by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

May 01, 2008

They sat around the library table, eight members of Oheb Shalom Congregation in South Orange, asking and answering questions about God, faith, and meaning.

“If you’re asking me if God has ever entered my life and affected me, I really can’t say that has happened,” said David Schechner.

“I experience God very often — several times a week or a month,” said physician Fred Cohen.

“Is there a God? I think so. Is it a man sitting on a chair with a beard? Absolutely not,” said Martin Bearg.

For more than an hour, they struggled with these perennial questions under the guidance of fourth-year rabbinical student Juan Mejia. They touched on prayer, on reading the Bible, and even on whether the Six-Day War involved divine intervention.

They are one of four such groups at Oheb Shalom, meeting in part in response to a Conservative movement leader’s call for a discussion about “mitzvot” and the meaning — for contemporary Conservative Jews — of being commanded. Named chancellor of the movement’s flagship Jewish Theological Seminary last year, Arnold Eisen announced the Mitzva Initiative as part of a general effort to reaffirm — and at times redefine — the centrist movement’s basic beliefs.

“Our congregation wants to give members the opportunity to have a meaningful discussion in an informal setting over issues that stem from the heart: How do we feel about God; what are our sources of faith; how do we find meaning?” said Oheb Shalom’s religious leader Rabbi Mark Cooper. “I believe this is in the spirit of what Chancellor Eisen has asked congregations to do.”

The discussions are also part of a concerted effort to integrate rabbinical students into the congregation, augmenting more traditional routes like teaching children in the congregational school.

Other congregations in the area have also crafted projects around Eisen’s initiative, including Congregation Beth El, also in South Orange, where Rabbi Francine Roston has been leading a year-long seminar focusing on a different mitzva every session.

“The Mitzva Initiative had no specific parameter; I think he wanted congregations and rabbis to talk meaningfully about what does being Jewish mean to us, and how do I relate to important aspects of being Jewish?” said Cooper.

Cooper chose to bring in rabbinical students both to serve as role models, he said, and because “they have thought very deeply about these issues.”

Although the search for God and meaning is certainly not new to religion, it is something that at least some members of the Conservative synagogue have rarely considered an essential part of Judaism.

Schechner, who grew up at Oheb Shalom, said he is among the members who have looked at the Torah and at Judaism as an ethical guide, not as a system of commandments or a theology.

“We were taught that the Jewish religion and the Torah are there to teach us how to lead a good life and establish a moral code — a way to live,” he said. “What was important is whether we lived a good life — not to lie, not to cheat, to be educated. God was not important.

“If you join First Presbyterian Church, you have to sign a card that says, ‘Having a belief in Jesus Christ I hereby apply for membership,’” he continued. “If you come to the shul office downstairs and say I’d like to be a member, there’s no paper you have to sign espousing your belief.”

Mejia called the current search for God and spirituality a “sociological” phenomenon that also has something to do with what philosophies are in vogue at JTS during a given time period.

“It’s true there’s no course at the seminary on ‘does God exist,’ and professors bring it up only to scoff at it, but something is changing,” he said.

Mejia sees the shift in the influence of two major figures in the seminary’s history. For nearly 50 years through the late 1950s, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan mentored generations of Conservative rabbis. Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism, put humans and history, not a supernatural God, at the center of his theology.

By contrast, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who taught at the seminary from 1946 until his death in 1972, was strongly mystical in his approach to God.

“Today,” said Mejia of his teachers, “they are all disciples of Heschel. And Heschel was a hasid!”

The topic of spirituality touched a nerve for Margery Cohen. “I hear about the search for spirituality all the time. But I’m never sure what they mean by that,” she said.

Mejia tried to explain it as a thirst for “experience,” and added, “For my generation, this language of belonging to a shul and living an ethical life is insufficient. We are looking for spirituality.”

It’s the kind of conversation that Cooper was hoping would emerge. Other classes are scheduled to enable different demographics of the synagogue to attend, including on Sunday mornings and evenings and a second weekday evening. About 40 members signed up for the sessions, with four rabbinical students hired by the synagogue to lead them.

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