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| Pâ•qidꞋ Yi•rᵊmᵊyâhꞋu |
According to "a leading [apparently Conservative] sociologist of American Jews" quoted by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), "Today, for most American Jews, Judaism is conceived of as an aesthetic understanding; being Jewish is a matter of beauty and culture." Excepting Orthodox Jews, American "Jews" no longer connect Jewish identity to úÌåÉøÈä.
As a result, the challenge for American ðÀöÈøÄéí is to develop strategies that complement "the varied new, self-organized communities and endeavors of young people, how to combine welcoming the intermarried while teaching the value of conversion and in-marriage, how to sustain Jewish collective identity, and, in general, how to bridge the gap between Judaic mission and the Jewish marketplace."
When you hear non-Orthodox talking about "Jews," it's essential to recognize that non-Orthodox definitions of Jewish identity are hybridized (assimilated and corrupted) by syncretism into western ecumenism, ðÆâÆã-úÌåÉøÈä and misleading. The non-Orthodox argue, to quote, that "When applied to Jews, its connotations are too individual, too static, and too attitudinal. 'Jewish identity' is–or should be seen as–a social identity, referring not only to beliefs and attitudes but also to how Jews interact with others, and how Jews act and behave. Judaism and Jewishness place primary emphasis on interaction with other Jews and participation in community and society." Thus, the assimilationists (Hellenists) displace úÌåÉøÈä with "aesthetics" and social – Leftist – values.
This same sociologist observes, "Aside from integration, the other major development is the rise of the Jewish Sovereign Self.… Jews feel far more ready to assert whether, when, where, and how they will express their Jewish identities, shifting from normative constructions of being Jewish to aesthetic understandings." This shift from group identity to self supremacy is at the heart of the crumbling of éÄùÒÀøÈàÅì as a people; and the core of a new scientific study contrasting group identity with Darwinian self-preservation (see below). The aesthetic approach is less judgmental and directive. It sees being Jewish as a matter of beauty and culture, as a resource for meaning rather than as an ethical or moral imperative. What the "Jew" sees as right becomes whatever the self decrees is personally right and beautiful, displacing the Authority of the Creator.
The greatest asset and resource in the American "Jewish" community, which is consistently overlooked, are the more than 200 Jewish Community Centers (JCCs), which comprise "the largest institutionally based association in American Jewish life, with about a million Jewish members. It even outnumbers Reform Judaism, the largest denominational movement in American Judaism… [offering] an impressive organizational range and complexity that embraces early childhood education, day camps, youth groups, continentally based sports events, adult Jewish education, cultural events, communitywide organizing, and engagement with Israel." At least back in the early 1980s in Central Florida, the local JCC was open to non-Jews and sympathetic to Jewish learning and improving Jewish-gentile inter-community relations without regard to whether one is a Jew, much less which denomination. In addition to trying to work with the local Orthodox community (if there is one), the local JCC is the first resource that the ðÀöÈøÄéí should try to cultivate and utilize to attract both non-Orthodox Jews and Christians to úÌåÉøÈä. I can help you design and conduct study programs. Within this context are the new tendency among young adult "Jews" to prefer çÂáåÌøåÉú or îÄðÈéðÄéí—exactly what I've been teaching you to develop.
The sociologist recognized the value of the JCCs: "On another plane, the JCC movement, as mentioned earlier, is widely overlooked as locus of Jewish community-building, to say nothing of its great strides in informal Jewish education. Furthermore, American Jews have a very rich cultural life in music, art, literature, scholarship, journalism, dance, museums of various kinds, and also now on the Internet." The ðÀöÈøÄéí must think Middle East úÌÅéîÈðÄé culinary, culture, music, dance; which implies that you must learn ðÀöÈøÄéí and must think Middle East úÌÅéîÈðÄé culinary, culture, music, dance to become beacons of úÌåÉøÈä in the framework of ðÀöÈøÄéí must think Middle East úÌÅéîÈðÄé culinary, culture, music, dance. It's all essential. You cannot pick and choose, ignoring music, dance, culinary or any other aspects. "Your people shall be my people…" (øåÌú 1.16).
Another point noted by the sociologist: "Deep within, most committed Orthodox Jews see other systems as violating úÌåÉøÈä-true, authentic understandings as to what Jews should do and what they should believe. They thus have far more of a problem with Conservative or Reform rabbis than with Conservative or Reform Jews." Each of us must always keep that distinction in mind. Most Conservative and Reform Jews don't know what their denomination stands for. If they did, like Christians, they might well abandon them.
Conservative "Judaism" (CJ), aside from being false, is self-destructing. Having neutralized úÌåÉøÈä, Jews increasingly quickly recognize that their emphasis on religion is empty of purpose or meaning. Like a balloon with a leak, CJ is shrinking into extinction as a few return to Orthodoxy while most continue their slide into assimilation by joining the Reform. The Reform, meanwhile, are doing no better: "perhaps half of the couples joining Reform temples have a partner who was not born Jewish, only a minority of whom have converted to Judaism… [and the] large number of congregants who leave their temples upon the bar/bat mitzvah of their youngest child; perhaps about half do so. Even more worrying, perhaps, are the large numbers of children raised in Reform Judaism who marry out, more by far than in the other two major movements." Non-orthodox "Jewishness"–it isn't úÌåÉøÈä/Judaism–is an intractable loser.
You will hear the non-Orthodox decry what they describe as the Orthodox creation of a schism with "the real òÇí éÄùÒÀøÈàÅì (the Jewish people) in America… the entire Jewish people. The alternative to ëÌÀìÇì éÄùÒÀøÈàÅì (the Jewish collective) is to separate itself from the majority of the Jewish people," by which they mean the great majority of non-Orthodox "Jews" in western society. You must always be ready to point out that they are reversing the real with the false. There is no point whatsoever in clinging to a false definition, which is why Jews leave their numbers when they recognize the superficiality of it.
They rightly (!) argue, for example, "The high rates of intermarriage, patrilineal descent, and what [the Orthodox] regard as illegitimate conversions, mean to many Orthodox parents that their children might unknowingly marry what to them are non-Jews, albeit those who were raised in Reform or Conservative congregations. Significant numbers insulate their children from the effects of the larger society and from contact with non-Orthodox Jews. The isolation of Orthodoxy from the wider precincts of American "Jewry" [i.e. polarizing, charging sectarianism; quotation marks added] means that those outside [Orthodoxy] who are arguing for placing Jewish interests first, seeing Israel as central, and stressing the importance of Jewish learning and observance are now viewed as more extreme and parochial in their movements.
These young non-Orthodox "Jews" are described by the non-Orthodox as "young-adult Jews who are socially progressive, religiously liberal and, at the same time, religiously and textually serious, and committed to high-quality spiritual experiences." It will be our job to focus on demonstrating our textual seriousness high-quality spirituality–as contrasted with "spiritual experiences," a euphemism for a superficial (non-serious) emotional rush, while showing how this is intractably incompatible with social progressiveness and religious liberalism. Young adult Jews must be shown that textual seriousness high-quality spirituality is mutually exclusive from social progressiveness and religious liberalism; and then recognize that they must choose whether to remain part of the true Jewish people or assimilate among the âÌåÉéÌÄí.
To correct the sociologist's biased observation with a pair of single quotation marks, "There is thus a plethora of 'Jewish' life that is being led by people in their twenties and thirties outside the traditional network… [oriented toward a] more recently emerging 'Jewish' spirituality movement with its shaping of prayer, healing" These are your prospects to restore to úÌåÉøÈä. Focus on úÌÀôÄìÌåÉú and a spiritual understanding of healing of the ðÆôÆùÑ or ðÀùÑÈîÈä, away from charismatic Christian beliefs; for self-actualization, purpose, direction, sense of value in contributing to making the world a better place for having lived, being a positive influence on others, a Light in the world, fulfillment, happiness and inner peace. That there is a plethora means you have a huge sea of prospects to reach. The way to lead them to úÌåÉøÈä should be obvious: education, from úÌåÉøÈä to .historical documentation, logic and science–all things that appeal to (secular) educated young adults.
Maintain a mailing list (and email list) so that you can eventually organize events on behalf of éÄùÒÀøÈàÅì, to celebrate çÇâÌÄéí and the like.
FWIW, they prefer, and you should adjust your ÷ÄéøåÌá accordingly, the term "participants"; avoiding such conventional words as 'members' or 'congregations' or 'officers.'
You aren't the only ones dependent upon keeping costs low. These "younger generation-Jews" are establishing independent îÄðÈéðÄéí and finding places to meet exactly like ùÑÀîåÌàÅì is doing (but not as well as ùÑÀîåÌàÅì; some of them rent churches on ùÑÇáÌÈú, for example) and rely on a borrowed or donated ñÅôÆø úÌåÉøÈä. Where there is an Orthodox community, we can work around that problem by meeting on an evening that doesn't interfere with ùÑÇáÌÈú, and attending an Orthodox áéäë"ð on ùÑÇáÌÈú (since they will have a ñÅôÆø úÌåÉøÈä).
For those isolated from an Orthodox áéäë"ð, you can only do your utmost with what you have. You may find it shocking but it just may be feasible that, once you're up-and-running as a úÌåÉøÈä group, the local JCC (more accurately, the related local Jewish Federation) sometimes make grants to cover such expenses to enable Judaic study and practice. It will likely take time for you to prove yourself but it is well worth the time and effort and good relations with the JCC is something you should pursue in any case.
Unlike the Orthodox, "Today, reflecting a worldwide pattern, most non-Orthodox Jewish adults under the age of forty are not married… and without children." This is our target audience; especially non-Orthodox born-Jews or faux-Jews aren't disqualified by intermarriage. Your ÷ÄéøåÌá should be tailored to show úÌåÉøÈä appealing to this (non-Orthodox) audience and Christians. Since young-adult Jews seek cordial relations with gentiles, including Christians, this is an advantage, not a problem.
As mentioned earlier, fewer Jews see themselves as obligated to support the collective interests of the Jewish people, or even to relate personally to the very notion of the Jewish people at all. This transitions us to the next article about the convergence of science and religion, from the Economist (2008.03.19), searching for the biological reasons why so many people believe in "God", "gods" and religion.
"Explaining Religion", as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the "God" business.
Religion cries out for a biological explanation… arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens· [a] marker of humanity.
The experiments [this project] will sponsor are designed to look at the mental mechanisms needed to represent an omniscient deity, whether (and how) belief in such a "surveillance-camera" "God" might improve reproductive success to an individual's Darwinian advantage, and whether religion enhances a person's reputation—for instance, do people think that those who believe in "God" are more trustworthy than those who do not? The researchers will also seek to establish whether different religions foster different levels of co-operation, for what reasons, and whether such co-operation brings collective benefits, both to the religious community and to those outside it.
"Patrick McNamara… head of the Evolutionary Neurobehaviour Laboratory at Boston University's School of Medicine… works with people who suffer from Parkinson's disease. This illness is caused by low levels of a messenger molecule called dopamine in certain parts of the brain. In a preliminary study, Dr McNamara discovered that those with Parkinson's had lower levels of religiosity than healthy individuals, and that the difference seemed to correlate with the disease's severity. He therefore suspects a link with dopamine levels…"
Nina Azari, a neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who also has a doctorate in theology… was expecting to see activity in the limbic systems of the Christians when they recited the [23rd] psalm. Previous research had suggested that this part of the brain (which regulates emotion) is an important centre of religious activity. In fact what happened was increased activity in three areas of the frontal and parietal cortex, some of which are better known for their involvement in rational thought. The control group did not show activity in these parts of their brains when listening to the psalm. And, intriguingly, the only thing that triggered limbic activity in either group was reading the happy story. Dr Azari's PET study, together with one by Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania, which used single-photon emission computed tomography done on Buddhist monks, and another by Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal, which put Carmelite nuns in a magnetic-resonance-imaging machine, all suggest that religious activity is spread across many parts of the brain."
The aim of the research is to illuminate how the brain generates and processes religious experiences. Dr Azari, however, is skeptical that such work will say much about religion's evolution and function.
The urgency for òÇí éÄùÒÀøÈàÅì and, therefore, the ðÀöÈøÄéí, is found in the context of the ascending assimilation and "personal sovereignty" of young-adult "Jews" described above. Dr McNamara… plans to analyze a database called the Ethnographic Atlas to see if he can find any correlations between the amount of cultural co-operation [in contrast to personal sovereignty] found in a society and the intensity of its religious rituals. And Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, has already done some research which suggests that the long-term co-operative benefits of religion outweigh the short-term costs it imposes in the form of praying many times a day, avoiding certain foods, fasting and so on. The competition between the good of the Jewish people through shared úÌåÉøÈä rituals, culture, etc. versus personal sovereignty becomes immediately clear.
Signs of religious commitment that are hard to fake provide a costly and reliable signal to others in a group that anyone engaging in them is committed to that group. Free-riders, in other words, would not be able to gain the advantages of group membership.
To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved's data include the span of each commune's existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.
A follow-up study that Dr Sosis conducted in collaboration with Eric Bressler of McMaster University in Canada focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members. The two researchers examined things like food consumption, attitudes to material possessions, rules about communication, rituals and taboos, and rules about marriage and sexual relationships.
As they expected, they found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, at the grand old age of 149). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40. Dr Sosis therefore concludes that ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community—what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified.
Dr Sosis has also studied modern secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel. Because a kibbutz, by its nature, depends on group co-operation, the principal difference between the two is the use of religious ritual. Within religious communities, men are expected to pray three times daily in groups of at least ten, while women are not. It should, therefore, be possible to observe whether group rituals do improve co-operation, based on the behaviour of men and women.
The researchers' hypothesis was that in religious kibbutzim men would be better collaborators (and thus would take less) than women, while in secular kibbutzim men and women would take about the same. And that was exactly what happened.
Dr Bering, too, likes the hypothesis that religion promotes fitness by promoting collaboration within groups. One way that might work would be to rely not just on other individuals to detect cheats by noticing things like slacking on the prayers or eating during fasts, but for cheats to detect and police themselves as well. In that case a sense of being watched by a supernatural being might be useful. Dr Bering thus proposes that belief in such beings would prevent what he called "dangerous risk miscalculations" that would lead to social deviance and reduced fitness.
The American communes, the kibbutzim, the students of the University of British Columbia and even the supernatural self-censorship observed by Dr Bering all seem to involve behavior that promotes the group over the individual. That is the opposite of Darwinism as conventionally understood. But it might be explained by an idea that most Darwinians dropped in the 1960s—group selection.
The idea that evolution can work by the differential survival of entire groups of organisms, rather than just of individuals, was rejected because it is mathematically implausible. But it has been revived recently, in particular by David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University, in New York, as a way of explaining the evolution of human morality in the context of inter-tribal warfare. Such warfare can be so murderous that groups whose members fail to collaborate in an individually self-sacrificial way may be wiped out entirely. This negates the benefits of selfish behavior within a group. Morality and religion are often closely connected, of course (as Dr Norenzayan's work confirms), so what holds for the one might be expected to hold for the other, too. That would make sense if adherence to the rules is a condition for the security which comes from membership of a group. He is also interested in what some religions hold out as the ultimate reward for good behaviour—life after death. That can promote any amount of self-sacrifice in a believer, up to and including suicidal behaviour—as recent events in the Islamic world have emphasized. However, belief in an afterlife is not equally well developed in all religions, and he suspects the differences may be illuminating.
Jason Slone, a professor of religious studies at Webster University in St Louis, argues that people who are religious will be seen as more likely to be faithful and to help in parenting than those who are not. That makes them desirable as mates. (This is an advantage you should mention to your charges.) He plans to conduct experiments designed to find out whether this is so. And, slightly tongue in cheek, Dr Wilson quips that "secularism is very maladaptive biologically. We're the ones who at best are having only two kids. Perhaps the socially progressive, personally sovereign, religiously liberals are intrinsically programmed to self-destruct? Look at Leftists–in America, Israel and Europe attacking their own countries, like scorpions stinging themselves to death.
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