Out of Business?

Just when you think that it’s safe to go in the water, the Pew Charitable Trust comes to tell us otherwise.

This time around the issue is Jews and prayer, namely that old time religion doesn’t work anymore. The difference between then and now is statistically significant. In 2014, the number was 45%. That means that when American Jews were asked about frequency, a little under half said they prayed seldom or never. Now comes news of a big-ass jump. The most recent figure is 58%. The number has yet to rise to public consciousness, but Pew is an historically reliable poll. If Pew says it, it must be true.

I know that I should feel a little panicked. I’ve just put the experience of the pulpit behind me, and I’m on to writing opinion pieces like this one. But leading services remains who I am. No sanctuary where I’ve presided has ever been full, but I chalked it up to generational change and the slow decline of conventional religiosity. That, and my failure of rabbinic leadership. (See an upcoming entry on this very subject.) This new figure, however, is a rapid acceleration. If Jews have by and large ceased to pray, what’s a rabbi? What’s a synagogue? What are we supposed to do next?

But that might be the wrong set of questions. The truth is that, with the exception of Orthodox Jews, synagogues are now different and arguably more interesting. Instead of a monoculture of traditional piety, they are a confluence of Jewish concerns and expressiveness. There are men and women at our synagogue in Tulsa who would never attend a single service, but who readily study with me for years at a stretch. Every week, no interruption, a serious encounter with classic Jewish texts. We’re now doing sessions on principled disobedience, using Genesis as our textual provocation.

Either that, or they do serious social justice. In my own short time, we’ve done literacy training for young children, pro-social business development, and, most recently, refugee resettlement. The administration has currently made the last impossible, but those days will surely come again. If we used the same language as our Christian brethren and sisthren, all of these would be described as sacraments, as important as categories like worship and prayer.

Worship might actually deepen this experience by foregrounding an Authority that calls us to service and exemplifies standards that encourage generosity and self-sacrifice, but not everyone buys a supernatural God who answers prayers by direct intervention. That is not a failure, but a symptom of modernity. It doesn’t mean, however, what Pew thinks it means, a rejection of Jewish preoccupations and identity. It just means that Jews are now doing their Jewishness differently.