Jewish Every Day:  Feeling Jewish
Yom Kippur Sermon, September 22, 2007
Rabbi Bruce Kadden

The New York Times recently ran a review of a book which claims that the reason that the Democratic party has been losing most national elections over the past 25 years is that they have been appealing to the rational part of voters’ minds, rather than to their emotions.  According to Drew Weston, a professor of psychology at Emory University in his book The Political Brain:  the Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, voters rely upon emotion to drive the decision-making process and reach conclusions that make them feel good. 

I am not sure if emotions and feelings are important in the political decision making process, but I am certain that they are crucial when it comes to religion.  In order for religion to be effective, it must be able to touch us on an emotional level.  A religion must generate feelings of joy and gratitude and must provide guidance to deal with feelings of sadness, anger, and outrage that are part of life.

Now, for most of our history, Judaism did a good job of nurturing feelings and emotions and channeling them appropriately.  Reading the psalms, for example, one can feel the despair of the author who, having witnessed the destruction of the First Temple, wrote, “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept for thee, Zion…. How can we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil?  If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither; let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you…” (Psalms 137:1, 4-5).  One can also feel the utter joy of the psalmist who insisted that we praise God with the blast of the horn, with harp and lyre, with timbrel and dance and resounding cymbals.

We feel David’s pain when he laments the death of his son:  “My son Absalom!  O my son, my son Absalom!  If only I had died instead of you!  O Absalom my son, my son.” (II Samuel 19:1)  And we can identify with the joy of Naomi as a son is born to Ruth who will perpetuate the name of her deceased husband and serve to sustain and renew her in her old age.

Throughout history Jews celebrated triumphs with great joy and ecstasy and mourned losses with great sadness and lamentation.  We wore our emotions on our sleeve and didn’t try to hide them or temper them.

But along came the Enlightenment, which extolled the value of the dispassionate, rational mind.  Suddenly, reason was in and emotion was out.  Judaism –especially Reform Judaism—was strongly influenced by the Enlightenment.  Only rituals that could be rationally justified by 19^th and then 20^th century standards of reason could be maintained.  Worship, the earlier Reformers insisted, needed to more like 19^th century formal Protestantism than medieval Judaism.  Rabbis tried, many quite successfully, to reach Jews through their minds, rather than their hearts.

This approach to Judaism lasted well into the 20^th century, and only began falling by the wayside when significant numbers of Jewish young adults began looking elsewhere for their religious/emotional fulfillment.  Over the last 40 years Reform Judaism has attempted to recover its emotional heritage and restore a healthy balance between the intellectual and emotional approaches to Judaism.

If Judaism is going to survive and thrive in the 21^st century, it is clear that Jews must feel Jewish every day.  We must nurture and encourage emotional connection to Judaism and to the Jewish people.

This task is not as easy as it seems.  For it is one thing to teach the basic facts about Judaism; it is something else to teach an appreciation for those facts.  It is one thing to explain how one does a particular ritual; it is something else to instill a deep feeling of wanting to do that ritual. 

This morning, as I conclude my series of High Holy Day sermons on Jewish Every Day, I want to offer some comments on feeling Jewish every day.

Now, for some Jews, feeling Jewish every day is quite natural.  They have developed a deep emotional attachment to Judaism and the Jewish people from their earliest days and have maintained the deep emotional ties throughout their lives. 

On Wednesday evening I attended the annual Seattle Jewish Federation dinner with Barbara.  The guest speaker was Rob Reiner of All in the Family fame, now a noted film producer and director and also a philanthropist.  Someone asked him about how Judaism affects him, and he said that it is a part of who he is; despite being raised in a secular Jewish home where the family had Passover seders but little else, he developed a strong Jewish identity and feels Jewish every day.

But for increasing numbers of Jews, feeling Jewish every day is not natural.  Some Jews were raised Jewish, but never had experiences that nurtured their emotional attachment to Judaism.  Other Jews may have had an emotional attachment at one time, but no longer feel the strong connection that they once felt. 

And then, of course, there are those who were not born into Judaism, but who came to Judaism later in life.  Charleen Neely discovered Judaism as a teenager.  Her father was an English Protestant and her mother was from a Catholic Hispanic family that settled in New Mexico.  The Catholic Church did not recognize their marriage, so her mother left the church and Charleen was not raised with any religion.  She writes, “At thirteen, I felt there was a spiritual hole in my life.  I started asking my friends if I could go to services with them.  I went to all kinds, but each felt uncomfortable because I didn’t believe in Jesus.  It made no sense to me, and I was brought up not to close my mind.”

Her mother suggested that she go to synagogue with a Jewish friend.  Charleen writes, “the minute I walked in, it was like, holy smokes.  This was home.  This was people caring about each other, welcoming each other, hugging!  The pronouns in the service struck me, too.  Christian prayer has to do with the singular:  MY personal salvation.  ‘I’ and ‘me’ are all over the service.  In the synagogue, everything was ‘our’ and ‘we.’  There was a sense of community, responsibility.  And family was predominantly part of Jewish theology and life.  You’re not alone.”

Charleen immediately felt at home in the synagogue and at 15 completed her conversion to Judaism.  But it was not until she was an adult that she discovered that her mother’s family was descended from crypto-Jews who had converted to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition, but continued to secretly practice Judaism.  “It’s a big responsibility:  five hundred years and now I find myself home,”  she concludes.

Charleen is one of a number of Jews whose stories are told in the book Suddenly Jewish:  Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover their Jewish Roots.  Some of them come from crypto-Jewish families like Charleen; others were hidden during the Holocaust and did not discover their Jewish roots until much later.  Still others were children of Holocaust survivors who hid their Jewish identity from them or children who had been adopted and only later learned that their birth parents were Jewish.

Not all of them immediately feel at home in Judaism as Charleen did, but many of them do feel an emotional connection to Judaism that can only be explained by the fact that they had Jewish ancestors.  And during my years as a rabbi I have worked with quite a number of individuals who have had similar feelings.  Converting to Judaism was not about a new journey, but about coming home.  Even if they could not be certain that they had Jewish ancestors, something about Judaism felt so familiar and so right that it was as if they had already experienced it.

These individuals know what it means to feel Jewish.  They know what it means to have a visceral connection to Judaism.  Many Jews who choose Judaism, however, do not have this natural feeling.  They discover Judaism for a variety of reasons; they might be attracted to the emphasis on community or family which Charleen discovered, or to the traditions or rituals.  They can learn about all these in a book or from observing others.  But they cannot easily learn to feel Jewish. 

Rather, Jewish feeling is something that must develop naturally over a long period of time, often many years.  They must create for themselves a bank of Jewish memory that will make the unfamiliar familiar and –in time—turn what was once a perfunctory ritual into a deeply meaningful experience. 

A woman who converted to Judaism said that the first time that she lit Shabbat candles she thought she was acting, playing the role of a Jewish woman who was lighting the candles.  But over the course of years, doing the ritual week in and week out, it became familiar and meaningful, and she was no longer acting, but was completely immersed in the experience as if she had been doing it her whole life.

That is the power of ritual, if we have the discipline and commitment to the ritual on a regular basis and the patience to allow its meaning and emotional connection to naturally evolve.  This is easier for rituals that we can do day in and day out, but much more difficult for holiday-related rituals that we might do only once a year.

But observing the rituals is the beginning of creating memories, the start of developing the feelings and emotions that are important for maintaining and developing a life-long commitment to Judaism.

Feelings and emotions cannot be learned from reading a book, but that does not mean that they cannot be taught.  Jewish summer camps are wonderful places for teaching feelings and emotions. 

One of the means of doing so is with programs that directly pull at the heart strings and stir emotions.  Some programs attempt to simulate what it would have been like to be a Jew in the Warsaw ghetto or among those smuggled into Palestine during British rule or a Jew attempting to celebrate Passover in the Soviet Union.  Most NFTY summer programs begin in Eastern Europe; after visiting Concentration Camps and historical Jewish centers, the youth are brought to Israel by boat, simulating the journey that many Jews took after the Holocaust.

These programs are designed to go right for the gut, to immerse the participants in the experience so that they actually feel what it would have been like to have been part of it.  When successful, participants come away with not only an intellectual understanding of the historical event or time period, but an emotional connection to the Jews who lived then and to Judaism.

In addition to such programs, camps create an atmosphere which encourages the honest expression of feelings and emotions.  Whether it is the joy of a rousing Shabbat song session, the beauty of havdalah under a star-lit sky or the bittersweet emotion of the closing friendship circle with nary a dry eye, these experiences leave lasting impressions which do more to develop Jewish identity than almost anything else we can do.

Certain aspects of these types of programs can be brought into the religious school classroom.  At one time, the theory of Jewish education seemed to be that if we just filled our students with enough Jewish information:  dates, personalities, rituals, we would assure their future commitment to Judaism.  But that approach soon gave way to an approach which recognized that it was important that Jewish education not only be cognitive, but be affective as well. 

In other words, at least as important as teaching the facts –and many educators would say even more important—is conveying the feelings.  Doing so begins with a teacher who cares about Judaism and cares about his or her students, a teacher who shares his or her love of Judaism with the students.  Joel Grishaver, a leading Jewish educator, is often asked for a good Jewish program for teenagers.  His stock answer is:  the programs are not what is important, the teacher is.  Find a teacher who is passionate about Judaism and can relate well to teenagers and almost any subject will be meaningful.

Once you have such teachers, you need a curriculum that reflects the value of affective education.  For example, just as important as the students learning the stories and values reflected in the Torah is their learning to cherish the Torah as a source of values and inspiration.  Just as important as learning the people and places of modern Israel is developing a love for the land and people of Israel.  Just as important as teaching students how to live a Jewish life is teaching students why to live a Jewish life.  While it is more challenging to design a curriculum that addresses these concerns, the reward is students who are passionate about Judaism and committed to living Jewish lives.

For many adults, feeling Jewish every day is more challenging.  Some Jews naturally have a deep emotional connection to Judaism.  Just being with other Jews feels different.  But for many Jewish adults, these feelings are not natural.  They are often ambivalent about Judaism; some may have even developed negative emotional feelings toward Jews or Judaism due to unpleasant experiences as a youth or younger adult.

I will never forget the time students in an Introduction to Judaism class were introducing themselves and one young man who was there with his non-Jewish fiancée said that if I did not smack his hand with a ruler when we were learning Hebrew, it would be the first time that did not occur.  Many adults bear similar emotional scars due to unpleasant educational experiences.  Other adults were raised in homes where one or both parents were ambivalent or even hostile toward Judaism and have absorbed such feelings themselves.  And still others witnessed the hypocrisy of Jews who embraced Jewish rituals but who lived unethical Jewish lives.

There is no easy solution to dealing with negative or ambiguous feelings toward Judaism.  At one time or another all of us have had unpleasant Jewish experiences; some have learned to deal with them better than others.  When I have a less than pleasant experience, I remind myself that this person does not speak for Judaism or does not represent all Jews.  Even if it is a significant Jewish institution, I simply say there are other Jewish groups or organizations.

Through my years as a rabbi, I have encountered many people who have had unpleasant experiences.  Some were quite traumatic, and I could easily understand the person’s hesitation to become involved with a synagogue again.  But, to be honest, others seemed relatively trivial and it appeared that the person was using it as an excuse for not becoming involved.

I would often think to myself:  if he had a similar experience at a bank or a health club or a particular store, he might not go to that particular bank or health club or store again, but he certainly would not refuse to set foot in any bank, health club or store.  Too often, a Jew who has a bad experience in one synagogue will not set foot in any synagogue for years, if ever again. 

It is unfortunate that we allow one individual or a single institution to control us in this way.  All of us, sooner or later, have such experiences.  It might be something that someone says or does that upsets us.  We do not have to allow such behavior to affect us, however.  While we cannot control our initial feelings, we can control our response and we can refuse to allow someone else to have control over us.  I have seen people who have been deeply hurt and offended by the actions of others, often justifiably so, gather the strength to put it behind them and refuse to allow one person or one incident to affect their participation in the synagogue and Jewish life.

Hopefully, for most of us, our negative experiences will be few and far between.  But in order to feel Jewish, we need to have positive Jewish experiences.  These are created by families celebrating Shabbat and holidays together, by Jews who may not have other family members in the area, but who come together as friends or in chaverot to celebrate holidays or share Jewish experiences. 

Often the most meaningful and lasting Jewish experiences are in large groups.  I look forward to the opportunities to attend conferences, such as the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education, which was held in Seattle a couple of summers ago.  There is something about more than a thousand committed Jewish educators coming together to learn and celebrate being Jewish.

This December the URJ will hold its national biennial convention in San Diego.  This conference is an incredible opportunity to learn from other Jewish professional and lay leaders from across the country and to join thousands of other Jews in a Shabbat service.  There are increasing opportunities for adults to learn about and celebrate Judaism in a retreat setting such as Kesher which is held each Labor Day weekend on Vashon Island. 

Feeling Jewish every day begins by creating Jewish experiences one day at a time.  It is nurtured when we have the opportunities to share in Jewish celebrations with others and to come together as a community in solidarity. 

On this Yom Kippur, we pray that we are able to develop a deep emotional connection to Judaism and the Jewish people so that we truly will be able to feel Jewish every day.

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