Wertheimer’s point is that poor Orthodox Jews are going to be increasingly reliant on outside philanthropy, which in turn may be increasingly scarce. But Miller proposes an alternative:

In 2008, 2.7 million Americans called themselves religiously Jewish, down from 3.1 million in 1990. Wouldn’t the central challenge of American Jewry be to encourage the broadest range of people (including the intermarried, like me) to identify as Jewish and to raise Jewish kids? Costly barriers to entry need to be taken away, or, at least, reimagined. “We have this very bizarre pay-to-play philosophy,” says Jay Sanderson, president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. Christian churches, Sanderson points out, begin with an invitation to prayer; they ask for money later. “The Jewish community’s first instinct is ‘give us money,’ instead of ‘come in.’”

Those black-clad Chabad volunteers who have no doubt approached you—first asking, always, “Are you Jewish?” (since Jews don’t proselytize outside the faith)—and then invited you to come to Shabbat dinner at the local house, without asking you for money? According to Miller, they represent the future of Jewish growth, if there is a future of Jewish growth.

The Cost of Being Jewish [Newsweek]
The High Cost of Jewish Living [Commentary]
Related: Teachable Moment

Indeed, even (or especially) Arab businessmen are getting curious, Singer said: “Whenever I go to the Gulf, it’s all they want to talk about, they’re so intrigued by the Israeli model. But everything about the economic strategy of these Gulf countries is about spending money.” American Jews, too, are starting to catch on. “For the longest time, American Jews would not invest in Israeli start-ups. They would give to UJA and they’d give to all these philanthropic organizations, but they kept a firewall up between their business activities and their philanthropic activities. I think for the last three to five years you are, for the first time, really seeing American Jewish investors investing in Israel.”

The Origins of Israel’s Tech Miracle [Atlantic]

New Israeli Data Pointing Toward An Erosion of The Middle Class [Forward]

“You make accommodations for the economy,” said Fox, who added that several of her friends have dropped their synagogue memberships in the past year for financial reasons. “I think they’re being more strict but trying to be accommodating at the same time.”

It’s a double bind: many synagogue-goers—both the weekly and the annual variety—can’t afford the traditionally expensive tickets to services this year, while synagogues, which depend on the contributions of their members, are struggling to accommodate them.

In New York City, Rabbi Judith Hauptman, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary who leads a free service geared toward young adults every year, said she’s never gotten so many reservations so fast—but also that contributions from the donors who fund her service are lower than usual this year.

“The economic downturn is of course the kind of factor that’s going to increase turnout” because people seek solace in religion and community, Hauptman said. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to pay for it. “I think that the number of people looking for either inexpensive or free services this year is going to shoot way up.”

In Miami, Rabbi Hector Epelbaum of Temple Beth David, a Conservative shul, said he expects that the major fundraising that usually takes place around the High Holidays will be low this year—which is a problem because the synagogue is also offering more than the usual number of reduced rates and day school scholarships. “I feel that this year is going to be more difficult than the last one,” he said. According to the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, synagogues generally strive to cover between 60 and 70 percent of their costs with dues, but wind up with only 45 or 50 percent covered that way—an annual shortfall typically covered by donations. But with both dues and donations down, some synagogues are cutting programs, laying off staff, or asking rabbis to take paycuts.

Though many synagogues routinely offer free or reduced-rate High Holiday tickets to members in need, just as they offer negotiable membership fees, those provisions are often only accessible to people who ask for them. “I’ve had a lot of people who’ve had to come to me for the first time, and there’s a lot of pain in doing that,” said Rabbi Anthony Fratello, who leads Temple Shaarei Shalom, a Reform temple in Boynton Beach, Florida. “They feel terrible about it.”

But Alan Sherman, executive vice president of the Palm Beach County Board of Rabbis, says the perceived stigma of asking for help may be lifting this year. For the past 30 years Sherman has placed newspaper announcements before the High Holidays offering to match Jews in the community with free or discounted services. “This year things have been totally upside down due to the recession, people’s job losses, and the fact that people—and this is a good thing—aren’t embarrassed or ashamed to ask for help,” Sherman said. “I’ve been inundated with a lot of requests.”

For Sherman, this suggests that the traditional High Holiday ticket model isn’t working.

“Maybe we have to reexamine the issue of charging money for this,” he said. But Fratello read the situation differently: as an argument for the utility of the synagogue membership system. “Part of the reason synagogue membership is so important is that in hard times, there’s somebody you can turn to. There’s so many havurot,” he said, referring to Jewish fellowships that meet routinely for prayer, “that have sprung up and people say, ‘The synagogues aren’t necessary.’ That’s all well and good, until somebody needs something. If you don’t support the synagogue or the congregation when things are good, they’re not going to be able to support you when things are bad.”

The High Holidays—and these High Holidays in particular—have been pushing me to think more about cyclicality. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we dust off the melodies, prayers, and tropes used only at this time of year. Simchat Torah represents the end of a cycle of Torah reading, and the beginning of a new one. Growing up in a large college town in the Midwest, it struck me that the High Holidays coincided with other vital cycles: the return of students to the college campus a few blocks away after a quiet summer, the turning of the leaves and onset of crispness in the air, displacing humidity. As an adult, the holidays inspire another type of cyclical activity—an annual visit to Sable’s, the hole-in-the-wall smoked fish mecca on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

At work (I’m the business columnist at Newsweek and Slate), the fall—and again, this fall in particular—is always a period for reflecting on cycles. September and October are the periods when those in the financial world remind themselves that bad things can happen in the markets—because bad things did happen in the falls of 1929, 1987, and 2008. This year, the High Holidays nearly coincide with the one-year anniversary of the market meltdowns and ensuing bailouts. The High Holidays are the Yomim Nora’im—Days of Awe. But in Hebrew, nora means both awesome and terrible. And last fall, as Lehman Brothers failed, as the world’s financial markets seized up, as governments scrambled to stop a total meltdown, they were truly terrible days for the global economy.

The downturns in markets are cycles we’d just as soon forget. And yet, I can’t help thinking this year that we’ve been too forgetful of cyclicality—in our personal and professional lives. Had our leaders—and we as individual investors and consumers—been more mindful of the power of cycles, we might have avoided some portion of our current woes.

Until recently, an appreciation of cyclicality was deeply embedded in the way we thought about how the global economy worked—periods of growth followed by occasional contractions, which set the stage for more growth. But in the past two decades, the thinking changed. Technology, globalization, interconnectedness, improved management, and understanding borne of experience and the study of history gave us the impression that we could escape the tyranny of economic cycles. Alan Greenspan, elevated to chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987, came to believe—and convinced us—that the business cycle could be tamed. And to a large degree, he was right. Recessions, which had plagued the economy every three or four years, became rare. Between March 1991 and December 2007, the economy contracted for a single eight-month period, in 2001. And even that recession was brief and shallow by historical standards.

A certain arrogance sets in among those who believe they live outside history. But that’s precisely what the financial world came to believe. As prosperity rose and spread, the prospect of a recession, of a cyclical downturn in the economy, or in markets like housing and stocks, was increasingly dismissed as an impossibility. Housing prices would always rise. Loans would always be paid back. The unemployment rate would always remain low. And with every passing day, more money was wagered on this belief that the business cycle was a thing of the past. When you believe prices move in only one direction, it makes sense to borrow (and lend) as much money as you can. The intensity of this belief made the reckoning all the more difficult when it inevitably came last year. The recession—the sudden reassertion of the economic cycle that began in December 2007 and probably ended this summer—was so devastating to the fortunes of so many individuals and institutions because their financial models didn’t account for the possibility of a downturn. It’s as if they had built houses astride an active fault that would shatter at the merest tremor. And so we should approach this High Holiday season with a deeper appreciation of the importance of cyclicality in worldly affairs.

Finally, for me, at least, the High Holidays—and Yom Kippur in particular—represent an antidote to another type of cycle: the news cycle. Journalists have always been captive to the relentless rhythms of world affairs. But in the past several years, it’s gotten much worse. Time was, a reporter could unplug in the evening, or for the weekend, without missing a beat. Now? Not so much. It’s irresponsible to turn off the BlackBerry and avoid email. Editors kick copy back in the evening, and sources in Asia may only be available at five in the morning Eastern time. Amidst the raging storm of Twitter, magazine deadlines, the mandates of filing for the internet, phoning in to radio shows, and rushing to television studios, there are only a few places you can seek respite from the datasmog: airplanes and synagogue. Yom Kippur is probably the one day of the year I don’t check my email or consume any media—regardless of which company might be failing or which television network is calling. It’s a time for reflection and humility. For at least 24 hours, the economic and news cycles can spin without my presence.

Daniel Gross writes about business for Newsweek and Slate.

According to Steven Bayme at the American Jewish Committee, U.S. Jewish organizations have lost 25 percent of their wealth since the market went south (though Bernie Madoff’s graft surely helped fritter away institutional funds and private wealth that would have gone toward donations, too). As a result, writes Rachel Zoll at the AP, many synagogues are doing what they can to offer free admission to Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana services, including putting off repairs, cutting jobs, and canceling programs.

Dilemma for High Holidays [Chicago Sun-Times]
Synagogues Under Stress as High Holy Days Approach [AP]

I had, typically, a strong proclivity toward both the observational thrills of reporting and the introspective opportunities afforded in covering the Jewish world, as well as obsessions with religion and cheesy pop culture (with which the Jewish world abounds), not to mention writing. I had until that point been relishing the looming opportunity to muck around in even more puddles of Jewish culture, with Tablet still in its pre-nascent stages. But all the news about the economy tanking and the impending death of Journalism had put a pressure on me I had yet to experience in my adult life—now, I was supposed to feel lucky just to have a job. Talk about a kein ayin hora. Suddenly, it seemed that my work was tightening around me, posing a threat to a large part of my identity: the unique role I played as a rebel and incorrigible seeker of exotic experiences as the child of an eighth-generation rabbi father and Jewish communal worker mother.

I decided to look for a therapist, guided by little more than my insurance company’s website and the vague idea that I wanted to see someone Jewish and female. I still can’t quite say whether this preference stemmed from a desire for someone who would mirror myself and provide comfort in a similar manner to my mother, some vestigial “insider” impulse, or was simply the least restrictive qualification I could apply, given the demographics of the New York City therapeutic community. As it turned out, my tenure as the patient of a woman I’ll call Sharon Stein helped enormously, but not for the reasons I, or anyone else, could have predicted.

****

Sharon is in her mid-60s and exudes the graceful toughness that I associate with a certain kind of Jewish woman. Her large features and skeptically-set mouth reminded me of an Ashkenazic version of my beloved late grandmother. As soon as I met her, I felt a familiar, if constricting, kinship. I immediately began to question my decision. Did I really need another mother, or aunt? Would she be able to understand my complicated relationship to my Jewishness?

But I found that what felt “Jewish” about her, at least initially, also felt good. Her specific brand of dark humor and matter-of-fact assessments seemed neutral and comforting, and I liked that she acknowledged ideas that had become taboo among women my age: that romantic longing sometimes drives us, that we want babies, and that we get irrationally angry when we feel like other people have what we, too, are due. Her folksy way of commiserating with my endless frustrations—“most people are schmucks,” “you’ve gotta have the chutzpah to decide who the people you want in your life are,” “there’s no point trying to relate to people who haven’t suffered”—just about balanced some of her more cringe-inducing self-help platitudes. She didn’t judge me for my obsession with omens, or my superstitious attachment to certain jewelry, but did take strong issue with my laziness and self-pity. I settled into a pattern of talking around the subject of my work. I slowly began to trust her, and to appreciate the symmetry in talking to someone who relied on Jewishness as a code, and obviously shared some of my familial neuroses, but seemed somehow immune to their crippling effects. A functional nut! Maybe I could be one too.

One day at work, though, four or five sessions into my time with Sharon, my issues with Jewish organizational life reached a fever pitch. I had a pathological desire to turn and run from the Jewish world, from the realm of neurotic writers, and from New York City, into the Wild West of the mind: California, working with kids, driving through mountains, freedom from Yiddish puns, arguments about Israel—even bagels had become sinister. Even in the heat of this anxiety, I knew I was conflating my job and my family and my personality and my fate, and perceiving an inappropriately grandiose narrative where there was just a quiet indie drama—but still, I was losing my grip.

Once in Sharon’s office, I took a deep breath and began describing my mounting desire to flee, heightened by the sense that, career-wise, I had gotten something I wanted but paid too dearly for it. I weepingly confessed that I was finding the focus on my people—our people—too parochial, and that I sometimes looked down on family members who had narrowed their professional worlds in this way. Without thinking, I offered frantic caveats—that many of my best friends were Jewish, that I love the holidays, that all else being equal, I would prefer to marry a Jew—none of which changed the fact that, at the moment, I would have given anything to be able to turn my back on the whole thing.

As I talked, Sharon’s face, peering out from that day’s scarf-brooch combo, went from expressing patient curiosity to amused condescension. When I paused for air, she jumped in. She explained that she too had struggled with her Judaism when she was younger, had dabbled in Buddhism and eventually came back to all the “wonderful” things about our faith. I sputtered that it wasn’t an issue of my personal Judaism, but of my work and my role in my family and my feeling that I was a fraud among the East Coast Jewish intelligentsia. She countered by telling me about how she had once attended a lecture about Judaism and the law and how it had gotten her more interested in the religion—maybe I should try something like that? Maybe I could write about klezmer music’s effect on other musical forms? Had I considered the idea of taking pride in being Jewish because “so many of us are so bright”?

At this point, I gave up trying to respond, but the coup de grace was still to come. Unbidden, Sharon launched into a story about how she had reluctantly joined a Torah study group at her Reform synagogue. At first, she explained, she was concerned that it wouldn’t be intellectual enough, but—through pluck and determination—she was able to bring her own perspective to the group, which then took everyone in an unexpected and “fascinating” direction. As she reached the triumphant climax of this tale of personal discovery, I glanced at the clock and realized we—she—had gone almost 10 minutes over our allotted time. I gathered my things, stood up and thanked her. Same time next week?

A few days later, I called Sharon’s receptionist and cancelled my next appointment. I never went back.

Over the next few months, I parsed the experience on my own. I had gone to Sharon looking for, at best, a way into understanding and, at least, an escape. Instead, what I got was a brochure. Just like my mother, just like my aunts—like me, even, in some ways—Sharon was incapable of impartiality when it came to the question of a young Jew questioning her place in the tribe. Instead, as I was drowning under the pressure to put a lens of pride on all things Jewish, she presented me with a surreal example of precisely what was making me feel suffocated in the first place.

But, like my grandmother used to say, God writes with a crooked hand. Sharon’s performance turned out to be a comically apt manifestation of the elusive thing I had been bothered by—the “pride blinders” that otherwise thoughtful people develop when conversations turn to Jewishness. And in hindsight, she provided me with a ripe Jewish story of my own—tricking me, in a way, back into engagement with this topic that had become so fraught. As my generalized anxiety waned, I woke up to my natural state of curiosity. Just as Judd Apatow could probably make a hilarious movie exploring the lives of professional golfers, and J.D. Salinger could likely write an intriguing novel from the perspective of a poor octogenarian (well, maybe he has), even the less talented among us have any number of paths we can go, but often function best within a certain realm. Maybe Jewishness won’t be mine forever, but Sharon helped me remember where my interest in the topic lay: myself.

Bill Kristol, on his Weekly Standard blog, chose to see the results as more evidence that American Jewry is “foolishly” maintaining “allegiance to a party that includes lots of people who don’t like them much (and who certainly don’t like Israel much).” But, Bill, doesn’t that argument, if it’s true, work against the whole country?

State of the Nation [Boston Review]
Democrats, Republicans and Jews [Weekly Standard]

If they can do it, why can’t I? Sure, they’ve spent years in rabbinical school studying the Torah, but I’ve spent hours, maybe even days, watching TV, playing video games, and reading blogs. When it comes to popular culture, I think it’s safe to assume that God, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, is on my side.

Welcome to “Blessed Week Ever,” a weekly drash written by one of the least likely Torah commentators you’ll ever meet.

This Shabbat, as synagogue-going Jews open the ark, I will turn on my Mac and play a new game called Spore. Created by Will Wright, the gaming guru who designed the Sims”the popular series of games that allow players to create and control small universes of virtual people”the game’s objective speaks to the central issue at the heart of this week’s parasha: the question of creation. In Spore, the player creates his own microcosmic organism, and then manipulates and tweaks it throughout a complex evolutionary process. Seeing one’s little virtual darlings grow from pixilated specks to spacefaring aliens, Spore‘s players get the satisfaction previously reserved only for He who, in the beginning, created the heavens and the earth.

But while the game allows us the heady pleasure of playing God, it’s also more than enough to demonstrate just how far we really are from Our Father Which Art in Heaven. For God, creation is no biggie: some dust off the ground, the breath of life, and voila”Man. For Man, however, creation is slightly more difficult. Indeed, all subsequent human history, arguably, has been little but an attempt to replicate that most splendid of God’s miracles: making something out of nothing.

Consider the past few weeks alone, a time in which markets all over the world, like cows on a slaughterhouse conveyor belt, have been gawking at their own approaching doom with quiet desperation. The reasons for the meltdown, naturally, are many and complex; but at its heart there seems to be one common cause: Things fell apart because we’ve become increasingly apt at creation.

We created an economic infrastructure that encouraged people to borrow fortunes they couldn’t possibly pay back in order to acquire real estate they couldn’t possibly afford. And we created an emotional environment in which debt-based living was gently encouraged. We have created, in short, an alternative reality, one in which coarse and mundane things like balance sheets and bottom lines, things that told us that we could not be who we truly wanted to be but only who our bank accounts enabled us to be, were simply not welcome.

Judging by the sullen faces and somber tones of the men and women discussing the financial crisis on television, we’ve learned our lesson well. But that, alas, is highly unlikely: after all, the current collapse was born of the same mindset that spawned the Dot-com crash of the early 1990s, the war in Iraq, and most presidential campaigns since at least 1988, a mindset that too often conflates perception with reality, and that joyfully confuses our meaning with our means.

Here, for example, is what an unnamed senior aide to President George W. Bush told journalist Ron Suskind in 2004: reporters, the source said, as well as other critics of the administration, are “in what we call the reality-based community,” a community occupied by saps who believe “that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” That, the aide continued, is “not the way the world really works anymore.”

Such ontological juggling, of course, would have been unthinkable even a century ago, when the markets still greatly depended on our ability to produce actual goods, and life, for the most part, was largely observed firsthand rather than through the prism of all sorts of media. But now that so many of us make our livings off of ideas”inventing new kinds of subprime mortgages, say, or plotting political campaigns based more on imagery than on issues”we can transcend the inclement world we inherited and somehow force our way back into the Garden of Eden.

There is no use, then, in beating our chests and promising, in op-eds or on CNBC, that we will never again get ourselves into needless wars or financial freefalls. We will. It’s our nature; we haven’t changed much since the first man and the first woman bit into the apple and willingly exchanged bliss for wisdom and happiness for self-awareness. Mindless happiness was never enough for us; what we wanted was to know as much as the Man Upstairs.

And so, it seems, we’ve internalized the immortal words of Dusty Springfield: nothing is forever. Instead, all we want is a brief respite, a few years here or there during which we can actually believe that a small Internet startup delivering gourmet pet food might make us rich overnight, or that a lush estate with a private creek might be ours to own, or that a failed politician with a feeble mind might lead us to glory. Even though we know we’re headed for a fall, we don’t care all that much: we make the same mistakes again and again, knowingly and gleefully, because, like God, we, too, want to create our own universe, even if we realize that our creations are deeply and truly flawed.