Small-town or small Orthodox communities need to provide a full-range of services to sustain themselves in the “extreme times” they live in today, according to Rabbi Michel Twerski of Milwaukee Congregation Beth Jehudah.
At the same time, larger Orthodox communities should learn from and build into themselves the advantages and characteristics that are found in smaller communities, according to Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union.
Both made their cases for these ideas at the Sunday evening keynote event of the Orthodox Union’s Synagogue Leadership Conference with a Focus on Smaller Jewish Communities, which was held in at the Courtyard by Marriott hotel in downtown Milwaukee.
According to Rabbi Shlomo Levin, spiritual leader of Lake Park Synagogue, which hosted the event, some 100 people from communities throughout the U.S. attended the two days of workshops Sunday and Monday.
Twerski, who spoke first, said Orthodox communities “can’t take [merely] moderate measures” to preserve “what makes a sane, meaningful, quality Jewish life” in the “violent, promiscuous, drug-crazed, hedonistic” culture in today’s U.S.
And the people who may know this best are young families of baalei teshuva, “returnees” to Orthodox Judaism, who “have been there” in the secular world and “know what they don’t want,” he said.
Such families may well appreciate the virtues of a small community, including its closeness, its ability to make its members feel that “everybody’s contribution means something,” and its affordability, said Twerski.
But in a world of shopping malls and demands for convenient access, such families can’t consider going to any community that does not offer a full range of Orthodox services, from a cheder-type elementary school to separate boys and girls high schools to glatt kosher food, he said.
On the map
Yet just having such programs and services available isn’t enough, Twerski continued. Orthodox synagogues need to become more inviting and exciting places.
“We live in such a cold, distant time” and in “one of the loneliest societies in history,” he said. Therefore, when somebody enters a synagogue, that person should feel “a sense of family, that this is a place where people care.”
Prayer services “should be full of joyous song,” and the synagogue should be a place where people can “laugh, rejoice, cry and be a full human being in service of the Creator,” Twerski said.
Large communities, for their part, need to “recapture the essential elements that characterize small communities,” said Weinreb.
Otherwise, these communities will have the “big problems” he said he has seen in his travels, like “alienation, isolation, rampant materialism, no spirituality … broken marriages, substance abuse, teens off the derech [path].”
Small communities offer a “sense of spirituality” and a sense that every person matters, while “90 percent of the people in larger communities don’t count or matter, and they feel it. Sometimes they’re even told they don’t matter” except when it comes to their money contributions, Weinreb said.
Weinreb also praised small communities for their diversity, while larger have become so divided and specialized in their synagogues, and even in minyan groups within the synagogues, that they display “a certain narrowness.”
He contended that it is important to model diversity for children. “If all are the same way,” then a child who feels or thinks differently may develop “feelings of guilt that turn into rebellion.”
But if a child sees “six or 12 models of being Orthodox,” then that child can think “I’m not off the map, I’m at a different place on the map,” Weinreb said.
Weinreb then offered suggestions about what synagogues, communities and individuals can do to change. They included:
• Take stock of the resources already present.
• Define concrete objectives, recognizing that “no one can accomplish everything.”
• Recognize one’s self worth and what one’s strengths are.
• Believe that change is possible.
• Don’t reject the positive aspects of the past. “You can’t start totally anew.”
• Be open to criticism.
• Expect frustration and setbacks, knowing that change “is a process; it doesn’t happen overnight.”
• Always hold onto joy and optimism, which “you need more than money.”
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