Republish: Time for a New American Judaism

“What does it mean today to speak to the world with a distinctively Jewish voice?”

Lainie Berger/Unsplash

Note: I’m republishing an interview from last December. Going into Yom Kippur, I thought this would be a good one to think about again. In what ways has Judaism changed for you this past year? In what ways would you like to see Judaism change in this new era we’re in? Share your thoughts in the comments or in the notes feature on Substack.

Judaism has perhaps found no better home than America.

But we had to make some trade-offs to integrate. We prioritized the universalist, humanist messages of the Torah and suppressed the particular and overly religious elements. We convinced our country and ourselves that Jewish values and American liberal values are virtually one and the same. Our religion became our politics. Our central narrative became “strangers in a strange land.” Uplifting others became our central tenet. We started calling mitzvot (commandments) “good deeds” and bathed ourselves in an Americanized idea of “tikkun olam” — repairing the world, whether it be collecting tube socks for homeless shelters or fighting climate change. “Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof!” we chant. “Social justice” became our rallying cry.

But what is tzedek? What is justice? We melded liberal, humanist, American values with the principles of Judaism until Judaism became an expression of liberal democracy, inflected with a Christ-like attitude toward charity.

Our success in America is a testament to how we are able to adapt in order to survive. I don’t think taking the humanistic approach was necessarily wrong as much as it was necessary, natural, and in pursuit of noble values. But our preoccupation with ruminating over how to solve other people’s problems has left us with a hollowed out identity. If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us?

We compromised too many of Judaism’s core values and we stopped understanding what makes our nation unique. We failed to educate our children and ourselves, preferring to believe that Judaism is some kind of service project. And we wonder why our kids go to college and become opposed to the existential plight of their own people.

Now, with anti-Zionist activists in streets and on college campuses convulsing in protest against the Jewish state, with professors redefining terrorism as legitimate political struggle, and citizens literally defending Hamas, as some did at an Oakland City Council meeting, you may be asking yourself: can American Judaism go on?

I reached out to Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum, the rabbi emeritus of Congregation Herzl-Ner Tamid on Mercer Island, originally to talk about the local response from non-Jewish communities to the October 7th terror attack. The answer was somewhat predictable. However, a more interesting conversation emerged around how we as a community are going to move forward. I look forward to hearing what you think about this question.

“What does it mean today to speak to the world with a distinctively Jewish voice?”

Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum is rabbi emeritus of Herzl-Ner Tamid Congregation in Mercer Island, WA after serving 17 years as HNT’s senior rabbi. As a congregational rabbi for 39 years, he has often been called upon to bring together people with opposing agendas. His work as a pastor is rooted in the central Jewish spiritual practice of Torah study which at its core is about harmonizing diverse opinions. Rabbi Rosenbaum has devoted his life’s energy to making peace between ancient texts with modern sensibilities. He believes that if you can close the gap between two ideas, you can overcome the barriers between two human beings. For the past several years, he has concentrated on deepening understanding between the Black and Jewish communities, Muslims and Jews, and Christians and Jews. In January, 2024, Rabbi Rosenbaum will be teaching a class at HNT called “Re-thinking Social Justice in an Age of Moral Confusion.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Cholent: We’ve been very connected as an American Jewish community to the idea of tikkun olam and the idea of social justice is the core value of Judaism. Do you think that in our effort to assimilate Jewish values with American universalist values, we’ve lost the plot?

Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum: One of the great strengths of Judaism is our ability to look at moral complexity. And we’ve really lost that ability. The way I like to put it is we are ethically bilingual people. We have the prophetic voice, which is all about passion for justice. The prophets were unequivocal. There wasn't much room for nuance and they saw right and wrong and they spoke out with tremendous energy and tremendous feeling.

But then there's the rabbinic voice, and the rabbinic voice is all about finding nuance in moral situations and balancing chesed (kindness) and din (justice). When we talk about social justice, over the past 50, 60 years, we’re overwhelmingly referring to the prophetic voice, and we're not at all referring to the rabbinic voice. I think we need a complete overhaul in the way we as a Jewish community understand social justice. A significant part of understanding social justice is creating an environment in which we can duke it out, in which we can have very vigorous and robust conversations about what the right thing to do is.

I'll go back to a text that I like to quote a lot, Genesis 18. Genesis 18 is where God actually tells the Jewish people what our mission is. It says to do what is right and just, but it’s very striking that the context is a very careful, calibrated, nuanced debate between God and Abraham about what we should do with the people of Sodom. Abraham is arguing that maybe we can transform this people of Sodom if we have enough righteous people there. And God says, yeah, we can, but it depends on how many. That’s a very careful moral argument. And that’s the context in which we are told to pursue what is just and right. God doesn't give Abraham the Torah. He doesn’t give him a set of fixed rules. He doesn’t give him a set of moral standards. He teaches them how to have a moral argument. And we’ve lost that ability.

I heard someone say recently that we should do away with the idea of kindness. I don’t think we should stop being kind, but it’s sort of dominated our moral culture. Those signs people put up in their yards, they say “kindness is everything.” As Jews, can we address that concept of kindness in a way that’s not going to be destructive and hurtful to people?

I think it’s absolutely necessary that kindness is not an isolated value. We’re all about carefully calibrating how complementary moral values bump up against each other, and how we balance those values out when we’re making a particular moral decision. I absolutely think that we can make a great contribution to American society if we start by having that conversation within our own community. Tikkun olam has unfortunately become a cliche. We have a lot more to offer as a Jewish people than the phrase “tikkun olam,” which has become superficial. It’s like saying, all we need is love.

We have a rich, fantastic, nuanced, complicated, 3,000 years of moral discussions and arguing and thinking and reflection. We’re not using what we got. We have to go back to our own sources and recapture the ability to have that conversation. And then if we do that, we’re really in a position to make a unique contribution to the world, because the world is missing that ability right now.

How does this look on a practical level?

I don't think it can be done in isolation from our other values. That might be the mistake that we have made up until now. I think we have to redefine our liberal values, not just with regard to Israel, with regard to everything. And then I think we’ll see that our attitudes toward Israel match up with our liberal values perfectly well.

We have to look at our attitudes toward every social justice issue and change the whole nature of the debate and recapture the center of America. What’s been killing us are these moral frameworks out there that have been accepted lock, stock, and barrel on the university campus and in certainly in the progressive community. Once you agree to apply them to anybody, then they’re going to apply them to Israel. The notion that there are two types of people in the world: There’s the oppressed, who are people of color, and there are the oppressors, who are white people. Well, that argument is not good for people of color either. Racism is not simple. Once you accept that binary thinking, it’s us versus them, it’s the good guys versus the bad guys, well, of course, you’re going to apply it to Israel at that point.

This oppressor-oppressed worldview ultimately leads to the breakdown of Western values. There’s been a shift going on that’s saying actually, our civilization is not better. But American civilization has been extremely good for Jews. Those values of democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion work really well for us. Now we’re seeing people saying Bin Laden was right. Morality has become relative. How do we push back and say, actually, our values are good?

We have a situation where there seems to be no common understanding of what's right and what's wrong. Nobody trusts the media anymore, because it's just my news and your news. There seem to be no common standards of anything.

I think it starts by challenging narratives which we think are false, or which we think are overly simplistic. We see that's already happening. People are beginning to challenge these things much more openly. I think we maybe have been too soft on challenging those things for fear of offending people or for fear of being called racist or whatever we're afraid of. I think we can't be afraid anymore. I think we have to stand our ground, and we have to be careful not to just go to the other extreme.

You mentioned Genesis 18. We’ve embraced “strangers in a strange land” as our central Jewish American narrative. Is there a new narrative that you think that we should try to embrace?

I wouldn't say that this is the message, but one thing that I often said to black colleagues in recent years is that there’s a pattern: when things get better, that's when the racism or anti-Semitism gets the most intense. The minute that black people start to rise, that’s when you have the worst expressions of racism. The same thing has happened to Jews over and over and over again in our history. We’d be invited into a country where we would need protection, but the minute we started to flourish, this is the story.

Pharaoh says, you’re too mighty, you’re too strong. You’re not our equal. We need a story line where we can love our neighbor when they’re strong, not just when they’re weak and needy. We need empathy for people who have overcome their neediness and are now strong and independent. We can’t abandon people or turn on them precisely when they do exactly what we said we wanted them to do. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re Asian, black, or Jewish or Native American. If we can only help people when they’re down, then we're saying that we never really wanted you to flourish. We only really wanted the good feeling of helping you. You can be powerful. It doesn't mean you’re no longer vulnerable. In fact, you may be most vulnerable at the moment that you’re powerful.

I think that’s really just to be a human being. There's a wonderful Hasidic saying that says a person should always carry a coin in his pocket. And on one side of the coin, it should say, “the world was created for me.” And the other side should say “yet I am dust and ashes.” We need to cultivate a culture of humility.

We had 2,000 years of living without sovereignty in our homeland. What have we learned from that experience? According to the narrowest Israeli narrative, we learned that we need our own state with our own army or else we’ll be dead. That’s it? The people who gave the world the Bible and ethical monotheism have nothing more to teach the world in the past 2,000 years than that? Truly, we need a new narrative, one that makes sense of Diaspora history and the miracle of the modern State of Israel. Only the whole Jewish people can create such a narrative together, Israeli and Diaspora Jewry working together in a kind of international Jewish conversation. It should answer the question: What does it mean today to speak to the world with a distinctively Jewish voice? At our core, we are meant to be a part of a world conversation about how to live a worthy life. This might well be the first opportunity in all of our history to take part in such a conversation.

Gmar chatima tova — may we all be inscribed in the Book of Life.