Rabbi sees kids cooling in their feeling for Israel

Jeff Salkin to speak at Temple Emanu-El

Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin

Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin will serve as scholar-in-residence at Temple Emanu-El of West Essex in Livingston April 4-6. Photo courtesy Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin

Sidebar

Meet the rabbi

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

April 03, 2008

Since Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin wrote Putting God on the Guest List: How To Reclaim the Spiritual Meaning of Your Child’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah in 1980, doing mitzvot has become fashionable, while Israel, the topic of his latest book, has become decidedly “passe.”

“Al Gore’s inconvenient truth is global warming. Our problem is a little bit of freezing. We are cooling off in terms of our relationship to Israel. It’s almost as if we have internalized the attitudes in the surrounding world, especially on college campuses,” said Salkin in a recent telephone interview from Boston.

His book, A Dream of Zion: American Jews Reflect on Why Israel Matters to Them, published by Jewish Lights in 2007, is a project he undertook as a corrective to that “cooling” trend, he said. “I edited Dream of Zion to strengthen the connection of American Jews to Israel and to give them role models for how to support Israel. There’s no orthodoxy in this book — no one approved method. There are right-wing Zionists and people critical of Israeli policy. But every person in the book wants Israel to be democratic, Jewish, and secure,” he said.

A Reform rabbi, Salkin acknowledged the trend is particularly acute among Reform Jews. “Reform Jews are statistically the least connected to Israel, they go to Israel the least, their children go to Israel the least, and they tend to be more critical of Israel,” he said.

If the connection is less visceral among this group, he also acknowledged that it is due to demographic trends, including the high numbers of non-Jews being brought into the denomination through intermarriage. “It does seem to be a smoking pistol,” he said. “It is fair to say that demographic trends in the Reform movement have put a strain upon our commitment to the larger Jewish community and people,” he said.

Salkin also pointed to the rise in “Jewish spirituality” as another culprit in the lessening of interest in Israel. “To the extent that Jewish spirituality has grown in the movement, there has been a concomitant shrinkage of Jewish peoplehood. Ethnic ties have grown strained. As we become more removed from the immigrant generation and more American, our commitment to the larger Jewish people is becoming strained.”

Salkin himself has written and edited books that focus on bringing spirituality into one’s life, including Being God’s Partner: How to Find the Hidden Link between Spirituality and Your Work.

Salkin is the founder, rabbi, and director of Kol Echad: Making Judaism Matter, a transdenominational kollel, or Jewish learning center, in Atlanta. Kol Echad was established in 2007. If this generation is less engaged with Israel, they are more focused on tzedaka.

“There’s a new hipness to altruism,” said Salkin. “I find many families increasingly interested in engaging in good works, and tzedaka. In some cases, they’re even becoming competitive with each other. The same effort that used to go into the celebration now goes into doing good works.”

And while he said he wishes the motivation were pure, he’ll take the deeds. “Even if people do good, ethical things for narcissistic reasons, they are still doing good things,” he said. He’s also thrilled that the impetus for the mitzvot often comes from the family itself, rather than as one more hoop for a young person to jump through before his or her big day.

So does Salkin think there’s still room for improvement? Yes. “I wish families were doing more things that are specifically Jewish,” he said. “Many people give to the disease of the week or to save the whales. We need to redress the imbalance between the universal and the particular. We need to remind ourselves that if we as Jews do not give to Jewish causes, who will?”

RABBI JEFFREY SALKIN will serve as scholar-in-residence at Temple Emanu-El of West Essex in Livingston April 4-6. He will speak on the Reform liturgy during Shabbat services on Friday, April 4, which begin at 8 p.m.; at a dinner Saturday evening at 6:30, he will discuss ethics in everyday life; on Sunday, 9-10:30 a.m., he will discuss reclaiming the bar and bat mitzva, based on his book Putting God on the Guest List.

All events are open to the public. The Friday night and Sunday morning programs are free; reservations are suggested for Sunday morning. The Saturday night event costs $45, $36 for Temple Emanu-El members. Reservations are required.