Rabbi Steve Segar's "Rabbinic Corner" message in Kol HaLev Happenings
The newsletter of Kol HaLev. the Reconstructionist community of Cleveland   August 2005

More thinking about Shabbat.

Most members of Kol HaLev are aware by this point both that we are in the midst of a two-year-old-plus conversation about setting guidelines for ourselves around communal Shabbat practices, and that we are about to launch a new education program that has been in the works for a long time. There has been a significant intersection of these two conversations over the past six months or so, because our decision to hold the new education program on Shabbat brought with it, inherently, a host of questions related to our Shabbat practice as a community.

In this context, one very important issue has been the goal of passing on Jewish tradition to the next generation. On the surface, this seems like a fairly simple and straightforward statement, but for those of us who have participated in these conversations, it has become clear that it is, in fact, a complex idea that calls for thoughtful reflection. There are at least three different categories of reasons for this.

The first has to do with the tendency of many in the American Jewish community to conflate Eastern European or Ashkenazic Judaism with the whole of Jewish tradition, which is fairly understandable given that most of us come from families with this particular history. However, from a more global Jewish perspective — a perspective that is deeply rooted in the thinking of Mordecai Kaplan–a multitude of Jewish traditions exist, of which the Eastern European is only one, albeit large, variety. Thus a truly inclusive discussion of the content of Jewish tradition would have to explore the range of beliefs, texts and practices found among S’fardic or Spanish Jews, among Middle Eastern Jews, among Ethiopian and Indian Jews and among still others.

The second has to do with a column I wrote several months ago in which I suggested that looking at the metaphors of Judaism as an art and Judaism as a science is one way to understand the distinction between traditional and liberal Jewish orientations. That is to say, there is a way of looking at Jewish tradition that focuses on broad areas of observance, such as Shabbat or Kashrus or Tzedakah, and there is another way that certainly begins with the broad areas but includes and emphasizes the specific working out of each of these broad areas at a level of great detail. In the context of Jewish history, the further back in time one goes, the less detailed are the instructions for the implementation of broad areas of observance. These considerations would lead us to think through the relationship between teaching broad concepts and specific practices, and also to wonder about the authority for us of a Jewish practice codified in the 1600s as compared to one codified in, for example, the fifth century.

Finally, and I think most challenging, is the fact that most of us as individuals and as a community do not tend to look at any part of Jewish tradition as whole cloth. By that I mean that there are clearly some parts of Jewish tradition that we absolutely do not want to pass down as normative to the next generation — the division of gender roles being the most obvious example. We may, however, want our kids to know about and understand this corner of Jewish practice despite the fact that it is not normative practice in our own community.

On the other hand, there are some practices from our tradition that our community has clearly embraced—the importance of gathering together for study and prayer on Shabbat mornings being one of the first things to come to mind. We certainly want our kids to understand these elements of Judaism and to value them as important practices for themselves. In between these two extremes there lies what I imagine to be a fairly vast middle ground of practices that may not be normative for us, or not yet normative, but that we certainly want our kids to understand and to experience.

While I have only touched the tip of the iceberg here, I have tried to lay out some of the reasons that this conversation about passing on Jewish tradition is so complex. It is also an extremely rich and valuable conversation to have. We have benefited from the work we have done in this area so far and we will continue to do so as we pursue our quest to build sacred community, tying our connection to the past to our hope and vision for the future.

Rabbi Steve

To read Rabbi Steve's November 2003 message on Shabbat, click here.