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New Jersey Jewish News Story
The barber of Seville? What does he charge?
Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief
In a 1990 episode of Seinfeld, Jerry and George meet the great Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez. George is impressed when he learns that Hernandez is a Civil War buff.
“I’d love to be a Civil War buff,” says George. “What do you have to do to be a buff?”
I kind of feel the same way about opera. I think it’s something I might enjoy. I know it’s something I’m supposed to enjoy. Like George, however, I can’t see myself taking the next step and actually going to the opera. I’m intimidated by the shlep, the ticket prices, and, truth be told, having to endure the three hours of warbling and convoluted plots that surround about 30 minutes of good stuff.
I admit it: I’m a Philistine. But I’m also a demographic, one that the officials at the Metropolitan Opera are eager, even desperate, to embrace. The world’s largest opera house is plagued by a shrinking audience and budget woes. The average attendee is 62.
The Met’s new general manager, Peter Gelb, hopes to turn things around. He’ll be replacing longtime g.m. Joseph Volpe in August. And according to The New York Times, he’s already announced moves to “reconceive the Met as an institution more open to popular influences and more attractive to a wider public.”
In the world of opera, his plans seem audacious. More new productions. High-profile directors from theater and film. An operatic tribute to the Three Stooges starring the Three Tenors (okay, I made that one up).
Gelb says he wants to “take this great institution that had grown somewhat isolated artistically and reconnect it to the world.” As the Times explained, Gelb feels “the old formula — counting on dedicated opera-goers to fill the house for standard productions — no longer worked.”
The risk is that serious opera buffs and critics, who have nurtured opera and its traditions and are the core of its audience, will feel alienated. Says critic Martin Bernheimer, “What will he do with the core audience while he’s courting the new audience?”
So what does all this have to do with Conservative Judaism? (And thanks for asking.) According to the journal Judaism, just about everything. The latest issue of the journal, published by the American Jewish Congress, includes a symposium with 17 mostly young rabbis from the Conservative movement. In his introduction, Jack Wertheimer, provost at the movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, also describes an institution in decline. Membership is eroding. After phenomenal growth 50 years ago, Conservative Judaism has seen 35 percent of its offspring defect to the Reform movement and 9 percent to Orthodoxy. While the Left offers theological pluralism and the Right “halachic fidelity,” JTS and the rabbis it trains are struggling with modern pressures — from women, gays, the intermarried — and the dictates of Halacha, or Jewish law. And like the Met, it is in the midst of a major transition at the top: JTS is looking for a successor to its longtime chancellor, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch.
The chancellor faces an almost identical dilemma to Gelb’s. Rabbi David G. Lerner describes the two “major camps” in the movement: “One sector claims that the focus should be on the core, contending that we must strengthen our most committed members and build a halachic movement. The other, while less monolithic, espouses more creativity and a less firm commitment to tradition.”
Almost every rabbi in the symposium thinks the movement should appeal to both camps — reach out to the margins and strengthen the core — although Lerner acknowledges that resources are limited. Rabbi Carl M. Perkins at first sounds like Gelb when he writes that Conservative synagogues must be open to “those who wish to connect with Judaism in a variety of ways.” He lists meditation, social action, Israeli culture, and “of course…religious practices.” But he could be Volpe when he adds that “entry-level programming must not done at the expense of the more learned and/or committed members of the community.”
Actually, none of the writers is a Gelb, describing the kinds of risky gestures that will get folks to think differently about Conservative Judaism. The changes they prescribe are theological, conceptual, philosophical.
Theory is well and good, but will anyone on the inside or outside notice if the movement adopts the “sane traditionalism” of Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, or the “God-centered” approach of Rabbi Susan Grossman?
I bet most of these rabbis are doing some daring things in their synagogues. And I’d like to hear about them. Is anyone looking at a way within Halacha to turn the three, sometimes three-and-a-half-hour Saturday morning service into an experience attractive beyond a core of die-hard daveners? I used to attend an Orthodox shul in Israel that broke halfway through the service for Kiddush and Torah study classes. After the “intermission” we’d return to the service — and still get out in under two-and-a-half hours.
Some Conservative synagogues tolerate a few new tunes by the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. But is anyone commissioning younger composers to write new melodies and encouraging cantors to mix things up now and then?
And why have Conservative (and Reform) rabbis ceded the outreach turf to the Lubavitch? I’ve seen Conservative rabbis go red in the face when a new Chabad house opens in town. But if JTS is convinced it has a product more suited to contemporary Jews, where are their rabbinic shock troops willing to carry its message to exurbia?
There’s no clear frontrunner in the search for a new chancellor. When he’s announced, you can only hope he considers the words of Peter Gelb: “What I’m trying to do is to honor the aesthetic traditions of the Met while at the same time moving forward. If I were to function purely as a curator, then the Met would not continue to thrive.”
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