Yom Kippur 5770, d'rosh
by Faye Kimerling

Shanah Tovah.

On March 28, 1958, I had my Bat Mitzvah at Temple Beth El in Birmingham, Alabama. On April 28, 1958, exactly one month later, 54 sticks of dynamite were discovered at Temple Beth El in a window well, unexploded. Except for rain, which extinguished the fuse, it is thought that the bomb would have blown up and done much damage.

I was 12 years old and Jewish and having a Bat Mitzvah. My large extended family played a big role in my connection to Judaism. We celebrated holidays with aunts and uncles and cousins, with lots of matza balls and chicken soup. It was fun and I enjoyed it.

After the dynamite was found, my family and I never stopped going to services on Saturday mornings. I didn’t stop going to Hebrew School three afternoons a week, or Sunday school every Sunday morning.

But I did stop, and realize, that being Jewish in Birmingham in 1958 wasn’t just about the security of family and the milestone of a Bat Mitzvah. It was about almost getting blown up.

I had learned about the destruction of Temples, but in 586 BCE or 70 AD, by the Babylonians and the Romans; not in 1958 by a small violent group of states righters. This was April, and the well-known Temple bombing in Atlanta didn’t happen until that fall. We Jews in the South were a vulnerable minority, and, whether we spoke our conscience or remained silent, we would still be attacked, said Rabbi Jacob Rothschild of The Temple in Atlanta. He was right, because even if no one spoke out in Nashville, Tennessee; in Miami and Jacksonville, FL; in Gastonia and Charlotte, NC; in Birmingham, Alabama; our JCC’s and synagogues were still targeted with bombs, and many went off. Rabbi Rothschild spoke out, and his own congregation listened fearfully, because they knew taking sides in the civil rights issue would rekindle the anti-Semitism that lay just beneath the surface of their suburban lives.

I don’t really know why this is so vivid for me this year. Maybe it is because of the multiple security emails that I got from our own JCC on the Hudson, reminding me that a new security policy has gone into effect and that absolutely no one would be admitted without a photo ID card. And then I got a link to a very professional announcement from the Anti Defamation League that they had compiled a security manual, updated for 2009, and called Protecting Your Jewish Institution: Security Strategies for Today’s Dangerous World. This, they said, was in response to several high profile incidents during the year, like the thwarted terrorist plot to bomb two Riverdale synagogues and the murder of a security guard at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington.

Rabbi Rothschild in Atlanta said he was moved to activism by the words of Isaiah, "Devote yourselves to justice, Aid the oppressed." He saw the African Americans in the South at that time as the poor and oppressed who are spoken about in Jewish tradition. He was a man isolated by the demands of conscience, says Melissa Fay Green, author of The Temple Bombing. The world around him was changing, and Rabbi Rothschild’s values were clear; they were Jewish values.

I’m not sure what values I got from the dynamite in Birmingham so close to my Bat Mitzvah. Our rabbi hadn’t spoken out in public about racial justice. I hadn’t been privy to my parents’ discussion about the incident. I didn’t know if they felt frightened or courageous when we continued our normal trips to the synagogue building. I don’t know if they had arguments. I don’t know what the issues were for them.

I wish I did know. I might not have understood then, but it could have helped me sort things out and perhaps distill a value from that traumatic situation. I don’t know what I would have done if I were a parent then. Today, unfortunately, parents face similar situations all over the world, from India to Argentina, from Israel to Riverdale: Jews and Jewish buildings are at risk.

Values were the catalyst for Rabbi Rothschild in Atlanta and he essentially became Isaiah in 1958.

Do you think we allow ourselves the same accessibility to Isaiah’s values today? Can we say that Jewish values drive our behavior? The vidui we read over and over today lists the many ways we’ve departed from our Jewish values. How can we start to identify and understand those values? Because it is our values that underlie our behavior. But does our Judaism underlie our values?

Surveys tell us there is a change in America across all religions: one out of five Americans do not have any religious affiliation. This is not to say they are not good people leading good lives. But their overriding principle is that doing good works is not a religious activity but a human activity that brings people together as human beings without any divine law saying to do it or threatening punishment if you don’t.

"The way the world functions is changing," says Rabbi Irwin Kula. In America, people increasingly use religion as a resource toolbox rather than a source of identity, he says. The challenge he sees is whether we can take our inherited Jewish tradition, wisdom, and practices and translate them into a resource that anyone can use.

In a recent interview, Lawrence Bacow, the first Jewish president of Tufts, offered that Jewish culture, stories, and tradition are too rich and valuable to keep to ourselves; they truly have universal appeal, he said.

This "universal appeal" and turning Jewish tradition "into a resource anyone can use" is part of what academics call "cosmopolitanism." It encourages people to learn from all contacts in life and not to resist but embrace what is different.

The approach does not look for fixed prescriptives like religion offers; it simply looks for purpose and meaning no matter where it comes from. The conditions for a cosmopolitan outlook turn a lot of our longstanding constructs on their heads—for example, a sense of stability might come through change, life is not questioned but simply appreciated as unfathomable, nothing is considered permanent, the way of the world is change.

Some of the changes in Jewish life have also opened the door to this cosmopolitanism. Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna notes, for example, that the great causes that once invigorated American Jewry – immigrant absorption, creating a Jewish State, rescuing endangered Jews – are essentially behind us. He worries that Diaspora Jews are poorer for not having a well-defined, elevating Jewish mission to inspire us.

So what will it be? Judaism as an ethnic identity with religious significance and particular missions, or Judaism as a part of cosmopolitanism, open to everyone. Have we revised our values about Jewish education so that now we now support education to bring us together with others instead of separating us into our own ethnic identity?

It is hard to know if our parents, or we as parents, will be passing on values that bring us together with the rest of the world or separate us into our own ethnic identity. That decision and that risk is ours to take with our own children and grandchildren. And it won’t be so easy. Jews don’t live as close to family as they once did. Nearly half of all Jews living in the West and two thirds of all Jews living in the South were not born there. Recent polls show that those who migrate from their region of birth are less likely to be Jewishly involved than Jews who do not migrate. And, while data shows that Jews remain more concentrated in the Northeast than are Americans in general, they have been moving to the West and the South at a much faster rate than all Americans.

Our communities are changing, our families are changing, where we live is changing, and our religious observance has dropped precipitously over the last decade to the point where more than one out of every three Jews reports they are thoroughly secularized. It is a little startling when you read that the number of all Americans identifying themselves as secular is only six percent, and for Jews it’s 33 percent!

But Rabbi Brad Hirschfield does not bemoan this fact. He says it shows that the way religiously identified Jews are practicing their Judaism is just not working for a lot of people. He says it is an opportunity for – guess what? -- change, that familiar word again. Researchers found that the concept that appeals to most Jews is not the going to synagogue or doing religious rituals, but the cultural and ethnic attachments to Judaism. They want to continue to be Jewish but not in a religious way.

Some people think it is a spiritual emptiness that has turned us away from the organized Jewish community. One response has been the emergence of independent prayer communities like ours. They feature high Judaic competence, gender egalitarianism, attention to welcoming and community building, dedication to text-learning, and an engagement with social justice activities. Being Jewish is not only about G-d, faith, rituals, worship, and spirituality. It is also about friends, neighborhoods, community, Israel, and Peoplehood.

Yes, the Jewish community is changing. There is more focus on the individual rather than the group. There is a burgeoning pluralism. And there are grassroots movements. The barriers between denominations are more open; and interfaith boundaries are more permeable.

My brother’s daughter recently got married and he reminded me of our family’s reaction when our oldest first cousin came home from graduate school at the University of Chicago intermarried, and with a step son my age. No one knew what to do, especially all the parents. We all had to try a few different things before finding some way to comport the reality with our strong family value against intermarriage. Today, listen to this, half of all respondents to the Jewish Population Survey agree with this statement: "It is racist to oppose Jewish-gentile marriages." More than half disagreed with this statement: "It would pain me if my child married a gentile."

We are players in this transition. We don’t practice Judaism like our parents did and our children won’t practice the way we do.

We can deconstruct our Jewish values and make them more open to everyone. But then will they still be Jewish values?

We can inculcate our families with Jewish values, but we see that family members can move away; what values do we want to make sure they have packed inside to take with them?

We can say we are safe because we live in the most Jewish populated area in the world, but we aren’t and we don’t. For the first time since biblical days, Israel is the single largest population center of world Jewry. Jews in America are about 1.8 percent of our national population. We continue to think that we are part of a Jewish people that lives all over the world, but the truth is that almost 80 percent of world Jewry lives in just two countries, the United States and Israel. And, over 98 percent of Jews live in only 15 countries. Why is this important? Because most of the 200 or so countries in the world are barren of Jews or have Jewish communities so small as to be unsustainable. This is a big change.

If I have persuaded you that this is not your parents Judaism, the next question is, what do we do? What is our responsibility? What values must we intentionally transmit to our families and our children that are Jewish, and portable, and pluralistic, and ethnic, and lasting? And how do we do it?

I’m not sure there are any precise answers; but here are some categories to help organize our thinking.

First, why stay connected? There are a lot of worshippers here today, some who come regularly and some who don’t come at any other time during the year. And welcome. I think it is wonderful how the congregation grows on the High Holidays. There is something here you are looking for, something Jewish you want to connect with. Think about it. What is it? Do your children know what it is? Do you know what connection they are looking for? And those who come each Shabbat and for holidays and shiva minyanim, and celebrations, what is it that is important to you about these rituals? Let’s talk and listen. And think and rethink. Why stay connected?

Second, we are all affected by this changing environment. Individually that may mean some good times and some conflicts. The person sitting next to you may be confronting all these changes just like you are. Maybe a son has moved away and disconnected from Judaism or a daughter has intermarried. We cannot change the world around us. But we can empower ourselves to make decisions in response to this new environment, even though we might not always be comfortable doing it. All of us reshape or transform the values we get from our parents and our grandparents. The ones our children take from us may look different: not so exclusive, not so G-d centered, not so history-based, but we can work to keep some core values. Let’s say, for example, you are kosher and your children become vegetarian. Will their children be able to trace ethical eating back to a Jewish value? Only if we give ourselves permission to make sure our Jewish values continue to be relevant.

Finally, what can being Jewish but not in a religious way look like? It can be an attachment to Jewish food and music and language and Israel and Chanukah and Passover. It can be seizing opportunities to be Isaiah and stand up for what is right. It can be giving tzedakah anonymously. It can be striving to be our best selves, living by the guidelines throughout our prayer book today, humility and ethical, truthful dealings with our fellow men and women, in our home, at work, in the community, and in the world at large. And caring when we hurt others or when we cannot keep our promises. And forgiving others without bearing a grudge. Being Jewish but not in a religious way might just look like being a mensch.

The world and the Jewish world are changing, so we must take notice. We must struggle with what it means to carry Jewish values like tikkun olam, education, family, social justice, tzedakah, peace, and the dignity of the individual. We have the obligation and we must assume the responsibility to identify our own Jewish values, and then transmit them in a way that endures in this changing environment. Remember, we are making Jewish history every day.

May we go with strength to strength from challenge to challenge. Because, as it is said, G-d does not give us tests in which we cannot succeed.

Gamar hatimah tovah.