How Does One Justify Change in Judaism?
Rabbi Lewis John Eron, Ph.D.
Director of Religious Services
Lions Gate CCRC
1100 Laurel Oak Road
Voorhees, NJ 08043
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Katz JCC Me’ah Program 2007-2007
Me’ah Rabbinic Panel
We are rapidly approaching the holiday of Chanukah, the festival that is essentially an eight-day celebration of Jewish survival. Historically it marks a significant turning point in Jewish history essence and is a lasting symbol of the vitality and creativity of the Jewish people. The struggles of our ancestors and the victories of the Maccabees helped create the circumstances that allowed the Jewish people to move beyond the religious and political system established almost four hundred years earlier under Persian rule and make way for the emergence of the multifaceted Judaisms of the late Second Temple Period out of which grew what later became known as Rabbinic Judaism.
In the presence of the Chanukah lights, the question of how does one justifies change in Judaism seems strange and somewhat perverse questions. How can Judaism not change? How can one argue for stasis?
We are the people who sing — Am Yisrael Chai! The People of Israel live! Od Avinu Chai! Our Divine Source lives within us!
We are the living people who follow the living God. Of course, we change. We are alive and all living things change.
The real question is not how does one justify change in Judaism but how does change happen in Judaism? What have been the circumstances that have led to periods of rapid change in Jewish life and what have been the circumstances that have led to periods of relative stability? How have the social, religious, political, and economic structures of the Jewish people been transformed by the loss and recovery of Jewish independence, the history of expulsion and exile, the rise and fall of empires, the changing cultural worlds in which we have lived? How well have we, the Jewish people, struck the balance of “continuity and change” in the past and how well are we doing it in the present?
To a very large extent, the study of history is the study of change over time. One of the goals of this Me’ah program, therefore, is to study how, where, when, and in which ways the Jewish people have responded to the changing circumstances of our lives. I hope that over the next year and a half you will continue to look into these questions. I urge you to think about the ways change affected various parts of the Jewish community and ask questions such as: “How did the Jewish religious, political, economic, and social elites respond? How did change affect the Jewish peasants, workers, and other groups among the common people? Were women affected differently than men, and if so which women and what were their social locations? How did change affect Jewish worship, poetry, art, literature, and law? What new institutions did the Jewish people have to develop and what old institutions did we leave behind? What choices were successful and what choices panned out?
The balance between innovation and conservation is a particularly pressing problem for Jews in the modern and contemporary worlds? Firstly, we are living in a period of history in which the study of history plays a privileged role in the realm of human knowledge so that as children of the modern world, we are particularly aware of history and cherish the insights it brings to human self-understanding.
Secondly, we are living in a period of great change for the Jewish people. Since the end of the 18th century, Jewish communities throughout the world have made the difficult shift from traditional ways of life to life in the modern world. This is an experience that we share with many nations and ethnic groups throughout the world and the difficulty in negotiating these changes has been and remains one of the enduring challenges to peace and stability today.
Beyond the common human experience the onset or onslaught of modernity, four major historical events have radically altered the political, social, and economic structure of the Jewish people over the last two hundred years. They are: (1) the breakdown of the walls of the ghettoes and the medieval social and political systems that sustained them during the Napoleonic Wars, (2) the impoverization of Jews in Eastern Europe and in the Ottoman Empire, and the mass migrations to North America in the middle of the 19th century for Jews from Central Europe and at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century for Jews from Eastern Europe, (3) the devastation of the Shoah and the destruction of European Jewry and (4) the rise of Zionism and the birth of the State of Israel.
All these events have taken place within living memory. Many of us have lived through them personally. The basic social structures, political arrangements, religious institutions, motivating ideologies, compelling theologies, and basic living patterns of our people have been shaken and tumbled in this tectonic shift in the Jewish world. At best, we are still living with the aftershocks. We are rebuilding, restructuring, restoring, and reforming Jewish life.
We do not have the choice of whether or not to change. The world has changed and we need to adapt to those changes. The choice we have is whether we want to influence our course or be carried along in the flow? Do we want to be actors or observers? The goal of this Me’ah program is to train actors — people who will use their knowledge of Jewish history, culture, tradition, and faith to be informed leaders of Am Yisrael and help guide our communities as we all respond to our changed and ever-changing world.