By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
As a child, Lawrence Bush would sit among his parents’ cohorts, experiencing what today is often viewed as Jewish literary legend: the bohemian culture and communist thought that pronounced religion dead and made popular such historical figures as Emma Goldman and Gertrude Stein. Now 55, Bush recalls the leftist Jewish groups that had different ways of reaching the same goals — labor rights and preservation of the Yiddish language among them — that fought each other fiercely at the time due to conflicts that few, if any, can remember. He has emerged as a leader of their cause.
His beliefs, which draw so closely to the atheistic worldview of his parents, differ from so many in his own generation. But perhaps most importantly, this editor of Jewish Currents magazine, a 60-year-old journal that once served as something of a de facto house organ for Jewish communists, wants to let liberal and socially conscious Jews the age of his own kids know that an organization started by his grandparents’ generation can be viable for them as well. It’s an uphill battle.
“I’ve begun to realize how, technologically, the generation gap is more awesome than I realized, both in terms of trying to get younger people to subscribe to a magazine [and] to appreciate print,” Bush says, holding a copy of his black-and-white bimonthly to his nose. “I’ve never seen someone of the age of 35 say, ‘This smells good. The ink actually smells good.’”
Jewish Currents began in 1949 as the magazine for the Morning Freiheit Association, a communist organization that hung on for several years after outliving its usefulness. Three years ago, after merging with its former enemy, the better-known socialist and labor organization The Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring, the magazine immediately increased its circulation, launched a Web site, and geared some content toward the sought-after younger audience, entering fully into the 21st century. These days, Jewish Currents focuses on liberal and spiritual issues — though not as an ideology, Bush says — that likely would resonate with his desired audience, should that audience find him.
Bush came to Seattle the weekend of October 20th, armed with his latest book and Sholom Aleichem bobblehead dolls, to speak before groups that themselves grapple with issues of atheistic worldviews and spirituality: the Kadima Reconstructionist community and the Secular Jewish Circle of Puget Sound.
“What he was suggesting was that there was a need for people to have that sort of spiritual experience,” said Judi Gladstone, a leader of the Secular Jewish Circle, about Bush’s talk. “It’s all about that empowerment of humanity and making that interconnectedness of humanity.”
Bush’s book, Waiting for God, The Spiritual Explorations of a Reluctant Atheist, consists of musings of a man adrift among his peers, the counterculture hippies of the ‘60s and ‘70s that have since become the mainstream and, in many cases, major donors to the synagogues and Jewish organizations that they once rebelled against.
It is a “very sympathetic look at Baby Boomer spirituality,” he says. “What was it that turned a generation — and their siblings and kids, for that matter — on a more spiritual path?”
The shift, he believes, was a huge change from the previous generation, where many sought to overthrow religion entirely.
“The rejection of God still carries implications of an empowering humanism…and opposition to the violent misogynistic and suppressive role played by fundamentalist religious forces around the globe,” he writes in his introduction.
In some ways, Bush is like many of the younger Jews he seeks to draw in: “I went to a Yiddish shula, I got a sense of Jewish history and culture and a little smattering of Yiddish and so on,” he says. “But the Bible, the Torah, was not something to read as a young proud secularist, because it was religion.”
At the same time, he sees crucial differences in the generations as well.
“Unlike my parents’ and grandparents’ generations of secular Jews who knew what they were rejecting, many young secular Jews, even conscious secular Jews who participate in the life, are ignorant of so much of the tradition,” he says. “Because the word God is there throughout [the liturgy], they jettison it.”
The twists and turns of Bush’s life reaffirmed his own secularism while at the same time pushing him to study the very texts his forebearers rejected. Before returning to Jewish Currents as its editor (he had had a previous short tenure at the magazine working under historian and former communist Morris Schappes), he spent 13 years as speechwriter for Rabbi Alex Schindler, former president of the Reform movement, and then another dozen years as editor of a magazine representing the Reconstructionist movement.
As a self-professed atheist, Bush spends a lot of time in the text — though for purposes more philosophical than religious.
“When I read, in translation, Talmudic texts, I’m not thinking about whether there’s a Divine being or an intelligent force in the universe. I’m thinking about how these men, 1,900, 1,800 years ago, discussed how people should live together in a community successfully.”
It is the idea of Judaism as a community first and foremost that keeps Bush within the fold, and it’s a view he believes is shared by others who either can’t or don’t know how to express that sentiment.
“One thing I realized when I was speechwriting for Alex Schindler was [that] I wasn’t faking it — I was interpreting. I was saying, ‘The 3,000 people at a Reform biennial probably have as many doubts about God, per se, as I do. So when you have a text here, acknowledge that doubt, play to that doubt, work with that doubt, find a humanist meaning for what it means, and you’ll be speaking to people’s hearts much more effectively than if you’re saying, Praise God.’”