A Movement Dies

Jewish denominationalism is a mystery to outsiders, for the same reason that I am personally confused by the Amish. I don’t really live in the center of Amish-ism, and its gradations of practice play out at a distance. I can never remember if Old Order believers allow the use of vehicles in family emergencies. This is no small matter, and I should remedy my ignorance.

The Jewish spectrum is much more familiar but still requires close attention. When people think “Jewish,” they think sidelocks and frock coats, the standard dress of certain Chasidic courts. That rhymes with what they’ve seen in productions of Fiddler on the Roof, but Orthodox believers of any variety are the smallest cohort in the modern Jewish world. It turns out that modernity is deeply attractive to Jews. They may be nostalgic for the gefilte fish-iness of Chasidism, but they want no meaningful part of it for themselves or their children.

That leaves Progressive Judaism in all its varieties: Post-Denominationalism, Renewal, Reconstructionism (now called “Reconstructing Judaism”), Reform and Conservativism. The first groups are doing reasonably well, with slight upticks in rabbinical school admissions. Reform recently closed its Mother Ship campus in Cincinnati and is struggling to stem the loss of movement congregations. Just today, it announced another closure, this time most of its footprint in Los Angeles.

But the real Sick Man of Europe (actually America) is the movement I am tied to. Even though I consider myself Post-Denominational in practice, Conservativism clings to me like old-person mothballs. There’s just enough scent so you can tell I once lived there. Our slide in numbers has been catastrophic, with hundreds of congregations folding or disaffiliating. Very few people are enrolling in our rabbinical schools, and our day school network is a skeleton operation. We seem to have given up on supplementary schooling altogether, along with affinity groups for kids and university students.

The problem is that we were never much of an idea. The idealogues of our movement (see the picture of Solomon Schechter with this article) were put off by Reform, believing that rapid modernization would kill us. They had a taste for the forms of Jewish ritual but never worked out the kinks of “commanded-ness.” Does God really care about the mechanics of observance—carrying on the Sabbath, forbidden foodstuffs, and the like—or are these ancient practices hallowed by centuries of repetition? Orthodoxy says yes to the theory of Divine Origin. Conservativism says maybe, with the bundle of anxiety and incoherence that comes of picking and choosing what to keep and discard.

The result is that we lost our mojo along the way. After the great suburbanization of Jewish life in the 70s, people stopped paying attention to our labored explanations about whether you could eat pizza in a non-supervised restaurant. We never created communities of believers who would generate their hospitality according to the rhythms of Jewish life. Where were the big, beautiful lunches on the Sabbath? We were done in by an unimaginative leadership who could not translate its considerable scholarship into powerful, charismatic gestures of transformation. I’m all for German-Jewish intellectual history, but it’s not the way to build a popular movement, or even a highly motivated community of the saved.

And we were especially damaged by institutional structures that were poorly suited to American Jewish life. For the better part of a century, the de-facto head of Conservativism was the “Chancellor” of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. In other words, power was invested in the president of a small college who wrangled with his faculty, plotted capital improvements, and faced down the consuming challenges of his little operation. Not the best set of givens for mobilizing a denomination.

We are now reassuring ourselves that the Jewish leadership in America does not have much to do with the Conservative Movement, but that some of its luminaries were educated in Conservative institutions. I like the feel of that, but it’s counterbalanced by the fact that I feel bad about signing up for the losing team.

Because whatever else I am, I’m an American Jew: a little bit crude and a lot competitive. Once upon a time, I wanted to win the game.