Judaism

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Judaism

Judaism is the world's oldest monotheistic faith and traces its historical beginnings to the convenant established by God with the biblical Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants almost four thousand years ago. This covenant was later renewed and elaborated upon at Mount Sinai through the revelation of the Torah: divine teachings issued as commandments that are incumbent upon Jews of every generation.

Judaism, as it had been understood and lived for much of the last two thousand years, is largely a rabbinic creation, based on the teachings of the Hebrew bible as interpreted by rabbinic sages of the first few centuries before and after the common era. It further developed during the Middle Ages and modern era and, through changes and additions to its laws and customs, continues to develop today. There has never been one creed or specific set of beliefs to which all Jews have adhered. Nonetheless, the three components or "symbolic structures" of God, Torah, and Israel, referring to the land of Israel and the entire Jewish people, have been central to Judaism since its inception.

Jews and Judaism in America

Out of a total Jewish population of twelve million (less than 0.2 percent of the world's population), approximately 5.8 million Jews live in the United States today. While this number represents slightly more than 2 percent of the U.S. population, it makes the United States home to the largest Jewish community in the world. Given the voluntary nature of religious and ethnic identification in the United States, it is also the most diverse.

The first Jews to settle in America arrived in New Amsterdam, the unofficial capital of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, in September 1654. Just as their Spanish and Portuguese ancestors had fled to South America hundreds of years before, so these twenty-three Brazilian Jews came to America seeking physical protection and religious freedom. Like many Jews in Brazil, they had sided with the Dutch in their earlier, successful struggle to take Brazil from the Portuguese, hoping to gain the kinds of religious rights already enjoyed by the Jews of Holland. When Brazil was recaptured, all those who had openly sided with the Dutch fled, the twenty-three Jews who eventually sailed to New Amsterdam on the Ste. Catherine among them.

Soon after their arrival, however, Governor Peter Stuyvesant requested permission from the directors of the Dutch West India Company to expel such "hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ." Had a second, more outspoken group of Jewish settlers not launched their own counterappeal, he might well have succeeded. Nonetheless, Stuyvesant issued a number of regulations that remained in effect throughout Dutch rule: Jews could not build synagogues (though by 1756, at the order of the Dutch West India Company, he was forced to let Jews worship in private homes); they could not build a ritual bath or have their own ritual slaughterers (kosher butchers); and they could neither vote, hold office, open shops for retail trade, nor serve in the colony's militia. Consequently, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, when it appeared that New Netherland would soon fall into British hands, most of the Jews of the colony left, having failed to gain religious, political, or economic equality under the Dutch and unsure as to what their situation under the British would be. While some sought greater freedoms elsewhere in America, many set sail for the Netherlands or for other Dutch colonies in the West Indies where, without Stuyvesant, the local Jewish population could live more freely, and more fully, as Jews.

By 1700, there were about 250 Jews in America; by 1776 that number had increased to 2,500, no more than 0.1 percent of the colonial population. Most of the early immigrants were traditionally religious Sephardim —Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent. Settling in such major seaport cities as New York City, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah, many found work in areas related to shipping and international trade. They built synagogues and mikvaot (ritual baths), purchased land for use as cemeteries, supervised the slaughter and preparation of meat, created mutual aid societies, and assumed communal responsibility for the religious education of their children. In each of the congregations they established, worship was in accordance with the liturgical customs of Sephardic Jews. Given the small size of pre–Revolutionary War Jewish communities, it is perhaps not surprising that throughout the eighteenth century, those Jewish immigrants of Central European origin (Ashkenazim) who settled in these cities, joined already existing Sephardic congregations rather than establishing synagogues of their own.

As early as 1730, the number of Ashkenazic Jews in America surpassed that of the Sephardim. This imbalance became even greater during the nineteenth century. Between 1830 and 1880, as the general population of America dramatically increased, almost 250,000 Jews immigrated to the United States, most from Central Europe. Unlike their eighteenth-century counterparts, the majority came with their families. Educated and primarily middle class, they were eager to take advantage of the many economic, political, and social opportunities that America offered and to build a new life in a country they soon considered to be home. Part of the attraction of America was its "newness." With neither a centuries-old history of anti-Semitism nor ghetto walls to serve as reminders of the medieval status of Jews as outsiders, and without an established church to formally identify them as "religious dissenters," America seemed to be filled with unlimited possibilities. Indeed, with religious affiliation voluntary and freedom of religion guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants saw America as offering them the unique opportunity to fully integrate into American society, as individuals and as Jews.

Coming to the United States during a period of great, geographical expansion, they spread out more widely than had earlier Jewish immigrants, in search of new places to settle and new economic opportunities. While many followed earlier patterns of Jewish immigration, settling in the north and southeast, a significant number joined the mid-nineteenth-century American migration to the west and southwest. Thousands put down roots in such pre-existing areas of Jewish settlement as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston, establishing their own, German Jewish congregations, while others created new and vibrant German Jewish communities in such cities as Albany, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and (after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803) New Orleans and St. Louis. By the end of the century, sizeable and enduring German Jewish communities had been created in cities like Atlanta, Louisville, Indianapolis, Chicago, and San Francisco as well.

By the 1850s, those who came to America from Germany included a number of ordained rabbis. Most of them were committed to moderate, if not radical, religious reform as a means of both adapting Judaism to the modern world and accommodating Judaism to America. Instigating liturgical and theological change in synagogues throughout the United States, leaders of America's nascent Reform movement soon created a network of organizations and institutions that facilitated Reform Judaism's influence and growth. Most notable were three national institutions established by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise: the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873), with which over one hundred synagogues were affiliated by 1880; Hebrew Union College, America's first rabbinical seminary, located in Cincinnati (1875); and the Central Conference of American (Reform) Rabbis (1889). (In 1950, Hebrew Union College merged with Rabbi Stephen Wise's Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. Today, HUC-JIR has campuses in New York, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem, and includes among its programs a Graudate School and Schools of Sacred Music and Education.)

Reform Judaism's overwhelming popularity began to decrease by the 1890s, as hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews began to arrive in America. Escaping the waves of anti-Semitic violence first set in motion after the assassination of Czar Alexander II, a great many of the 1,250,000 Eastern European Jews who arrived between 1881 and 1914 had abandoned Judaism long before coming to America. Most who remained traditionally religious were willing to make certain accommodations in ritual observance, yet few, if any, were willing to declare all of them "inessential," as had the Reformers. For most Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their children, a Judaism stripped of such ethnic elements as the use of Hebrew and distinctive prayer garb in communal worship; the dietary laws; and holidays and prayers reflecting an ongoing, emotional attachment to the land of Israel was no longer Judaism. Even if they had been attracted to the Reform movement, they would not have received a warm welcome, for most German Jewish immigrants and their children had little if any desire to worship alongside of poor, uneducated, and not yet Americanized Jews who threatened their own, successful integration into American society.

Almost all of the congregations established by the new immigrants were Orthodox. A great many of them were tiny, impoverished congregations where immigrants worshiped and socialized with other traditionally religious Jews who came from the same area or town. Among the more religiously devout were thousands who identified themselves as hasidic (though Hasidism primarily grew in the United States after World War II). They, like those immigrant rabbis who joined the newly created Association of American Orthodox Rabbis (Agudath Ha-Rabonim), opposed the Americanization of Judaism, a stance maintained by the association even today. On the other hand, a significant number of immigrants and their children were attracted to a more modern form of Orthodoxy. While modern Orthodoxy, like Hasidism, has experienced greatest growth since 1945, earlier organizations and institutions facilitating its success include the Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary in New York City (1897); the Rabbinical Council of the Union of Jewish Congregations of America, created by Elchanan Seminary graduates as a modern alternative to the Agudas HaRabonim; Yeshiva College (1928, chartered as a university in 1945) and Yeshiva's Stern College for Women (1954). They also include Young Israel, a movement that, by the 1920s, introduced greater decorum and the use of English into traditional Jewish worship and sponsored public lectures aimed at attracting young, well-educated Jews to Orthodoxy.

The religious movement that proved most successful in attracting Eastern European Jewish immigrants and especially, their children, was Conservative Judaism, with its emphasis on Jewish peoplehood and its dual commitments to tradition and change. Established by a number of prominent, traditional rabbis in direct response to the radical universalism of Reform and the parochialism of Orthodoxy, it began in Januay 1887 with the opening of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City. Reorganized in 1902 under the leadership of Rabbi Solomon Schechter, the seminary soon boasted a distinguished faculty, a library, and a Teachers Institute to prepare lay people for careers in Jewish education. Established in 1909, the Teachers Institute was ably led for over fifty years by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, one of the seminary's first ordinees, who later founded American Judaism's fourth major religious movement: Reconstructionism.

From 1902 until his death in 1915, Solomon Schechter laid a philosophical and organizational foundation for Conservative Judaism that remains today. He helped initiate the establishment of the Rabbinical Assembly (of Conservative Rabbis); instigated the creation of the movement's congregational arm, the United Synagogue of America (now known as the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism) in 1913; and in numerous essays, books, and lectures, expounded an understanding of Judaism that offered an all-embracing concept of Jewish peoplehood as Klal Yisroel (translated by Schechter as " Catholic Israel"). He unabashedly proclaimed a love for the land of Israel, as Judaism's spiritual and cultural home, and viewed religious observance within the context of a rabbinic, legal system (halakhah) that contained within it the mechanisms for change.

Contemporary Concerns and Developments

According to a 1990 population survey conducted by the Council of Jewish Federations (CJF), more than 50 percent of American Jews who religiously identify themselves as Jewish do not belong to a synagogue. Included among the unaffiliated are those who confuse, or conflate, Judaism with Jewishness ( Jewish ethnic and cultural identity); those whose observance is limited to such family-oriented holidays as Chanukah and Passover, attending synagogue on the Jewish High Holidays and, perhaps, fasting on Yom Kippur; and those who are, in fact, affiliated Jews, though they are not members of religious congregations. Actively supporting such seemingly secular Jewish organizations as those involved in communal fund-raising, Jewish education, social service, support for Israel, or the fight against anti-Semitism, may not appear to be religiously motivated. Yet, as Jonathan Woocher convincingly argues in his book Sacred Survival (1986), such involvement is, in fact, an expression of a "civil Judaism" rooted in a distinct, Jewish religious sensibility and a passionate commitment to the survival of Jews, Judaism, and Jewish moral values.

Among the 41 percent of American Jewish households with current synagogue affiliation, 43 percent are affiliated with the Conservative movement; 35 percent with Reform, 2 percent with Reconstructionism, and 16 percent with Orthodoxy. The remaining 4 percent, who listed their affiliation on the CJF survey as "other" or "don't know," presumably belong to a Jewish religious fellowship (havurah) or group that is not affiliated with American Judaism's four major denominations. Included among them are those within the Jewish Renewal movement, a loosely organized, international network of havurot (fellowship members) that see themselves as part of a larger Jewish alliance committed to the healing and transformation of one's self, one's communities (both local and national), and the world. Particular concerns of this movement include mysticism, feminism, and ecology. Historically rooted in the American Jewish counterculture of the 1960s, its popularly acknowledged spiritual elder is Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, founder of ALEPH: [The] Alliance for Jewish Renewal. While the number of those self-identifying as Renewal Jews is relatively small, its progressive political and religious agenda continues to reach a wide Jewish audience through books and publications such as Tikkun, founded and edited by Michael Lerner, and New Menorah and The Shalom Report, published by Arthur Waskow's Shalom Center, now a division of ALEPH. In addition to special events and presentations throughout the country, ALEPH offers courses, holiday programs, and spirititual retreats at Elat Chayyim, its retreat center in upstate New York.

Contemporary Concerns and Developments

Reform Judaism

While Reform Judaism continues to place greatest emphasis on Judaism as a religion whose essence is ethical monotheism, the last few decades have witnessed a greater appreciation for rituals and observances long dismissed by the movement as oldfashioned, if not obsolete. The Centenary Perspective, issued by the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) in 1976, counterbalanced Reform's long-held universalistic hopes with a particular focus on Jewish survival. Without mandating a specific code of behavior, the perspective insisted that Jewish living does not just mean living an ethical life but engaging in activities "which promote the survival of the Jewish people and enhance its existence." Suggested activities included creating a Jewish home, observing the Sabbath and holy days, engaging in private and public worship, and making a serious commitment to Jewish study. At its May 1999 convention in Pittsburgh, the CCAR adopted a new statement of principles. Reidentifying those activities suggested in the 1976 perspective as modes of living to which the Reform movement was committed, it also affirmed the importance of Hebrew knowledge and of religious obligations, some long observed by Reform Jews, others demanding renewed attention. While the creation of ARZA (The Assocation of Reform Zionists of America) in 1967 signaled a radical departure from the movement's early anti-Zionism, the 1999 perspective, addressing itself to all Reform Jews, went even further. It described love for the Jewish people as a mitzvah (religious obligation), affirmed Reform's commitment to the State of Israel, and encouraged immigration to Israel (aliyah), acknowledging the unique opportunities for Jewish living that it affords.

Yet despite what some have heralded, or decried, as Reform's return to tradition, the movement continues to support ideas and activities that reflect an ongoing adaptation to modernity. As the 1999 perspective makes clear, Reform Judaism remains firmly committed to egalitarianism. This is reflected in the movement's early obliteration of sex-differentiated religious roles; the ordination of women as rabbis (since 1972); women's investiture as cantors (since 1975), and the recent creation of gender-inclusive liturgies. Reform's most radical break with tradition remains the CCAR's Patrilineal Discent Decision of 1983. In contrast to rabbinic law's insistence that in cases of mixed marriage, religious status follows that of the mother (matrilineality), the CCAR maintained that such offspring are Jewish if either parent is a Jew and if he or she is religiously raised and self-identifies as Jewish. Moreover, having long accepted interested gay and lesbian Jewish congregations as members of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and more recently, qualified gay and lesbian Jews into the Reform rabbinate (1990), the movement continues to see itself as an inclusive community, open to different kinds of families "regardless of their sexual orientation," including those who have converted or inter-married, who are committed to creating a Jewish home.

Conservative Judaism

Having emerged as a movement driven less by ideology than by specific actions in reaction to the extremes of Orthodoxy and reform, Conservative Judaism long refrained from promulgating any ideological platforms or perspectives. Indeed, as some sociologists have observed, the lack of a clear-cut ideology may well contribute to Conservatism's wide appeal. At the very least, it helps explain why there remains less uniformity in religious attitudes and behavior among Conservative synagogues, and between Conservative clergy and laity, than in other Jewish religious movements (though the increasing use of the movement's recently published prayer book, Sim Shalom, has helped promote greater liturgical uniformity among congregations). It also helps explain what Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the seminary, described as the "admirable and intriguing" tension lying beneath the surface of the movement's first collective statement of principles, Emet ve'Emunah (Truth and Faith), issued by lay and rabbinic leaders in 1988.

Recognizing the difficulty of effecting change within the framework of halakhah, the Rabbinical Assembly's Law Committee has long maintained that its decisions are not binding, giving Conservative pulpit rabbis far greater power in establishing congregational religious policy than that exercised by rabbis serving other types of congregations. It has also prompted the movement to put difficult issues on hold, sometimes "indefinitely," including the recently debated question of whether or not to admit openly lesbian and gay Jews into the Conservative rabbinate. Because the spectrum of those self-identifying as Conservative Jews is fairly large, the long-standing concern that the movement might split was realized following the seminary's 1983 decision to admit women into its rabbinical program and the subsequent ordination of Amy Eilberg in 1985 (soon thereafter, women were admitted into the seminary's School of Sacred Music, invested as cantors, and after a protracted struggle, gained entry into Conservatism's professional cantorial association as well). Opposed to these decisions, a small but vocal group of Conservative rabbis and lay people formed their own Union for Traditional Conservative Judaism. Still small in number, the group (now known as the Union for Traditional Judaism), no longer identifies with the Conservative movement, thus ending the split initially caused by their departure.

Reconstructionism

More so than any other American Jewish movement, Reconstructionism remains closely tied to the thought of one individual: Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), a Conservative rabbi whose emphasis on Judaism as an ongoing, ever-changing religious civilization created by the Jewish people, led to the establishment of a small, yet vibrant movement whose date of origin is considered by some to be 1922 (with Kaplan's assuming leadership of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York City), by others, 1934 (the publication date of his monumental Judaism as a Civilization). Its major organizations and institutions currently include the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in Wyncote, Pennsylvania (first opened in Philadelphia in 1968); the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association; and the Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations and Havurot. Decisions reached by other Jewish movements after years of debate and dissension have been arrived at more easily, and with far less fanfare, by Reconstructionist leaders. Such decisions have included the ordination of women as rabbis (women were admitted to RRC from its inception), the ordination of openly gay and lesbian Jews, and the acceptance of patrilineal descent. Reconstructionist prayer books of the 1940s deleted references to the election of the Jewish people, God as a supernatural miracle worker, and a future messianic redeemer. Its newer liturgies, including the Sabbath and holiday prayer book published in 1994, have "remained faithful to these principles," while including formerly deleted prayers as liturgical options. Other recent liturgical changes include the use of gender-inclusive language, poems and prayers written by contemporary Jewish men and women, and new, theologically diverse, metaphors for God.

Orthodoxy

The term "Orthodoxy" applies to Jews who strive to live in accordance with God's teachings as revealed in Judaism's sacred texts and codified by rabbinic sages. It does not, however, refer either to a unified movement or a single religious community. Thus, for example, concerns and trends within modern Orthodoxy are very different from those within Hasidism, while Hasidism itself does not refer to a single group of Jews, but rather to a number of different religious communities, each with its own leaders, beliefs, and particular religious concerns.

Since the 1970s, some of the most visible developments within modern Orthodoxy have concerned the religious roles and education of women. There has been a proliferation of traditional women's prayer groups, created by Orthodox women as a means of participating more fully in public worship. Such groups meet once or twice a month, most often on Shabbat morning, and conduct a full service, with the exception of prayers for which a minyan (prayer quorum) is needed. Since men are not present, participants are halakhically permitted to lead prayers, recite the Torah blessings, and read from the Torah scroll. While strong opposition to these groups continues, they continue to receive the guidance and support of Orthodox rabbis like Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, who believe that to seek more Jewish responsibility is not anti-halakhic but, to the contrary, claims halakhah as "the birthright of all Jews." Since February 1997, over a thousand women, and some men, have attended annual conferences on feminism and Orthodoxy in New York City. The interest and excitement they have generated, along with the development of new educational programs, growing demands to remedy halakhically sanctioned injustices against women, and, since December 1997, the hiring of a female "congregational intern" to serve as pastor, teacher, and counselor at Manhattan's Lincoln Square Synagogue, demonstrate that even among Jews who accept halakhically based, gender-distinctive roles, a growing number are actively seeking to raise women's legal status, while creating new opportunities for women to participate more knowledgeably, and more fully, in communal religious life.

Hasidic Jews continue to live in tightly knit, pietistic communities, bound together by their strict adherence to Jewish law; devotion to the rebbe (the charismatic leader of a particular, Hasidic dynasty or group); distinctive dress, customs, and educational institutions; a unique sense of history; and, to as great a degree as possible, isolation from "outsiders" (including other Jews) and from the modern world. Political and ideological disagreements continue to engender hostility among Hasaidic communities, including rabbinical supervision of kashrut (the proper observance of Judaism's dietary laws); political recognition and support of the modern State of Israel (still opposed by some Satmar Hasidim); and out-reach to nonobservant Jews (a major effort of Lubavitcher Hasidim since the 1960s). Finally, there continues to be disagreement over the immanence of messianic redemption. By the early 1990s, many Lubavitchers were heralding their rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, as the messiah. Since Schneerson's death in 1994, most Lubavitch Jews have accepted this belief, some denying his death, others awaiting his physical resurrection.

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Ellen M. Umansky

Contemporary American Religion