And yet, the conservative chair never materialized—a fact that came as a disappointment, if not a surprise, to some. Although American Judaism’s largest religious denomination prides itself on being a big tent—part of HUC’s mission statement is to apply “the open and pluralistic spirit of the Reform movement to the study of the great issues of Jewish life and thought”—certain students and observers are sensing a troubling trend that directly contradicts this vision, particularly on the matter of Israel.

“While I loved my time there and deeply respected my professors, I found that HUC was not comfortable exploring or discussing anything politically that wasn’t left,” said Rabbi Samantha Kahn, who received her ordination from Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles in 2011 and is now the assistant rabbi at Congregation Emanu El in Houston, Texas. “I definitely struggled with it, and I was hurt by the lack of openness and the anger toward positions of center and right when it came to Israel and foreign affairs.”

To be sure, most observers point out that the political atmosphere at HUC does not comprehensively reflect the reality of the wider Reform movement. But the differences can sometimes be unusually stark. Kahn, who worked at the Hillel at the University of Miami before entering HUC, recently recalled the “strange transition” she experienced: “As a Hillel professional, it seemed that I was [politically] very left. All of a sudden, at HUC I wasn’t left anymore, but very right. The truth is, being in Houston, I feel more left again. I pay attention to the New Israel Fund and read Haaretz. But I’m also still involved with and appreciative of AIPAC and Hadassah and am glad to see them still thriving in Houston. At HUC, AIPAC and Hadassah were four-letter words. They were the devil.”

HUC—like all educational institutions—is a bubble of sorts, and it is often difficult to find genuine ideological pluralism inside any such closed environment, especially on a subject as complicated as Israel. Nevertheless, some have grown concerned about the ways the political culture of HUC could influence the future texture of Reform Judaism and the broader American Jewish community.

“You could probably do the same story at Yeshiva University and you might get the exact opposite political trend,” David Wolpe, the rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, said in an interview this week. “Having said that, the difference between right-wing support of Israel and left-wing support of Israel is that left-wing support much more easily morphs into indifference to and abandonment of Israel. That’s what the left wing has to guard against.”

***

Founded in 1875, Hebrew Union College has always been a proudly liberal institution. It has brought religious leaders through its ranks that have played integral roles in nearly every major social movement of the past century—from its social-action mandate in the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform to the March on Washington in 1963. Rabbi Jerome Davidson, a longtime pulpit rabbi from Great Neck, N.Y., who teaches a required course on social action at the seminary, seems to exemplify a certain model of rabbi-as-political-leader popular at the institution. “As far as I’m concerned, a rabbi should be able to get up on his pulpit and speak about why it’s necessary to have stronger gun-control laws or why the death penalty should be abolished or curtailed or strengthened or whatever she or he thinks Judaism teaches us,” Davidson said in an interview this week. And to his mind, the politics that should be transmitted from the pulpit are very specific.

Continue reading: Politics from the pulpit

It didn’t happen for me until adulthood. I became a bat mitzvah when I was 40, when my growing interest in Judaism made me decide to make up for lost time. I grew up in the Jewish waters of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, but I never felt I truly belonged until five years ago, when I joined Manhattan’s Central Synagogue. I began to attend services more regularly at the historic Reform congregation, founded in 1872, and became involved in its community-organizing efforts.

I never used to worry about that lifeless, amorphous concept of “continuity”; it seemed to me Jews were overly worried about other Jews’ Judaism. Then my own children came into the picture. I watched their peers drop out of Hebrew school as soon as they’d crossed the seventh-grade finish line. Even my own son, Ben, despite a bar mitzvah he described as “perfect,” is on the fence as to whether to continue his Jewish studies. Many of Central’s members, when asked about their chief concerns during a recent campaign run by lay leadership, said they’d lost the battle to keep their kids connected—especially in the years between bar mitzvah and wedding.

So, these questions were on my mind when Central’s cantor, Angela Warnick Buchdahl, told me that she and the senior rabbi, Peter J. Rubinstein, were looking for ways to deepen and underscore that moment on Saturday mornings when the b’nei mitzvah have finished their Torah readings. They decided, among other changes, to add a new song that might infuse more resonance and clarity. And they wanted an original composition.

I’m a journalist, not a songwriter. (I wrote my share of overwrought guitar ballads in high school, and I take pride in my spoof lyrics for friends’ birthday parties.) But cantor Buchdahl, whose voice soars through the sanctuary each week, knew I’d begun a double life as a lyricist. My first book, Stars of David, is currently being adapted for the off-Broadway stage, produced by Daryl Roth, who last June won a Tony for The Normal Heart, and by Aaron Harnick, who nudged me three years ago to start writing lyrics for the show (and happens to be Sheldon’s nephew). Harnick paired me with the gifted composer Tom Kitt, a fellow semi-observant Jew who, soon after we met, won a Tony and Pulitzer for Next to Normal.

Buchdahl encouraged me to submit a song, making it clear it might never get sung. I was nervous about attempting any kind of text for the congregation I’ve come to cherish. But I’ve always admired Central’s mission to keep ritual as fluid as it is inviolable. And when I sat down to write, it became a personal opportunity to find the words I wished to tell my children on their b’nei mitzvah: Pause here, I’d wanted to say. Consider what this moment means. You’re joining a line of descendants who have survived against all reason. You are chanting from a book that Jews have kept vital for centuries. Investigate this tradition before you decide it doesn’t fit into your schedule anymore.

Most kids are obviously nervous on the bimah, anxious to just get through their Torah portion, focused on the party. Families get caught up in making sure they’ve ordered the personalized yarmulkes or haven’t left out an uncle from the guest list; they haven’t prefaced “the big day” with a sit-down talk about why they wanted their child to do this in the first place, what it means not just to become a man or woman, but to join a people.

I called the song “Taking Your Place” and tried to keep the lyrics simple, hoping to stave off pretension or schmaltz. Per cantor Buchdahl’s suggestion, I added a line of Hebrew from the Misheberach prayer that’s recited Saturday mornings (not the same as the prayer for healing). Late this past summer, I sent them off to Kitt, who wrote a beautiful melody.

Last week, cantor Buchdahl told me that she would be singing “Taking Your Place” in front of thousands on Yom Kippur morning, because the lyrics dovetailed with Rabbi Rubinstein’s sermon. And she would sing the song at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, no less, because that’s where Central synagogue’s services were held this year.

The fact that I was fasting only compounded the queasiness as I entered Lincoln Center last Saturday. But then as I listened to Rubinstein speak, his words focused me. He asked us to think about how we explain to our children not just why they should care about being (and remaining) Jewish, but why we care. He talked about the fragility of endurance: that the generation before us, who chose to pass on the Torah to their children, could not have been sure it would make it any further.

When he finished, the cantor approached the pulpit as Kitt’s chords began softly. Her voice poured over the packed rows, my daughter squeezed my hand, and my son, who chose to sit up high in the third tier, gave me a visible thumbs-up. After the last note, the rabbi descended the stage to embrace me in the aisle. I hugged him back awkwardly, probably a little too tight.

After the service, as I exited behind the hordes, I spotted Tom Kitt standing amidst emptying seats. He had come to hear it, too, and we looked at each other with a kind of bewilderment.

You can hear the song below, recorded in the synagogue before Yom Kippur. Whatever anyone else thinks of it, my gratitude is acute and the experience imprinted: a snapshot of how Jewish amateurs, when invited, can participate in an ancient conversation.

“Taking Your Place” for Central Synagogue
Lyrics by Abigail Pogrebin, music by Tom Kitt

Taking your place
In an enduring line.
This is the day
that you stood up to say,
“Our tradition is mine.”

You have now read the Torah.
It’s been passed onto you.
It’s our law and our story–But each telling is new.

It is said we stood at Sinai
And today, you know you’re there.
You’re the promise of a people,
a blessing and a prayer.

Taking your place
In a resilient line
This is the day
that you stood up to say,
“Our tradition is mine.”

You have now held the Torah,
forged a link to the past.
You’re the face of our future,
and the reason we last.

Lalechet bidrachav v’lishmor mitzvotav kol hayamim.
May you walk in God’s ways and may all of your days be blessings.

It is said we stood at Sinai
And today, you know you’re there.
You’re the promise of a people,
a blessing and a prayer.

You’re the promise of a people,
a blessing and a prayer.

Laura Gee, Daniel Wise [NYT]

• In the course of reviewing Los Angeles’s new Holocaust museum, Edward Rothstein essentially asks if there are too many such places. [NYT]

• Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the designated new head of Reform Judaism, talks about his movement’s rivalry with Chabad. From 2008. [New Voices]

• On Bo Belinsky, the California Angels pitcher from the 1960s who was the original athlete-playboy (at least publicly). His mother was Jewish. [Deadspin]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Daniel Estrin reports on Jerusalem’s brand-new light rail system. [Business Week]

• A small gallery in a small town in northern Israel has slowly grown into what will be a permanent museum of Arab-Israeli and Palestinian art. [NYT]

Here’s an epic Vanity Fair piece from last year about the even more epic marriage(s) of Richard Burton and the late, lamented Elizabeth Taylor. And here they are in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

These two trends come together in an important essay in this week’s Forward by Dana Evan Kaplan, a Reform rabbi in Albany, Georgia. To her him*, the inability of Reform Judaism’s ability to coalesce—the deluge it is potentially on the verge of—is actually a consequence of its religious substance. He argues:

The pluralistic theologies of Reform Judaism make it difficult to reach consensus on what we Reform Jews believe on any given issue. The liberal approach to observance makes it impossible to set and maintain high expectations in terms of communal participation. Without an omnipotent God who can compel believers to practice a prescribed pattern of behavior, religious consumerism becomes the movement’s dominant ethos. As members focus on what they want rather than what they can contribute, it becomes increasingly difficult to build committed religious communities.

His solution would seem to be a return to Reform Judaism’s roots, which, though of course based on a laxer approach than what we would now call Orthodox Judaism, was in its own way as theologically rigorous.

“As the Reform movement has increasingly emphasized religious autonomy and the importance of choosing what each person finds spiritually meaningful, it has become impossible to compel members to come to services regularly, study Torah seriously and contribute to the vibrant well-being of their congregation,” he notes. “Instead, they are allowed to come twice a year and call on the rabbi whenever they need a life cycle ceremony.” There is a difference, in other words, between formal laxness and informal laxness.

What he fails, to my reading, to argue is that a more rigorous theological approach would be not only real-world practical but theologically superior. I would love to read that piece, though.

Why Is Patrilineal Descent Not Catching On in Reform Worldwide? [JTA]
Liberal Denominations Face Crisis as Rabbis Rebel, Numbers Shrink [Forward]
The Theological Roots of Reform Judaism’s Woes [Forward]

* Josh Lambert emails me to point out that Kaplan is, in fact, a man. Apologies! I suppose, though, that it is a sign of progress that a journalist had no trouble assuming a rabbi named Dana is a woman.

• Mideast leaders expressed hope concerning what will follow last week’s direct peace talks. (Except for Avigdor Lieberman.) [NYT]

• A detailed look into who is funding both sides of the Park51 debate. [Politico]

• Palestinian Authority security forces face their toughest challenge yet—you can expect a continued uptick in West Bank violence as direct talks proceed apace. [LAT]

• Israel and Russia signed their first military deal, pledging cooperation in fighting nuclear proliferation and terrorism and leaving the door open to Russia’s buying further Israeli-made drones. (Defense Minister Barak had also sought to prevent missile sales to Syria.) [LAT]

• An interview with a Reform rabbi who has taken the lead in trying to force Israeli courts to grant greater accomodations to Progressive Jews. [LAT]

The panel did not advocate changing Reform Judaism’s current rules, which leave the question of whether or not to officiate at interfaith weddings up to individual rabbis. (Conservative and Orthodox Judaism bar their rabbis from doing this; Reconstructionists also delegate that decision to each rabbi.) Rather, the panel suggests that the movement establish special blessings to codify and recognize these unions.

What do you guys think?

U.S. Reform Rabbis Suggest Welcoming Interfaith Couples [AP/Haaretz]

Specifically, Ellenson predicted that in the next decade, the number of Israeli Reform rabbis will increase from 60 to 130 or more. “What an Israeli expression is going to require is Israelis who are alive to the culture of what Israeli society is,” Ellenson said: a future brand of Israeli Progressive Judaism will not “progress very far at all” if the movement consists solely of Americans. However, he acknowledged that many of the Israelis studying at HUC’s campus in Israel were influenced by a trip to the Diaspora, where they gain “a broader sense of what the possibilities are.”

As for how Progressive Judaism will grow within an Israeli political and economic system that doesn’t support it, Ellenson argued that it will be able to move outside of the existing structures; he cited two thriving congregations in Tel Aviv that receive funding from the municipality.

Ellenson made it clear that Reform Judaism’s Israeli future is about Israel’s future, too. “You cannot have a country where 20 percent of the people… cannot have a union sanctified,” he argued, adding, “this type of monopoly is seen as pernicious. … I don’t want to be overly Pollyanna-ish about it, but I do believe you can begin to see certain chinks in the formerly monolithic armor.”

Hadeish Yameinu by David Gelernter

David Gelernter, a prominent victim of the Unabomber, is a Yale computer science professor who is also fluent in the history and practice of Judaism. An observant Jew, Gelernter just published Judaism: A Way of Being (Yale University Press). Partly an exploration of the religion’s core themes and partly a defense of adherence to its commandments, the book is also an impassioned and provocative plea for Jews to recognize their religion’s unique relationship to God and to Western civilization. Gelernter spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the importance of separation to Jewish life, about Jewish superiority, and about why Conservative and Reform Judaism appear doomed to failure.

For the preservation of life: Part 1: Jewish Perspectives on Healthcare Reform [Jewish Herald-Voice]
Related: Why Jewish Grandmothers Should Oppose Obama Care [American Thinker]

Germany was the birthplace of Reform Judaism, and it has a rich cantorial history, though it looked for a while like that history had ended with the Holocaust. In the decades after the war, only a small number of Jews lived in Germany. That began to change with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Since then, tens of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union have immigrated to Germany. Now there are some 120 synagogues throughout the country, but of those about 80 have no rabbi or cantor at their helm.

The new school in Berlin is starting small, with just three students in its inaugural class. To mark the occasion, the school flew over nine Reform cantors from North America to perform.

Photos: Evgeny Plyukhin.

I first met Adriaan years ago, before she converted. She was my cousin Sam’s strikingly beautiful new girlfriend then; they’ve been married for 30 years now, and she’s still striking—always in black, with pearly skin, and a long, fair braid down her back.

Why did you convert?

Adriaan Finnerman

Sam and I were in love and wanted to get married. He asked me if I would consider converting and I said yes. Quite simple, no discussion. As Ruth said to Naomi, “I want to be with you and go where you go.” I believe that in reality the conversion question arises more at the level of interpersonal relationships than it does at the level of great spiritual questing. I had taken a few courses on Judaism in college, and it appealed to me intellectually. If I had not met Sam, would I have converted? Maybe eventually, but not at that point.

Now I’ve been a Jew longer than I was a Christian. Sam and I went through the Reform program for couples. It had some study that you do together, and that was very interesting—we read books I had read in college when I studied Judaism. One anthology was Great Jewish Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, which contained an array of pieces by people like Ahad Ha’am, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Mordecai M. Kaplan. The program was geared toward a general knowledge.

So you became interested in Judaism in college?

It probably really began in junior high when I started going to a school outside of my immediate neighborhood, and the first friends I chose were all Jews. I didn’t realize when I was a kid that there was any connection between the people I was drawn to and the fact that most of them were Jewish. Over time I’ve learned that Jews are, by and large, fun and intellectually exciting people to be with. I grew up in Sharon, Pennsylvania, which at the time was a steel mill town near Pittsburgh. But my parents are Methodists from the South, and I always sort of felt like I was probably one of those people that the bible mentions, the stragglers that hung around after Exodus.

But for more than 20 years after I converted I felt like there was a glass wall, and that I could see Judaism, but I wasn’t touching it. I understand now that until you comprehend the transcendent nature of Am Yisrael and experience yourself as a part of it, the real conversion hasn’t taken place. Maybe if I had gone into the mikvah, which was not part of the Reform ritual at the time, I might have experienced it right away. On the other hand, maybe you just have to grow into being a Jew. Perhaps it can’t happen overnight. During that first long stretch of time after I converted I really struggled to articulate the difference between Judaism and Christianity. You can say: “Well, there’s Jesus.” But we live in a Judeo-Christian culture, and it never really seemed to make very much difference. So actually, the real conversion—or maybe it should be called transformation—for me only took place about five years ago.

What happened then?

It started when Moses went off to college in 1999. Until then we had gone through bar mitzvahs, and everything was progressing just like a traditional Reform Jewish home. But when he got to college he encountered the local Chabad house and he enjoyed it. A lot of Chabad’s focus is outreach to secular Jews with the goal of bringing them back to traditional observances. On campus, they approached students and invited them to have Friday night dinners with them, which Moses started to do regularly. When he would come home, the Shabbat table started to get very tense because we did everything wrong. For us it was a time to light candles and bring a little decorum to the table. Moses felt that our observances were pathetic. It got to the point that we had to make a rule like they’d had in Sam’s family when he was growing up. In that household it was “you can’t talk about business at the table”; for us it was “you can’t talk about Judaism at the table!”

Until then my approach to Judaism had been intellectual. I was just so puzzled that there would be so many things that were important to Moses—this salt goes on that bread, you must have two challahs.

Did you ever feel like there was a cultlike quality to it? Moses goes off to college, falls in with this group of people, and suddenly he’s being pulled away from his parents toward a religious organization.

His grades were plummeting and we worried. At that point we attributed it to his new interest in Judaism, and spending too much time trying to figure out how to prepare kosher meals in the Theta Xi Alpha fraternity house—”The Zoo.”

But as I was looking at all these things that Chabad did, and we didn’t do, these rituals that build group solidarity, I was wondering what makes Judaism any different from the Elks? And then, it suddenly struck me—in fact, right now, it brings tears to my eyes when I talk about it—I suddenly saw how necessary, in an ultimate sense of the word, it is that the Jewish people survive. I saw that they had a role as the servants of God. So that was when the glass wall disappeared.

I think, as a Jew by choice, you have to understand that you’re joining a people. You’re joining something that goes back in time, and will go forward in time; you’re a part of it, your job is to keep it going, sort of like when you’re running a relay race, you have the baton, and then you pass it on.

Does the deeper connection to Judaism that you feel now go hand in hand with a connection to God?

The reason I don’t think it does is that I was always very religious, since I was a child. So for me, God is God, no matter which religion you call yourself.

Do you have a different image of God now than you did when you were a child?

For a very long time my image of God was kind of like your best friend, that you could talk to at any time—and that I did, a lot. And I would certainly ask God for this or that. God was a “you.”

Right now, my feeling about God is—I am overwhelmed by praise. I feel the incredible mystery in life itself. I see God in so many things, and feel deep gratitude and thankfulness. I no longer have that sense of you-ness, of a guide. Ken Wilber is a contemporary philosopher who’s trying to reintegrate spirituality into the consciousness of critical thinkers. He talks about experiencing God in the first person, the second person, and the third person. And the first person would be when you have that feeling of the voice within, or that sense that God’s within you. I certainly feel the third person, which would be the Itness. I appreciate God as a force, something much more abstract. My God now is the God of science, intersecting with the God of kabbalah and Hassidut. Not only the ein sof, but the indwelling presence of shekinah described by Albert Einstein as “manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty.” I believe that in time we will come to realize that God is the creative force in everything.

I admit that when I finally realized that I had lost God in the second person—that “You”—I felt a profound loss.

Can you place when God changed from the second to third person for you?

Well, there’s a whole lot of gaps in my own understanding. On this meditation retreat that I was on recently, we did a Hasidic practice called hitbodidut. You go off by yourself and talk to God nonstop. You’re not supposed to stop, even if you’re thinking, “I think this is the most ridiculous practice I’ve ever done in my life.” But what you find is that if you keep rattling on, talking to God, assuming that there’s a “you” who’s listening, you can really have some profound experiences. So, as much as I say my God is more abstract, I find that I still pray, and I don’t know, really, who I’m praying to.

How much of your everyday life is devoted to thinking about these large philosophical and religious issues, and how much to the practice?

Well, I belong to a traditional morning minyan, and that’s the really important start to my day. And the questions never cease throughout the day—they’re interspersed with mundane ones like, “What did I want to get at the grocery store?” I have found so much benefit from this new experience of Judaism, and the observances have a lot of meaning. We’re just about to redo our kitchen; we’ll have a kosher kitchen. At this point, other than the fact that it hasn’t been koshered, we observe kashruth. Of course that’s kind of easy because I’m a vegetarian.

How have your parents reacted—both to your becoming Jewish, and also to your newer passionate feelings about it?

My parents were okay with it, maybe because it seemed like it wasn’t going to get me into trouble. And they had left their Baptist roots to find another spiritual outlet. I call my mother in the morning, and usually we talk about what she’s been doing at the church and what I’ve been doing at the synagogue. But once in a while—and maybe I’m just being an overly sensitive daughter—I sense disapproval. I have a hunch that it relates to some vague, unconscious concern that I won’t get into heaven.

I don’t believe in an afterlife the way people who talk about heaven and hell do. We are so crucial at that moment in time that we’re to take the baton and carry it. We have to do our best, we have to really strive. But then we pass it on to someone else and I think that I’m really at peace with my sense of death. I hope that I make some small contribution to the world. That’s my job.