San Francisco - an incredible city. I just returned from what I thought would be a 5 day respite from my “real world”.
I explored, what was for me, a new corner of the globe.
The food, the climate, and the tourist attractions – all were unforgettable.
And so was the real world I crashed into - the homeless denizens of the Bay Area:
that community of rootless individuals living in doorways, panhandling, living their lives – if that’s what you can call it – the best they can.
I kept asking myself “Why?”
While on my vacation, I kept up, as best I could, with my on-line life (much to my wife’s chagrin!) A theme that popped up was about the individualistic nature of today’s Jewish young people. They, it seems, want to know what Judaism and the Jewish community can do for them as individuals. What can the “we” do for “me”? Okay, in the context of the American ethos of hyper-individualism (sort of an extension of Ayn Rand’s concept of selfishness as a virtue), American Jews seem to strive for individual fulfillment in their Jewish identity. How does this inform the work we do as Jewish educators? How do we teach that “us” matters?
We’ve been mulling over the apparent failure of contemporary Jewish education. We’ve been trying to figure out how to make being a Jew in the 21st century meaningful to the individual. Maybe we are focusing on the wrong thing. I’m not sure if the Jews of the future who are growing up today hear God the way we or our parents do: through ritual, B’nai Mitzvah, Hebrew, Israel. We need to find new hearing aids.
The lost souls of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district got me thinking about how holiness and community can be found by supporting the fallen, raising them from the doorways that are their beds. Perhaps creating Jewish schools of conscience, schools where mitzvot bein adam l'chavero – obligations relating to human interactions - are taught as being the essence of Jewish community, is a direction that we can take to help students hear God again. Maybe through teaching that together we can make a difference in the world, we would be providing the key that would help the one student join with the many, creating a compelling reason to be part of something larger. Conceivably, the concept of Klal Yisrael may need to be redefined as the Jewish path that starts with study, leads to action, and ends with a new and different world. Jewish, because inherent in this old-new Halacha is the word tzedek – justice.
Who knows? Maybe our children will find God living on Market Street.
I think that what you describe is exactly what started happening amongst the 20/30-something set a few years back, with the proliferation of informal and formal networks of yoiung Jews for exactly the short of ben adam l'havero purposes you suggest. I think this is one way of helping the next few generations con enct to Judaism with a sense of community, but I believe it is only one piece of a much larger puzzle that alone may not get us where we need to be.
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