According to the March 2009 report, How Spiritual Are America’s Jew?, spirituality is one of the gateways into meaningful Jewish life, a gateway that the Jewish community has neglected. The authors of the report, Steven Cohen and Lawrence Hoffman, find that Jews lack the language to talk about God. Without language to describe spiritual experiences, …
Continue reading “Nurturing the Spiritual Lives of Our Children”
(*and avoid the pitfalls of quick-fix religious consumerism) by Jeffrey K. Salkin From Reform Judaism, Fall 1995Reprinted with Permission. Everywhere you go in the Reform movement, the word on people’s lips is spirituality. It is the religious buzz word of our age. The trend towards spirituality has greatly enriched Reform Judaism, energizing a movement once …
The search for spirituality transcends the empowerment of women and Jews by choice, of course. It is inextricably linked to larger demographic changes that began to be felt in the 1960s when the first phalanx of baby-boomers came of age. Those same men and women are now in their forties, and are but one of …
By 1950, American Jews had settled down into two competing visions of what Judaism ought to be. Intermarriage between Germans and Russians veiled the divide to some extent, as did the very vastness of the eastern European numbers which overflowed into the German temples, despite their organ music, strange decorum, and other trappings of a …
What the German founders never did appreciate was the positive pull of peoplehood on the Jewish psyche. How could they? When they arrived here, their claim to belonging was precisely the fact that they were not a people at all; they were a religion. That claim had been implicit in the Enlightenment all along. Even …
It helps to have some dates in mind, but dates are arbitrary. Dating by decades is at least convenient, however, starting with our own and looking backward. Also helpful is the Bible’s generational calculus. There too we find “generations,” the generation of the flood, as the Rabbis put it, or the generation of the dispersion, …
by Dr. Lawrence A. Hoffman From the Synagogue 2000 Library Our long-term goal is the spiritualization of the North American synagogue. Whatever kind of congregation we attend, whatever our movement or ideological allegiance, we all have this in common: we are on a Jewish quest for a better tomorrow, and to judge by all the …
Continue reading “From Ethnic to Spiritual: A Tale of Four Generations”
Lawrence A. Hoffman From Reform Judaism, Fall 1994Reprinted with permission. Picture a map of North America: a web of crisscrossed lines called interstate highways, perhaps. Or is it the natural network of lakes and rivers that feed our cities and townships? Maps are simply lines joining dots, but whether the dots are points on a …
by Donna Berman From New Menorah, Fall 1995 Reprinted With Permission. “Jewish professionals” have been in a collective panic since the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey indicated that modernity is taking a toll on Jewish numbers, that there is a “strengthening of assimilatory trends…” Responding to the results of this survey as if …