From Jewish Continuity to Jewish Continuity

The analysis is now complete. The time has come to move from reflection to a programme for action. Jews are an intensely practical people. There is an expressive Yiddish monosyllable – the word Nu – which brings all theoretical discussion to an end. It means: the analysis is fine, but what then shall we do? The talmudic question, lemai nafka minei has the same connotation. It means: what are the practical consequences? We now know that we face a crisis of continuity. What shall we do about it?

Let us remind ourselves why the crisis has occurred. For several generations we have neglected Jewish education. The result is that we know little about Judaism, and our children know even less. They have heard about Israel, but that is a place where they do not live. They have heard about the Holocaust, but that happened sometime else, somewhere else, to people they did not know. They may have experienced antisemitism, but that is not a reason to want their children to be Jewish and thus carry the risk of being exposed to it. They know that Jews like Jewish food, Jewish humour and Jewish friends, but so, too, do many non-Jews. Why then should our children choose not to marry out?

Take “David,” or “Susan,” hypothetical twenty-three-year-olds. They know that when they were young their parents wanted them to go to the best available non-Jewish school. They wanted them to achieve high grades in their secular subjects and go to a good university. Their Jewish education was secondary. They went to cheder until bar and bat mitzvah but if they missed a few weeks here and there, no one minded. As soon as they were old enough to think for themselves, their Jewish education such as it was, ceased. By now they have forgotten what little they learned. What they remember seems childish; and it is, because when they learned it they were children. They have no significant memories to make them want to stay Jewish. Cheder was boring. The synagogue service was unintelligible. Jewish living is something they do not understand because they never experienced it at home. Now, having been to a non-Jewish school and university, knowing much about non-Jewish culture and little or nothing about their Jewish heritage, they meet a non-Jewish partner, fall in love and want to get married. What argument is there that will persuade them to do otherwise? The short answer is: None.

David and Susan are our children. We neglected their Jewish future for sound and adequate reasons. Our thoughts were elsewhere. We were concerned with social integration. We were worried about Israel. We were alarmed by the threat to Jewish communities in Arab lands and in Eastern Europe. We responded. We succeeded. But in the process, something happened, the full import of which we are only now beginning to grasp. In saving the Jewish world, we have come perilously close to losing our own children. In reaching out to help Jews far away, we have forgotten those closest to us. They too needed our help. Now, as the force of Jewish tradition weakens, they need it even more.

THE ONLY ARGUMENT AGAINST INTERMARRIAGE Times have changed, and we are beginning to sense how suddenly and radically they have changed. We had grown used to a situation in which Jewish identity was passed on through the generations by habit, memory, external events and an inescapable sense that being Jewish is what we are. Belatedly we have discovered that for our children, being Jewish is no more than a matter of choice. They know that they can choose otherwise, if not for themselves then for their children. They will choose to be Jewish for one reason only, that knowing the drama of Jewish history, the richness of Jewish life, the grandeur of Jewish ethics and the majesty of Jewish faith, they are proud to be Jews.

There is only one cogent argument against intermarriage, and it is this. To be a Jew is to be a member of the people of the covenant, an heir to one of the world’s most ancient, enduring and awe-inspiring faiths. It is to inherit a way of life which has earned the admiration of the world for its love of family, its devotion to education, its philanthropy, its social justice and its infinitely loyal dedication to a unique destiny. It is to know that this way of life, passed on from parents to children since the days of Abraham and Sarah, can only be sustained through the Jewish family; and knowing this, it is to choose to continue it by creating a Jewish home and having Jewish children. No one who has been touched by Judaism’s wings of eternity would willingly break the link between the past and the Jewish future. This and only this will ensure that we have Jewish grandchildren.

How do we achieve this? At the very outset, I knew that this would be the greatest challenge of my Chief Rabbinate, and the greatest single challenge facing today’s diaspora as a whole. Despite the fact that the core of the solution is education, the process of acculturation is already too far advanced for this to be our sole response. Most of our children attend, and in the future will continue to attend, non-Jewish schools. There is the question of those who have left school and perhaps have gone to university, or who have already begun their careers. There is the problem of educating parents as well as children, for what will we gain if our children hear one message at school and another conflicting message at home? What about the many social contexts in which young Jews can stay Jewish and which are not primarily educational, such as youth clubs, friends, meeting places, organisations and social events? How will any of this help if we do not make our synagogues genuine centres of community, warm, welcoming and all-embracing? A vast global policy is needed, with learning at its heart, but wider than anything normally associated with the word “education.”

It will be difficult. But it will be possible, if we are prepared to change our priorities because times have changed. Two factors might sabotage a solution. The first is despair, which we must resist at all costs. If we believe nothing can be done, then nothing will be done. The Jewish people has never in the past yielded to despair, and now is not the time to begin.

The second factor would be a failure to understand that times have changed. Let me candidly admit that I did not go to Jewish schools. Neither did my parents. My generation, and that of our parents and grandparents did not need intensive Jewish education to remind us that we were Jews. But our children belong to the fourth generation. What was enough for us is not enough for them. In the fourth generation, Judaism is either renewed or it is abandoned: there is no other alternative.

We are not our parents, and our children are not us. Our parents sought to give us the things they did not have when they were children: material comforts, a good secular education, the chance to pursue a profession. They tried to give us the opportunities which they themselves had missed. We in our turn must try to give our children what we lacked, namely the chance to experience, live, know and understand our Jewish heritage. That is the challenge.

A NEW FRAMEWORK It is a vast challenge, complex and profound. It will call for a response at many levels of our Jewish life, as individuals, members of families and participants in congregations. But my concern here is with only one dimension, namely our collective response as Anglo-Jewry.

We need a new community-wide organisation. The reason is simple. There are many religious and educational bodies in Anglo-Jewry and many youth groups and outreach programmes. Each is valuable and each has a vital role to play. But there is nothing that puts them together into a coherent strategy. The result is fragmentation and creative chaos – creative, but chaos nonetheless.

A single body is needed to promote, plan and resource all those many activities in our community which create Jewish continuity. Its task will be to intensify Jewish life in such a way as to create future generations of Jews who are proud, knowledgeable and committed as Jews. To do so it will have to aim at nothing less than a complete transformation of Anglo-Jewish attitudes, so that continuity moves from last to first place on our communal agenda. The new organisation will have to become the third arm of Anglo-Jewry, alongside Israel and welfare. The clearest test of its success or failure will be whether in five years’ time education is still languishing at the bottom of our list of communal charities or whether it has made its claim to at least equal status with the other two causes. If we succeed, Anglo-Jewry will have a future. If we fail, its future is altogether in doubt.

To my knowledge, no other diaspora community has ever attempted a project on this scale. Each has its educational bodies. But none has a global, community-wide strategy for continuity. In the main, schools, synagogues, youth groups, adult education and outreach projects operate independently of one another. The result is less like a strategy, more like a dodgem-car track, with many vehicles moving in random directions, more often colliding than cohering. This is wasteful of energies and resources and cannot be the best way to proceed. If Anglo-Jewry is to be the first diaspora community to bring order out of chaos, so be it. There is no alternative if we are to solve the greatest problem facing Jewry outside of Israel, and therefore we must begin.

WHO CONTINUES? To do so I had first to answer three questions. The first and most fundamental was whom would the new organisation be aimed at? At committed Jewry, or at all Jews?

There is one widely held view which I call Jewish Darwinism. It holds that throughout the generations, only the fittest Jews survive. At all times, and especially in an open society, Jews leave the fold. They opt out, marry out and disappear. Only the most dedicated remain. On this reading, it is futile to speak of continuity as a programme for all Jews. Instead, one should concentrate on the committed. They are Jewry’s survivalists. Only they will have Jewish grandchildren. Their schools, yeshivot and houses of study will compensate for Jewish ignorance elsewhere; their large families will make up for Jews lost elsewhere. In an age in which 80 percent of young Jews see nothing wrong in intermarriage, there is no point in even talking to 80 percent of young Jews, let alone wasting resources on them. Rather, we should focus exclusively on the 20 percent who will survive.

Though this position has many adherents, I reject it absolutely. I have explained my reasons, at length, in my books Arguments for the Sake of Heaven and One People? I reject it because it is not the way of Abraham or Moses, who wrestled with wayward generations and refused to write them off. I reject it because it is not the way of the great Jewish leaders of our time, the late Rabbis Kook and Soloveitchik, and the present Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn.

I reject it because it mistakes fact for principle, confusing what may happen if we do nothing with what we have allowed to happen. I reject it because after the Holocaust in which we lost 80 percent of European Jewry, we cannot stand idly by while a spiritual holocaust takes its toll of 80 percent of the Jews who remain. I reject it because as a human being and as a believing Jew I cannot live at ease with the knowledge that 20 percent of my people will survive while I and they failed to extend a hand to the 80 percent whose Jewish future is at risk.

I reject it, above all, because Jewish destiny is a collective destiny, defined by a covenant which links all Jews in a bond of shared responsibility. Every Jew is a fragment of the Shekhinah, the Divine presence which dwells in the heart of Jews wherever and whatever they are. When the Israelites made the Golden Calf, God proposed to destroy the people there and then and to begin afresh with Moses. Moses replied: “Please forgive their sin – but if not, then blot me out of the book You have written.” This is and must be the Jewish response: collective, not selective survival.

The new organisation, then, will be aimed at all Jews in the unshakable belief that every Jew is precious.

FROM EDUCATION TO CONTINUITY The second question is to define the nature of the challenge, and thus provide the new organisation with a clear identity and purpose, a “mission statement.” It is here that we made a fundamental choice: we would speak not about Jewish education but about Jewish continuity.

In the past, Jewish education was understood as the acquisition of knowledge, understanding and skills. Jewish identity was taken for granted. Today, it can no longer be taken for granted. It has to be created. I believe that the main vehicle for creating Jewish identity in the diaspora is education. But there is a difference between education as an end in itself and as a means for sustaining Jewish identity across the generations.

Education was always important to Jews. Our generation is unique in that it is the first in 2,500 years of history in which a majority of young Jews in the diaspora is deciding not to marry another Jew, create a Jewish home and have Jewish children. This what lends our project its particular urgency and direction.

Not all education creates continuity, and not everything that creates continuity is education. On the one hand, there are programmes of Jewish study which aim at detachment rather than commitment and which can be participated in equally by non-Jews and Jews. These are important and valuable but they fall outside the scope of this project. On the other, there are programmes which are not explicitly educational but which may be highly effective in creating Jewish involvement, such as youth centres, community service programmes, Israel visits and singles groups. These would fall within our brief. In general, however, there can be no sustainable and transmissible Jewish identity without learning and knowledge. So “education” and “continuity” substantially overlap but they are not identical.

I believe that in framing matters in this way we are reverting to a more traditional Jewish concept of education. The Talmud asks which is greater, talmud or maaseh, Jewish learning or Jewish living? It answers: Jewish learning is greater because it leads to Jewish living. Education, then, is not an end in itself but a path to something else. Jewishly, learning is tested not by passing exams but by how I live. If I become a great scholar but I do not live Jewishly, then my education has been an academic success but a Jewish failure. The fundamental value is Jewish living.

When the Torah speaks about education it does so in a striking and unusual way. It does not speak – as do the great Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle – of academies, schools, classrooms, pupils, the search for knowledge and the quest for truth. It speaks of parents and children and handing on the tradition from one generation to the next. Abraham is chosen – “so that he will instruct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord, doing what is right and just.” The Shema commands us: “Teach these things diligently to your children, speaking of them when you sit at home and when you journey on the way, when you lie down and when you rise up.” The Seder service on Pesach – Judaism’s most intense and revolutionary educational experience – involves teaching a child to see himself or herself as part of a people and its memories, and it is achieved not by teachers in classrooms but by parents around the family table. Jewish education is not about the abstract contemplation of truth. It is about introducing the next generation to the covenant which they inherit from their parents and their parents’ parents through a family line which stretches back to Sinai. Jewish education is about Jewish continuity.

So we arrived at a name and a mission statement for the organisation. It will be called Jewish Continuity, and its aim will be to secure the future of Anglo-Jewry by creating a vibrant community of proud, knowledgeable and committed Jews.

FROM FRAGMENTATION TO STRATEGY The third question is no less fundamental. The past twenty-five years have witnessed a considerable investment by diaspora communities in Jewish education. Jewish day schools have been built. In America, though to a much lesser extent in Britain, there has been a proliferation of Jewish Studies programmes at universities. Yet assimilation, outmarriage and disengagement have proceeded apace. If education is the answer why is there still a problem?

The short answer is this: there has been education but not an educational strategy, still less a considered programme for continuity. In the process, two things have been overlooked. One is coverage, the other is reinforcement.

The growth of Jewish day schools since the end of the Second World War has been one of the great achievements of diaspora Jewry in modern times. However, while Jewish education has flourished, the part-time system – cheder, Hebrew Classes or supplementary schooling – has declined. Recent studies in Britain and America have concluded that the part-time system is weak and growing weaker, with under-qualified teachers, bored and listless children and indifferent parents. The result is a polarisation of the Jewish educational experience for the young. For some – still a minority – their education is becoming more intensive. For others, it is becoming less substantial year by year.

Ironically, while the numbers attending Jewish day schools have grown, so too have the numbers receiving little or no Jewish education. It therefore comes as no surprise that while Jewish schools have multiplied, so too has the intermarriage rate. The Jewish community is beginning to divide, less between Orthodoxy and others or between religious and secular, but between those who know and those who do not. And because participation in the Jewish community requires a certain minimum of knowledge, those who lack that knowledge will inevitably feel alienated: spectators at an event they do not understand.

A strategy for continuity would therefore examine coverage. It would ask what is happening to all Jews, not just those at Jewish schools. Equally important, it would explore the dynamics of reinforcement.

It was once thought that Jewish day schools, in and by themselves, would solve the problem of Jewish continuity. Since education was good, more education must be better, and the Jewish day school offered the most intensive form of education available outside the yeshivah. This theory neglected the fact that the school is only one influence on the child. Friends and peer groups, the wider society (in particular, the media), and above all, parents and home all affect a child’s development. Where these other influences conflict with the school, the child experiences “cognitive dissonance,” a tension between different sets of messages. Schools succeed when they are supported by the rest of the child’s experience of the world. When they are unsupported they fail.

Schools work when they are part of a global strategy of identity formation and reinforcement. Often, we lack such a strategy. To take a simple example: in London several Jewish primary schools achieved fine results in teaching their pupils to speak Ivrit, only to find that this programme was not carried through in the curriculum of the Jewish secondary schools. Within months the children had forgotten what they had been so assiduously taught.

There are communities throughout Britain which have excellent Jewish primary schools, but which lack Jewish secondary schools. Indeed, some communities do not even have a policy for teenagers. Some children join Jewish youth groups, but many do not. Another gap: in most universities there are Jewish student societies and Hillel Houses. There are Jewish university chaplains. But there is little or no provision for young Jews leaving university. They are not yet married and are just setting out on a career. If they enter a synagogue or join a Jewish organisation, they will find few of their contemporaries there. There are too few places where they can mix, meet and feel that they belong. Teenage and post-university are critical stages of identity formation. The excellent work done by primary schools and university chaplains can go to waste simply because there is no follow-through, no global planning.

A coherent strategy for continuity would look at what happens to children outside the classroom as well as within, and at what happens when one life-phase ends and another begins. It would examine the Jewish home, the peer group, the synagogue and other institutional expressions of Jewish life and strive to forge links between them. It would look at critical moments of transition. It would be based on careful research, monitoring and evaluation. It would discover what works and what does not; which Jewish experiences are positive and which negative; where the community loses Jews and where it can hope to attract them.

We realised that we would have to revolutionise the way we think about continuity. Until now we have thought about institutions – schools, synagogues and so on – and sought excellence from them. That is right and proper, but it is the wrong place to begin. Instead, we must think about people. People are exposed to many influences over a lifetime, and at times make decisions that will affect the rest of their lives. Schools, synagogues, youth groups and student societies are all part of this larger framework and we must view them from that perspective. What makes people proud to be Jews? What makes them involved as Jews? What makes them want to have Jewish grandchildren? These are the questions we will continually have to ask. So Jewish Continuity will have a global, integrated and people-based strategy.

Many other decisions needed to be made about organisational style and objectives, and I have set these out in an appendix. But the overall aims of Jewish Continuity are clear. It will be a community-wide organisation encompassing all activities which promote Jewish continuity across the generations. It will seek to secure the future of Anglo-Jewry by creating a vibrant community of proud, knowledgeable and committed Jews. It is built upon the principles that every Jew is precious, that Jewish life has a distinctive spiritual and ethical content, and that Jewish identity can only be sustained in the long run by Jewish learning, experiencing and doing.

Through the structures it creates, the tasks it undertakes and the funds it raises, Jewish Continuity will promote the importance of continuity until it becomes the first item on the Anglo-Jewish agenda. It will develop a strategy for continuity, informed by research, monitoring and evaluation. It will create an informed and energetic lay leadership dedicated to the task. It will seek to increase funding for continuity-creating projects, including Jewish day schools, Jewish enrichment at non-Jewish schools, youth groups, adult, informal and family education, student societies, university chaplaincy, outreach activities, residential retreats and Israel experiences. It will allocate funds in such a way as to ensure a rational distribution of resources, minimising waste and duplication and encouraging excellence, creativity, coverage, integration and reinforcement. It will focus on the “people” dimension of continuity, the recruitment and training of teachers, youth leaders, adult educators and outreach workers. It will create a central and nationally available pool of resources and specialised expertise. By these means it will strive to raise levels of knowledge of and participation in Jewish life.

TODAY’S QUESTION It is less than a year since the words “Jewish Continuity” first coalesced in my mind as an idea, a problem and the glimmerings of a solution. Since then my office has engaged in consultation with rabbis, educators, youth leaders, outreach workers, academics, lay leaders and communal representatives. We have drafted and redrafted proposals and subjected them to the detailed scrutiny of the world’s leading Jewish educational planners at a special consultation in Jerusalem. We have recruited impressive groups of lay leaders, supporters and advisers, and begun to put in place our professional team and initial projects. We have had the benefit of many exceptional individuals. We are now ready to begin.

Throughout this whole process one thing has become clear: Jewish Continuity is an idea whose time has come. We are about to enter the third great era of modern Jewry. Almost everyone we have spoken to agrees that the single most burning question in today’s diaspora is: will we have Jewish grandchildren? If we act now to make continuity our first priority, we will.

There are deep questions which I have not attempted to answer here, and they are crucial to the project of Jewish continuity. What does it mean to be Jewish today? Are there modes of Jewish “belonging” for those alienated from Judaism’s religious faith and way of life? Is Jewish education effective, or does some of it fail to touch those to whom it is addressed? And most simply and searchingly: why be Jewish in an age when disaffiliation is possible?

I recognise the force of these questions, and I hope to address them elsewhere. We must begin somewhere, however. I have chosen to begin, intellectually and organisationally, with the question: what can we do as a community? The attrition which today threatens the future of the diaspora is not inevitable. It is the result of communal decisions and ways of thinking which may have been justifiable in the past but are so no longer. Jewish Continuity is not of itself a total solution to the formation and transmission of a positive Jewish identity. It is an attempt to create the necessary framework. By focusing our minds, energies and resources on continuity, we will make it the arena within which solutions will be tested and put into practice.

We have, I believe, no alternative if we are to keep faith with the Jewish past and the Jewish future. As we look back on this extraordinary century – the century in which Yom ha-Shoah, Yom ha-Atzma’ut and Yom Yerushalayim were added to the Jewish calendar – we have cause to wonder and to give thanks. I cannot fathom the mysteries of the Holocaust. But I know this, that after one of the greatest tragedies in human history, the Jewish people has emerged from the valley of the shadow of death and found independence and sovereignty in the land of its birth, and freedom and affluence in most countries of the diaspora. But one question reverberates throughout the Jewish world today. What will God have given us if we gain all else and lose our own children? Jewish Continuity begins with that question. We will not forgive ourselves nor will posterity forgive us if we fail. With the help of God, we will succeed.