Reform Taps A Loving Critic

Reform Taps A Loving Critic

Reform Judaism is the largest of the religious streams, with some 900 synagogues in North America, but it is far from immune from the challenges facing Jewish life in the diaspora.
A position paper drafted last month by the rabbis of the 18 largest congregations and circulating now among their colleagues offers a sober assessment of the social changes in the national Jewish landscape, and a tough critique of the movement’s key organizations.
The paper, obtained by The Jewish Week and titled “Urgent Change, Lasting Transformation,” notes that Jews today feel less of a sense of kinship with each other; denominational loyalty is less relevant; synagogues have become “pass-throughs of convenience for life-cycle celebration”; intermarriage has made its mark, and “almost half of the children being educated in Reform synagogues are growing up in a family in which one parent was not born Jewish”; younger Jews “are not joiners and see denominations as divisive or irrelevant”; and “national organizations can no longer depend on communal support for Israel.”
There’s more. The Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) is criticized for having “not responded to the dramatic changes in the wider landscape of Jewish life,” and its alleged faults are cited in detail.
The rabbis who formed what they call the Rabbinic Vision Initiative and drafted the document said they did so out of love and concern for Reform Judaism, in hopes of focusing more attention to synagogue life, and bringing the movement’s congregational arm, rabbinic school and rabbinic organization in alignment and better able to work together.
One of those rabbis is Richard (“Rick”) Jacobs, the highly regarded senior rabbi of Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale. In a move expected to bring dynamism and innovation to the movement, Rabbi Jacobs was tapped this week to succeed Rabbi Eric Yoffie as president of the URJ, when Rabbi Yoffie retires in 2012 after 16 years at the helm.
The most telling sign that Rabbi Jacobs was an excellent choice is the fact that so many of his colleagues are describing him as having the vision, energy, passion and commitment to take on the challenges he surely will face.
And as he noted in an interview on Tuesday, the problems his movement faces are those that much of organized Jewish life, from religious streams to organizations, are confronting. Only those that can answer the questions “why join and what’s in it for me,” will succeed.
Rabbi Jacobs has had much success in making his synagogue into a place of spirituality, learning and service. “Only meaningful congregations will matter,” he says. “People won’t join just because their grandparents did. We have to matter every day.”
He hopes to bring that energy and sense of meaning to congregations throughout North America, and we wish him every success.




Taking notice

A few weeks back, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman speculated on the “not-so-obvious forces” that led Tunisians, Egyptians, and citizens of other Arab nations to rise up against their despotic rulers.
Among those forces was one overlooked in much of the rest of the media: Israel’s democratic example. While Israel’s critics continue to smear it as an “apartheid state” and worse, Friedman focused on some high-profile cases of corruption in Israel and the ways in which its system worked to hold the perpetrators accountable. His examples included the forced resignation of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on suspicions of graft, and the investigation of Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant for an illicit land deal that derailed his appointment as the army’s new chief of staff.
Friedman also mentioned the case of former Israeli President Moshe Katsav, who was found guilty of rape and sexual assault. This week, Katsav was sentenced to seven years in jail and ordered to pay compensation to two of his victims.
In sentencing Katsav, who intends to appeal, the judges wrote, “The defendant committed the crime and like every other person, he must bear the consequences. No man is above the law. The contention that seeing a former president of the country go to jail is too painful to watch is an emotional argument, but it definitely cannot be accepted as an ethical argument.”
The Katsav case was painful and embarrassing. And yet it serves as a reminder of the ways in which Israel continues to live up to its democratic ideals and provides an example for the societies that may emerge out of the current upheaval. As Friedman put it, “When you live right next to a country that is bringing to justice its top leaders for corruption, and you live in a country where many of the top leaders are corrupt, well, you notice.”




Terror in Jerusalem

It had been more than three years since the last terrorist bombing targeting civilians in Israel — until a blast caused by an explosive pipe placed next to a telephone pole near the bus station in central Jerusalem on March 23 ended that period of relative quiet. Suddenly, the familiar images appeared across our screens, of shattered streets, frantic rescue efforts, harsh denunciations. And the familiar sorrow of lives lost and irreparably injured.
But the Middle East has changed dramatically during those three years, something that seems to have escaped the cowards who hold onto the discredited belief that bombing civilians in the heart of a cherished city will serve their cause. How can they ignore the obvious? Besides being morally wrong, this sort of terrorism simply does not work.
As of this writing, no one has claimed responsibility for the attack that has killed one and wounded at least 30, but whoever the culprits, they clearly have willfully ignored the powerful lessons from elsewhere in the region. First in Tunisia, then in Egypt, nonviolent uprisings drove despotic leaders from office.
The efficacy of peaceful protest is not wishful thinking but historical fact. A major study published in 2008 comparing the outcomes of hundreds of violent insurgencies with those of major nonviolent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 found that 53% of the nonviolent movements succeeded, compared with only 26% of the violent insurgencies.
Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, who conducted the study, reason that nonviolent movements are more effective because they are broad-based and enjoy more domestic and international legitimacy, in part because they are perceived to be less extreme. Violent reactions to peaceful protest, meantime, can backfire, as former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak learned the hard way.
The Palestinian people deserve their own, viable state. But 40 years of terrorism hasn’t brought them any closer, and the uprisings of 2011 only reinforce that message.