Yom Kippur Morning Sermon 5784

 YK Sermon 5784 -- Jewish Future -- YK Morning

Four years ago I began one of my Yom Kippur sermons with a thought experiment. Imagine that a visionary philanthropist offered our kehilah an endowment of 20 million dollars on condition that we no longer charge membership dues. An endowment of that size with a conservative investment portfolio would produce more than enough income to keep our shul going without ever touching the principle. Unless, of course, so many people found out that there was a shul in Montgomery Village that didn’t charge dues and in fact was forbidden by the terms of an endowment gift to charge them. If our no dues policy resulted in a massive membership growth, we might have to hire more staff and expand the building to accommodate our greater numbers. We might find that the income from our endowment no longer covered our expenses. Would we simply continue to accept everyone who signs up as a member? Or would we try to define some non-monetary requirements for membership?

For the typical American synagogue, membership is defined financially. You fill out an application, you pay your dues -- or if you can’t afford full dues you make some kind of arrangement and pay a lesser amount -- and that’s pretty much it. If a congregation could no longer define membership by virtue of paying dues, what would be the criterion?

A few months ago Rabbi Danny Schiff, a friend from rabbinical school who is now the Federation Scholar for the Pittsburgh Jewish Federation, published a book called Judaism For A Digital Age. We were fortunate to arrange for him to speak over Zoom to my class on Contemporary Jewish Controversies this past spring. One of the questions Rabbi Schiff explores is why both Reform and Conservative Judaism are facing a crisis of numbers. To give you an example of what that crisis  looks like, the 2019 Washington Jewish Population survey revealed that between 2003 and 2017 the Jewish population of Greater Washington grew by 37% but the absolute number of synagogue members shrank slightly from 26,500 households to 25,600 households; and that 58% of Jewish children received no formal Jewish education of any sort at any point.

For several decades following the end of the Second World War, the suburban synagogue was in the Hebrew school and Bar/Bat Mitzvah business. Jews were moving  to the suburbs, which were ethnically and religiously mixed, from their urban, predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. The Jews in this exodus were mostly American born children of immigrants. When growing up they might have spoken English with their parents but they probably spoke Yiddish or Yinglish with their grandparents. The neighborhoods where they lived were overwhelmingly Jewish. The newly-suburban Jews might not have been religiously observant but they were steeped in Jewish culture.

Now they found themselves living in neighborhoods which might be ten or twenty percent Jewish rather than eighty or ninety. Their children were going to public schools with mostly non-Jewish classmates and very often the grandparents stayed behind in the “old neighborhood.” New synagogues were created at a dizzying pace and were sometimes unkindly labeled “Bar Mitzvah factories.” The typical membership trajectory saw a family join when their oldest child started Hebrew school and give up their membership shortly after the youngest kid’s Bar Mitzvah or maybe Confirmation in tenth grade. The fact that a significant percentage, perhaps even a majority, of families were only members for a few years didn’t threaten the stability of the model because there were always more families in the pipeline to replace them. Jewish parents would always want to make sure their kids had Bar or Bat Mitzvahs, the only way to do that was to join a shul and send your kids to Hebrew school, so people would join, pay the assigned dues, and send their kids to Hebrew school for the specified number of years. Postwar America placed a lot of importance on religion, and for American Jews, part of fitting in with their neighbors was to create and support synagogues, which were often located on the main thoroughfares of the new suburban neighborhoods as a sign of full Jewish belonging.

But this model started to crumble in the 1990s or so. More families had one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent, and even families with two Jewish parents didn’t always consider Jewish education a priority or feel the need to provide their children with Bar and Bat Mitzvah ceremonies. And if the family did decide that a Bar or Bat Mitzvah was important, there were other ways of doing it; independent Hebrew schools, tutors, free-lance clergy who operate on a fee-for-service model. 

What have we done wrong that got us in this situation? 

Rabbi Schiff says that Reform and Conservative Judaism continue to do an excellent job at what they were invented to do. They are both answers to the challenge of modernity -- how do we participate in a democratic, pluralistic society and still maintain our Jewish identity? The problem, says Rabbi Schiff, is that Reform and Conservative Judaism are excellent answers to questions that no one is asking anymore. When a US president whose daughter converted to Orthodox Judaism is followed by a president whose three children all married Jews; when the Vice President and her Jewish husband attended Rosh Hashanah services at the largest Conservative shul in the District of Columbia and have a mezuzah on their official residence’s front door; when the Jewish White House Chief of Staff resigns and is replaced by another Jewish White House Chief of Staff who is also part owner of a Jewish, albeit not kosher, deli named “Call Your Mother”; the question of how exactly we maintain our Jewishness while participating in general society is not exactly high on anyone’s list anymore. 

A few days before Rosh Hashanah I asked members of our community to answer the question “what is the purpose of Kehilat Shalom”? I set up a Google Form so that it could be done anonymously because I wanted people to feel that they could answer the question honestly without fear of offending me or being judged by me. Sixteen people answered the question; it’s impossible to know to what extent this is a representative sample but for a community of our size it is a pretty good rate of return. 

The answers to the question were quite varied. A number of them mentioned that Kehilat Shalom is or should be primarily a place of prayer. One congregant wrote that the purpose of Kehilat Shalom is to focus on providing spiritual experiences in the company of other congregants and that  all other activities are secondary. “Without the spiritual, Kehilat Shalom is a social club, and the rituals are pointless and might as well be scrapped.” But other congregants wrote that they are not particularly religious, but they view Kehilat Shalom as a source of friendship, of comfort, of connecting to their people, providing intellectual stimulation and doing good deeds. A couple of congregants wrote about the importance of religious school education and Bar and Bat Mitzvah ceremonies, which does not fit our current demographic situation at all. Some of the writers spoke about their attachment to our current building, and that no other synagogue sanctuary had ever given them the feeling that they get in this room. Others said their connection is to the community and not to the building, and that given financial realities we should consider some real changes.

COVID-19 simply accelerated changes and questions in American Judaism and American religious institutions generallly which were already on the horizon. There are more and more single person households, and the advent of online services and the convenience of praying at home in your sweats has served to further attenuate the nature of community. 

Rabbi Danny Schiff says: “People are asking themselves, ‘If I can do everything I want to do with life without having to compromise with somebody else, then why would I?’ Is that in line with classical Jewish thinking? If not, then is it something we should now take on as being a positive or take a stand against?  I’m not asking these questions with a particular agenda. I’m simply pointing out that this is a dramatic shift in the way that people live. Judaism needs to think that through and to have a thoughtful response.”

In my introduction to the Unetaneh Tokef prayer on Rosh Hashanah, I quoted Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s observation that when we repent we acknowledge that we have done wrong and are not perfect; when we pray we reach out and acknowledge that we cannot fix what we have done wrong without external help; and when we give charity we give up a part of what we believe belongs to us. All involve a diminution of the ego and a sense of belonging to something bigger and beyond oneself. 

Because American synagogues have generally not asked for anything from their members other than money, synagogue membership has been for many a business transaction. While it is true that we use the term “member”, so does Costco. I am a “member” of Costco which asks nothing of me other than payment of my $60 annual dues. But if Keleigh and I ever reach the point where we shop at Costco so infrequently that it no longer seems worth the $60, we will not have any moral qualms or lose any sleep over our decision not to renew our membership. In being a member of Costco, I do not get a feeling of being part of something bigger than myself, something which transcends boundaries of place and time or connects me with my people’s past and future. I just get an opportunity to purchase multi-packs of organic salsa or 96-packs of K-Cups. 

There are new questions which postmodernity poses: in an era of artificial intelligence, what does it mean to be really human? Rabbi Schiff writes: “over the course of three decades, our technology, culture, society, financial system, media, marriages, families, sexuality, privacy standards, and even our mental functioning have changed. . . . The way we live, the way we work, the way we interact, the way we communicate, the way we think, and the way we curate and perceive our reality have all been refashioned. . . . This digital age is thoroughly discontinuous with what preceded it.”

The questions we are asking may be different in some ways than before, but in other ways they are not so different. What continues is the human quest for meaning and for ways to be less lonely. Our tradition has a lot to say about these questions. Synagogues in the next decades may look different in some ways than what has come before, but Rabbi Schiff says, and I agree with him, that they will still be the key institutions of Jewish life and Jewish community.

Synagogue membership is not a “fee for service” proposition where you are purchasing certain services. It is a brit kodesh, a holy covenant. It is a two-way commitment and a two-way responsibility. 

The Days of Awe are all about teshuvah, which while we translate it as “repentance” is really closer to “return.” There are certain values which we know we ought to live by. We know that we need community, that we need each other. We know that our society can be better, that taking care of our neighbor is more important than saving a couple of bucks, that caring about others and being cared about are basic human needs. Yom Kippur comes to remind us, to call us back to a better way of life. May we have the courage to live our lives in community and with concern for each other.