mutilated corpses and were shocked," wrote Mr. Fischer. The British commander simply denied responsibility. "The words of the British commander, as much as the acts of his men," wrote Mr. Fischer, "reinforced the American resolve to run their own war in a different spirit. ... Washington ordered that Hessian captives would be treated as human beings with the same rights of humanity for which Americans were striving. The Hessians ... were amazed to be treated with decency and even kindness. At first they could not understand it." The same policy was extended to British prisoners.
In concluding his book, Mr. Fischer wrote lines that President Bush would do well to ponder: George Washington and the American soldiers and civilians fighting alongside him in the New Jersey campaign not only reversed the momentum of a bitter war, but they did so by choosing "a policy of humanity that aligned the conduct of the war with the values of the Revolution. They set a high example, and we have much to learn from them."

Crazy New York Times article.... what does this mean?

March 23, 2005
Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed GeneBy NICHOLAS WADE
n a startling discovery, geneticists at Purdue University say they have found plants that possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been made in the grandparents' generation or earlier.
The finding implies that some organisms may contain a cryptic backup copy of their genome that bypasses the usual mechanisms of heredity. If confirmed, it would represent an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century. Equally surprising, the cryptic genome appears not to be made of DNA, the standard hereditary material.
The discovery also raises interesting biological questions - including whether it gets in the way of evolution, which depends on mutations changing an organism rather than being put right by a backup system.
"It looks like a marvelous discovery," said Dr. Elliott Meyerowitz, a plant geneticist at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, described the finding as "a really strange and unexpected result," which would be important if the observation holds up and applies widely in nature.
The result, reported online yesterday in the journal Nature by Dr. Robert E. Pruitt, Dr. Susan J. Lolle and colleagues at Purdue, has been found in a single species, the mustardlike plant called arabidopsis that is the standard laboratory organism of plant geneticists. But there are hints that the same mechanism may occur in people, according to a commentary by Dr. Detlef Weigel of the Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. Dr. Weigel describes the Purdue work as "a spectacular discovery."
The finding grew out of a research project started three years ago in which Dr. Pruitt and Dr. Lolle were trying to understand the genes that control the plant's outer skin, or cuticle. As part of the project, they were studying plants with a mutated gene that made the plant's petals and other floral organs clump together. Because each of the plant's two copies of the gene were in mutated form, they had virtually no chance of having normal offspring.
But up to 10 percent of the plants' offspring kept reverting to normal. Various rare events can make this happen, but none involve altering the actual sequence of DNA units in the gene. Yet when the researchers analyzed the mutated gene, known as hothead, they found it had changed, with the mutated DNA units being changed back to normal form.
"That was the moment when it was a complete shock," Dr. Pruitt said.
A mutated gene can be put right by various mechanisms that are already known, but all require a correct copy of the gene to be available to serve as the template. The Purdue team scanned the DNA of the entire arabidopsis genome for a second, cryptic copy of the hothead gene but could find none.
Dr. Pruitt and his colleagues argue that a correct template must exist, but because it is not in the form of DNA, it probably exists as RNA, DNA's close chemical cousin. RNA performs many important roles in the cell, and is the hereditary material of some viruses. But it is less stable than DNA, and so has been regarded as unsuitable for preserving the genetic information of higher organisms.
Dr. Pruitt said he favored the idea that there is an RNA backup copy for the entire genome, not just the hothead gene, and that it might be set in motion when the plant was under stress, as is the case with those having mutated hothead genes.
He and other experts said it was possible that an entire RNA backup copy of the genome could exist without being detected, especially since there has been no reason until now to look for it.
Scientific journals often take months or years to get comfortable with articles presenting novel ideas. But Nature accepted the paper within six weeks of receiving it. Dr. Christopher Surridge, a biology editor at Nature, said the finding had been discussed at scientific conferences for quite a while, with people saying it was impossible and proposing alternative explanations. But the authors had checked all these out and disposed of them, Dr. Surridge said.
As for their proposal of a backup RNA genome, "that is very much a hypothesis, and basically the least mad hypothesis for how this might be working," Dr. Surridge said.
Dr. Haig, the evolutionary biologist, said that the finding was fascinating but that it was too early to try to interpret it. He noted that if there was a cryptic template, it ought to be more resistant to mutation than the DNA it helps correct. Yet it is hard to make this case for RNA, which accumulates many more errors than DNA when it is copied by the cell.
He said that the mechanism, if confirmed, would be an unprecedented exception to Mendel's laws of inheritance, since the DNA sequence itself is changed. Imprinting, an odd feature of inheritance of which Dr. Haig is a leading student, involves inherited changes to the way certain genes are activated, not to the genes themselves.
The finding poses a puzzle for evolutionary theory because it corrects mutations, which evolution depends on as generators of novelty. Dr. Meyerowitz said he did not see this posing any problem for evolution because it seems to happen only rarely. "What keeps Darwinian evolution intact is that this only happens when there is something wrong," Dr. Surridge said.
The finding could undercut a leading theory of why sex is necessary. Some biologists say sex is needed to discard the mutations, almost all of them bad, that steadily accumulate on the genome. People inherit half of their genes from each parent, which allows the half left on the cutting room floor to carry away many bad mutations. Dr. Pruitt said the backup genome could be particularly useful for self-fertilizing plants, as arabidopsis is, since it could help avoid the adverse effects of inbreeding. It might also operate in the curious organisms known as bdelloid rotifers that are renowned for not having had sex for millions of years, an abstinence that would be expected to seriously threaten their Darwinian fitness.

really beautiful story from Jay Michaelson

Some days later, R. Yitzhak and the rebbe of Hebron visited the tomb of the patriarchs and matriarchs in the Cave of Machpelah.

"You see," said the rebbe, "it is not just a matter of recognizing God's love because a man knows what love is. It is also recognizing God Himself."

"How so?" asked R. Yitzhak.

"When a man is in love," and here the rebbe looked into R.
Yitzhak's eyes, and seemed to know all his secrets, "it is both inexplicable and needs no explanation. We cannot prove what love is. There is no cloud of love that men can see with their eyes. But we know that love exists, because the pull of love is so strong, it cannot be denied. So it is with God."

The rebbe paused to utter a prayer.

"However, when a man only yearns for love, and does not feel his love returned, he creates tales about his beloved. Perhaps she looks this way, definitely she likes this and hates that. He replaces reality with these tales. And if another man should tell him differently maybe your beloved has brown hair and not black he will argue forcefully: no! In this way, discord rises in the world, and the man himself becomes estranged from true love, which is open to every possibility."

R. Yitzhak felt that the rebbe did not understand him, and feared that he did.

"On your path," the rebbe said, again with his gaze seeming to penetrate R. Yitzhak's soul, "there can be no ahavas Hashem. You will always doubt yourself, until you come to know love. Then you will know that God is loving you, at every moment, and is here, and exists and lives, because you will no longer be able to tolerate doubt."

R. Yitzhak wanted to cry, but did not want to reveal himself to the rebbe. By the time they parted and R. Yitzhak was alone, the tears had already been swallowed.

Plugging Away

Oy... this is the real large push for finals. Its wierd because it comes before everyone else's. Tomrrow I have a science paper, a science final, a hebrew paper and a hebrew final all due within 3 hours of each other. AHHH. And then to top it all off, I walked into plato class today, and my computer refused loudly to turn on. And it won. So I am sitting in the library trying to make my science paper coherent so I can then learn heberw, and write a hebrew paper to hand in at 8:45 tomorrow morning. Lets see:

9:15 (now) pm
8:45 (class)
------------------
11 1/2 hours to get my work done and sleep and transit and eat and.... And here I am writing a blog, that no one I know even checks. Shit.

cramming and chosen-ness

Hey world, just thought I would check in. So I am cramming trying to get ready for finals and papers and all the other things I need to do before I come home next Tuesday. Its really not THAT much, its just hard to do it. Oy.

I had an interesting talk today with the Chabad rabbi about chosen-ness. I really can’t get my head around the idea that the Jews are a chosen people and all the other religions aren’t. On a very low level it seems weird that every group thinks that they are the best/chosen. Statistically there is not such a great chance that any group including Judaism would be the highest one. On a much deeper level, I can’t imagine G-d caring what language one speaks when they talk to him. All religions seem so similar in so many ways, like they are all trying to explain the same or very similar experiences. It is just a hard thing to put into words and that is the reason why we have separate religions. I don’t know, I am going to meet with him again on Shabbos to keep talking about this because it’s a hard thing to believe in a Jewish community of people where many people really think that they are the chosen people to the exclusion of others.

Any thoughts?

Happy Chanukah

A COMMENTARY ON REWRITING JUDAISM, OR JUST A FUNNY SONG:

I took a piece of cardboard
Some staples and the pen
But whey I try to use it
It simply would not spin

Oh, dreidle, dreidle, dreidle
How come you will not spin
I think I'll make another
And try my luck again.

I took a piece of metal
and made one in the shop,
I tell you then what happened
When that dreidle dropped

Oh, dreidle, dreidle, dreidle
It fell upon my toe
and when they take my cast off
I won't use it no more.

I made one out of cotton
It was much fun to play
I left the window open
My dreidle flew away

Oh, dreidle, dreidle, dreidle
I made this one through life,
I think I'll make another
This time I'll get it right

I made one out of ice-cream
It was so nice and sweet
But one day I was hungry
My dreidle I did eat

Oh, dreidle, dreidle, dreidle
I better stick with clay
And when it's dry and ready
My dreidle I shall play!

OOOh this is a blog

So I just got a blog and I think it is cool so this is gonna be my first post. I have started live journals before and given up because I have forgotten to write in them for so long, but this might work better. Lets see...