I RAN across an astonishing article by Rabbi Rachel Cowan in Contact, a publication of The Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life. I wish to state up front that I have learned much from this publication. I find it generally to be of high quality and relevance. However, this opening comment by Cowan was jarring in its braggadocio and absence of self-scrutiny:
Our Jewish communities are wasting a precious resource: the engaged wisdom, passion and experience of all of us in the third chapter of our lives.
We are part of an amazing generation.
Weve made revolutionary changes as weve gone along. Many of us escaped the stultifying conformity of suburbia; found, made and sang extraordinary new music; organized for voting and other civil rights; successfully helped to end the unjust war in Vietnam; joined the Peace Corps; created the feminist movement and the gay movement; founded havurot and other study programs to replace sterile prayer services and to promote womens participation and leadership; became women rabbis and ritual inventors; learned the power of telling our stories; brought Buddhist meditation and yoga back from the East to enrich American spirituality. We fell in love with Israel, and we still love it even when were critical. In short, we changed our society and our social reality.
One certainly need not add to Cowans long list of self-praises:
We learned to engage in self-criticism, to subject what we took to be our best thinking to critical review. We learned to think dialectically and see more than one side to critical issues.
No, Cowans paean to herself and those whom she sees in her own image certainly do not include the arts of self-criticism and complex thinking.
In Cowans voice, the segment of boomers whom she claims to speak for the oldest of the cohort do not see, for example, that for all the feminist movements gains in equalizing equal pay for equal work, and other gains, the movement had deleterious effects, such as promoting long delay in marriage and even undermining marriage altogether, resulting in countless masses bereft of sustained intimate companionship. Cowan and those she speaks for see only one-sided success and unmitigated accomplishment as if the past four decades of history have all been monochromatic, shining and incandescent.
Cowans boomers, to take other examples, do not see that ritual inventors inspired many, but that the alternative, the resuscitation of commitment to the traditional Jewish ritual system, inspired many more; or that the struggle for civil rights, a humane and important effort, bequeathed, ironically, a society obsessed with quotas and racial identities that bespeak civil inequalities.
Cowan is happy to credit boomers with helping to end the unjust war in Vietnam. On this, she is right, but again she overlooks the down side, indeed the dark side. She overlooks the fact that many early protesters of the war acted out of a profound sense of personal alienation, not just from objections to the war per se. Opposition to the war and the widespread use of drugs went hand in hand for many early war protesters. I witnessed the first major student protest against the Vietnam War in February, 1965, at the University of California at Berkeley, shortly after the Free Speech Movement there. Though I never used drugs myself, I watched drug use spread like wildfire, and saw the root of their widespread use in America in the alienation felt by the war protesters.
This was before the migration to Haight Ashbury in San Francisco a couple of years later, by which time drug use had become an end in and of itself.
Drugs, too, have ruined countless lives, and also count as a social change introduced by Cowans amazing generation.
But no, Cowan only sees the one side, the end of the war. She sees the world in black-and-white, and insists, because we did it, it is good.
Her focus, her emphasis, is on the I, the we, the natural sense of centrality accruing from the disproportionate numbers of the Boomers (in relation to those who came before and after them).
IF you think Im being unfair, try this next nugget from Cowan: Many of us have witnessed the agonizing dying experiences of our parents and want to die differently.
Die differently.
As if, however many new medicines or technologies may become available, the agony of dying can be universally reversed. As if it is within the hands of a superior, amazing generation to transcend the debilitation of terrible diseases, to become the ones to determine who shall live and who shall die and how and when. Not to mention, the agony of dying includes the pain that many dying people feel in foreseeing the effect of his or her death on loved ones. To die differently cannot remove the loss, the gaping hole, created by death for the survivors. Agony is part of the existential reality of death that no generation can do differently just because it wants to just because it has been used to having others see the world the way it wants to.
Cowan continues:
Each check-up feels as if the stakes are higher. Suddenly we cant remember a completely familiar name or a word: is this the first step down that scary slope? We dont know how to plan our finances in order to balance the things we have always wanted to do, the things we currently love to do and have to do, and the needs we will have in the future.
Needless to say, for Cowan and her cohort, it is their needs that take center stage; and what they love to do is non-negotiable.
You may discern that also missing from the long list of self-praises with which Cowan began are qualities such as sacrifice, self-abnegation, appreciation for what we already have done, the capacity to think and feel beyond the we and the I, the desire to see and meet the needs of others. Most notably, the needs of children and grandchildren, whom, Cowan seems to prefer to forget, should hardly exist, since a critical mass in her cohort praised the value of voluntary childlessness or, alternatively, the low priority of children. This idea influenced countless people to believe that it was wrong to grow the world. Remember, it was Cowans cohort that was big on ZPG, zero population growth, not on big families the ultimate in personal abnegation and focus on the needs of others.
Of course, Cowan does go on to pay homage to the future and to leaving the world a better place, but to her it all leads up to this: We deserve a place high on the agenda of the Jewish community.
We deserve.
Thats been the rallying cry of the the early boomer generation every since I began to observe it at Berkeley. The subtext of the student protests for various causes, many of them worthy indeed, was this: Hey, look whos talking. Were here! We have the power of numbers. Ignore us at your risk. We, we, we.
In vignettes of what Cowan calls challenge and of opportunity, she next cites the case of a long-time leader in the Jewish community who now tells Cowan that she (the leader) and her friends are tired of doing holidays. The leader and her friends say that synagogues offer them nothing and they have withdrawn some of their energy and talent from the community.
I heard this dirge repeatedly, especially during my Boston days (in the early 1970s) from the people who thought themselves an amazing generation, and whose approach was always the same: If someone found Judaism irrelevant, it was not their responsibility; it was always someone elses fault.
Come on. If someone is already 65 years of age, and if going to the synagogue offers nothing, then what is needed is not the diversion of communal resources to a high place on the agenda. What is needed, simply, is the observation that if one synagogue offers nothing, try another. Take responsibility for your own boredom.
Or, if all synagogues offer nothing, well, go to the JCC, or to AIPAC, or the AJC, or an Orthodox outreach group or any other thriving entity in American Jewry. If some leader finds doing holidays not worth it at this age of life, its her problem, not a cause for a new and expensive communal priority.
Maybe its time for the boomers whom Cowan claims to speak for to look for ways to give, not for new ways to take. Maybe, horror of horrors, the boomers might symbolically declare themselves willing to take a 1% cut in Social Security benefits, out of concern for the future of this country, even if this might cut down on the things we currently love to do.
If Rachel Cowan is representative of the boomers, and if all she can offer up at this last stage of her cohorts lives is to cry for more attention and more money (plus different death), why should anyone take the boomer generation seriously?
COWAN concludes:
A focus on this stage of aging is a new phenomenon in Jewish life . . .
Really? Believe it or not, the predecessors of the boomers have long focused on this stage of aging. Predecessors have built and sustained Jewish nursing homes, subsidized assisted living facilities, paid for meals-on-wheels, volunteered in countless programs for the aged all focused on others.
No, the only thing new here is the view that because it is now the boomers who are aging, this focus is new.
Actually, the only thing new here is the egocentricity.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
