By Rabbi Josh Feigelson
An Orthodox teenager rebels against his parents. He begins eating at McDonald’s, going out on Friday nights and watching movies with graphic sexual content.
His parents bring him to their rabbi for a talk. The rabbi refers him to a psychotherapist — a non-Jewish African-American.
After one session, the boy is suddenly back on the path, proud of his identity and behaving accordingly.
I heard this not-quite-hypothetical story in my first year as a rabbinic student at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. The person who told it was an eminent Orthodox psychotherapist and rabbi.
The main point of the anecdote, he emphasized, was that the boy had never encountered someone to whom he had to tell his story.
He had never had to explain what it meant that he was an Orthodox Jew, therefore he had never articulated his values for himself. Telling his story allowed the boy to embrace his identity in a new and powerful way.
This story has stuck in my memory ever since. Its message is that telling our stories to people different from us is important, if for no other reason than because the exercise helps us clarify our own values, our own story.
And from that message emerges a lesson about the importance of dialogue — with Jews from outside our home communities, and with human beings from other religious and ethnic traditions.
Genuine choice
Today all Jews are Jews by choice — even Orthodox Jews, as our teenager demonstrates.
The way to strengthen our young people’s Jewish identity and commitment is not to attempt to limit their choices. It is, instead, to help them make their Jewish story more compelling and meaningful than the other stories from which they can choose.
But this move involves a paradox. If our children are to choose willingly to make their story Jewish, we must give them a genuine experience of choice. That means we must willingly expose them seriously to other choices, including other cultures and other religions.
Like all paradoxes, this is difficult to embrace. And yet, in the world of unprecedented choice and access to information in which we live, Jewish survival depends on it.
Our tradition teaches as much. The first generation of Israelites accepted the Torah under duress, as God “held a mountain over their heads,” according to the Talmud.
Ultimately, their commitment and their descendents’ commitment to living Jewishly waned.
Jewish faith was renewed, reaffirmed, and re-accepted in the diaspora, this time without duress. This second commitment was sustained where the first would have collapsed, through centuries of cultural mixing, in the land of Israel and throughout the world.
Of course, many Jews chose other stories. Many assimilated into other cultures and religions. But the risk of assimilation is the paradoxical price of keeping Judaism alive, of maintaining a living Torah.
The greatest figures of our biblical tradition bear witness to this. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and David, all formed their identities in the midst of others, not in sealed enclaves. We cannot develop our own story in isolation, and without our story, we cease to be.
There are those who would stay away from intra- and inter-religious dialogue for fear of what they might hear, or perhaps what they might say. Dialogue, as the above-mentioned rabbi/psychotherapist has recently written, is “fraught with dangers and difficulties.”
These concerns are real. Genuine dialogue and genuine choice have unpredictable results. Historically, many Jews have found other stories more compelling than their own.
But no wall can keep out the world of possible stories and choices that exist in our time. Our children will eventually be exposed to those stories and choices. Our best defense is not quarantine but inoculation.
The process of inoculation in this case is dialogue. Not a dialogue in which the parties try to convince each another, but rather one in which we try to listen to one another’s genuineness — never giving up on our own story, nor expecting our interlocutors to give up on theirs.
That kind of dialogue produces understanding of the Other and of ourselves. Jewish self-understanding is essential for Jewish choosing.
Yet, individual dialogue can only happen between parties who respect one another’s right to their narrative. I think most of the time we do respect the right of individuals to their stories, but when it gets institutionalized we start to lose the concern with the individual.
Jews today have unprecedented freedom to construct their identity. If we are to continue the Jewish story, we must make it our most compelling story. We must tell it to others who will listen, in order to hear it for ourselves.
Rabbi Josh Feigelson works at the Fiedler Hillel Center at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. This article was provided by Edah, “the advocacy movement for a modern and relevant Orthodox Judaism.”
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