On Raising Good Jews

On Oct. 6, 2023, I had a wonderful day, along with thousands of other Reform Jews. It was Simchat Torah and my synagogue was alive. A young Jewish girl danced in fairy wings with her face painted. A mother linked arms with an older man and circled to the tune of Am Yisrael Chai. A father put on a tallis for what looked like the first time—awkwardly but happily. It was pure and true Jewish joy. All the worries about continuity and literacy and peoplehood vanished for a brief moment and hope replaced them as we began yet another blessed cycle of Torah reading.

It wasn’t just Oct. 6 that was so wonderful. Jews, particularly in the liberal world, were in a really good place for quite some time. We were comfortable living in America. Proud of the access we’d gained into every institution that once shunned us, proud of the coalitions we’d built within and beyond Judaism. We were relatively happy with our Jewish lives as well, training our children on the way to bar/bat mitzvahs and attending synagogue as frequently or infrequently as we wanted.

And then, on Oct. 7, so much shattered—first and foremost in Israel. But also in our corner of the Jewish world, the betrayals began pretty quickly. We quickly came to realize that some of the good people we elected did not represent us, some of the good institutions we built had built a protest movement against us, and some of the good people we stood with didn’t stand with us. It is this phrase—“good people”—that’s been ringing in my mind for the past year.

“If we make them good people, we’ve done our jobs.” That was the sales pitch I once heard from the deep voice of a respected, even revered, Reform rabbi addressing a potential new family. Enroll your child in our religious school and we will make them into a good citizen, a good friend, a good human being. And this rabbi in particular certainly was a good person: He had been a speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr., and had in fact raised a generation of similar do-gooders through his decadeslong career in the congregational rabbinate.

Is raising good people the job of rabbis? It’s harder to answer than it sounds.

Fifteen years ago, when I was in rabbinical school, I had the privilege of teaching a group of incredible Jewish teens at a Reform synagogue. Over the course of two years, we became close. For Sukkot, we made pizza in the hut. For Purim, we debated the practice of requiring drunkenness. For Passover, we led a chocolate Seder for younger children. We traveled together, we studied together, and we laughed together. They would tease me, like teens do, about all kinds of things. Eventually, we established a running joke. Any question I would ask them, they would always respond with the same answer because they had figured out that the answer was always the same. It consisted of two magic words: tikkun olam. What is one of the core values of Judaism? Tikkun olam. What are we studying today? Tikkun olam. What day of the week is it? Tikkun olam. Teens have a way of just getting to the bottom line.

Those teens were craving something more than learning how to be good people; they wanted to learn how to be good Jews, literate Jews. They wanted, and they deserved, to be taught much more about mitzvot, about history, about holidays, and about “how to Jew.” What we were teaching wasn’t wrong: lifting up the fallen; remembering the stranger, the orphan, the widow; and bringing justice to the world entire. On the contrary, these are serious and intrinsic Jewish values. But it wasn’t really right, either.

Because those teens are the exact same people left wondering after Oct. 7 why the secular world they built has rejected them. They’re the ones who have been good people their whole lives only now to be abandoned by their very recent compatriots. And it’s not their fault that they’re confused and surprised. It’s my fault and all of our faults who shied away from teaching that being a good person was enough. At the end of the day being a good person counts, but so does being a part of the Jewish people—perhaps even more.

What is the balance between emphasizing global values versus mitzvot, for example? In rabbi talk, we call this the tension between the universalist and the particular. In normal talk, we say, how Jewish are you?

America has a vehicle for this conversation and we call that vehicle the Reform movement. Whether you’re in the movement, detest the movement, or have no understanding of it at all, if you want to understand the state of American Jewry, the Reform movement—which is America’s largest movement by far—is the place to look.

In fact, the Reform movement has been one of the primary vessels to decide how to live as an American Jew in the modern world for over 150 years. Are you curious about Jewish ambivalence toward Israel in America? Then investigate the movement’s 1898 resolution condemning Zionism and our decadeslong struggle that ultimately reversed that grave error. Are you interested in why so many Jews feel social justice is critical to their Jewish identity? It’s not an accident; it was a decision based on history, theology, and a specific conception of what Judaism in America should be that the Reform movement wrote down in 1918 and again in 1955.

Oct. 7 and its aftermath unlocked all of these questions about peoplehood and particularism, so once again we need to do the hard work of understanding who we are and visioning who we want to be. Are you concerned about the future of American Jewry? Then considering where the Reform movement has been, and might go, is urgent.