where are we going?

UJA-FEDERATION OF NEW YORK

The Jewish Community in 5777:

WHERE ARE WE GOING? Featuring Essays by

Dr. Erica Brown, Eric S. Goldstein, Yossi Klein Halevi, Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, and Dr. Jonathan D. Sarna

GLANCING BACK AND LOOKING AHEAD

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he High Holidays provide a sacred oasis in time, when we can pause and think about the big questions and challenges of our lives, both individually and globally. As we celebrate these holidays together, we’re given the chance to look back on the previous year and ponder the possibilities ahead. As you reflect on the past year, we hope you’ll take this time to consider the successes our community has achieved as well as the difficulties we’ve faced. And as we look ahead to the coming year, let’s resolve to work together to do better. At UJA-Federation of New York, we’re working to make the world better every day of the year. For 99 years, we have been caring for those in need, strengthening Israel, building Jewish identity, and responding to crises. We continue this work with a renewed sense of commitment as we approach our centennial year. We have a lot of work to do. Challenges ahead mean opportunities for action, and we must seize the moment. The essays within highlight some of these opportunities, as seen by significant thinkers and leaders in our community. Where are we going? How will we shape 5777? The answer is in our hands. We hope the compositions and questions in this booklet will spark meaningful conversations with family and friends, launching you into 5777 with the motivation to act and create change in your personal life and in our community as a whole. L’Shanah tovah u’metukah. May you have a sweet and joyous New Year.

REFLECTIONS ON JEWISH COMMUNITY

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e hope you enjoy the following reflections from Jewish thinkers and leaders, which are meant to evoke introspection as we contemplate the

coming year. These individuals have shared their thoughts about the challenges and opportunities facing the Jewish community, about what it means to learn from the past, how to adapt to evolving circumstances, and how to make real change in

Jeffrey A. Schoenfeld President UJA-Federation of New York

Robert S. Kapito Chair of the Board UJA-Federation of New York

ourselves and our communities.

LEANING IN AND LEANING OUT

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here we are going as a community almost always depends on where we are coming from. The past sets the context for change. Either we lean into it or we lean away, trying to make a clean break from who we are as we shape who we want to be.

Dr. Erica Brown is a writer and educator on Jewish ethics, Bible, and leadership. She is the author of ten books, including Take Your Soul to Work: 365 Meditations on Every Day Leadership, and Return: Daily Inspiration for the Days of Awe.

This season provokes us with its call for introspection. We tend to do this alone, either at prayer or in moments of mindfulness, or perhaps gathered around holiday tables, thinking about our deepest wishes for family and friends in the coming year. Although we beat our chests on Yom Kippur as individuals, our traditional prayer language is all in the plural, indicating a collective desire to transform ourselves — to use softer, more generous language and refrain from gossip, to avoid haughtiness and the taunts of the ego, to consider our relationship with God and each other. Each year, I find myself thinking of a modern set of community “Al Cheits” — the prayer that begins “For the sin which we have sinned” and then offers a long list of offenses. Here’s my list for this year:

• For our sin of treating our relationship with Israel as a marriage of convenience and not a marriage of substance.

• For our sin of not doing more to make Jewish dialogue saturated with kindness.

• For our sin of prioritizing money over meaning in Jewish organizational life.

• For our sin of not spreading enough love in the wake of domestic violence and hate crimes.

By Dr. Erica Brown • For our sin of talking about tikkun olam but not doing enough for the plight of Syrian refugees.

• For our sin of not insisting emphatically on

an American political discourse that is civil and meaningful.

Articulating these sentiments in prayer is the first step in inspiring a different future. Where are we going? Hopefully, we will deepen our relationship with Israel and bridge the increasing distance. Hopefully, we will insist on greater meaning, literacy, and civility in organized Jewish life and in the American political landscape. Hopefully, we will come together with a sense of cause and mission to attack global problems beyond our community and live what we preach. This is where I hope we are going. When the High Priest offered the annual atonement sacrifice with all its attendant solemnity, it was a formal and frightening occasion. He brought this gift on behalf of us all, a community in need of healing and change. In synagogues, we break out in song at the end of the service, signifying our shared relief that the sacrifice was accepted, giving us a chance to move on. Where are we going? It depends on our leadership, as much now as it did in ancient times. It depends on our capacity to articulate communal mistakes, be accountable for them, and to forge an optimistic and unabashedly Jewish path forward.

Hopefully, we will come together with a sense of cause and mission to attack global problems beyond our community and live what we preach. This is where I hope we are going.

RETURN TO COMMUNITY

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osh Hashanah is about teshuvah, which frequently is translated as “repentance.” In fact, teshuvah means “return.” Every year, we’re given the chance to return to the core values of our Torah and tradition, and become better versions of ourselves.

Eric S. Goldstein is CEO of UJA-Federation of New York.

For 5777, I believe our collective challenge is to return to community. Now, more than ever, we need to repair the fraying bonds among our people, recognizing there will always be dissent in Jewish circles. Indeed, the Talmud, one of the cornerstones of our tradition, is a compendium of canonized disagreements. Our rabbinic sages saw intrinsic value in tracking and recording differences. They may have decided for one view over another, but fundamentally believed that discussing and embracing disagreement strengthened — and even united — us as a people. We need to recapture that willingness to embrace difference and hear voices that may be vastly different than our own. Considering that Jews represent less than .2 percent of the world’s population, we can only succeed by addressing the challenges and opportunities ahead as a united community. And so, at the dawn of UJA-Federation’s second century, I invite Jews of all backgrounds and orientations to return to community and join with us in shaping what comes next. For more than 99 years, UJA-Federation has served as a safety net for the global Jewish people and all New Yorkers. We’ve helped influence modern Jewish history on a massive scale — settling and caring for millions of Jewish immigrants and their families on these shores, partnering in the building of the modern State of Israel, rescuing Jews from the four corners of the world, and creating the foundation for a vibrant Jewish future.

By Eric S. Goldstein Today, UJA-Federation continues to represent a unique expression of collective action, uniting our community in all its diversity around our most important opportunities and challenges. Together, we can make certain that far fewer of our neighbors go hungry. We can stand up to the scourge of anti-Semitism and empower European Jewish communities and students on college campuses. We can care for Holocaust survivors, many already living at or near the poverty level, as their needs increase. We can make certain that every child has the ability to experience Jewish summer camp and other transformational Jewish experiences. And we can invest in Israel to ensure its vibrant and thriving future. That’s how together we can create the Jewish future we want for ourselves and for our children and grandchildren. And so, this Rosh Hashanah, let us return to each other and the community that gives us strength, awakening the possibility of all the good we can do together this year and in the years ahead.

Together we can create the Jewish future we want for ourselves and for our children and grandchildren.

THE CHALLENGE OF PRAYER

P Yossi Klein Halevi is an author and a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His latest book is Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation.

rayer, the capacity to surrender self-consciousness and speak with God, is the living heart of religion. And yet for much of the Jewish people today, prayer is an inaccessible language, an invitation not to inwardness and expansiveness but a reminder of spiritual awkwardness. And with the High Holidays, the inadequacy of our prayer life becomes, for many, acute. Aside from pockets of devotional life, contemporary Jewish prayer is often impoverished — burdened by formal liturgy, an excess of words. The crisis of Jewish prayer is a reflection of the crisis of Judaism. The problem is hardly confined to the liberal denominations; many Orthodox Jews pray by rote, substituting faithfulness to religion for a personal relationship with God. There are compelling reasons for our spiritual decline — the inevitable result of two centuries of secularization and the Holocaust. Perhaps the fact that Jews are still trying to pray at all is itself a kind of miracle.

By Yossi Klein Halevi Here is Ehud Banai, arguably Israel’s most beloved poet-singer, comparing prayer to speaking into a broken telephone, “Are you there?” he asks God in his song, “Aneh Li,” answer me. “I don’t understand the language You speak/ Perhaps this is a wrong number, maybe a malfunction/ Maybe we should hang up and try again.” Or Shuli Rand, a well-known actor and now popular singer whose songs focus on spiritual struggle, “Master of the universe, if we can speak frankly/Sometimes I have no strength to live in Your world.” When prayer becomes elusive, a Jew prays for the ability to pray. “I want to pray,” sings Naomi Hashmonai. “And to argue with You in a still small voice/Afterward we will be silent with a great thunderous voice/And then let me fall/ into You.”

How, then, to pray in an age of doubt? How to stand before a God many in the pews aren’t sure is listening, or even there?

We need to relearn how to pray. Not simply learn how to navigate the prayer book but also how to free ourselves from the prayer book — how to speak to God in our own words, as Israeli musicians are now attempting.

In recent years, inspiration has come from an unexpected source: Israeli rock music. Many of Israel’s leading musicians are writing songs that combine the traditional liturgy of Jewish communities from the Arab world and Eastern Europe with their own language of devotion, creating, in effect, a new genre of contemporary Jewish prayer.

This is music created by Israelis but not only for Israelis. It is Jewish prayer for the whole Jewish people. I recently taught this music to a group of American rabbis at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Many of the participants were galvanized; how, they asked, do we bring this music and sensibility into our synagogues? How can we encourage our congregants to speak to God in their own words?

This is not the Jewish equivalent of “Christian rock,” an unequivocal celebration of faith. Such Jewish music certainly exists, mostly in the haredi world. But this new Israeli devotional music emphasizes spiritual struggle — at once postmodern and deeply Jewish.

The renaissance of Jewish spirituality that is breaking through Israeli rock music could help us create a new language that Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews can share. The result would not only be a deepening of ties between Israel and the Diaspora but also, perhaps, a renewal of our capacity for an inner devotional life.

How, then, to pray in an age of doubt? How to stand before a God many in the pews aren’t sure is listening, or even there?

REMEMBER, ZAKHOR : LOOKING BACK AND LOOKING OOKING FORWARD

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emember, Zakhor.

Dr. Deborah Lipstadt is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. The recently released film, Denial, which tells the story of her libel defense in London against Holocaust denier David Irving, is based on her book Denial: Holocaust History on Trial (2016), originally published as History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005).

That word, that act, is one of the central themes of the Days of Awe. The Talmud’s name for what we call Rosh Hashanah is Yom Hazikaron, the Day of Remembrance. One of the main sections of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy is called Zikhronot, Remembrances. Originally, Yizkor, the prayer memorializing our loved ones who have died, and whose name is derived from the verb zakhor, was said only on Yom Kippur because that was the day for remembrances. This emphasis on remembering is striking because Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the only holidays in the Jewish calendar that are not tied to a historical event. Pesach concerns the Exodus, Shavuot the events at Mt. Sinai, and Sukkot 40 years of wandering in the desert. In contrast, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are ostensibly focused on the year to come — on the future, on what we hope to do and aim to be in the next twelve months. It may seem strange then that remembering plays such a big role during the High Holidays. So why the focus on remembering? Why look backwards when our emphasis is on moving forward? For Jews, the past is the anchor for the present. The author Philip Roth once observed, “Jews are to history as Eskimos are to ice.” True as all this may be — that remembering is built into the Jewish DNA — I don’t think it is a sufficient explanation. Jewish tradition posits that looking backwards shapes how we will look forward. The past does not determine who we are or who we will be. But the past is the raw material from which we build our future. We can’t know where we are going unless we know from whence we came. But it is important that we get a full — not a selective — picture of that history. In these days, when so many things

By Dr. Deborah Lipstadt

about Jewish life seem so bleak and when anti-Semitism seems to be more prevalent than in many decades, some people are inclined to look to the past and see only a pattern of persecution and suffering. So too in relation to contemporary Jewish life and to Israel: some among us tend only to see travails and problems facing Israel. The challenge to us, particularly now, is to look to the past and the present and see both the difficult and the good, to look to Israel and see the difficulties and the successes, to look back at this past year and see both where we have failed and where we have succeeded, to contemplate what we have done well — particularly in terms of good deeds and helping others — and where we can still do better. We remember the past because it contains the roots of who we are as individuals, families, and a people. But we also remember the past because it contains the seeds of what we shall be in the future. May this be a blessed year; a year where remembrances of the past help us secure a brighter future.

The past does not determine who we are or who we will be. But the past is the raw material from which we build our future.

FROM WORLD-WIDE PEOPLE TO FIRST-WORLD PEOPLE

W Dr. Jonathan D. Sarna is a university professor and the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History as well as chair of the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program at Brandeis University. His many books include American Judaism: A History and Lincoln and the Jews: A History (with Benjamin Shapell).  

By Dr. Jonathan D. Sarna

here once Jews were a world-wide people, an am olam, scattered “from one end of the world even unto the other,” we have become, overwhelmingly, a first-world people, living primarily in Israel and North America. As we prepare to blow the shofar this Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish people is consolidating at an unprecedented rate.

because they do not personally know them. Also, by consolidating, Judaism runs the risk of diminishing its distinctive vision and mission. It is all too easy, living in Israel and North America, to ignore the majority of the world. We may, if we are not careful, read Judaism’s social teachings exclusively within a first-world context, focusing on the world we know and ignoring the rest.

Already, according to the premier Jewish demographer Sergio DellaPergola, some 86 percent of world Jewry lives in Israel, the United States, and Canada. Add England, France, and Germany to the mix and the percentage rises to 92 percent. Today, close to 95 percent of all the world’s Jews live in first-world countries — those with advanced economies, worldwide influence, high standards of living, and abundant technology. In 1950, that was true of but 54 percent of world Jewry.

Our job, looking forward, is to enjoy the blessings that the consolidation of Jewry has brought to us, but also to be mindful of its dangers. Especially at this time of the year, let us pledge that our privileged position does not cause us to lose touch with global realities.

Life in North America and Israel offers Jews an abundance of opportunities that, especially at the start of the New Year, we have every reason to celebrate. We feel physically safe, enjoy high standards of living, and also exercise substantial power. Consolidation of Jews into a small number of countries also means that it is easier than ever before to meet, interact, learn from one another, and assist one another. At the same time, consolidation also poses grave challenges that it behooves us as a community to consider. Most importantly, the fact that more Jews live in fewer places means that the vast majority of the world’s 196 or so countries — most of them thirdworld countries — are either completely barren of Jews or house tiny communities that are unsustainable. Huge areas of today’s world show no Jewish presence whatsoever. The reason people in many of those countries suspect and even hate Jews is likely

Fittingly, the shofar that we sound on Rosh Hashanah has both a narrow and a wide end. We blow through the narrow end. The world hears us through the wide end.

We may, if we are not careful, read Judaism’s social teachings exclusively within a first world context, focusing on the world that we know and ignoring the rest.

THE BIG QUESTIONS These questions are intended to help jumpstart your thinking about joining, building, and leading community, and what it means to be part of one. How will you impact your community in 5777?

HOW

Do you define community? 

L’SHANAH TOVAH! We hope your new year is sweet. And we hope you’re inspired by these reflections.

Do the different communities in your life converge or diverge? Might you step outside your comfort zone and interact with people different from yourself? Has the community changed over time?

WHAT

Community has had the most impact on you to date? Unites our community and what divides us? Do you feel is lacking in our Jewish community — and what one thing could begin to fill the void? Role do you play in shaping or leading your community? Makes you speak up? What makes you stay silent? Do you gain from being part of your community? Are your hopes and dreams for the next generation?

WHICH

Communities do you consider yourself a part of? Leaders inspire you the most? Why?

IF

you had to pick one communal value to pass down to your children, what would that be?

At UJAFederation, we believe in the power of coming together to act on our Jewish values to make the world a better place for everyone. One person can do a lot, but together we can do even more.

For almost 100 years, UJA-Federation has been a central force addressing the issues that matter to us most as Jews and as New Yorkers. We were there when waves of Jewish immigrants first came to these shores, when a newly founded Israel required our staunch support, when our city faced unprecedented crisis in the aftermath of 9/11, and again, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. And thanks to you, we’re continuing to shape our community and our world today. We’re ensuring needy New Yorkers get on the path to selfsufficiency, helping thousands of young Jews in the former Soviet Union discover their Jewish identities, and supporting Israel in times of peace and crisis. Let’s continue doing this good work together — this year and beyond.

For more information about UJA-Federation’s work or how to get involved, contact [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

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The world’s largest local philanthropy, UJA-Federation of New York cares for Jews everywhere and New Yorkers of all backgrounds, connects people to their Jewish communities, and responds to crises — in New York, in Israel, and around the world.