For decades, American Jewish leaders have sought ways to combat rising rates of intermarriage and declining rates of synagogue membership, and then lamented the apparent failures of their efforts. Daniel Gordis, an American Conservative rabbi who eventually settled in Israel to become an educator and writer, traces these problems to the hollowness of Jewish education in the U.S. since World War II:
American Jewish leaders never made the claim publicly, nor in all likelihood did they ever articulate it to themselves. Yet in retrospect, the wager they made has become clear: American Jewish leadership believed that it could fashion a variety of Judaism that would be both meaningful and sustainable with virtually no content at its core.
We, [members of the older generation]. see the result of Jewish “education” sans content most painfully when it comes to Israel. Many of us are distraught at the antipathy [many members of the] younger generation feel toward what we see as a national liberation movement, but to no small degree, it’s our fault. What have we done to show them that Zionism is not a simple and uniform ideology, but a profound and ongoing conversation? What have we done to usher them into the [vibrant exchange] that was once (and in certain circles, still is) Zionist discourse? What have we taught them about the differing worldviews of the great Zionist thinkers—the [cultural nationalism of] Ahad Ha’am; Leon Pinsker, the diagnostician of the illness of European Jewry; A.D. Gordon and his belief that redemption would come from having the earth of the Land of Israel under their fingernails; Vladimir Jabotinsky, the classical liberal who opposed mainstream Zionism’s naïveté about Arabs; or Abraham Isaac Kook and his unique theological stance that allowed his Orthodoxy to embrace the revolution?
The most basic truths about Judaism are utterly unfamiliar to the Jews we claim to have educated. By the time we send them off to freshman orientation, have we ever taken their intelligence seriously? . . .
How did this play out in American Jewish life? American non-Orthodox religious leaders, increasingly shaped by academic scholarship, found themselves unable to embrace theological principles that had long been a bedrock of Jewish life. If God’s authorship of the Torah was suddenly called into question because of various formulations of the documentary hypothesis, how could one speak of the authority of the laws that emerged from the Bible, or the Talmud, or the Shulḥan Arukh?
Read more on Sapir: https://sapirjournal.org/continuity/2021/10/continuity-requires-content/