Vive la difference: The event flier
Last Thursday night, NYU hosted a debate between Birthright
Israel founder Michael Steinhardt, rabbi and TV personality Shmuley Boteach,
and law professor Noah Feldman on the question “Are Jews different?” But as commenter agenious put it over in the Noah Feldman thread, what took place wasn’t really a
debate. (I suspect agenius and I
don’t agree on much, but we’re together on that.) It was more like a chance for three very different Jews to
air their beliefs about Judaism, followed by a mini-drubbing of Noah Feldman by
the NYU audience.
Rabbi Shmuley, who spoke first, testified to the virtues of Torah-based Jewish values. I can't top Jewlicious's hilarious description, so I'm just going to quote it: "Shmuley Boteach is, and I do not exaggerate, an evangelical Protestant minister with a beard and hand gestures." The girl sitting next to me, wearing a sensible skirt and loafers that I can only describe as tsniut, leaned over and whispered “Isn’t he great? I was at his house for dinner last Shabbat.”
Michael Steinhardt, up next, argued that Jewish values are indeed worthy, but not because of the Torah. He believes that Jews developed a series of core values over the centuries: education, tzedakah, belief in the here and now, a beneficial sense of outsiderness, a strong sense of group responsibility, and an ability to succeed any society based on individualism and meritocracy. These six values make Jews special, he explained, so we can really scrap the rest, including the Torah. At this most of the crowd gasped, and the NYU freshman in front of me put down her Sidekick and reapplied her lip gloss.
Noah Feldman: Dapper!
Noah Feldman was up next. (“He’s so cute!” said my new
Orthodox friend. She was
right—if Tiger Beat made pin-up posters of Jewish intellectuals, he’d be
their best seller.) He put forth a
third opinion: There’s no point in preserving Jewish values if they’re not
worth saving. Rather than argue
about how best to sell them to the 12 million unaffiliated Jews of the world,
we should be examining them critically, to see what good they do. “We are not in the business of
preservation for its own sake,” he said, “at least we ought not to be.”
To me, this makes perfect sense. I should reveal my biases: I’m one of those 12 million unaffiliated Jews. My family belongs to a Reform synagogue which I attend twice a year on the high holidays because, like a lot of Jewish girls, I’m fairly close with my parents. I had a Bat Mitzvah the year My So-Called Life debuted; the latter had a much greater influence on my adolescence. I’ve tried Shabbat on occasion and I basically enjoy it, but I enjoy bacon-wrapped shrimp too. My mind is open: I’m curious about Judaism and I think about it constantly. But nothing has ever successfully convinced me that a life of Jewish observance would be better than my current secular existence.
Both Shmuley and Steinhardt, it seemed to me, were preaching to the converted—or the unconverted, I suppose, in Steinhardt’s case. Shmuley’s points seemed tautological: The Torah is great because it’s great. Steinhardt seemed to be participating in a different discussion altogether; he was essentially arguing for a re-definition of “unaffiliated,” since the Jewish values on his list don’t require any kind of behavior change for most of us prodigal types. Only Feldman took the conversation away from describing Judaism and towards engaging with it.
The Jewish community's best mustache: SteinhardtI may have been the only unaffiliated Jew in the audience,
though, because everyone seemed less interested in discussing Judaism’s role in
contemporary society than in Noah Feldman’s family life. The moderator started the pile-on by
asking a spectacularly wimpy question about a legal case Feldman had handled
between two different members of the Jewish community. At the time, Feldman had said it was a
shame this intra-Jewish conflict couldn’t be resolved without bringing in the
Federal government. “So,” asked
the moderator, “when is it appropriate to bring inside Jewish issues to the
outside world?”
“Nothing is ‘inside’ anymore,” Feldman replied. If you’re proud of your community, you should be public about what takes place there. Also, he added, it was pretty obvious that the real issue at stake wasn’t the intra-Jewish legal case he’d handled a few years ago; it was his infamous New York Times article.
An effusive 2004 NYU grad stood up to gush about Birthright. He said he’d been to the recent reunion, and the whole room burst into applause—I guess a lot of people had been there. On the bus on the way up to the Steinhardt estate, he’d been struck by what he described as a spiritual experience: a sudden, overwhelming certainty that someday he would have his own kids, and Birthright would send them to Israel too. “You’re doing a good job,” he concluded to Steinhardt, “and it’s working.”
Then he turned to Feldman. “My question is for you. How are you going to raise your children?”
“Ooooooooooh,” said everyone in the room. This was the Jewish equivalent of smacking your dueling partner with a silk-lined glove.
Feldman replied that of course he was raising his kids Jewish—it’s a part of who he is. But he’s also raising them in his wife’s tradition.
Preach on: Rev ShmuleyThe girl next to me chose this moment to whisper that she
has a friend who thinks it’s evil to raise as Jewish the children of a
non-Jewish mother, because when they turn 18 they’ll find out that they’re not
real Jews. “Can’t they convert?” I
asked her. Just like that, our
friendship ended.
Agenius wonders why Feldman wants to be accepted by his community. He’s a success in every other aspect of his life—Shmuley compared him to Einstein, another intermarried Jew who did his people proud—so why does he want to be a star among Jews, too?
This question may have been intended rhetorically, but it’s a good one. Why would someone embrace both Judaism and a non-Jewish spouse? Perhaps because, for most of us, Judaism is only once facet of our fractured 21st-century personalities. We’re not used to swearing total allegiance to any single identity, and we see no reason to join organizations that ask us to give up every other part of our selves. That’s why unaffiliated Jews don’t show up to debates about Jewish values—because they’ve come to believe that you can’t engage curiously with Judaism without becoming a Super-Jew. (I see this all the time as a Jewcy editor recruiting writers; I ask them if they want to participate in a professional relationship with the magazine, and they react as if I’m trying to get them join a cult.) Of course it’s risky to ask secular Jews to participate in honest discussions about Judaism; they might discover that they don’t like it. But to me it seems like a worthwhile pursuit – much more useful than fretting about Noah Feldman’s personal life.
* * *Past Jewcy coverage of Noah Feldman:
Q&A with the Author of "Orthodox Paradox"
JTA Misses the Point on Feldman
The Rules of Engagement
The Feldman Flare-Up