Rabbi Herman E. Schaalman -- Rosh Hashanah Morning -- 1st Day -- 5767

Where Are Our Children?

It is 11 o’clock Saturday night and the announcer will say “Parents, do you know where your children are?” And this embarrassing statement is a clue to the fact that as our society has unfolded, very often parents have either attenuated or totally abdicated their supervision over their teenage children and have totally given up any idea of controlling their lives, or even knowing where they might be and what they are doing. And in a very real way, it is a major blot on our own self-understanding and a clear indication of the depth of the problematics that we as a modern society face. Today, however, let us enlarge or if you will perhaps narrow that question and ask ourselves, “Parents – Jewish parents, do you know where your children are?”

To begin with, this question might sound as though it is merely a variant on the universal one, but a recent poll has shown a rather startling fact, namely that at this moment, right now, half of all the Jewish children under 12 in the United States live in Orthodox Jewish homes. That means that within 20 to 30 years at least half of the adult Jewish population in the United States will not only have been reared in an Orthodox environment, but most likely continue to adhere to it. Right now adults, as of this day let us say, reform Jews account for about 39% of all Jews that are affiliated with a congregation. We are right now the largest single component of the religious Jewish community in the United States, followed by the Conservatives and only a small percentage – some 20% perhaps to 22% – of religiously affiliated Jews in the United States right now are of Orthodox practice. But this obviously is going to change significantly, if not radically, and you and I can well imagine what the profile of the Jewish community will look like, where the leadership will come from in the generations to come, and what ideas and policies will be promoted simply because those who will come from that sector of the Jewish community, which up to now has been albeit a vocal minority, but a minority, are likely to attain the position of being the majority.

So the question, where are our children is more than merely a phrase. Fact is that in our own communities childbearing has no longer become as important and overwhelmingly sacred a vocation, a demand, a practice. We get married later. Men and women have professional capacities and lives and very often the number of children in our modern Jewish families, in the so-called liberal wing of things, tend to be so much smaller than those in the traditionalist sector that the results are predictable. So to ask where are our children is not an idle question, but really something that needs to give us pause and to make us understand that the future of American Jewish life is likely to undergo significant readjustments and changes in a generation or two to follow ours. Whatever that may mean may be topics for conversations and deliberations some other time. However, it is a serious problem and one that demands our attention.

But our Jewish children are going to face other additional difficulties or changes. Perhaps the best way to enter into this phase of deliberations is to recall an event that happened a few months ago when the American Jewish Committee, which most of us recognize as certainly one of the most important, if not the most important Jewish organization in the country, celebrating its 100^th anniversary in a major event in Washington, invited as one of its key-note speakers the well known and widely appreciated and admired Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua. Together with Amos Oz, he is certainly one of the two great voices of contemporary Israel. And A. B. Yehoshua shocked, and some would even say profoundly offended, this august celebratory gathering by making it clear that he believed that the most authentic Jewish life in the future, and perhaps even now already, is lived no place except in the state of Israel. What did he mean? He certainly said, and we all ought to remember it, and perhaps we already know it but pay perhaps too little attention, that a Jewish child growing up in Israel is totally submerged in his Jewishness. To begin with, he is not Anglophone or Francophone or Germanophone, he speaks Hebrew. And not as a second language or as an acquisition, not as the proud achievement in some kind of special studies, but as his mother’s tongue, as the nursery rhymes that he or she hears. He is totally submerged in the Hebrew language with its cadences, with its overtones, with its grammatical structures – all different and at variance with anything that you and I speak or our children speak as their natural endowment. And we all know that language is ultimately one of the greatest shapers of the persona, of the way we are, of who we are, of our identities. So someone who grows up Hebrew-speaking and usually even doesn’t know any other language is shaped and formed from earliest moments of life in a manner that is certainly significantly different from that which our children and grandchildren know and experience. When he grows, he lives in a Jewish neighborhood, not by the accident of an agglomeration of immigrants who happened to cluster together in a given sector of an American city; he lives in a Jewish neighborhood because that’s the only neighborhood there is! Next door, upstairs, downstairs, across the street, everybody’s a Jew. When he goes to school, he’s not one of a few Jewish children that happen to be in a classroom – everybody in the classroom is Jewish; the teacher is Jewish, the janitor is Jewish, the secretaries are Jewish, the principal is Jewish, the postman is Jewish, the security man is Jewish, the grocer is Jewish, the butcher is Jewish. We can’t even think of what this is when we take is such great pride that in the Senate of the United States, of the hundred Senators, there are 10 Jews! Yes, we say that sometimes with great satisfaction, and it is very meaningful. But when he or she grows up in Israel, everybody in the Knesset, with the exception of 5 or 6 Arabs, is Jewish! And the Prime Minister is Jewish and the President is Jewish! These children grow up in a way which is so radically different from any experience and any input into the formation of their identity and character, which our children experience, that we need to be aware of the fact that beginning now already more Jews live in Israel than live in the United States and that there is every projection that that disparity of numbers will grow in favor of the Jewish community of Israel as over against our own Jewish life here in the foreseeable future.

All these are significant elements which we need to ponder, which we need to understand, which we need to examine because we cannot simply assume as we have perhaps understood in the last few years, that we will be the dominant strand of Jewish life and Jewish being in this world. Increasingly it is likely that this will shift and shift away from us and towards our kin in the land of Israel. Of course, even A. B. Yehoshua has known and made reference in what I’d almost say an exculpatory kind of remark he made after he had shocked his audience and asserted that, of course, for some 2500 years, there always had been a Diaspora. When the Babylonian Emperor conquered Jerusalem in 586 BCE and took a sizeable slice of the elite of the Jewish people into exile in Babylon, the overwhelming majority remained there even when later, under Persian rule, the opportunity arose for those who wanted to return to their homeland. So for 2,500 or 2,600 years, there have always been two foci of Jewish life – the land of Israel and a diaspora community – then Babylonia, later, as you can well understand and know, in the whole Greek world, the Roman world, eventually…well, Europe and the whole globe. And what we need to remember and what we need to remind our Israeli friends and kin – and A.B. Yehoshua also for he speaks for a lot of those who think like he does – that it was the Jewish diaspora that really produced some of the greatest of the achievements of mind and spirit which have made up the tradition of our people. The Talmud is the Babylonian Talmud; that is the main Talmud. The Shulchan Aruch, that compendium of laws of which traditional Jews guide their lives to this day, was written in Safed in the Galilee. Maimonides wrote his magnificent Moreh Nevuchim – The Guide to the Perplexed – in Spain and functioned in Egypt. And one could go on and on and cite the great achievements of human intellects and artists and masters of the spirit knowing what they produced, that they were the greats of their time and perhaps of all time, in the Diaspora. We just heard a reading from Torah and we ought to remember that that Torah is forever associated with the name of the greatest Jew that ever lived, namely Moses. That very Moses was born in Egypt and died in Moab, never in the land. He was forbidden, in fact, rather brutally by God, from entering the land.

But it is not only that diaspora has been a historic fact, a phenomenon of our historical journey through time. There really are always two types of Jews and two kind of major emphases of what a Jew could be. Yes, there is the land of Israel, and Jews have a right to have a land like everybody else because without a land you are nobody in this world. But land is also a danger; land has demands, land takes over, land becomes dominant, it needs to be tended, it needs to be cared for, it needs to be defended! Land tends to absorb a person and a community totally, but there has always, always been a different tone in our Biblical past, though it was never listened to, but it was there. We just read some passages from Isaiah in the Haftarah and that voice does not speak about the land; that voice speaks about that identity of being Jewish that is a task, a command, a project, a program. What the prophets were saying is that to be a Jew is not simply to live and breathe and be self-fulfilling, self-vindicating; to be a Jew means to be called, to be a Jew is a vocation. So the prophets taught. And, in the Diaspora, perhaps that was cultivated and moved into the center of our attention and our being simply because we were “landless,” though we always remembered it and even yearned for it. So the Diaspora is not an incidental fact of Jewish existence, it dare not be an incidental fact of Jewish existence and identity. But if Diaspora has a right to be, and even perhaps a need to be, then we need to understand that it is not simply a fact, an accident, something that happens without our having done anything about it. We need to understand that to be Diaspora means to live as Jews, to fulfill the Jewish vision, to be the dreamers of the Jewish dream – justice, care for the poor, sensitivity to others, and underlying and overarching it all – that ultimate visionary fantasy – shalom, peace, wholeness – when there will be no more ruptures or fractions or violence, when all that is to be controlled will be controlled. And that is the time when the yetzer ha-ra, the inclination to do evil, will have finally succumbed to the yetzer tov, the good inclination, the inclination towards that which all of us recognize and know of as being the right one.

So where are our children? They need to think of it. But above all, we need to be convinced ourselves that we, as Jews in the Diaspora, have not only a right to be, that we are the necessary counterpart to the Jews in the land of Israel, that we can never abdicate our role and our function and our place in the unfolding of the Jewish story to those who live in the land of Israel, with all that that means that is good and wonderful and hopeful. We have a permanent place - it is to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.