For U.S. Jews, Era of Plenty Takes Many Far From Roots

Even as Jews worldwide celebrate the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel, those in the United States find themselves at a delicate moment.

For millenniums, Jewish communities have been defined in large part by outside threats, from the Egyptian slave masters of biblical times to the ancient Romans, from the oppressions of the European ghettos to the threats of Arab armies.

Suddenly, in this place--America--and in this time, that history has turned upside down. After centuries of persecution and murders, of poverty and exile, Jews in America have found themselves in a land that offers freedom, wealth and security--all on a scale no previous Jewish community has ever experienced in 4,000 years of tribal history.

In Southern California, now home to the third-largest Jewish community in the world, Jews exert profound influence in politics, education and commerce--and in Hollywood, the region’s signature industry.

It is part of the irony of Jewish history that all this comfort is making many Jews uncomfortable.

Being Jewish has now become a choice. And, many Jewish leaders fear, too few Jews are choosing it.

Does that matter? Jews themselves are sharply divided.

In a new Los Angeles Times poll, 43% of American Jews said Jews should try to assimilate as much as possible into American society; 41% said Jews should try to maintain themselves as a distinctive group within American society. Sixteen percent remain uncertain.

One in five American Jews say that being Jewish is of little or no importance to their own identity. At the other end of the scale, 13% say that Jewishness is the single most important component of how they identify themselves. The majority fall somewhere in between.

All this has been the subject of considerable gloom among Jewish leaders.

“The Jewish security problem is not Israel anymore,” said noted novelist and editor Chaim Potok. “The security problem is here.”

And yet, the angst is only half the story.

America’s freedom has also led to a surge of creativity and innovation.

In fits and starts, these new models are reshaping the Judaism practiced in America. And that American Judaism, in turn, is being exported--to Israel, where it has sparked conflict with Orthodox rabbis who have had a monopoly on religious affairs since the founding of the state, and throughout the Jewish world.

Perhaps American Jews will forge a new distinctive Jewish identity that remains both true to tradition and stable in a modern world.

Or perhaps American Jews as a distinct group will simply melt away until only a small remnant of the ultra-Orthodox remain, like the Amish, as a reminder of what once was.

The outcome remains many years off. In the meantime, asks Rabbi Irwin Kula, who heads the New York-based National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, “What could be more interesting than being part of a people redefining itself?”

Pulled in Many Directions

Steve Eaton, a Chicago stamp and coin dealer, bestowed upon his daughter on her wedding day the first religious objects he had ever given her.

One was a golden menorah, a Hanukkah candleholder, that stood nearly a foot in height. The second was a mezuzah, the prayer container traditionally affixed to the doors of the faithful.

After 25 years, he was begging her: Please, please don’t forsake your roots.

He hadn’t felt such a need when she was 13 and, at her bat mitzvah, read from the Torah--the first five books of the Jewish Bible--in an important rite of passage. For that occasion, she was granted her own telephone line.

This milestone was different. As the relatives arrived from Santa Monica and Spring, Texas, from Denver and Omaha, Lisa Michelle Eaton prepared to take as her husband Frederick James Carroll--a soft-spoken, good-hearted man who happens to be a Presbyterian and likes his Easter ham.

Lisa was moving away from the extended family that had hosted her at various Jewish holidays while she grew up. She was joining her new husband in Gastonia, N.C., a Piedmont textile mill town of 60,000.

The route from the nearest big airport, in Charlotte, runs along the Billy Graham Parkway. Three local radio stations carry the evangelical PTL Club program. People are so friendly they routinely invite newcomers to church, assuming the gesture will be appreciated.

Though the grocery store stocks bagels, no one really thinks of them as Jewish food. Only three decidedly untraditional flavors are available: multi-grain, blueberry and cinnamon raisin. “No plain,” Lisa Eaton sighed.

She is well aware that there is also a synagogue in town, though she has yet to search it out. Judaism does exert a pull. The question in her father’s mind is just how strong its gravity will prove to be.

A few weeks and a couple of thousand miles away from the Eaton-Carroll wedding, another Jewish family celebrated with a daughter.

Eva Mae Schulman, three months of age, was formally welcomed to Judaism at a synagogue in San Diego with her mother and father, her grandparents, her 87-year-old great-grandmother, an uncle and two fidgety young cousins surrounding her.

Wearing a white-on-white smocked dress and white shoes, the baby’s eyes opened wide and her family beamed as Rabbi Dana L. Magat said a blessing, then announced her Hebrew name--Chava Maya. “The birth of a daughter brings us joy and hope,” he declared.

Traditionally, little boys have been welcomed to the faith at 8 days old in that most distinctively Jewish of rituals, the bris. In front of family and the community, Jewish boys are circumcised and given a Hebrew name.

Baby namings for little girls, however, were once unheard-of.

Today, however, the ceremony has become thoroughly ingrained into American Judaism, except in some Orthodox circles.

Eva Mae, like Lisa, received Jewish gifts: from her great-grandmother, a tiny gold Star of David to wear around her neck; from a family friend, a framed certificate with her Hebrew name that hangs on the nursery wall back in Manhattan, where she lives with her parents, freelance television producer Linda Feldman, 35, and entertainment marketing executive Alan Schulman, 38.

Again, the presents symbolized roots. For her parents, Schulman said, the occasion was a time to “step back from the secular nature of our lives and acknowledge our ancestors, may they rest in peace.”

Intermarriage Is One Challenge

These days, far too many Jews are rootless, say those inclined to worry about the Jewish future.

In past eras, leaving the Jewish community usually meant converting to another faith to avoid oppression.

In America’s more secular culture, Jews have found they do not have to convert out of Judaism. They can simply drop out.

For the first time ever, Rabbi Daniel Gordis says in his new book, “Does the World Need the Jews?” a significant chunk of an entire generation--the baby boomers--is drifting away from Jewish life “without even giving it much thought, lured away by the currents of a culture that makes Judaism seem of little consequence.”

One of the chief signs of trouble that many Jewish leaders point to is intermarriage. In a group that defines itself both in terms of religion and ethnicity, intermarriage traditionally was strongly opposed.

Today, however, 33% of Jews nationwide who are married have married non-Jews, according to the Times poll. Among those under the age of 45, the number is 47%.

In Los Angeles, the intermarriage rate from 1991 through 1996 was 41%, according to a 1997 survey by the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles.

The phenomenon is almost certain to continue. Just 21% of unmarried Jews in the Times survey said they would only marry someone Jewish. And 57% said the religion of a prospective partner would make no difference at all. Moreover, only 33% of all Jews polled said they would object if their child married outside the faith; 58% said it would not matter to them.

But intermarriage is just one sign that some find ominous.

“People are falling off a cliff,” said Gordis, a dean at the University of Judaism.

In focus group interviews conducted for a recent book by Minnesota businessman Gil Mann, one 38-year-old executive said, “Maybe Judaism has just outlived its usefulness.”

A 43-year-old mother of three said going to the synagogue is “a waste of time.”

A 46-year-old corporate lawyer finds the Passover Seder, the springtime ritual that commemorates the Jewish exodus from ancient Egypt, “mostly a bore.”

Some blame a system of Jewish education that Rabbi Steven Zane Leder of Los Angeles’ Wilshire Boulevard Temple wryly refers to as “dry-cleaning Judaism”: parents drop their kids off at Hebrew school weekdays after “regular” school, pay a fee and, Leder said, “presto, expect their kids to be Jewish.”

At the same time, many of the traditional ties that held the Jewish community together have weakened. Three, in particular, stand out: Israel’s struggle to exist. The specter of anti-Semitism. The Holocaust.

“You can go to Israel and rejoice in it, as one almost always does,” said Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Valley Beth Shalom synagogue in Encino. Nevertheless, he said, it’s not uncommon for many American visitors to come home feeling that life there “has nothing to do with your daily life as a Jew.”

The Times poll found that nearly three of five American Jews, 58%, feel close to Israel. But this sentiment has weakened over the past 10 years. In a 1988 Times poll, 75% said they felt close to Israel.

As for anti-Semitism, it is at historic lows. According to the Times poll, 55% of Jews say they have never been the victim of discrimination or anti-Semitism. Among those younger than 30, nearly two-thirds said they have not been the victim of anti-Semitism.

The memory of 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust remains a more powerful tie. But it is also a complicated one.

“If we say this is the single area in which our Jewishness is expressed, we would become a melancholy, paranoid generation. We should not do that,” said author and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.

Traditions Anchor Family Life

And yet, amid all the evidence for disaffection, there are also thriving communities, vibrant synagogues and families adapting their lives to Jewish traditions and Jewish traditions to their lives.

In Los Angeles, Joel and Fran Grossman’s lives revolve around Judaism.

Their synagogue is a Conservative one, Temple Beth Am. Conservative Judaism allows equal roles for men and women, which is important to them. And belonging to a movement that is rooted in tradition yet flexible enough to allow for adaptation “calls to me,” Fran Grossman said.

Yet their daily routine is quite similar to that of many Orthodox families. They picked their house in order to be within walking distance of their synagogue--they do not drive on the Sabbath.

Joel Grossman, 47, an executive at Sony, where he directs litigation and labor relations, is home by sundown Friday night, even when work is heavy-duty--as it was a few weeks ago in the midst of negotiations to avert an actors and producers strike.

He left the bargaining table to come home as the Sabbath neared, then went back to work after the sun set on Saturday.

The family keeps kosher.

That means children David, 11, and Gabriella, 7, have never eaten an ordinary McDonald’s hamburger.

“When he was 4,” Fran Grossman said of her son, “we would go into McDonald’s and say, ‘Can we buy a Happy Meal and give it to somebody else? We just want the toys.’ ”

“There are times--I remember during the O.J. [Simpson] chase, it was a Friday, and it would have been nice to see the end of it. But we turned off the TV to make Shabbat and to be with our family.”

To some, all this may seem overly restrictive. Fran Grossman disagrees. “All our actions in life, from the most mundane to most intellectual, have meaning; the challenge is to make the most mundane seem to have part of that meaning. That to me is what spirituality is,” she said.

Orthodox Jews, for their part, insist that spirituality is incomplete without law.

The Orthodox remain a small fraction of the Jewish population--9% nationwide, according to the latest Times poll, and about 4% in the Los Angeles area, according to a 1997 survey conducted by the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles.

And despite occasional claims by spokesmen for some Orthodox organizations, there is scant evidence that Orthodox ranks are growing rapidly.

But 40 or 50 years ago, Orthodox leaders note, many students of Judaism predicted that Orthodoxy would have disappeared entirely by now. Instead, it has not just survived, it has thrived.

That vitality is most evident in neighborhoods such as Los Angeles’ Pico-Robertson and Fairfax districts or in Brooklyn’s Borough Park. The grocery stores display kosher signs in Hebrew and the sidewalks are crowded on Saturday afternoons with families walking home from prayer services.

Contrary to popular belief, Orthodox Jews are a diverse group, ranging from Hasidic sects, who remove themselves from much of modern life and culture, to the Modern Orthodox, who strictly observe Jewish law but are otherwise thoroughly mainstream.

What all have in common is a way of life that centers on scrupulous observance of ritual and Jewish law.

For the vast majority of Jews, Orthodoxy remains an alien concept. Some rebel against rules that govern every aspect of life, from diet to sexual behavior.

Others cannot accept Orthodox restrictions on the role of women.

Still others balk at a theology that believes the Torah was literally delivered to Jews, as an ancient prayer puts it, “from the mouth of God by the hand of Moses.”

But for many within the Orthodox community, their faith is a liberation.

“There are lots of people in Hollywood willing to pay enormous sums of money to go to [tropical resorts],” said Rob Kurtz, 35, a Modern Orthodox Jew who is a writer on TV’s “Cosby” show. “Why? It’s quiet. You can’t be reached by phone. You go to a state of bliss.

“They’re paying tens of thousands of dollars to experience, in essence, Shabbat. And it’s right there, every week.”

“The world looks at us like we’re from the Stone Age,” said Nachum Fishman, a 61-year-old Hasidic nursing home administrator, as he sat on a recent Saturday night at his Borough Park home, dressed in a black caftan and a fur hat and surrounded by four of his children and more than 15 grandkids.

“But this creates cohesiveness, love, warmth--and real family.”

Renewing Focus on Spirituality

Once, many of the most creative Jewish minds in the country sought to create that kind of cohesiveness through models of Jewish identity based on ethnicity, not religion. But those models have shown little staying power.

Today, the most vibrant experimentation revolves around spirituality.

“There is a wild search--some creative, some foolish, some erudite, some superficial--to find a way to re-enchant Judaism,” said David Wolpe, rabbi at Los Angeles’ Sinai Temple.

Skeptics agree with Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, the UCLA director of Hillel, the nationwide campus outreach project. “The current quest for spirituality . . . seems to be, at its best, a desire for more celebration. It lacks the discipline and the understanding which is provided by [Jewish] tradition,” Seidler-Feller said.

But advocates of experimentation say Judaism has little choice.

“America is in the middle of a great religious awakening,” said Ron Wolfson, a vice president of the University of Judaism. “The synagogues have been slow on the uptake.”

In particular, he says, Jewish institutions have been slower than Christian mega-churches to reach out to the spiritual needs of adults, rather than children.

A few years ago, Wolfson helped launch a nationwide project, Synagogue 2000, aimed at changing that. “If we still esteem Plato, Shakespeare and Beethoven, it is because they directed their genius at adults. We should value Judaism, too, but only if it defies being reduced to a comic book plot line or an hourlong youth group program,” a Synagogue 2000 vision statement states.

The B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in New York is one model.

Prayers there are not just in Hebrew and English; sometimes they’re in Arabic. At a recent service on Friday night, the music came not from an organ, but from a mandolin, a violin and bongo drums. Congregants danced in the aisles.

B’nai Jeshurun’s early Friday service usually draws about 700 people; the later service--popular with singles--attracts a standing-room-only crowd of 1,200 into a nearby church that can hold that many people.

The draw goes well beyond meeting a potential mate; worship at B’nai Jeshurun “touches your soul in a place you don’t even know is missing,” said therapist Linda White.

The 16 participants in Synagogue 2000 aim to copy that feeling. Two are in Southern California--Temple Isaiah, a Reform synagogue on Los Angeles’ Westside, and Congregation Ner Tamid, a Conservative shul in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Last year at Ner Tamid, the focus was on prayer--what it is, how to make it meaningful. The Saturday service now includes a prayer written by someone in the congregation, said Rabbi Ron Shulman, the congregation’s 42-year-old leader.

This year, part of the focus is about what it means to join the synagogue--”the first year ought to be free,” Shulman said--and breaking down the congregation into “Jewish journey groups,” small groups of people with common interests, such as studying together or visiting the sick.

Some innovators, meanwhile, are trying to inspire that same feeling outside the synagogue.

In Southern California, newly married couples are eligible for a free weekend at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, a 3,100-acre retreat in Simi Valley.

The only condition: Couples had to have been married by a rabbi. The deceptively modest Brandeis goal: to celebrate the Sabbath, share a Jewish experience, make friends with whom to share more Jewish experiences.

“They emphasize some of the facets people might not immediately associate with Judaism: music, dance, arts,” said Nancy Steiner, who attended one Brandeis weekend in March. “They open people’s eyes to possibilities.”

One slightly startling possibility now advanced by many Jewish thinkers is that intermarriage could just as easily be opportunity as danger.

“If I had not married a non-Jew, I’m not sure I would have gone on that quest to figure out what it means to be Jewish,” said Anita Diamant, who went on to write a series of books on Jewish practice.

The focus is shifting away from discouraging intermarriage toward cultivating Jewishness in interfaith children.

“There may be 600,000 kids in the United States who aren’t being raised Jewishly. If we could get 70%, or even 50% . . . that’s 300,000 kids,” said Steven Foster, a Denver rabbi.

He founded a program to offer two years of free Jewish education to interfaith families; a University of Denver report found that 67% of participants chose to continue Jewish study after graduating.

A Strong Pull at Times of Transition

A key theory behind the new experiments is that the potential for a commitment to some form of Judaism is almost always present.

Nina Friedman, the 34-year-old manager of a Houston deli, is a case in point. She wore her Easter Bunny earrings two weeks ago to mark the Christian holiday, but hanging always around her neck is a large pressed-gold Star of David that belonged to her mother’s father.

“This is my prize possession,” she said, lifting the star on its chain to show it off. “It means Judaism. It means my grandfather.”

Only about four out of 10 Jews belong to a synagogue at any one time, but studies repeatedly have shown that between 75% and 85% of American Jews belong to a synagogue at some point in the course of their lives--if only to provide their children with a bare-bones grounding in Jewish rites and values.

Predictably, perhaps, Jewish sentiment tends to well up at important times of transition. This was true for Lisa Eaton and her father at her wedding--and for Eva Mae Schulman’s family at her baby-naming as well. It will take years, in both cases, to discover whether the emotions of the moment lead to a Jewish way of life.

When Fred Carroll proposed, after the couple had dated for three years, Eaton never thought of declining because of his faith. Yet she insisted on having a rabbi officiate with his family pastor. She needed God--her people’s God--to be a member of the wedding.

Lisa’s 52-year-old father contributed his own surge of feeling. He offered Lisa her mother’s Hebrew Bible to carry down the aisle. And on the day before the wedding, Steve Eaton suddenly pointed out, “We forgot the yarmulkes.”

Lisa was startled. Ordinarily, her father never covered his silver hair with the skullcap, a trademark of more observant leanings.

He went out and bought five dozen so he could offer one to anyone who wanted to wear one. He took the first for himself.

At the newlyweds’ two-bedroom apartment in a gray clapboard building at Gastonia’s edge, no crucifix or Jesus portrait is part of the scene. But neither is there much of a visible Jewish presence--just a tiny menorah on a living room shelf, half-hidden behind a stuffed dog and a framed photograph. The one Steve Eaton gave them is still packed in its white box, destined to stay there until Hanukkah. “It’s so huge,” Lisa said.

How to raise the children they plan remains unresolved. They are inclined to let any children make their own decisions.

At first glance, Eva Mae Schulman’s religious identity appears less complicated. But it may not be.

She is the child of two parents born Jewish--Feldman in the Chicago area and Schulman from Cincinnati. They do not currently belong to a synagogue, but lean toward joining up--eventually--and joining in.

When they married, Schulman was the more observant of the two. “I’ve actually learned a lot from him,” said Feldman. “I’ve come to appreciate some of the basic things about the holidays. He refreshes my memory.”

At the same time, over the years, Schulman got in touch with his inner skeptic. “With all due respect to those Jews who have chosen to follow the letter of the Torah,” he said, “those of us who believe in questioning are not wrong either.”

And as they think about Eva Mae’s future, they don’t necessarily foresee a bat mitzvah, a confirmation, a Jewish husband for their little girl.

Yet again, 10 years into marriage, there they were at the baby naming. Schulman explains it this way: “I do believe there are times when it’s incumbent upon me to be the bearer of the torch, the bearer of the flame.”