In Rabbi Dana Evan Kaplan’s new book, Contemporary American Judaism, he notes American Jews are “no longer controlled by a handful of institutional leaders based in remote headquarters and rabbinic seminaries. American Judaism is being transformed by the spiritual decisions of tens of thousands of Jews living in all corners of the United States . . . . From Hebrew tattooing to Jewish Buddhist meditations, Kaplan describes the remaking of historical tradition in ways that channel multiple ethnic and national identities. While pessimists worry about the vanishing American Jew, Kaplan focuses on the creative responses to contemporary spiritual trends that have made a Jewish religious renaissance possible. He believes that the reorientation of American Judaism has been a ‘bottom-up’ process resisted by elites who have only reluctantly responded to the demands of the ‘spiritual marketplace.’ The American Jewish denominational structure is therefore weakening at the same time that religious experimentation is rising; leading to innovative approaches that have supplanted existing institutions. The result, as Kapan makes clear, is an exciting transformation of what it means to be a religious Jew in twenty-first century America.”
When the Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakkai gathered together a group of sages in Yavneh and created new ways to remember the ritualistic practices. With the Temple destroyed, there was no longer a way for the priests to perform their rituals and no way for them to offer the sacrifices. What had been known up to then, as Judaism was no longer in existence so the sages had to develop new radical paradigms for the future.
The Jewish community is changing quickly and at times in bewildering ways. Beginning on November 8th for four sessions, we will begin our adult education class with an in depth look at the changes that occurred to the American Jew beginning after World War II. While now we have the most prosperity and freedom that we have had in more than 2,000 years, we are again facing enemies who wish to destroy us and the threat of a secular society which requires the synagogue to create new imaginative and exciting paradigms that will help us survive in the twenty-first century.
