by Rebecca Honig Friedman

The old Jewish guard — what’s often referred to as the organized Jewish community — has two main concerns: the future of the Jewish people and the future of the Jewish people. Two different senses of the same problem, that is. The first sense is the future generations of Jews, us young’uns who are supposedly being “lost” — assimilating, intermarrying and, perhaps most disturbing to the old guard, not joining the established religious institutions that allow us to be counted as “affiliated” Jews. The second sense is the future of the idea of the Jewish people as one, unified people.

There’s certainly reason to be concerned with the future of the Jewish people in both senses, but there’s also reason to think that problem #1 is actually taking care of problem #2. The young and diffuse next Jewish generation may be comprised largely of individuals doing their own thing, but when doing their own Jewish thing, they are more likely to seek out an accepting community and to eschew the traditional denominational labels that have done much more to divide than to unite the Jewish people.

This point is brought home by the juxtaposition of two recent news items, from the Forward and the New York Times.

This month on the Foward’s Bintel Brief advice column, the Jewish power couple of Blu and Rabbi Yitz Greenberg have been answering readers’ questions on a variety of what might be called halachic ethics issues. (Short aside: I love that the Forward listed Blu’s name and bio first in their intro of the couple.) Their last question comes from a man who underwent a Conservative Jewish conversion, which he claims was done properly according to halacha. He now wonders whether he should tell members of the Orthodox minyan where he prays regularly about his conversion, since they might then no longer consider him eligible to act as one of the ten men required for a minyan by Orthodox standards. In other words, there is a chance that if they knew he had converted under a Conservative rabbi, they might no longer consider him truly Jewish.

The Greenbergs’ response is quite critical of the Orthodox establishment… Read more on the Lilith Blog…

Posted on November 30th, 2007 Filed under: Lilith Blog |