Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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Jewish community: Is it the cause or the effect?

The huge Jewish community on the Lower East Side all but disappeared. What’s the lesson for today?

Rare indeed is the Jew who is not excited when, far from home, he meets another “member of the tribe” and feels at home. But why?

Rare indeed is the Jew who has not launched into “Jewish geography” with a perfect stranger who, on short order, is no longer a stranger. But why?

Even before electronic communication, how long did it take for a Jew who moved to a different state, or even a different country, to find the local shul, Jewish meeting place or club or restaurant? But why so fast?
Multiple choice: What defines and propels the Jew? a. Ethnicity. b. Belief. c. Food. d. Community. As often as not, the answer is d. community.

But is community the cause or the effect? If Jewish community is a “cause” — an antecedent, something with an independent existence, just sitting there on the shelf, so to speak, ready to be accessed at will — we can simply embrace it or pass it along to someone else.

But if Jewish community is an “effect,” it has no existence separate from what we ourselves create. In fact, Jewish community is not a preexistent “package” to be embraced or passed around to friends or passed down to our children.

In and of itself, Jewish community has no permanent legs. It must be a byproduct.

Item: What more dense, ethnically, linguistically and socially Jewish community was there on American shores than the Lower East Side of New York in the early decades of the 20th century?

Yet, the Lower East Side dissipated, radically so. Over time, it all but disappeared, and not just because of upward economic mobility. If community were simply a “cause,” a preexistent package, the Lower East Side would be a major Jewish community today. Either that, or it could have spawned comparably large, parallel communities elsewhere.

Item: Unnoticed in the most linguistically, ethnically and socially dense Jewish community in 2,000 years — the State of Israel — Jewish identity faces increased pressure in growing circles. Army service? Not the universal pull it once was. Nationalistic pride? Not necessarily the top priority if professional, academic or economic opportunity beckons elsewhere.

Any expression of Jewish solidarity — food, for example — can build Jewish community, but that’s exactly it: community is the effect, not the cause. When the pleasing experience of Jewish peoplehood is relished far from home in unexpected places, it usually stems from the Jewish community we build together. The community we build in our house, in our neighborhood, in our village or city.

True enough, some Jews discover their feeling for the Jewish people far from home; it’s that unexpected encounter in an unfamiliar setting that awakens them. Mostly, however, the closeness to a fellow Jew encountered faraway stems from the closeness we have already nurtured where we live. Here, in our own community, we can live Jewishly most consistently and intensely.Here, we can have the most Jewish impact on ourselves and create the ripples outward.

Five-hundred steps in any direction. If we walk outside and in short order we meet, speak to, wave at or otherwise acknowledge a member of the tribe, we build Jewish community just by being here. The community is the effect. The cause is our proximity to fellow Jews, provided only that our proximity is consciously chosen.

Walking. In our fast-paced world very few of us are out there walking in leisurely fashion; if we can fit in the day’s tasks within the crowded confines of work, school and recreation, this itself is an achievement, leaving little space, mental or physical, for much else — unless we seek to build Jewish community. When we make it a priority, the time opens up, somehow, to make it happen.

In addition to which, of course, we live in a society built on the five-day work week and in a religion built on the six-day week. On the work-free days —especially on the seventh day of the six-day week — we may most intensely build our community and relish it. We may embrace the community we have built.

Jews are moved by the beauty of Shabbat in Jerusalem. The quiet. The peace. The pervasive effect. Yet, the Jewish philosophic universe divides between holiness of time and and holiness of space. Shabbat is an example of sacred time, not sacred space. Shabbat peace is possible in any space, wherever Jews live. The embrace of Shabbat is a primary cause whose effect is a Jewish community.

Two steps in any direction, from where we sit to the book shelf or to the electronic device, each of which these days can supply us with a text that teaches, a text that builds, a text that defines Jewish community; a text of Torah. We can read it, view it, listen to it, even interact with it, question it, argue with it, contemplate it, understand or be perplexed by it.

Here is a fundamental cause of Jewish community. A Jewish community is a literate community.

Not that we delve too deeply into our joy when we meet a Jew faraway or when we launch into Jewish geography, always coming up with surprising results. But there is a dynamic here. It is not automatic. Our sense of community is not inborn. It is the expression of countless signals that our parents and and predecessors poured into us; even more, it is the extension of the Jewish commitments to Shabbat, Torah study, family and other Jewish expressions that we ourselves have made.

Jewish community: cause or effect? Always, effect. As we begin again this week the story of our people, the account in Genesis of its founding by the two most influential people who ever lived, Abraham our Father and Sarah our Mother, we observe: the world historic community that they founded, the longest, sustained community in human history, was the effect of the most powerful cause ever unleashed. Two words: “Go forth!”

Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News




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