Conservative Judaism and mainline Protestant denominations have much in common, especially when it comes to issues of declining membership and financial support, said Arnold M. Eisen, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
Eisen, who was appointed chancellor-elect in 2006 and assumed his duties in 2007, is moving JTS forward by sharpening the focus on addressing the needs of Jewish communities and enacting changes in education curricula that emphasize innovative synagogue practices, continuing education, pastoral care and interfaith dialogue.
JTS has an enrollment of about 500 students, about 125 of whom are studying to become rabbis.
Considered one of the world’s pre-eminent leaders and thinkers in Conservative Judaism, Eisen suggests that the challenges facing faith communities in America are best addressed by providing individuals the opportunity to be part of something “larger than themselves.”
“The most important things we do are form strong communities, and without communities we go nowhere,” he said. Those communities help individuals find purpose, direction and profound joy as they search for and serve God, he said.
What makes a faith community different from a social circle or other special-interest group is its ability to help bring real meaning to daily life and the sense of mutual caring and responsibility it fosters among its members, Eisen said.
Before his appointment as the seventh chancellor of JTS, Eisen served in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Tel Aviv University and the Department of Religion at Columbia University.
Eisen spoke recently with Faith & Leadership about the challenges facing Conservative Judaism in America and how best to address them.
Q: “JTS” stands for Jewish Theological Seminary, but isn’t it more than a seminary?
JTS was founded in 1886 by a group of rabbis in Philadelphia and New York. At the turn of the century they brought over from Cambridge University Solomon Schechter, the discoverer of the great Cairo Genizah, a storehouse of Jewish documents and a treasure trove for Jewish history.
Schechter [who in 1902 was appointed chancellor] recognized that the United States was soon going to be a center of Judaism and needed a different vision of Judaism and a different kind of leader.
By 1909, the Jewish Theological Seminary was training educators as well as rabbis for the new reality of the United States.
But JTS has always been more than just a training ground for rabbis, cantors or educators: It bears on our question of leadership.
Schechter believed that in order to guide the Jewish future you have to be fully immersed in the Jewish past. That comfort level with Jewish tradition we might call today authenticity.
Schechter gathered together the single finest collection of scholars of Judaica that existed anywhere at that point and, secondly, he accumulated what was the single finest Jewish library (and is today one of the two finest Jewish libraries) in the world.
We are not only training professional leaders, we are training lay leaders for the Jewish future, and we regard that intersection as very, very important.
Thus we’re not only giving people knowledge; we also are giving them skills for lifelong learning and application of that learning to ever-new challenges.
Q: The Conservative movement has a slogan of “tradition and change,” but I understand you’re not a big fan of that motto.
That’s right. One model holds that tradition doesn’t change and you [are to] simply pass it down, as Jews pass on a Torah scroll from one generation to another.
In many synagogues, we have a lovely ceremony where the grandparents take the Torah scroll out of the ark and hand it to the parents, and the parents hand it to the children and say, “OK, now this is for you to carry forward.”
But that’s not how you carry Torah forward in the deeper sense and never has been. In Jewish tradition, we’ve accumulated generations and centuries of commentaries on the Torah, and interpretations and commentaries on the commentaries on the commentaries.
So the way you carry tradition forward is not just by transmitting it, or even by continuing it the same way you’ve inherited it, but by changing it.
I’ve used a series of adjectives to describe what you need to do in order to keep tradition alive: by changing it with learning and with love and with commitment and with care, boldness and imagination.
All of these things are necessary for communities to carry tradition forward. When we change tradition too much or too fast or in a way that is not suitable to its past, we disrupt it or we kill it. But we also know that if we don’t change it, it dies or becomes hollow and irrelevant.
So being a leader of a religious community involves finding the balance between those two.
Q: Judaism in America is facing some of the issues that are also evident in mainline Protestant denominations, such as declining membership, financial difficulties and trouble attracting young people. How are you addressing those challenges?
Those of us who stand for the kind of religion that I just talked about are caught in a pincer from both sides in contemporary culture.
Often the media presents religion as an all-or-nothing proposition. The “all” is fundamentalist and the “nothing” is militant secularism, and that’s not where most of us live our lives.
So to stem the tide is to create communities of people who, from experience, are committed to the proposition that there’s a right way to live -- more than one right way to live -- and we’re going to negotiate this together. The community is what counts.
In speaking with rabbis, community is a theme: Do the Jews in your synagogues get together around meals? Do they celebrate holidays together? Do they know one another? If they do, your synagogue is already successful, because that is a large part of it.
When Jews were persecuted, they were thrown together. They had to live with one another, because there was nobody else who would eat with them. But now everything’s voluntary. You’re completely evaluating that choice over and over and over again, and so you have to be persuaded to opt in.
What’s persuasive is giving people meaning with a capital M -- meaning with significance that one can live by and live for. It lets you know that your life is good; you’re not wasting your brief amount of time on earth. That’s what we all want: to spend our time well, raise our kids well, be good friends, be good spouses.
We don’t want to be alone. We want to be part of something larger than ourselves.
Q: I can imagine someone saying, “I’ve got community. I have a group of friends.” So what is particularly significant about having community within the institution of a church or a synagogue?
Yes, our sages agreed 2,000 years ago that you don’t have to be Jewish to be a righteous person or to have a share in the world to come. I believe that you can be a thoroughly good Jewish person and be a different kind of Jew than I am. And, certainly, you don’t have to be a Jew at all to be a thoroughly good person and have access to God and have a great amount of meaning in your life.
I also can’t tell you straight out that you can’t be part of a community unless it’s a religious community.
But community is more than friendship, more than social activities. I follow Robert Bellah, the great religious sociologist, who made a distinction between lifestyle enclaves and communities.
Lifestyle enclaves take up one particular piece of your life.
A religious community is a community with a capital C that touches on various aspects of your experience, and engages you in connections of obligation and responsibility to other people. It’s where you share some deep-seated commitments like God, like truth, like ethics, etc.
Christians and Jews share the conviction that we are here to do things in this world, and God needs us to do those things. Without our partnership with God, they can’t get done as well. That’s got to be the plane on which religion rests, and it’s up to us to demonstrate that we are adding meaning to people’s lives and we are adding goodness to the world.
Q: In this country people have so many options that often they don’t choose to be part of a religious institution.
There are lots of options, including various things that we would call secularism. They’re competing for your adherence, and there are lots of ways to spend your time.
The larger point is that you can live your life fully in this world but also be part of a religious tradition, and the religious tradition is enriched by your living fully in this world.
There’s time for golf and tennis. There’s time for Broadway. There’s time for Beethoven. There’s time for Picasso. And religion wants to be a part of that life.
Q: You are one of the first non-rabbis to serve in your position, a key leadership role in Conservative Judaism in America. What does your training as a university professor bring to the table?
I think that there are two parts of my preparation that are important. One of them was I happened to be a scholar of American Judaism, so I think I understand the needs and desires of the community. People support us financially when they see us responding to the needs. So it’s important to understand those.
But I’ve also been a lifelong, committed Jew and have written from the standpoint of being a committed Jew. In other words, I’ve spoken the way a rabbi might speak. I’m not just a scholar on Judaism. I’m a Jew in the pew. That is also indispensable to my roles as chancellor and as a leader of Conservative Judaism.
You can’t train Jewish leaders unless you are yourself a practicing Jew and have some experience in leading Jews. I didn’t have that experience as a rabbi, but I have been active as a lay leader, a scholar and as a teacher in the movement for over three decades.
Q: You took on your position just about the time the recession hit, and you have faced financial difficulties. As you look at these challenges, what is your strategic vision for JTS, and what are the principles that underlie that?
Our strategic plan begins with a vision statement about what we think Judaism should be. Especially now, in the current climate, no one has the luxury of doing everything one wants. You have to decide what’s essential and what’s non-essential.
What the institution is going to stand for in 2012 has to be contiguous with what it stood for in the past, but also has to be adapted to suit present realities. As the leader of that institution, there has to be an alignment between what you stand for and what the institution stands for. People have to know who you are and what you stand for in order for you to lead an institution, to rally support for it.
I hope the stock market rises and the budget situation grows, but philanthropy is not going to be easy. In the Jewish community, as in the mainline Protestant community, we have smaller and smaller numbers, and that’s going to proceed for some time.
There’s a need there for thinking and for partnerships that didn’t exist before – across denominational lines and among different religious communities. You can’t assume everybody should be doing their own thing all the time just because that’s the way it’s always been done. You have to take the opposite assumption -- that the default position should be partnership.
I find that institutions don’t partner well, mine included. There’s a resistance to teaming up with other people to do things. This is a challenge we all face. Let’s face it together, and the sooner the better.
