By Leyna Krow, Assistant Editor, JTNews
A growing recognition of helping others within one religious community brought in a rabbi from another. Rabbi Sidney Schwarz, founder and president of PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, visited Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation on Dec. 14–16 as the congregation’s 2007 Alfred & Tillie Shemanski Scholar-in-Residence.
Schwarz, of Rockville, Md., puts on a variety of leadership programs for Jewish high school and college students. He is also the author of Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World and Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews Can Transform the American Synagogue.
Melanie Berman, education director for Herzl-Ner Tamid said that Schwarz was selected as this year’s Shemanski Scholar-in-Residence as a corollary to the congregation’s growing interest in community service and political advocacy.
“There seems to be, in many people’s minds, a vague connection between Judaism and social justice,” Berman said. “I think by studying with Rabbi Schwarz, they can better understand where that connection comes from.”
Last year, Herzl-Ner Tamid revitalized its Social Action Committee, which recently sponsored a program that raised funds to buy solar cookers for people in the Darfur region of Sudan. Members of the congregation also regularly volunteer at Teen Feed, which provides meals for homeless youth through the Union Gospel Mission in Seattle’s University District. Berman said she hoped Schwarz’s talks would help solidify the necessity of this kind of involvement for the congregation.
In his lecture, “Can Social Justice Save American Judaism’s Soul?” which he delivered to about 25 synagogue members on Sunday, Dec. 16, Schwarz discussed the drive that Jews have to do good in the world and the ways in which American synagogues often fall short in supporting those desires.
“When thinking about how to affect change in a broken world, we need to start by talking about why we pursue social justice,” Schwarz said.
According to Schwarz, a recent survey of American Jews showed that respondents considered involvement in social justice to be the most important component of their Judaism, even more so than regular synagogue attendance, keeping kosher or observing Shabbat. However, Schwarz said, this prioritizing of good works for Jewish individuals does not appear to line up with the priorities of most American synagogues.
“I see a dangerous disconnect between how Jews see themselves and what they say is important to them as individuals and what Jewish organizations have as their priorities,” he said, explaining that instead of focusing on the good they can do for greater society, most synagogues have turned their attention inward, choosing instead to focus on self-preservation.
Schwarz noted that through much of the 20th century, Jews could be found at the forefront of major American social movements, from the labor movement to civil rights to the anti-war movement during Vietnam. However, in recent decades, Jewish participation in political activism appears to have fallen off.
Schwarz suggested several reasons for why Jews have backed away from their leadership in social issues. The first is what he refers to as “the great liberal betrayal,” whereby Jews have found far more allies for Israel on the right side of the American political spectrum than on the left.
Secondly is the changing socio-economic profile of the Jewish community, which has also pushed it to the right. Schwarz pointed out, however, that a majority of Jews continue to vote as Democrats and have, by no means, made a full shift to the right.
Lastly and perhaps most significantly, Schwarz said that the decline in the number of practicing Jews in the U.S. and the world (outside of Israel) has led many congregations to spend more time working to keep the members they have rather than risk polarizing their communities by taking on outside political or social interests.
“The conclusion is reached that we cannot think about saving the whales because we need to think about saving ourselves,” Schwarz said.
However, Schwarz noted, in the past two decades, a number of Jewish service organizations, including MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, Jewish Fund for Justice, and the New Israel Fund have appeared independently of the support of synagogues and have garnered quite a bit of support from American Jews.
“I use these as examples that we are hardwired for tzedek,” Schwarz said. “If the organized community won’t do it, we’ll find ways to do it ourselves.”
The problem with this, he said, is that it separates the thing that Jews consider most important about being Jewish from the role of synagogues. In a kind of Catch-22, Schwarz blames this lack of focus on social justice for the falloff in the number of practicing Jews in the U.S. in recent decades.
“People see a community that’s so parochial and so obsessed with its own survival and they’re just not interested,” Schwarz said. “What I want to see us create instead is a community that will be a beacon to Jews existing on the margins of the tent.”
To do this, Schwarz recommended that synagogues find ways, as Herzl-Ner Tamid has done, of encouraging portions of their membership to pursue their own projects.
“We need to find a way to encourage subsets of the community to take part in social justice without requiring the wholesale endorsement from the board, because that’s, more or less, what has paralyzed us,” he said.