A minhag America is blooming, says Diamant

          “Stop me if you’ve heard this,” said novelist and Jewish activist Anita Diamant at the beginning of her talk on Jan. 15 at the Urban Ecology Center.

          With this common introduction to jokes, she described the scene she was in — a Tu B’Shevat seder featuring an Orthodox rabbi ordained in Israel (Shlomo Levin of Lake Park Synagogue), a Reconstructionist rabbi who is a Jew-by-choice and a woman of color who was ordained at a non-denominational seminary (Tiferet Gordon of Congregation Shir Hadash), and a Reform woman who started a mikvah, a ritual bath normally associated with Orthodox practice (herself).

          “And there is no punch line,” she said to the laughter of the about 100 people attending the event.

          But the scene is in truth no joke to her. Diamant said it is emblematic of something happening throughout the Jewish community of the United States — the development of what she called a “minhag America” (literally custom of America).

          “We are part of a whole new chapter in Judaism and in American Jewish history,” Diamant said, “full of ideas and possibilities.”

          And this means the audience should “forget all the surveys and all the pundits” who say the Jewish community is in crisis and danger. “There has never been a better time to be Jewish” than right now, she said.

          She does understand why people are worried, she added. “We’re living in a time of spectacular change” that is “as profound and as troubling” as the period after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temples, which must have “felt like the end of the Jewish world,” she said.

          But that world didn’t end. It continued because “our ancestors chose life, which meant choosing change,” Diamant said.

          Diamant, author of the historical novel “The Red Tent” and other books, said she has been collecting and listing ideas, changes and values that have been appearing in the Jewish world. She said there are “15 to 20 at least,” but she described four during her presentation:

          • The growing participation of women. “I was part of the change from the exclusion of women to the inclusion of women,” Diamant said. “We have doubled the capacities of the Jewish people by including women” in scholarship, decision-making and leadership.

          • A growing commitment of Jews to lifelong Jewish learning. Today we have “the largest community of learning and learned Jews in history,” Diamant said.

          This is something new, she contended. “For most of our history, Jewish study as a lifelong endeavor was an elite practice,” accessible only to a few men as well as not at all to women, she said.

          But the developing minhag America includes “a vision of universal Jewish literacy,” and “democratization of Jewish learning,” she said. Therefore, Jewish learning “needs to be available to everyone… Nothing Jewish should be foreign to any Jew.”

          This is part of the vision of the Mayyim Hayyim: Living Waters Community Mikveh, of which Diamant is the founding president. Located in Newton, Mass., it is not only an open-to-the-community ritual bath, but also an educational center. In fact, Diamant said more people come to the facility to learn than to immerse.

          • The search for an authentic Jewish spirituality. This can involve “worshipping at the holidays in ways that inspire,” “mindfulness practice,” and above all performing rituals, “religious gestures that give us a handle on the sacred, on the ineffable” in ways that do not allow “too many words to get in the way. Which is a very good thing because language is pretty useless when you’re confronting the divine,” Diamant said.

          • The values of ahavat yisrael (love of the Jewish people) and klal yisrael (being open to and sustaining the whole community of Jews). “We are one Jewish people,” Diamant said, and these values involve having Jews “love, honor and cherish our differences.”

          “People have been talking around the word ‘post-denominational’ for a long time,” Diamant said. American Jews are now “beginning to translate that into new forms of community, where your affiliation is not the first or second or even the tenth question that you ask.”

          All this is “happening in American Judaism today,” said Diamant, and she added that the Tu B’Shevat seder — a collaboration of Congregation Shir Hadash and Lake Park Synagogue — is another example.

          These developments cause her to feel optimistic about the future. Indeed, she said, “You have to be an optimist to be Jewish.”