The Jewish Condition: Essays on Contemporary Judaism Honoring Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, edited by Aron Hirt-Manheimer, URJ Press

Reviewed by Rabbi Goldstein

Perhaps no modern liberal Jewish thinker has challenged, enlightened, enlivened, infuriated, vexed, and loved the Jewish people more than Rabbi Alexander Schindler. For thirty four years Schindler guided the Reform movement, twenty-two of them as President of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the umbrella organization of millions of reform Jews and hundreds of Reform synagogues. Schindler initiated the controversial stand of patrilineal descent, whereby the child of a Jewish father (but not Jewish mother) is counted as a Jew in reform. He was the first to cry out for outreach to the unaffiliated and what he called "the unchurched"- non-Jews who may be drawn into conversion to Judaism. He championed for the religious equality of women and gays long before it was politically correct. He worked tirelessly for inter-religious dialogue, and inter-Jewish dialogue. When he died just recently, it was not only a shock but also a great loss to the Jewish people.

This book has dozens of insightful essays on the contemporary Jewish condition, its overarching issues, its future. The array of authors and topics is impressive. Julius Lester, author of Lovesong and the famous black son of a Baptist minister turned Jew, writes a wonderful piece on Blacks, Jews, and Farrakhan. Rabbi Jack Stern has a beautiful article on Jewish Ethics in the Daily Life of a Jew; Rachel Adler on Women and Tradition; and Rabbi Gunther Plaut on the Limits of Reform Judaism. These are just a few of my favorites in a book well worth reading, by people we ought to be listening to. This is not just a book for Reform Jews, or for people interested in Reform Judaism. This is a book for all Jews who live in the modern world and who care about the Jewish condition.

For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, by Irving (Yitz) Greenberg)
Jewish Publication Society

reviewed by Allan Gould


There are some books which I have the honour of reviewing for you that I long for every Jew to own: Emil Fackenheim’s brilliant yet accessible WHAT IS JUDAISM?, which I looked at last year as a Kaddish for that wonderful human being, Jew, and philosopher, is a good example.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg—known as "Yitz" to nearly anyone who has met this kind, good, wise Orthodox rabbi—has written several books which should, indeed, be in every Jewish library, such as his THE JEWISH WAY—THE JEWISH HOLIDAYS, a profound, exquisitely-written study of each of the major yom-tovim of our faith, which I find myself re-reading several times each year (and which can be purchased from various Internet book stores in used condition). (Get it!)

Only last year, the revered Yitz Greenberg gathered together several scholarly articles on a subject which has long vexed him, and which has long been [dangerously?] ignored by most Jews, especially the most "traditional" of our faith, and added a devastating opening essay of just under 50 pages. The book is called For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, and is subtitled “The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity,” and it was published in 2004 as a low-priced paperback by the Jewish Publication Society. This latest book by one of our faith’s most intriguing philosophers and thinkers is NOT one that need be in most private Jewish libraries; it is hard-going, and often maddeningly complex. But it raises so many serious, challenging questions about Jewish/Gentile relations—and from an Orthodox rabbi yet!—that it is impossible to ignore. Let me at least raise some of those questions for you, without urging you to rush out and buy a copy.

The opening paragraph of Rabbi Yitz’s first, most recent essay (“On the Road to a New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity: a Personal Journey”) really messed up my brain. But then, listening to Yitz—as I always do, when he comes and lectures in Toronto—and reading Yitz—as I often do, as noted above—has always been a kind of Cuisinart for my thinking. And what more can anyone ask of a serious philosopher? Here goes:

Almost 2000 years ago, Judaism and nascent Christianity separated from each other. The two communities set out on very different journeys through history, guided by the star of a parallel policy: hear no good, see no good, and speak no good of each other. Important Christian canonical texts portrayed Judaism as a religion that had no right to exist; Jewish faith was a once valid, now spiritually bankrupt creed, repudiated by God. Great Jewish rabbis defined Christianity as a faith founded on folly, whose dogmas violently twisted classical Jewish concepts into a not-to-be-recognized form of idolatry. The church was viewed as a bastard offspring (a medieval polemicist would say: the offspring of a bastard) that grew up and became big and violent enough to abuse its parent unmercifully.

Whew. That’s certainly "telling it like it is," isn't it? But then, Rabbi Yitz never minces words. Of course, then he lays out what will be his major purpose, and theme, of this collection of often difficult-to-follow essays: "Yet in the past century, both religions have begun a new encounter with each other. Every passing decade reveals that this process is offering both faiths a true historical rarity: a second chance to connect and thus an opportunity to re-revision themselves. I believe that by responding openly with honesty, both communities will discover that God has given them an opportunity to renew the purpose of their sacred existence on earth…."

Whew, again. What words to encounter—and from a halachic, 613-law-following Orthodox Jewish rabbi in the 21st century! And you can see what Yitz Greenberg has been up against: as more and more Christian Americans (especially) move to the "right" in religiosity and observance, more and more of them see Jews, Muslims, and everyone who does not "accept the divinity of Jesus as the Messiah" as being doomed to a fiery eternity. And the Jews? Those who count themselves among "the Torah-true," like my dear friend Yitz Greenberg, essentially "don’t give a damn what the Gentiles think," any more than most people on this earth lose any sleep over global warming, or the Newfoundland seal hunt, or anything else which does not seem to impact on their lives in any important, vital way.

Of course, there is a needle in this haystack; a fly in this ointment; a mosquito in this tent: and it is a very large needle/fly/mosquito: the cold-blooded, organized, deliberate murder of 85% of the Jews of Europe, or over a third of every Jew who was alive on this earth in 1940. How can one escape the centrality of the Holocaust; the Shoah? For most Jews, it destroyed their ability to ever trust their Christian brothers and sisters again (who were either murdering us by gas or gun, or ignoring the smell and sound of the latter); for most Christians, the image of their parents or friends dragging their Jewish neighbours to the death-camp-directed trains, when it comes to their minds at all, since the end of World War II, has been a source of deep guilt, only alleviated by trying to forget the whole thing, or smiling at the thought that there was the occasional Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg which somehow forgave millions of others for not responding humanely. For six decades now, Jews have turned to Eli Wiesel (when they turned in that painful direction at all); Christians have mainly turned away. (And who can blame them for that?)

And then, along comes an ordained Orthodox rabbi and Harvard Ph.D., Irving Greenberg, who has been struggling passionately, intellectually, RELIGIOUSLY, with the Big Questions about Jewish (as well as Christian) responses to the Holocaust, since 1961. (Yet, he admits in the extraordinary essay which opens his latest book, "while in college, I did not reflect on my attitude toward Christianity as a religion; on the whole, I remained mildly dismissive of the faith as practiced and remembered that its practitioners had not treated Jews well historically.") (There is an understatement for you!)

Then, Yitz truly began to wake up to the Holocaust. (And I use that phrase advisedly; I am forever quoting the amazing line which James Joyce gives Stephen Daedalus in his early novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.") Greenberg finally hears of his many aunts and uncles murdered in Eastern Europe; he reads many of the books that were being published in the late 1960s which showed how "the United States had abandoned and betrayed the European Jews," and he responded, as a young husband and father, in that deeply profound way which, one would think, most people should respond to that bleak period in human—not only Jewish—history:

Days of helpless despair sequenced into nights of joy. Hours of sitting, enveloped by consuming, all-pervasive anxiety and fear of what the next moment would bring, were followed by walks through the peaceful, secure, unafraid streets of Jerusalem. [How ironic this last sentence seems today, over four decades later, as bus bombings and pizzeria slaughters had become common over the past few years!] In the end, my wife’s loving presence preserved me from madness, and a living Israel saved me from death of the soul. Although I since have moved on to other stages of Holocaust consciousness and religious response, there is a piece of my soul that is permanently fixed in this relentless, locked embrace of the life force and the death force….

What a response! And that’s where the agony begins, and never ends. Because Rabbi Irving Greenberg eventually came to see—as did his dear friend, the recently-deceased Emil Fackenheim—that the Shoah was NOT merely just "one more slaughter," but a murderous explosion which challenged Christian purpose and survival, and even shook (and possibly broke?) the actual covenant made between God and his people Israel in the Sinai desert, some three millennia ago.

To quote the good Rabbi, "I became convinced that dialogue was an absolute necessity—first to check Christian teaching of contempt and then to revise Jewish negative stereotypes toward Christianity." As one might joke (but won’t): good luck! And this obsession with a dialogue (with the enemy? With our younger, sister, murderous brethren?) led to a further conviction on the part of Rabbi Irving Greenberg: ". . .I was convinced that the Holocaust was a revelational event in at least two religions (Judaism and Christianity). Therefore, it was important to spell out its messages and teach them to be practitioners in both faiths. Can one event be a revelation in two religions?" A good question! And answered in a fascinating fashion.

Along the way, Yitz Greenberg found true, deep, supportive friends in the Christian community, such as Alice and Roy Eckardt, who recognized in the Holocaust a crippling failure in Christian goodness and acceptable response. But he often received reactions from the religious Jewish community which were passionately negative: it’s useless to try and have a dialogue with these people who murdered our parents, our families, our children! Why even attempt it? And, perhaps even more crushing was the refusal of most "frum" Jews to see the Shoah as a possible break in the eternal covenant between Ha-Shem and His People; had there not been so many other mass murders, slaughters, expulsions, crusades, pogroms, Chmelnitzkis, Stalins. . . ?

You can see why I find Yitz Greenberg such a haunting—and haunted—philosopher. He has spent most of his life trying to convince his fellow (religious) Jews that the Shoah was NOT merely "one more event" in Jewish history; and to convince his growing number of Christian philosopher friends that “the teaching of contempt goes straight back to the original Gospel accounts. The Holocaust had revealed that, at the very heart of Christianity, a shelter for evil existed that must be razed, since hatred was in fundamental contradiction to the gospel of love that is the New Testament’s true role and goal.”

What makes Yitz’s struggle all the more painful is, that a growing number of Christians (especially since the Six Day War) have seen the Israelis as "the new Nazis," whose actions in self-defense (and often more pro-active) against suicide bombers and Palestinians who felt displaced since 1967, have been excessive, cruel, and a too-simple way of forgiving their own fellow-practitioners of Christianity for their grotesque failure of morality and humanity during the 1940s.

Whew, indeed. I often think of Yitz Greenberg as a kind of modern John the Baptist, "a voice crying out in the wilderness"—although the good Rabbi might prefer to hear me compare him with the more classically-Jewish figure of Jeremiah, crying out against Jewish failings and demanding positive moral responses from everyone.

What I love about Yitz Greenberg—and this problematic, mind-boggling book (especially the opening 50 pages of "a philosopher’s autobiography")—is that he keeps raising the Big Questions—questions so big that few of us think of them, once we move past our teenage years, get married, have families, find jobs, pay our mortgages and taxes, etc. One example which echoes through the entire collection of essays: "The general Jewish position has been that Jesus was a false messiah. Why? Would it not be more precise to say that a false messiah is one who teaches the wrong values and who turns sin into holiness? A more accurate description, from a Jewish perspective, would be that Jesus was not a 'false' but a 'failed' messiah. He has not finished the job but his work is not in vain."

What a thought! But to a religious Jew, what could Jesus have been but false—well, if not Jesus, then assuredly what his followers made of him and his teachings. And to a religious Christian, even the term "failed messiah" can easily be taken as an insult, in spite of the obvious fact that Rabbi Greenberg means nothing of the sort.

Do I recommend this book? Certainly, the first 50 pages, in which Yitz Greenberg shares his growing obsession with the Shoah, with Christianity, and with what he thinks is the vital need for some kind of serious dialogue. It is heartbreaking, meaningful, tragic, possibly doomed work. Should this book be in your library? Well, maybe not; not all the essays are up to the level of the opening chapter, although each has the occasional mind-teaser which I was happy to have twig my brain.

I love Yitz Greenberg. Whether a modern John the Baptist or a modern Jeremiah, he is certainly an important thorn—in the sides of both Jews and Christians alike. I hope the above thoughts will stir in you a new longing to try and bridge that ferocious, terrifying gap between the Jewish people and our younger brothers and sisters (as the late Pope would say about Christians).

Of course, the need for such dialogue is ever changing, ever growing—and not only with our Christian friends and neighbours. I’ll conclude with one painful line (and a footnote to that line) in one of the essays reprinted in this book: "The reason we no longer have religious wars is not so much that modern people are so pluralist, but that they no longer care so passionately about religion." Then, just below, Yitz adds a footnote: "This was written in 1968. Since 9/11/2001, we have been taught that people who care passionately about religion are back and they are prepared to terrorize without limit and kill without mercy."

Oh, Lord; does it ever end?

The Wicked Son
by David Mamet
Schocken, 191 pp.

Reviewed by Allan Gould

Are you familiar with the hard-hitting, filthy-language, make-you-think-a-lot-deeper plays and novels of David Mamet of Chicago? Oleanna took on nothing less than male/female relationships in academia, and Glengarry Glen Ross is a truly devastating attack on, or is a description of rapacious capitalism, as shown in the back-stabbing actions of a group of desperate men trying to sell homes in a new development of that name. (The movie was a solid version of the play; check it out). His best plays have won Pulitzer Prizes, and he is inarguably one of the most exciting playwrights and screenwriters of our times, and far more interesting and talented than 95% of Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Tennessee Williams.

Perhaps one should not be taken aback to discover that he recently came out with a thin, 191-paged volume called The Wicked Son, sporting a sub-title which could well cause shivers in the (bleeding?) hearts of a number of North American Jews: the 75% who have never visited the State of Israel, perhaps, and certainly the 50% or so who never studied their faith, much less attended a Sabbath meal. The opening essay, which is the Foreward, leaps in your face like a traffic accident, only partly because the juiciest part is reprinted on the back cover. (The title of the book refers to the four boys described in the Passover Haggadah, of course.) Here is that offending/shocking/undeniably thought-provoking paragraph in full; were only more of the essays as powerful and as focused:

To the wicked son, who asks 'What does all this mean to you?' To the Jews who, in the sixties, envied the Black Power Movement; who, in the nineties, envied the Palestinians; who weep at Exodus but jeer at the Israeli Defense Forces; who nod when Tevye praises tradition but fidget through the seder; who might take their curiosity to a dogfight, to a bordello or an opium den but find ludicrous the notion of a visit to a synagogue; whose favorite Jew is Anne Frank and whose second-favorite does not exist; who are humble in their desire to learn about Kwanzaa and proud of their ignorance of Tu Bi'Shvat; who dread endogamy more than incest; who bow the head reverently at a baptism and have never attended a bris, to you, who find your religion and race repulsive, your ignorance of your history a satisfaction, here is a book from your brother.

Wow. And whew. How can almost any Jew in the world today, except the close followers of Halacha and the most serious, scholarly members of the more liberal interpreters of Jewish practice, not feel queasy about at least a few of Mamet's damning descriptions?

Much of the undeniable power in the better essays in this book (I doubt if any are longer than eight or nine pages, and too many of their screeds quickly melt like snow in April) seems dated now: not all Jews are rushing about cutting off their noses to spite their race as the old joke goes; not all Jews are joining groups who applaud Hamas and accuse Israel of apartheid or choose to run toward Buddhism, Maharishis, and anything BUT the faith of their parents and ancestors. Those numbers are probably less than in 1 in 10 but then, a religion/people/nation who recently lost 85% of its adherents during genocidal slaughters in the 1940s cannot afford any self-hating number, no matter how small.

Yet it is true, and widely known, that the number of Jews in the world today who have ever visited the Jewish State at all, much less study its history, its people, its place in a very tense Middle East, is outrageously small, and that gets under Mamet's skin like a hot coal.

This inability to assign to the Israelis a basic humanity is, to me, more deeply disturbing than the reluctance to endorse or accept any of their national positions . Do, can, or could the Israelis delight in reprisals,' in retaliation'? The very words are revelatory, for such actions by the United States are known as defense-- a country defends itself; reprisals and retaliation are the actions of a mob. . . . The outright denunciation of Israel as acquisitionist, bloodthirsty, colonial, etc.' is to me simply a modern instance of the blood libel; that Jews delight in the blood of others.

I could quote two dozen more sections from this highly-uneven, often dated, but often mind-blowing group of nearly three dozen brief essays, but I lack the space. Yet buying and photocopying off a choice essay or two could certainly liven up your next Passover Seder, because it is inarguable that three millennia of being hated has led large numbers of Jews to be embarrassed by their history ("We went like sheep to the slaughter! I continue to hear about the Shoah, which utterly ignores the crafty evil which kept every European Jew off balance (you're just being shipped to farms in the East), and is unaware that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, led by a few thousand starving Jews most of them women and children lasted longer than the entire country of Poland, which had hundreds of thousands of well-fed soldiers, rather more than the ghetto's 87 pistols and single machine gun.")

This book often sickened me, because for all its ranting and raving, its sometimes-unearned rage, it still hit home. Did I, myself, not go to work in Civil Rights in Mississippi in 1964, because I inarguably felt closer to, and more worried about, my black American brothers than my Jewish family in Israel? Did I not often feel embarrassed by the Israeli response to those awful kidnappings last summer in Lebanon? No, I'm not a self-hating Jew; I revel in our culture, rejoice in our heritage and faith, and study, teach, and thrill to (and weep over) our blood-stained history. If anything, perhaps we Jews should congratulate ourselves on how little real self-hatred there is, in our people; the black-on-black crime we still see around the world today shows how easy it is to absorb that ultimate of all self-destructive thoughts: if all these people hate my skin/religion so much, there must be some truth in their feelings; I shall hate it too. Of course, the Jew can always escape through renouncing his synagogue and her people; the descendants of African slaves can also try to run, but never fully hide. Mamet is a brilliant playwright, and although I was completely satisfied with only a half-dozen or so of this thin collection, my head is still spinning, and throbbing, from the occasional Truth that hit too close to home. Far too close.

The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to GUILT
by Ruth Andrew Ellenson (ed.)
Softcover - 318 pages (2006), Plume (Penguin Group); ISBN: 0452287480

Reviewed by Baruch Sienna

I might not have picked up a book with the title, The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to GUILT, both because I have a relatively positive attitude to Judaism and might worry that a volume on guilt would unnecessarily pull out the various hackneyed Jewish stereotypes on Jewish mothers and neurosis, and because I might have felt that this collection of essays by women would be too gender specific for my (male) life experience. However, because I have an inherited family disease that makes me unable to resist reading the printed word (even discarded ticket stubs), while lying sick in bed, I cracked open this volume on my wife's night table. Lucky for me, since this treasure of 28 modern essays is one of the best collections of well written essays that capture the angst of being Jewish in the modern world.

Really, my only criticism is the title. I am sure the marketing people decided that "Guilt" sells, and since the contributors are all women, they wanted the reader (ie. would be purchaser) to be aware of that, but the truth is, although many of the essays use "Jewish Guilt" as the jumping off point, the essays are really about identity, self, tradition, community, sexuality and family. Even the word 'Jewish' is not entirely necessary. Yes, all the essays are by Jews, and relate to Judaism in one way or another, but many cultural minorities could relate and would agree with many of the contibutors and say, "Yes, my life is exactly like that." My only other caveat is: don't read the whole book in one sitting or you might get indigestion. All the essays are powerful, and frankly, reading them all in one go can be a little overwhelming. I'd recommend reading one or two on a Shabbat afternoon.

So, what's this book about anyways? There are essays about the challenges of finding a place within Judaism for modern (read intellectually critical) feminists. Some grew up in religious, observant homes, and moved away from that world for a variety of reasons but are able to share intelligently about a world that many readers don't have access to. (One contributor grew up in the Chasidic world of Satmar). Others write about family, but the essays are much deeper and thoughtful than you might think. I found only one about a 'stereotypical' Jewish mother to be borderline offensive. One essay is about our relationship with the land of Israel. One of the things I found surprising was the range of experiences: one woman wrote of her family's experience in Iran. Some wrote about having children (or not). Others talked about JDate or their relationships (often with non-Jews) and the issues that raised for families, holiday celebrations, or naming their children. There were also chapters that talked about sexuality (one author shared her coming out experience that I'm sure any non-heterosexual could relate to), and body image. One woman asks, tongue in cheek, "Why are all Jewish women so fat" (meaning: why are all Jewish women (and men) so loud)? There is something for everyone.

The essays are all so wonderful and so insightful. One of my favourites was Rachel Kadish's piece on Guilt Judo. She (together with several others in this volume) are grandchildren of survivors, and she helpfully explains the rules of a game that Jews seem to play called 'Guilt Judo.' "Family obligations pin the needs of single people.... Safety pins punctuality... The Holocaust pins everything." But she then teaches a valuable lesson of how 'Jewish Guilt' or 'Guilt Judo' can become poisonous- and goes on to brilliantly transform the word 'guilt' into simply a road sign that tells us that we have a choice and responsibility.

The list of contributors is a veritable who's who in the modern, young, Jewish world. Ellenson (herself no lightweight) has collected an amazing group of writers, filmmakers, professors. All of them are communicators and write articulately and powerfully about the modern Jewish experience. Almost all are authors of other novels or essays, (one contributor's novel is reviewed here; another founded the hip "Heeb" Jewish counter-culture magazine) so one could easily use this book as a syllabus for the modern Jewish experience by simply listing the contibutors at the back and their published works. Please read this book.

Nothing Sacred
by Douglas Rushkoff, Crown Publishers, 2003, 260 pp.

Reviewed by Baruch Sienna

"Mr. Rushkoff, can we talk indeed?" I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable and committed Jew, and yet, more often than I would like, I walk out of many synagogue services feeling disappointed, frustrated (and sometimes even worse). And it's not because I'm intimidated by rabbis (I'm married to one), or unfamiliar with the service (my Hebrew is fluent), or don't 'get' how liturgy works (I have a degree in Jewish studies). So imagine how someone who is trying to reconnect to Judaism, but without this background, might react. I understand deeply why many with a committed and yet a critical approach to Judaism have yet to find a spiritual home. I am fond of quoting Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg: "I don't care what denomination you belong to, as long as you're embarrassed by it."

So, it was re-affirming to read an analysis of how Judaism has, in Mr. Rushkoff's words, "lost the plot." He says something similar to Yitz, "Religion is a good thing- as long as you don't believe in it." In other words, Judaism has a lot to offer the modern world, but we have to be careful not to take things too literally. I think one of the more valuable lessons of Nothing Sacred is its stress on how we confuse metaphors with the real thing. As a Jewish educator I have tried very hard to teach kids in ways that won't have to be untaught. And as faculty at Kolel, where we have an approach that I think Mr. Rushkoff would admire, we are (unfortunately, too often) constantly puncturing people's myths about the origins of customs or the meanings of stories (such as our "The True Story of Chanukah").

Mr. Rushkoff is no scholar and the book suffers from errors (Tziporrah watering her horses just to name one, but there are many others) and oversimplification. It is not fair or accurate to distill 3000 years of Judaism into Iconoclasm, Radical Monotheism, and Social Action. The midrash of Abraham's iconoclasm (as he points out), is in fact NOT in Torah, so to claim it as one of the main pillars of Judaism seems a stretch. His assertion that "assimilation was not a sin, it was survival" is simply unfounded in Jewish history. He has a tendency for overblown rhetoric, such as his conclusion that Judaism's evolving theology is only to wean humanity from believing in God altogether. Is that what Maimonides really meant? And for someone who preaches a Judaism of tolerance, he seems mighty intolerant at times.

Sometimes, I'm afraid, he is just too provocative. I would agree that there are some Jews who have confused the 'label' with the 'contents', but it cannot be seriously argued that the 'lapsed' assimilated Jew is the true inheritor of our faith and the future of Judaism. Yes, lots of Jews are homophobic, racist and sexist, but one doesn't need to be pro-intermarriage either! And I believe Mr. Rushkoff would agree, that a Jew can be committed to Social Action AND have a place for ritual and mitzvot in their lives - a position that he does not sufficiently acknowledge.

He is right, however, about the proliferation of 'idols' even within the observant community. It is indeed a provocative concept that the Western Wall, the Mitzvot and even the Torah have been reduced to 'idols' on some levels. (And don't even get us started on the Lubavitcher Rebbe!!) While he has been studying with some of the top rabbis and teachers, he is no authority on Judaism, so the book is his 'midrash' on Jewish history. His analyses (borrowed from his field of media and technology) of Jewish sociology are bang on the mark. I enjoyed reading his insights from his work in media and contemporary life to Judaism and how it is perceived and 'marketed' to a new generation. As Kolel's director of Interactive Technology, I particularly relate to his use of computer metaphors, describing Judaism as 'open source' software. (When I read the book, and his recommendations, my first reaction was, he needs to have an open forum website to continue the conversation, which I was pleased to learn that he has done (called OpenSourceJudaism). To continue the metaphor, though, Open Source software is for geeks; not many average users have Linux installed. Like the new Macintosh operating system (OS X) which sits on (and hides) a kernel of Unix, we need a user-friendly "Jewish" interface and a manual for the equivalent of Jewish 'luddites'.

Mr. Rushkoff is not the first to suggest that Judaism is in (desperate) need of a renaissance. People like Arthur Waskow and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi have spent their lifetimes working for that goal. Kolel opened in 1991 because of visionaries who recognized, and still recognize, that one path to a new Judaism will be built by a community engaged in passionate study of classical texts while grappling with modern ideas. But unlike the terribly unfair review (published in The Jerusalem Report) I don't think anyone who criticizes Judaism is a self-hating Jew and therefore automatically deserves out-of-hand dismissal. Actually, I thought Mr. Rushkoff comes off as a fairly serious Jew. While highly critical of some movements and institutions, he presents Judaism as something with great value, that needs to take a good hard look at itself.

The book is not meant to be scholarly, and has a comfortable, easy to read style. And Mr. Rushkoff has the challenge of needing to explain much of Jewish history and concepts parenthetically as he correctly assumes that the average reader has little familiarity with the people, events and processes that he is describing. Consequently, he is repetitive at times, and simplistic at others. As he necessarily explains, he cannot be prescriptive- only together can we come up with that process. But he has begun a discussion that I, for one, would be happy to be part of. Thanks Mr. Rushkoff, for inviting us to talk.

Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls
by Stephanie Wellen Levine, New University Press, 2003

Reviewed by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein


When I was an undergraduate at Brandeis University, I decided to do my honors thesis on The Role of Women in Old World Religious Orders. That brought me to live one week with the Mennonites of "Pennsylvania Dutch" country, and one week with Lubavitcher Hasidim in Crown Heights. The young girls of the Mennonites were blunt: "In our religion, it's clear. Men and women are not equal. Men are the head and women are the helpers. Men run the church, the business, and the society, and women run the home. Nobody tries to be equal. " Then I went to Crown Heights. Everywhere I went, people tried to match me up with "former" Reform Jews, who told me how much happier they were now as women. The young girls equivocated: "We are separate but equal. We are definitely equal in God's sight, but we have different roles to play, different rules. It might seem unequal to you as an outsider, but it isn't." The last interview I had became the title of my thesis. This young ba'alat teshuva (newly religious) girl said to me, "Now I am free- of the need to be free."
Are the young girls whom Stephanie Wellen Levine met in her year in Crown Heights "free of the need to be free"? Unfortunately, she does not go deep enough into analyzing their lives to answer that question. Her book Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls sets out to see if Hasidic girls are able to "cultivate their inner voices" by interviewing seven girls in the Lubavitch community. She got the best and brightest ones, to be sure. And she has prejudices, like most modern feminists, assuming these girls would be squashed, one-dimensional, oppressed creatures. To her surprise, she finds them feisty, spirited, independent, clear, and insightful. They have strong, wonderful friendships. They are bold, but not brazen. She meets the rebels among them and presets them with a colourful stroke. We are taken into this somewhat closed world (though among the Hasidim, the Lubavitchers are certainly the most worldly and open) and given insights into its richness. She exposes the reader to the underlying strength of the girls' convictions that their lives matter, and that each person is valued. It is that spiritual strength that gives the girls their clear "inner voices." The interviews are entertaining and full. She relates the fights as well as the beauty, and shares the pain of the "outsiders" of the community. She is impressed by the sweet teasing and easy comraderie between the girls. In the end, she even makes a convincing argument for gender-segregated activities among adolescents and calls for a move away from the sex-soaked atmosphere that most teens inhabit. She takes the best of Crown Heights sex-segregation- the fact that it allows girls freedom from the demands of always being attractive and accessible to boys- and tries to imagine some form of it in our non-Hasidic, egalitarian world. She isn't altogether successful in that, though, because she doesn't analyze the difference between chosen separation and enforced separation; between taking leadership in a small group of girls and the inability to take leadership for one's entire community; and between individual girls benefiting from periods of separation from boys and an entire system based on the deep-seated belief that male and female are so inherently different that that one difference must inform what they can and cannot do every day of their lives.

The book may not satisfy an intellectual reader with more than a voyeuristic curiosity about how this "exotic" Jewish community lives. Let's admit that many Jews have a marked fascination for how "they" live and what "they" think and why "they" do certain things, thus the popularity of books like Holy Days and Boys 'N The Hood. The author admits: "I will escort you through the girls' lives and minds more for the pure delight of knowing them than for any lessons you might glean." But with a foreword by Carol Gilligan, a foremost researcher whose work In A Different Voice inspired an entire generation to understand masculinity and femininity in a profoundly analytical way, I had hoped for a deeper quest. How does being raised in a spiritual community with such clear and marked gender differentiation impact upon the life of a young girl? This lack of analysis mars the book for readers who want to understand how, in the twenty-first century, a life of traditional values, clear patriarchy and gender obsession is balanced with an independence of spirit. She admits: "..."there is little place for the person who falls beyond basic assumptions about belief, desire, or personality." But she never seems to ask whether those basic assumptions are the problem, or whether the person's own quirks and personality are the problem.

Levine does a splendid job of presenting how the girls cope, and she paints vivid pictures of Shabbat around their family tables. But after a while, it gets repetitive. For example, she explains how all the Bais Rivka girls get invited to each other's weddings at least three times; every time she describes an engagement party she tells us this fact again. She explains Lubavitch philosophy over and over again. She spends too much time describing the foods, the houses, the neighbourhood, and the small talk and not enough time probing the questions and assumptions of her subjects.

She is unapologetic about her lack of desire to become a ba'alat teshuva even after a year with the strongest Jewish outreach group in the world. I was grateful to see her acknowledge that "...I may have received a somewhat packaged vision of the truth, a movie version as opposed to messy, haphazard lives." Let's face it, that's what outreach is. She calls herself "an extremely sympathetic skeptic" and indeed she portrays the girls, even the so-called "troubled" ones (who wear short skirts or go to secular colleges) very sympathetically, because they are, truly, nice girls. It's great to meet so many nice teenagers, though there are many nice teenagers in the non-Hasidic world, too, contrary to the misty-eyed view that only cloistered kids come out with strong values. Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers is a little misty-eyed too, but it's nice reading about nice people trying to make this world a little nicer.

Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry
by Samuel G. Freedman
Simon and Schuster, N.Y, 2000

Reviewed by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein

No one has to tell me that the Jewish community is fractured, politicized, and torn. As president of the interdenominational Toronto Board of Rabbis, I see it every day. Rabbis who won't speak in the shuls of certain denominations. Rabbis who don't accept conversions of other rabbis. Jews who won't let their kids marry Jews of other denominations. Name calling. Insinuations and outright slander. I've seen and heard it all.

That is why I came to Jew vs. Jew by Samuel G. Freedman with such high hopes. At last a book that will both paint a realistic picture and offer its antidote. A book that will not take sides, but will help us see how the sides which now work against one another can work together. Because here in Toronto, at least, there are small pockets, quiet pockets of people of good will who are hoping for an end to denominational mudslinging and a beginning to dialogue. Such dialogue, however, is based on the deep-seated conviction that we will agree to disagree, and that no one in the end will either "lose" or "win."

I was so sorely disappointed. This best seller depresses. Nowhere does the author speak of his own Jewish identity or commitment, but one gets the feeling that the Judaism he doesn't practice is Orthodox. He intimates in several different ways that liberal Judaism is floundering, and that the most committed liberal Jews eventually become Orthodox. Of all his stories of passionate, articulate secular, Conservative, or reform Jews, they all "convert" to Orthodoxy sooner or later.

In chapter one, Secular Judaism, in the form of Camp Kinderwelt in New York, dies an agonizing death when the "next" generation of camp graduates has a reunion in Manhattan and most of them lament either their own and or their children's lack of Jewish involvement.
In chapter two, The great "conversion experiment" in Denver fails when the Orthodox rabbis feel compromised byt he low level of true observance by their graduates.
In chapters three and four, love of Israel is no longer enough for Jews in the diaspora as an identity factor.,

In the epilogue, Freedman presents his thesis clearly, "In the struggle for the soul of American Jewry, the Orthodox model has triumphed. To say this is not to say the Orthodox themselves have prevailed, or that only the Orthodox denomination will survive on these shores. But the portion of American Jewry that will flourish in the future...is the portion that has accepted the central premise that religion defines Jewish identity." This from a book which promises on its jacket, "...even as it chronicles an embittered and polarized community, it refuses to take sides to pass judgment."

Finding Each Other in Judaism

Finding Each Other in Judaism by Rabbi Harold Schulweis, URJ Press.

Reviewed by Rabbi Loevinger

Rabbi Schulweis is a very interesting thinker- a leading Conservative rabbi, a proponent of inter and intra-faith dialogue, a student of Reconstructionist theology, and now the author of a book on the Jewish life cycle published by the Reform movement press. Finding Each Other in Judaism is not a "how-to" book about the Jewish life cycle- rather, it is an exploration of the teachings contained in Jewish rituals and texts. It is a guide to meaning, not a guide to practice, per se.

Thus, each section (birth, bar/bat mitzvah, wedding, and so on), has within it a selection of contemporary and classic poetry pertaining to that particular life passage. Rabbi Schulweis is very, very concerned that we be able to say things we can believe- he does not want our life cycle passages to seem magical or have them depend on a theology that modern minds cannot accept. Some of his own poetry veers towards a very naturalistic theology (some would argue that he's a better theologian than poet), but much of both the poetry and prose sections would be appropriate to excerpt for inclusion in life rituals themselves.

If you want extensive information about the history of life cycle rituals or a very practical guide to putting one together, this might not be the book for you. (Though you will certainly know more about how these rituals are practiced after you've finished each chapter, check out the JewishGates website for life cycle basics.) If, however, you want to think deeply about how contemporary religious practice can create meaningful guideposts for life's inevitable milestones, Rabbi Schulweis will challenge you, inform you, and help you envision a wholistic, theologically consistent Judaism.