My name is Gella and I am a 25-year-old 3rd generation Conservative Jew. I grew up in the Kane Street Synagogue community, attended East Midwood Jewish Center Talmud Torah and later Prozdor at JTS, have been a member of USY, and a Ramah camper. I will, starting in July, be attending The Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem for a full year, after which I sincerely hope I will be accepted to attend rabbinical school at JTS. I am the quintessential product of The Conservative Movement. And I have something to say.
I remember vividly the voice of my Hebrew school principal ringing through my kitah Hay classroom as he preemptively admonished us for destroying American Jewry. “You children,” he screamed at us, in his thick Israeli accent, “you have no Jewish identity! You do not go to shul on Shabbat! You do not keep kosher! You do not care about Israel!” Ten years old and we were already the downfall of our nation. Impressive. Sitting in that classroom, listening to him chew us out for our apathy I seethed silently. I did keep kosher. I did attend synagogue every Shabbat. In fact, I attended a different synagogue because the one to which this Hebrew school was attached did not conform well enough to the progressive standards of the Conservative movement for my family’s taste, in that they did not allow full participation of women.
It is now 15 years later, and I still hear echoes of that principal’s tirade every day: rants and railings against my generation’s apathy and non-connectedness. Plans of action that must be drawn up to pull my cohort back into the fold, to engage our notoriously short attention span long enough to grab our interest and bring us back for more, to make Judaism palatable. As a non-Orthodox single between the ages of 18 and 29, I am included within what is nearly universally regarded as the most critical demographic of American Jewry today. What we do with these decisive years in our lives will make or break the future of our people. I am an anomaly within this group. I am the non-Orthodox, interested and practicing, engaged and committed, childless single young Jew. I am a stunning and shining example of everything gone mysteriously right, it would seem, against all odds. I am a curiosity.
One of the chief complaints I hear repeatedly about the Conservative Movement is the theoretical and practical disconnect between the laity and the professional body. We are an old joke: an Orthodox rabbi with a Reform congregation. Our congregants don’t think about the philosophical or theological messages of the Movement, nor do they adhere to or practice that which our halachic authoritative body puts forth as the laws and standards of The Conservative Movement. Their decisions are not read or understood or even much cared about among the laity. It is essentially, the argument goes, rabbis writing rules for rabbis.
I have a theory about this phenomenon, which I now submit to you: Often when I would speak to friends of mine, at shul or at JTS about this issue, and have said to them “But look at me… I am the laity. I am a counter-example!” their response to me has been that “You, my friend, are overwhelmingly the minority.” In light of such dismissals, the message is clear. I do not conform to the model of the laity, and as such I must not belong to the laity. This is, I think, where a significant part of the problem lies. Nobody likes to be told that they don’t fit, that they don’t count. Treat the committed young Jews as an anomaly, and they will seek out an environment where they will not feel like an anomaly. Tell someone that they don’t match the laity, and they will leave the laity for the professional body. The only recourse for such people, it seems, is rabbinical school (or else post-denominationalism). And the gap widens.
As I said, people like me are a curiosity within the Movement. And yet it seems that no one is curious about us! The rants and tirades, the studies, the figures, the tables, they all talk right past me and others like me. The overwhelming majority of my cohort is dangerously disengaged from their Judaism and it is they who need the attention. It is they on whom we need to focus. As for me and my kind, the minority that already takes all of this very seriously, we don’t merit attention. We’re not a source of worry. We don’t need saving. We will be fine.
Well, frankly, I think that this is a piss-poor attitude and I am resolved to do something about it. And so I am proposing a project which I am tentatively calling Nogah Chadash. This is in very early conceptual stages and I haven’t talked to many people about it. I am not in a position right now to get anything off the ground, but this is an idea that has been knocking around my head for a few years now and I think that it is high time to share it.
The problem with the majority of initiatives to re-engage the unengaged is that they do not generally allow for a space for active and interested young Jews to be actively Jewish and still be a part of the laity, for us to study and explore our Judaism and our Jewish practice in absence of the remedial fingerpainting and pattycake programs that hold peoples hands through the basic stuff which many of us learned when we were five or six… and then to take the initiative ourselves to pass our knowledge on to our peers who might not have learned these things in their childhoods. What we need is a space where we can discuss things like why we do or don’t wear a kippah or tallit katan in public, what we would like to see done better or differently within our communities, to study different theological and philosophical approaches to Judaism within an open and egalitarian context, to learn and to teach each other how to lay tefillin, to learn and teach how to observe and to daven outside of the synagogue, maybe even to get regular daily minyanim established, something sorely lacking within our communities. What we need, basically, is a Conservative Chabad initiative, where we can combine the bottled energy of the frustrated portion of the younger generation that already knows enough to be ignored by the Movement at large, with the portion that is searching for a place to learn serious Jewish practice from and with people their own age to whom they can relate… the ones who often enough stumble through the doors of the Chabad houses. We need places where young people can go whenever they need to feel engaged, where they can learn unselfconsciously and do something with what they’ve learned.