The Crisis

In November 1992 the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations met in New York. The agenda was dominated by one theme: continuity. The Strategic Planning Committee of the UJA-Federation of New York delivered a report on the future prospects of the Jewish community. It presented its conclusions in the form of an imaginary article which might well be published in the New York Times forty years from now. The article began:

New York, June 2, 2032. It was a time for memories and tears yesterday as the United Jewish Federation of New York formally ceased operations. The Federation, once known as UJA-Jewish Federation of New York, and its predecessor organizations had once served a community of more than 2 million Jews. Now that the Jewish community numbers fewer than 200,000 persons…

The article was prompted by the hard demographic facts that, contrary to the optimistic predictions of the 1980s that American Jewry was surviving, even reviving, it was in fact disappearing at an unprecedented rate. Outmarriage was at an all-time high, up a thousand percent on the figures of thirty years previously. The American Jewish community now included 2.1 million non-Jewish spouses and children of mixed marriages. Of the 3.2 million Jewish households, only 1.8 million – barely more than a half – consisted of Jews living exclusively with other Jews.

The November 1992 issue of The Jerusalem Report carried on its front cover the headline “America’s Vanishing Jews: Intermarriage Threatens the World’s Largest Community.” It told the story of the devastating statistics of the recent National Jewish Population Survey and traced some of its consequences. Despite the unique power of American Jewry’s fund-raising machine, money raised by the United Jewish Appeal has fallen consistently in real terms since the 1970s. Leading Jewish organisations such as B’nai B’rith have suffered dramatic falls in membership and income. The conclusion is inescapable. American Jewry is disappearing faster than perhaps any leading community since the Ten Lost Tribes.

In one respect, though, American Jewry is in a better condition than Anglo-Jewry. The Hasidic master, Rabbi Henoch of Alexander, said: “The greatest exile is not to know that you are in exile.” Likewise, the greatest crisis is not to know that you are in crisis. That is the Anglo- Jewish situation.

About ten years ago the Sunday Times published a front page article about the sharp and dramatic fall in synagogue marriages. The news was treated as an item of national interest. By contrast, the Jewish community ignored it almost completely. There was no shock wave, no debate, no discussion, no further research commissioned into the dimensions of the problem and its causes.

For the past few years the Board of Deputies Community Research Unit has been compiling yearly statistics on synagogue marriages within Anglo-Jewry. In 1991 the Unit completed a study which showed that the number of first marriages had fallen to significantly less than half of the figure at which it should stand if all Jews in Britain reaching marriageable age were marrying in a synagogue. The implication is simple. More than a half of young Jews are not marrying other Jews, or not marrying, or not celebrating their marriages under Jewish auspices. The loss cannot be explained in terms of aliyah, Jews leaving Britain for Israel. The number doing so is small, and is compensated for by foreign-born Jews marrying in Britain. Instead, the statistic spells disaffiliation and decline. Again there has been no furore, no debate, no response. Appeals by the Community Research Unit for additional resources to fund further research to understand what is happening to young Jews have gone unheeded.

The research that created the storm in America – the Council of Jewish Federation’s 1990 National Jewish Population Survey – was conducted by an outstanding demographer, Dr. Barry Kosmin. Dr. Kosmin heads the most sophisticated social research department in the diaspora, the North American Jewish Data Bank. The irony is that until a few years ago Dr. Kosmin, himself an Anglo-Jew, worked for the British Jewish community – for the Board of Deputies Community Research Unit. We had in London a Jewish social scientist of world ranking, whose work until the late 1980s was dedicated to providing Anglo-Jewry with information about itself. Eventually, he was driven to leave by the sheer indifference to his work. He had produced groundbreaking studies such as Jewish Identity in an Anglo-Jewish Community (the “Redbridge Report”) and (with Professor Stanley Waterman) British Jewry in the ’80s. These reports contained several striking and potentially controversial findings that had significant implications for communal planning. But no one was listening. So he left.

Professor Daniel Elazar of Bar-Ilan University, the Jerusalem Institute and a founder of the Jerusalem Institute of Public Affairs, was driven to this conclusion in a recent handbook of world Jewry: “By and large, the powers that be in British Jewry are content with the status quo and do not seek change. At most they bemoan the decline of British Jewry but, like their British peers, do little to try to alter their state.” American Jewry knows it faces a crisis of continuity. We do not, and that is the crisis.

AGAINST DESPAIR What are the facts and dimensions of the problem? Because American Jewry has a wealth of data while Anglo-Jewry has little, many of the figures quoted here are drawn from the United States. America, it is often said, is a different case. But this is only partially true. Where American Jewry is today, Anglo-Jewry is in danger of being tomorrow. Indeed, the trends now being uncovered in the United States characterise the diaspora as a whole, as a host of demographic studies has shown. The American situation, then, is crucial to an understanding of our own. For the challenge facing Anglo-Jewry today is the same as that of all diaspora communities: creating Jewish continuity in an age of radical discontinuity.

Before proceeding, a warning is necessary. The portrait sketched below is bleak and there is a danger that it may lead to despair. Despair is not a Jewish emotion. Od lo avda tikvatenu: our hope, we say, has never been destroyed. For there is a Jewish way of telling the story of our situation. The Mishna instructs us, matchil bignut umesayem beshevach, to “begin with the bad news and end with the good.” That is how we tell the story of the exodus on Pesach and that is how we have always told the narrative of Jewish history. We begin with exile and end with redemption. We start with catastrophe and culminate with hope. The Rabbis said: “Whenever you find the phrase ‘and it came to pass,’ this is always a sign of suffering. Whenever you find the phrase ‘and it shall come to pass,’ this is always a sign of joy.” The past might be cause for lamentation, but the future still holds its promise. The reason lies deep in Jewish consciousness. As Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes explains, one of our most profound beliefs is that there is meaning in history. Providence is interwoven in our lives. What happens is not chance but a chapter in the complex script of the covenant which leads, mysteriously but assuredly, to our redemption. Crisis in Jewish history has always led to renewal, not despair. So it must be now. With this preface, we can now turn to the bad news.

THE MISSING CHILDREN The most obvious test of a people’s numerical strength is its birth-rate. By this measure, diaspora Jewry has been in decline for over a century. With few exceptions in few countries, Jews exhibit the lowest birth-rates of any religious or ethnic group.

In the United States, for example, Jews have had a lower rate of fertility than Catholics or Protestants in every decade of the twentieth century. At one time, in the 1970s, this had fallen to an average of 1.2 children per childbearing couple, far below the population replacement figure of 2.1. The rate has since risen. But it still heralds a declining and ageing Jewish population and one that is consistently shrinking in absolute terms and even more so relative to other population groups. In Anglo-Jewry similar findings have emerged. In his Redbridge survey, Dr. Barry Kosmin found that in both 1967 and 1977, Redbridge Jews were 20 percent below the fertility rate of Britain as a whole.

Jews are either marrying late or not marrying or, once marrying, are not having children in the numbers that other groups do. Analysts have been unable to come up with a simple explanation of why this is so, and perhaps there is no single cause. What we can say with some certainty, however, is that it is an effect of emancipation. Demographic studies of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have shown that wherever and whenever Jews emerged into an open society their birth-rates abruptly changed from above to below the national average.

INTERMARRIAGE Even had there been no outmarriage, therefore, we would today be concerned about the state of Jewish survival. Nevertheless, the single most dramatic change in recent years has been in outmarriage itself. This has been a problem of Jewish life since the very beginning of the covenant. Abraham was concerned that Isaac should not marry into the local Canaanite population. Isaac and Rebecca were distressed when their son Esau married two Hittite women. Moses delivered warnings against intermarriage. Ezra and Nehemiah, returning to Israel after the Babylonian exile, instituted drastic measures against those who had been “unfaithful to our God by marrying foreign women from the peoples around us.” The rabbis of mishnaic times enacted protective decrees against behaviour that might lead to outmarriage. So the problem is not new. But its dimensions are.

In America, for example, intermarriage was estimated in the 1920s at no more than 1 percent. A study in 1944 yielded a figure of 2.6 percent. Until the 1960s the rate remained at or below 6 percent. The turning point came in the 1960s. In the first half of that decade the rate of intermarriage jumped to 17.4 percent, and by 1971 it had risen to 31.7 percent. Even then, however, the nature of what was happening was not fully appreciated, and it took the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey to send shock waves through American Jewry. What the survey showed was that the rate had risen to 57 percent. More than one Jew in two was marrying out. The speed at which this has happened has been overwhelming. From 6 percent in 1960 to 57 percent in the late 1980s means that the intermarriage rate has risen almost ten times in less than thirty years. The great chain of Jewish continuity, stretching back some four thousand years, is in danger of breaking in a single generation.

Though the latest figures have sent a shock wave through American Jewry, they merely confirm what demographers have known for some time. Neil Sandberg, for example, had shown some years ago that intermarriage in Los Angeles rose from 11.6 percent among first generation Americans to 43.5 percent among the fourth generation. A study of Denver Jewry in the early 1980s showed that the percentage of intermarried households rose from 53 percent among those aged 30–39 to 72 percent among those aged 18–29. In Phoenix, the parallel figures were 43 percent and 72 percent. Once intermarriage gains a hold in a community, its increase is rapid and seemingly inexorable. Over three generations – Jewish immigrants and their children and grandchildren – Jewish identity can be sustained. In the fourth generation, ties of kinship and ethnicity weaken and mixed marriage soars.

No less significantly, the stigma traditionally attaching to outmarriage has almost entirely disappeared. Only one-fifth of young American Jews declared themselves opposed in principle to mixed marriage, and only 6 percent strongly so. The importance of this statistic is that in the area of group continuity, attitudes are no less significant than behaviour. In a completely open society, where Jewish identity is a matter of voluntary commitment and choice, the fact that only a tiny minority of Jews indicate that they are opposed to an act that will almost certainly mean that their grandchildren will not be Jewish must be a matter for the gravest concern.

When I was last in America, in 1989, my eye was caught by a story on the front page of the New York Times. It was headed “The Assimilating Bagel,” and the tale it told was this. A bagel was once a hard, round roll with a large hole in the centre. It was a Jewish delicacy which you ate with cream cheese or smoked salmon and temporarily forgot the troubles of the world. But according to the New York Times the bagel was subtly changing. Its crust was getting softer. The hole was getting smaller. Little by little, the bagel was assimilating into a bun. For “bagel” read “Jewry” and the metaphor is clear. Jewish identity in America is vanishing with frightening, unprecedented speed.

ANGLO-JEWRY In Britain, we lack this kind of exhaustive, detailed research. Nonetheless, for some years there has been a disturbing fall in the number of marriages recorded in British synagogues.

Before the Second World War the number of Anglo-Jewish marriages was around three thousand a year. The figure dipped during the war and rose thereafter, but between the mid-1950s and the 1970s it fell precipitously to around fifteen hundred per annum. By the 1980s it had fallen further to some one thousand per annum. Community marriage rates have been consistently less than half the national rates since the mid-1950s. They have now reached the critical position where they represent less than one half of Jews of marriageable age, suggesting that more than half of young Jews are not marrying, are marrying out, or are leaving the community in some other way.

This trend is confirmed by a recently published survey (reported in the Jewish Chronicle, 24 September 1993) conducted by Jewish Care. Fifty-three percent of Jewish men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five said that they had married, or would consider marrying, someone of another religion. This figure is all the more striking given that those questioned had attended a debate on Jewish life, in aid of a Jewish charity, thereby signalling some interest and commitment. Amongst the uncommitted, the figure is almost certain to be higher. This suggests that resistance to intermarriage has collapsed in Anglo-Jewry just as it has in America.

In fact, the situation is worse. An estimated three hundred gittin (religious divorces) are currently issued each year by British rabbinic courts. On the basis of this figure, Rabbi Dr. Julian Shindler has calculated that the ratio of divorces to marriages in Anglo-Jewry has risen to approximately three in ten. If we were to add even a small conjectural figure for marriages terminated civilly but not religiously, the true rate may be nearer one in three. Therefore, we may conclude that Jews are not marrying other Jews, and if they do, they are likely to marry late and have few children. Even then, on current trends, one in three marriages will collapse. The Jewish family, for millennia the crucible of continuity, is fissuring and beginning to fail.

These trends, common to both Britain and America, signal a crisis in Jewish continuity. Whether we speak halakhically, biologically or culturally, Jewish identity has always been passed on through the family. In Israel it is supported in the public domain by a Jewish state, society and culture. In the diaspora, on the other hand, it is either sustained in the framework of marriage, parenthood and a Jewish home, or it disintegrates. Every indication suggests that for many, even most, young Jews, Jewish identity is not being sustained.

Kosmin’s expert assessment is this: “In historical terms, the change in the demography of the Jewish people in the twentieth century is not only unparalleled but catastrophic.… Unless the erosion of Jewish numbers can be halted, the Jews are destined for the future of an endangered species.”

AN IDENTIFIABLE JEWISH COMMUNITY? One result of the rise in outmarriage is an unprecedented confusion of Jewish identity. Despite the fact that it ignored the profound differences between Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism and their conflicting approaches to conversion and Jewish status, the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey was forced to abandon the concept of a single measure of the Jewish population. Its authors found that they could quantify American Jewry only by dividing it into the following categories:

Born Jews, Religion Judaism

Jews by choice (converts of all denominations)

Jews by religion (the sum of the previous two categories)

Born Jews with no religion (secular Jews)

Born or raised Jewish, converted out

Adults of Jewish parentage with other current religion (usually children of a mixed marriage with one Jewish parent, who have been raised as Christians)

Children under 18 being raised with other current religion.

The survey showed a “core Jewish population” of 4.2 million. Around the core was a variety of “marginal” groups: 1.1 million secular Jews, 185,000 converts, and 1,325,000 Jews who, whether through conversion or upbringing, today identify themselves as adherents of another religion, usually Christianity. Considered in their own right, these are disturbing figures. Considered in the light of current trends, they are portents of much worse to come.

THE END OF OPTIMISM In the mid-1980s, as demographers began to sound the alarm, there was determined resistance by a group of American intellectuals who argued that the Jewish community was not disintegrating. It was merely in a state of transformation. Mixed marriage was not a catastrophe. It might even prove to be a blessing in disguise.

Their argument was this. There had been times in the past – particularly in the pre-Christian era – when Judaism had been an actively missionary faith. It had sought converts. It could do so again. After all, Judaism was an attractive option in a pluralistic society. Jewishness was no longer what Heinrich Heine had once called it: “not a religion but a misfortune.” On the contrary, Jews were now the most educated and affluent group in America. Moreover, American Reform Judaism had begun a campaign to ease the path of entry into the Jewish fold. It had eased the standards for conversion and had even declared that it would consider Jewish, without the need for conversion, the child of a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father. Charles Silberman set out the equation in his much discussed book, A Certain People: “If half the children of intermarriages are raised as Jews, there will be no net reduction in the number of Jews, no matter how high the intermarriage rate is.”

Rarely has an illusion been more quickly dispelled. We now know that this optimism was massively misplaced. The latest figures show that among the 57 percent of Jews who marry out, in only 5 percent of cases does the non-Jewish partner convert to Judaism. In the remaining 52 percent of cases the partner retains his or her original religion. Within these mixed marriages, only 28 percent of children are raised as Jews; 41 percent are raised as Christians; 31 percent are raised without religion at all.

There is, in short, no solace in these figures. Jews in America are failing to sustain themselves as a distinctive group at anything like previous numerical levels. They have too few children. More than half of them marry out. Even when they marry other Jews, the partnership is increasingly likely to end in divorce, and second marriages are even more likely to be outmarriages. The prospect that mixed marriage might result in a net gain for the Jewish community has disappeared. Non-Jewish partners are disinclined to convert, and in three-quarters of mixed marriages the children are not brought up as Jews.

In an age of shifting religious affiliations, Judaism has been the loser. The outflow of Jews to other religions has been vastly greater than the inflow through conversion, despite the efforts of liberal denominations to engage in active proselytisation and open the gates of admission more widely than Jews have ever done before. The sobering fact is that in the United States – the diaspora community for which we have the most accurate and reliable demographic evidence – for every non-Jew who has become a Jew even by the most lenient standards, there are between seven and eight Jews who have become adherents of other religions and six who profess to no faith at all.

Nor is our own community safe from such a fate. As I have noted already, British Jewry, estimated at 450,000 in the 1950s, is today reckoned to number some 300,000. This represents the loss of more than ten Jews a day, every day, for forty years. Of these, at most a fifth have left for Israel. The rest have disaffiliated and disappeared from the Jewish map.

AN UNFOLDING TRAGEDY These are the facts, and they are very bad news. In the century of the Holocaust, they are nothing short of tragic. After the Shoah, one phrase came to encapsulate the collective response of world Jewry: “Never again.” Never again would we stand by defenceless as Jews were dying because they were Jews. Yet, albeit in a radically different form, it is happening again. Admittedly, it is not Jews who are dying. But it is no less significant from the perspective of Jewish continuity. Judaism and Jewish identity are dying: that which made us Jews and gave shape and meaning to our lives.

Every nation that suffered casualties during the Second World War has since repopulated itself. Except the Jewish people. For every Jewish child who perished in the Holocaust there is a child today who could have been enjoying a free and secure Jewish identity, but is not, because its parents have divorced, or because one of its parents is not Jewish, or because it has no understanding or knowledge of what it is to be a Jew.

Jews are not dying, but Judaism and Jewish identity are. There is no moral comparison between these phenomena and none is intended. Nevertheless, in one respect the effect is the same. Jewish survival is once more in doubt. The catastrophe is spiritual and cultural, not physical. It is passive, not active. It is motivated by no malign intentions. However, it has consequences no less significant for the course of Jewish history. A people once known for its loyalty to a unique destiny is vanishing into oblivion. A nation whose seemingly infinite capacity for survival excited the astonishment of historians is losing its will to survive.

To put the comparison a different way: until the twentieth century, despite the terrible suffering experienced by Jews, none of their enemies believed that they had no right to live. From time to time, however, they did believe that they had no right to live as Jews. Consider three such moments.

The book of Esther describes the first edict of genocide, Haman’s order “to destroy, kill and annihilate all the Jews, young and old, women and little children, on a single day.” But, as the narrative makes clear, Haman would have harboured no enmity towards the Jews had they been prepared to do one thing: to bow down. Mordechai refused, as Jews have consistently refused to prostrate themselves before the idols of their time. Haman thus discovered a feature of Jewish life which has been, before and since, the touchstone of our identity. Jews are a people apart. “There is,” as he told the king, “a certain people dispersed and scattered among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom who keep themselves separate.” That was the prelude to genocide: not that Jews existed, but that Jews persisted as Jews, as a “certain people” who, despite their dispersion, maintained their identity. When over half of young Jews decide not to marry Jews and have Jewish children, we grant Haman a posthumous victory.

On 31 March 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain decreed the expulsion of the Jews from their lands. It was the most traumatic event of the Jewish middle ages. Jews had been expelled from other countries before, notably from England in 1290. But Spain had been the setting for medieval Jewry’s golden age. During its periods of relative liberalism, Jews had risen to take their place among the leading statesmen, poets, scientists, philosophers, doctors, traders and financiers of the time. Spanish Jewry had glittered in the brief sunshine, and when the storm of expulsion overwhelmed them, the shock waves were felt throughout the Jewish world for centuries. Yet the decree was not directed against Jews as such. It was directed against Jews who remained Jews. It was not racial but religious in intent. Jews were offered a choice: convert to Christianity and stay, or remain Jewish and leave. Today, when four-fifths of young American Jews are not against marrying out of the faith, we grant Queen Isabella of Spain a posthumous victory.

Martin Luther (1483–1546) the leader of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, was one of Jewry’s most virulent opponents. In Concerning the Jews and their Lies (1543) he set out a programme that was to be taken up in precise detail by the Nazis four centuries later: synagogues were to be burned, Jewish property seized, homes destroyed and Jews “put under one roof or in a stable like gypsies.” It was, writes Paul Johnson, “the first work of modern anti-Semitism and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust.” But Luther was not originally an antisemite. On the contrary, he believed that Jews would welcome his break with the Papacy, and would voluntarily convert en masse to his new Christianity. In 1523 he had written: “I hope that if the Jews are treated friendly and are instructed kindly through the Bible many of them will become real Christians.… I would advise and beg everybody to deal kindly with the Jews and to instruct them in the Scriptures; in such a case we could expect them to come over to us.” Luther’s principle in those early days was that Jews would be converted by kindness. It was only anti-Jewish hostility that had kept them from assimilating to the majority. In the century of the Holocaust we are granting Luther an astonishing posthumous victory.

That we should allow millennia of Jewish continuity to come to an end for one Jew in two is unthinkable. What would become of every sacrifice our ancestors made in order to live as Jews and raise children as Jews? What would become of that extraordinary history of courage and persistence that so astounded Pascal and Nietzsche? What would become of the meaning of the covenant? If the past lays any obligation on us at all, it is that we cannot let the Jewish story end this way, in ignominious anticlimax. The minority of Jews who defected in the past did so under overwhelming pressure, in the face of threat and persecution, hatred and exclusion. Postbiblical history contains no precedent for the mass disappearance of Jews for no other reason than a loss of the will to hand our identity on to our children.

COUNTING JEWS The news is bad. But the test of a people’s spirit lies in how it responds to bad news. If we are to respond Jewishly we must rule out ab initio two reactions: denial and despair. Denial argues that there is nothing to worry about. Despair says that there is nothing we can do. Against this, faith is the courage to face facts, however painful, without losing hope. The facts are painful. Our children are choosing, in unprecedented numbers, not to have Jewish children. How then should we respond?

The Torah contains a remarkable perspective on demography. In the book of Exodus, God tells Moses: “When you take a census of the Israelites to count them, each one must pay the Lord a ransom for his life at the time he is counted. Then no plague will come on them when you number them.”

In other words, it is hazardous to count Jews. Elsewhere, in the second book of Samuel and the first book of Chronicles, we read of how King David ignored the advice of his chief of staff Yoav, and took a census of Israel with disastrous consequences.

Why is it hazardous to count Jews? Our tradition records many explanations. But Jewish history suggests a simple answer. At most times in our history we have been a tiny people. Despite the promises which we believe will one day be fulfilled – that the descendants of Abraham and Sarah would be as many as the stars of the sky, the dust of the earth and the sand of the sea shore – thus far we have been one of the world’s smallest peoples.

By the end of the book of Genesis the people of Israel numbered no more than seventy individuals. At the end of his life, Moses declared to the now much more numerous nation in the wilderness: “The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you are the fewest of all peoples.” From then on, Israel remained a small country ranged against great empires: Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. At almost no time in history has the people Israel been a numerically significant population. This was true even when it was a sovereign power in its own land. Still more was it true when it was a scattered and exiled diaspora.

Historians have estimated that between the fall of the second Temple in 70 CE and the seventeenth century, the Jewish population never rose above 1.5 million. At times, as in the wake of the Spanish expulsion, it fell to below a million. Jewry increased significantly only between 1800 and 1939, when it grew from two million to 16.6 million. At no time in the last nineteen hundred years have Jews constituted even 1 percent of the population of the world.

Nevertheless, Jews did more than survive. Throughout history we have been at the epicentre of world history. In periods of toleration, Jews rose with astonishing speed to the forefront of human achievement. The Judaic heritage shaped and continues to shape Western civilisation. As a result, Jews could rarely be ignored. From earliest times to the present day, both the friends and the enemies of the Jews have attributed us to an influence far beyond our numbers. Demographically, we have been grasshoppers. In impact and influence we have been giants. Milton Himmelfarb put it graphically: “The number of Jews in the world is smaller than a small statistical error in the Chinese census. Yet we remain bigger than our numbers. Big things seem to happen around us and to us.”

This has given rise to a most curious phenomenon. Recently, a research exercise was conducted in the United States in which people at random were asked to estimate the percentage of the American population that was Jewish. The average answer given was about 20 percent. The true figure is 2 percent. The experiment can be repeated with similar results almost anywhere that Jews live. We always seem to be many times more numerous than we actually are.

Why then is it hazardous to count Jews? Because when we take a census we are basing our strength on numbers. Jewish strength has never lain in numbers. When we count Jews there is a serious danger that we will become demoralised, realising that we are so few. When a people depends – as the Jewish people depends – on its spirit and sense of pride, demoralisation can be nothing short of catastrophic. It can lead to despair, and from despair to defeat.

King David was wrong to believe that his military strength depended on the size of his population, just as the State of Israel would be wrong to think likewise today. If military strength does not depend on numbers, still less does ethical or intellectual or religious strength. The inscription beneath the portrait of Jewish history still reads: “Not by might nor by power, but by My spirit.”

What is troubling about present demographic trends in the diaspora is not the fact that there are fewer Jews and hence less Jewish influence and power. In the diaspora we have never depended on power, nor has our influence anything to do with numbers. What is troubling is the message the statistics are telling us about the state of the Jewish spirit. Never before have Jews felt so indifferent to their heritage that they were unconcerned to pass it on to their children. Once we state the problem in these terms we are already halfway to a solution. For what is born in the spirit can be cured in the spirit. And no people has had greater experience in sustaining the human spirit than the heirs of those who stood at Sinai.

The question therefore is this: what is the skill at which Jews proved themselves so adept in the past and which we seem to have lost in the present? What is the secret of Jewish continuity?