Tradition?
And They shall Be My People: An American Rabbi and His Congregation.
by Paul Wilkes.
Atlantic Monthly Press. 348 pp. $23.00.
Paul Wilkes, a Catholic, has written several books about his own religion. One of them, In Mysterious Ways: The Death and Life of a Parish Priest, tells the story of a local priest in Natick, Massachusetts. This new book is a kind of sequel, following a rabbi and his congregation—this time in Worcester, Massachusetts—for a year.
The congregation is Beth Israel, a Conservative synagogue with a membership of 500 families. In several ways, Beth Israel is religiously a more observant and traditional congregation than most in the Conservative movement. It houses a Jewish day school (only 70 of the 550 Conservative synagogues in America can claim this distinction); perhaps as many as 20 per-cent of the congregants follow the laws of kashrut; and 40 members are sufficiently learned to be able to serve as readers of the Torah scroll (which requires memorizing the punctuation and vocalization of the text, as well as the musical notes in which it is chanted). Beth Israel’s rabbi, not coincidentally, is a member of the Union for Traditional Judaism, the more traditional caucus within the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly.
Wilkes’s hero, or at least his protagonist, is Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum, who is forty-two years old when the narrative begins. Born in the Bronx and raised in Levittown, Long Island, Jay Rosenbaum is the son of a rabbi, a graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary (where most Conservative rabbis are trained), and has been rabbi at Beth Israel for six years. This makes him a fairly typical example of today’s Conservative rabbinate, and he is typical in other ways, too:
The rabbi written about in these pages is not well known outside his congregation, and while he is certainly admired by his people, Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum has done nothing particular to distinguish himself outside this small world. He is not the author of a popular book; he is not sought out by talk-show hosts to convey the “Jewish point of view”; he is not renowned by any means.
It is clearly Wilkes’s intention here to present a portrait not only of one rabbi and one synagogue, but of American Judaism in the 1990’s. Thus his book contains a kind of primer on Judaism, Jewish sociology, and American Jewish history. This material, familiar to some readers, will be very valuable to others.
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When it comes to epitomizing the religious situation of most American Jews today, Wilkes has it about right: this is a community where some belong to synagogues but never go; some keep kosher, others keep kosher only at home, and still others not at all; some seek God but say they are “turned off” by synagogues, while still others lead a happily secular life. In brief, the problem facing contemporary American Jews is how to balance whatever pull they feel toward religious practice with the manifold attractions of American freedom. As Wilkes puts it:
Should Jews attempt to live a life that appears so at odds with mainstream American culture? Perhaps no other religious group has found American soil so fertile for their personal aspirations, yet so antagonistic to the demands of their religious practice.
The resulting dilemma, as it is played out in actual day-to-day life, forms the heart of Wilkes’s story as he introduces us to his cast of characters, Worcester Jews of all ages, professions, and degrees of attachment to or isolation from their religion. For it turns out in the course of And They Shall Be My People that not even a synagogue with an ostensibly high “traditionalist” profile like Beth Israel is immune to the permutations and compromises that characterize the religious life of American Jews today.
At Beth Israel, the principal fault line seems to run between the rabbi’s search for ways to bring passion to his congregants and the congregants’ tendency to reserve their passions for squabbling, and (no matter how much they admire him personally) for finding fault with their rabbi. The day school is accused of not paying enough rent to the synagogue. Synagogue membership is declining, and the board blames the rabbi. Enrollment in the nursery school is being surpassed by the nearby Reform temple. When the rabbi organizes a trip to Israel, the itinerary becomes the focus of an endless series of arguments.
As for the rabbi, he must placate all the rival forces, or his contract will not be renewed. For a decent but not terrific salary, he works 60 hours or more a week, his schedule destroyed by a funeral here, a hospital call there. While he is trying to build a religious community of committed Jews, he is judged by his work as administrator, social director, marriage counselor, orator.
Mutatis mutandis, this is surely the lot of any cleric in any denomination of any religion. But as Wilkes notes, it may be an especially trying one for Conservative rabbis. Among Orthodox Jews, the rabbi’s flock is nearly as observant as he; among Reform, all are content, as it were, to share the lobster salad; but in Conservative synagogues, the typical rabbi preaches and practices a traditional Judaism while his people often pay it only lip service. On this point, Wilkes tellingly quotes Professor Neil Gillman of the Jewish Theological Seminary:
[T]he Conservative movement did a remarkable thing, marrying the best of tradition and the best of what needed to change. Tradition and change. Our motto. But, internally, we stopped growing. And our rabbis are out there, feeling very lonely and isolated, wondering what to do next.
This is, literally, Rabbi Rosenbaum’s problem. His own personal approach to Judaism is “straightforward,” writes Wilkes:
If an American born a Jew is to remain a Jew, he or she must live as a Jew, within America. Cultural Judaism, ethnic Jewish identity, high-holiday attendance, and yiddishkeit are not enough to sustain them.
And so he tells his congregation. But Rabbi Rosenbaum’s passion is received by most of his congregants as scolding, his religious ambition as unwelcome pressure. By the end of this book, after six years of unending effort to build a true Jewish community, Rabbi Rosenbaum is informed by his board that he has made some members “uncomfortable with his demands for stricter Judaic observance and practice; he had asked for more than they were willing to give.”
Wilkes notes the irony: for Jay Rosenbaum—and for his wife, Janine, whose story is in many ways the most affecting in this book—“being the rabbi of a Conservative congregation was exactly what was standing in the way of a fully religious life.” One need not believe that the Rosenbaums’ problems are universal, or that Beth Israel is typical of every congregation in America, to appreciate the troubling accuracy of the portrait Paul Wilkes has given us of American Jews in the 1990’s.