Jew vs. Jew

Rabbi Melanie Aron

January 5, 2001

Last Friday night we talked about some of the important Jewish events that had taken place over the past 25 years and identified major changes in American and World Jewry. As we were identifying the trends over this past quarter century, someone mentioned the increasingly vociferous debate and strained relations among Jews that seemed to them to particularly mark recent years. Think of the battle over "Who is a Jew" in Israel with its spillover to the United States, the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin by a religiously motivated Orthodox Jew, and the tensions in New York city between the Lubavitch community in Crown Heights and the Jewish mainstream establishment.

Samuel Freedman's book Jew v Jew supports the contention that relations among Jews have grown significantly more fractious over the past 25 years. A professor of journalism, who has written movingly about the black Church, Freedman examines six conflicts within the Jewish world that have taken place since the 1960's.

He begins by telling the story of Camp Kinderwelt, a labor Zionist summer camp that was eventually replaced by Orthodox bungalows. The secular Yiddish-speaking Israel-oriented communities that provided the children for Camp Kindervelt disappeared by the mid 1960's, assimilating into the English speaking, Synagogue oriented suburbs, and the only Yiddish speaking community remaining was Ultra-Orthodox.

Freedman looks at the Denver Beit Din, an experiment in trans-denominational cooperation, in which Orthodox, Conservative and Reform rabbis worked together to create common standards for conversion. From 1977-1983 candidates for conversion to Judaism took classes together, taught by a combination of rabbis from various denominations and then were taken to the mikvah under the auspices of the local Orthodox rabbinate. This experiment, kept secret from the national Orthodox organizations, fell apart when the two participating Orthodox rabbis withdrew. They felt compromised by the difference in standards concerning kashrut, Shabbat, and other elements in the agreed upon list of Ten Commitments, and also overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of conversion students. This idea of creating mutually accepted standards for conversion has since been revived many times. As a rabbi in Brooklyn, I was once flown out to Cleveland to participate in some very preliminary meetings concerning a national beit din, a national rabbinic court, which never came to be. (I think I was invited because of some work I had done with Orthodox groups to help enable women to receive gettin, religious divorces. However my Brooklyn experience, which was not one of trans-denominational cooperation, did not make me the ideal participant in this endeavor.) The Denver model was also used as a model at the time of the Ne'eman Commission in Israel, Netanyahu's unsuccessful attempt to bring peace to the warring factions of religious Judaism in Israel.

Freedman highlights the library minyan in Los Angeles, an informal group of long standing that meets at a large and established Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles. The introduction of the Imahot, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah, into the worship service, one Saturday morning in 1987 threatened to disrupt the balance that existed in that community between the more Orthodox leaning and more liberal elements of the group. Though the minyan was egalitarian in practice, with women leading the service and coming up to the Torah, changing the established language of the tefillah, a well known prayer which dates back about 2,000 years, was profoundly disturbing to many of the worshippers. The library minyan survived, but not without the loss of significant members on both sides.

Reviewing the events that lead up to a bomb being placed in a Conservative synagogue in Jacksonville Florida where Shimon Peres was scheduled to speak, gives Freedman a chance to discuss the influence of the rifts in Israel politics on American Jewry. Harry Shapiro, a troubled Orthodox man who had attempted Aliyah to Israel several times, identified strongly with the settlers in Yamit, and became involved in various extremist and fringe groups, including the followers of the late Meir Kahane. He felt compelled to place the bomb in the synagogue, his brother belonged to, in order to oppose the Oslo accords in every way possible. Freedman contrasts his attitudes with those of the 1,300 Jews of Jacksonville who had given Shimon Peres a standing ovation, cheering at his words, "It is time for peace".

The Yale Five, the five Orthodox students at Yale University who sued in order to be exempt from the regulation requiring that all first year students live in the dormitories, argued that their religious observance would be compromised by coed bathrooms and sex education lectures. Their case highlights changes that have taken place over the past 20 years, both in the relations of the Ivy League schools to Jews and Judaism and also in the attitudes of Orthodox Jews towards the rest of the world. Freedman notes the irony of a Jewish college president and Jewish dean, with a student body that was 25% Jewish and a kosher eating facility, being told that Yale was not accommodating its Jewish students. He also notes that a generation earlier Orthodox students expected to make compromises in order to make it in the greater world, rather than rejecting all contact with other value systems.

Finally, the very nasty zoning battle in Beachwood Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, is retold both from the perspective of a long time resident and active member of the Fairmount Temple and from the viewpoint of a modern Orthodox Jewish son of Holocaust survivors. The first attempt to build a Temple in suburban Beachwood, back in the 40's was initially rejected by a totally non-Jewish zoning board. But when white supremacists handed out anti-Jewish literature, the mood of the city shifted and Fairmount Temple was allowed to build. In this recent case, the planning commission, town council and voting population were all over 80% Jewish, but the differences among Jews were enough to create a bitter schism. The attempt to build a landscaped campus of two synagogues, two ritual baths, and a girl's day school was seen as an invasion by the Lubavitch and Haredi communities. Jewish neighbors felt that their way of life would be threatened and their town made foreign if the project was allowed to go forward. This was not a case of more assimilated Jews being embarrassed in front of the non-Jewish world by their less assimilated brethren, as had happened often in American Jewish history, but of the kind of fear of neighborhood tipping that had characterized urban communities in the 1950's and 60's.

Freedman sees these six fights as particular examples of the struggle of Yiddishkeit Judaism against religious Judaism. He argues that even the upsurge in Reform and Conservative congregations, still represents a loss for Jewish ethnic identity, as even these more liberal forms of Judaism see religion as being what defines Jewishness. He notes that for all of the outcry about assimilation, Jewish religious practice has remained constant, even rising slightly among Jews over the past 50 years, while measures of Jewish ethnicity, friendships with fellow Jews, attachment to Israel, membership in Jewish clubs, and commitment to social justice, have plummeted.

I don't think all of the battles Freedman describes can be traced back to the decline of Jewish secularism. Federation may try and remind us that we are one people, but our life experiences and outlooks can be vastly different. Perhaps even more than a century ago, attitudes towards modernity, western values and science differ greatly between different elements of the Jewish community.

In this week's Torah portion, when Joseph sends his brother back to Canaan with wagons of gifts and grain, and with the mission of bringing Jacob and his entire family down to Egypt, he sends them off with the following words- al tirgozu baderech- don't become quarrelsome on the way. These words seem strange under the circumstances. Things have just gone well for the brothers -- what do they have to fight about? The commentators find many explanations, but one relates to our topic at hand. Maaseh le-avot, siman lebanim, what happens to the ancestors is a sign for their descendents. The derech, the way, is the entire journey of Jewish history. However much we differ with one another, we should not get berogez, so angry that we become totally alienated from one another. Especially in smaller communities, further from the centers of Jewish life, our need for our fellow Jews, can outweigh the differences among us.