Published: 12 October 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IT’S EASY TO JUDGE the growing cohort of young people turning their backs on Jewish identity. Their abandonment of Judaism in an age safer than most can feel ungrateful and even traitorous.
We should refrain from such judgements. If we want Jewishness to survive in any meaningful way beyond Israel, we need to reach out to the renouncers and confront the pressures pushing them away.
Demographic predictions of the global future of Jews have grown pessimistic. By 2050, the PEW Research Centre predicts the Jewish population in Europe will fall by 15 per cent, from 1.42 million to 1.2 million. Decline is anticipated across the Americas and Africa. The American Jewish Community is expected to shrink to 1.4 per cent of the population (it was 3 per cent in 1942, then 2.6 per cent in 1970 and 1.7 per cent in 2010).
However, population forecasts can miss the point, and often invite poor conclusions. The crisis is not in fertility, it is in desertion: across the world, the values of institutional Judaism are diverging from the values of adherents, particularly among youth. The Jewish present no longer aligns with the Jewish future.
I am an example of this dilemma. I identify as a Jew, but I come from an intermarriage; I don’t know if I believe in God, I’m gay, most of my friends aren’t Jewish and I don’t feel an unconditional allegiance to Israel.
How can I be those things and still be a Jew? How can I still meaningfully connect to this culture? I found the answers but many in my shoes haven’t.
Once again, the youth are looking beyond the Shtetl, and Judaism faces the same two options it always has when presented with major social change:
We can pull inwards, cling to our kind, multiply and observe piously. We can impose harsh standards on our youth and when they desert, we can castigate them. We shrink decisively but make up for it in zeal.
Or, we can go outwards. We adapt to the new world and forge a Jewish identity of the future. We win back the youth.
Judaism has always valued adaptation: it is a strategy for survival in a hostile world. When the Enlightenment hit Europe in the 19th Century, Conservative Judaism was formed as an alternative to orthodoxy, keeping its relevance to millions. When modernity and democracy spread in the 20th Century, Reform Judaism sought to integrate the faith with modern values and Judaism endured.
This process of flexible redesign has kept us around, in some form, all over the world. The crisis of our youth signals a need for adaptation and we must act decisively.
Luckily for us, an answer may have already presented itself.
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Enter American Rabbi Sherwin Wine, who founded the Society for Humanistic Judaism in 1963. Wine realised that as Jews turned to science, secularism and social justice, they began to experience an uncomfortable dualism. At the synagogue, an “incongruity between the words spoken and what [they] really believed” was arising and growing impossible to ignore. He found whispers of this phenomena across denominations and knew it was unsustainable.
In a storm of controversy that made it to Time Magazine, he founded a Detroit temple with the mission of developing a movement that made it possible to be both a fully-fledged person of the information age while finding genuine meaning in the ancient tradition of Judaism.
Wine’s vision was a celebration of Jewish survival and excellence rooted in the human accomplishments of Jews independent of the divine. Rather than obedience to godly law, he centred Jewish commitment to human dignity and justice.
Critics questioned what made the movement Jewish if it didn’t worship the Jewish god, but Humanistic Jews practice Jewish holidays, seek inspiration in the saga of Jewish history and assemble in congregation and community. They find meaning in Judaism according to how it was experienced by human beings on Earth. This is the meaning of humanistic.
Instead of reducing the enormity of what it means to be Jewish to belief in a certain god, they view Judaism as an ongoing political, cultural and historical experience rich with value. It is a movement that finds its meaning in the lives of Jews as human beings on Earth.
Under this interpretation, one could be a Jew and an evolutionary biologist. One could be a Jew under the beating lights of a gay nightclub. One could be a Jew raising placards for abortion rights. One could be a Jew married to a non-Jew. One could even be a Jew and not believe in God. These are all shards of the Jewish experience. The past and the present are reconciled.
Wine’s vision was to retain the meaning and to also open the gates. To find value outside of theology and the prejudices it bought. With this, I found a way to be all that I am and a Jew.
Humanistic Judaism is a compelling alternative to existing sects. The movement has 40,000 declared followers and temples have sprung up in countries including Israel, England, France, Italy, Australia and Mexico.
On the question of young Jews “abandoning” their culture, I wonder if we forget that many were first abandoned by the faith. Told, explicitly or otherwise, to renounce their sexuality, secular lifestyles and political beliefs to prove their legitimacy as Jews, many refused. Can we blame them?
I am deeply invested in the survival of this culture, but I worry that if people are to be lighting menorahs in a hundred years’ time, we might need another reformation. Humanistic Judaism offers an insight into what that could look like.
Illustration: John Kron
