I’ve recently been complaining around the Shabbat Dessert Table (where my conversations about Jewish life happen) about the lack of a coherent vision in modern Judaism that was attractive to my generation. So when I stumbled on In Search Of The Next Big Jewish Idea in Jewish week, I thought I was getting my answer, something I could reference instead of the massive blog posts I was planning to write. Instead, I found an article that may as well have been titled “What should we throw money at next?” Here’s my breakdown of some key passages:

In recent years the most compelling and successful Big Idea to strengthen Jewish life has been birthright israel, the project begun by several mega-philanthropists who believed that young Jews around the world deserve, and would benefit from, a free 10-day trip to Israel, connecting them to their history, to the land of Israel and the people of Israel.

If Birthright is supposed to be the most compelling and successful Big Idea in the Jewish community, they’re starting from a bad position. “Free vacations” isn’t a Big Idea, it’s a bribe, and a dubiously effective one based on a poorly thought out premise. We are not off to a good start.

Studies show that these visits have a powerfully positive impact on most participants, strengthening their Jewish identity. (The biggest shame is that many additional thousands of young people have been wait-listed on birthright trips for lack of communal funds, with a number of federations failing to meet their own proposed budgets for these trips.)

I could go into an entire post – probably a journal article – about how these studies suck. They ask people who just got a free vacation an amorphous question about their Jewish identity and if it improved. Most importantly, though, Birthright participation is a major self-selection bias. If you want to do a good study, use the wait list as a control group, poll them both and compare the results, rather than compare participants to non-participants. But like I said, this is a topic for another post, and I’m getting off topic – where’s my Big Idea?

It was only fitting that CAJE held the symposium, since CAJE itself was a Next Big Idea when it was founded three decades ago by Jewish teachers as a counter-cultural, grassroots attempt to give support and attention to their work, underpaid and underappreciated.

Great! The big ideas are coming from CAJE, which the quality Jewish educators I know think of as crazy consultants who fly in from New York or LA to waste their time, and the crappy ones think of as the people who give them a paid day off. CAJE might have been a big idea at the time, but as far as big ideas go, I feel like it flopped pretty bad. Maybe things are different in New York, though. OK, let’s see what their panelists had to say:

Rabbi Elliot Dorf, rector of the University of Judaism, is concerned that Jews aren’t replacing themselves because they marry and start families late. How do we solve it?

His suggestion: encourage these young people to marry and have children while in graduate school, and for the community to create and subsidize affordable day care in Jewish institutions.

I don’t know if he’s clueless or just hasn’t thought this through, but Jews aren’t alone in marrying late, it’s a generational thing. Encouraging them to marry will drive more people away than it will attract – especially with the chaning nature of marriage as an institution. Affordable daycare is a great idea, but my intuition says that it will have a marginal impact on family size or start time.

My favorite, and the only one that makes sense to me is here:

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, the president of the Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation, spoke of Steinhardt’s idea to articulate and disseminate a Common Judaism, a distillation of core Jewish values that speak to the widest possible audience of Jews today. Rabbi Greenberg added his own longstanding idea of creating a retreat center in the New York area.

The Common Judaism is important to me. It says “here is what Jews believe,” and creates a differentiating factor for Judaism in the marketplace of ideas that allows Judaism to compete for finite attention – which has a smaller budget than most Jews’ money-budgets. The retreat center is a stupid idea – there are enough opportunities for Jews to get sent into the woods to study, we don’t need another one.

Dr. Bethamie Horowitz, research director of the Mandel Foundation, asserted that “Jews don’t have to be cloistered” to live Jewish lives anymore, and that rather than ask “why be Jewish?” the question should be “why not be Jewish?”

That doesn’t even make sense to me. The answer to “why not be Jewish?” is because being Jewish is hard – it has added responsibilities and obligations. “Why be Jewish” is the question that identifies what you get for that extra effort. Her ideas sound like really stupid marketing spin to me.

Rabbi Jan Katzew, director of lifelong learning at the Union of Reform Judaism, said that “the single greatest problem” in his work is that “it costs too much to live a rich Jewish life.” He said that many leadership programs and quality day schools with high tuitions “enrich the rich and exacerbate the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”

I think Rabbi Katzew needs to redefine what it means to live a rich Jewish life. Cost is an issue if a) a rich Jewish life isn’t worth it or b) the costs are higher than the value of a rich Jewish life (can I teach Econ 101 at UJ?), or c) a rich Jewish life breaks the budget. A rich Jewish life shouldn’t have a dollar cost – not because schools and kosher food become free, but because you should be able to live a rich Jewish life without them. There is a nice opportunity for an Economics of Religion discussion here, but I’m not going to get into it.

Cyd Weissman, New York director of the Re-Imagine Project, called for “bringing down the walls” on a number of levels — between “learning and living,” between professionals and lay leaders, lay leaders and teachers, and to “create space” to foster a sense of “oneness.”

Quit smoking the doobie smackers. This is another one that doesn’t even make sense. Come up with something concrete, because the Jewish community doesn’t need more vague ideas. Everything I know about the Re-Imagine Project I just learned from their website, and it seems like a good idea, just not a Big Idea. It’s process improvement or strategic realignment for synagogues, but the synagogue is no longer the central Jewish communal institution.

The article ends on a question from an audience member:

A woman in my small discussion group said she and her husband raised their children with Jewish rituals, Hebrew school and synagogue attendance but that the children, now in their 20s, were not at all interested anymore.

“What can we do to bring them back?” she asked.

The problem is that ritual, Hebrew school, and synagogue attendance all need to provide value, or else they’re just a chore. If she had taught her children Jewish values in such a way that they served as some sort of guiding principle in their lives, or demonstrated the worth of being Jewish (and with the synagogues, rituals, and Hebrew Schools I’ve seen, it’s tough), it’s much less likely they would have left, and it would probably be much easier to bring them back.

This turned into a pretty long screed, but there were so few good ideas in that article, and my frustrations with the organized Jewish community are continuing to grow. The last thing the Jewish community needs right now is something else for a philanthropist to throw money away on, even though the philanthropists are lining up to do so. It’s time some serious thought was put into gathering the right data and coming up with real non-programmatic solutions to the problems faced by the community. This means reassessing human resources policies, allocations, governance structures, communal institutions, and coming up with a real strategy for providing Jewish meaning in the 21st century.

(this was too long for me to proofread, so if you catch anything, let me know)

I found the article through the canonist blog, and I’m not sure where I found that.

Categories: America, Community, Jewishness, Philanthropy, Strategy
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