Back to the Synagogue

U.S. Judaism seems to be experiencing a powerful revival. Synagogues and seminaries are expanding, congregation membership and attendance figures are rising, and more & more young faces are turning up at Sabbath worship. But according to Jewish free-lance scholar Will Herberg, Jews should not mistake these facts as signs of a religious awakening. After six months of study and interviews on the subject, Herberg has concluded that the revival must ground itself in religion or it will not amount to much.

In the April issue of the Jewish monthly Commentary, Author Herberg says that the synagogues have benefited from a new pride felt by U.S. Jews in their faith. During the past two decades, the horror of the Nazi persecution and the triumph of the new state of Israel "have helped reverse the trend toward assimilation." To identify themselves with Jewish culture, Herberg suggests, more & more U.S. Jews have turned to the synagogues: "America does know a free variety and plurality of religions, and it is as a member of a religious group that the great mass of Americans understand the status of the Jew in this country."

Leisure Activity. The three main groups in U.S. Judaism--Orthodox, Conservative and Reform--have all profited by the new trend, but the Conservative most of all. Though it is still the smallest* of the three, the younger generation is attracted to it because it "seems best able to combine a considerable degree of traditionalism in the forms of religion with a modern and 'American' outlook in everything else." Meanwhile, the differences between the three are toning down; "Orthodoxy has become less 'orthodox' in the older European sense, so has the Reform movement grown more traditional, especially in very recent years."

Herberg finds the divisions in contemporary Judaism insignificant compared to "the great gulf that today separates the synagogue as a whole from the vital areas of Jewish life." Though there are nearly 5,000,000 U.S. Jews, no more than 1,500,000--less than a third--"have even the remotest connection with the synagogue." And most of these, says Herberg, find the center of their interest as Jews not in religious but in secular concerns such as "Zionism, labor unionism, philanthropy, social service, 'anti-defamation.' . . . Religion is, in fact, often regarded as a kind of leisure-time supplemental activity, and the synagogue as something you belong to because you 'happen' to be a Jew."

Hidden Sparks. The U.S. synagogue is no longer a community of believers, Herberg says. "This means that, in a very, basic respect, the synagogue of today is no longer the synagogue of the entire Jewish past. There have always been unbelievers . . . but in former times these people . . . were held in reproach by themselves and their fellow Jews. Only since the last century, and perhaps only in the past generation or two, has it become 'normal' for ... synagogue members to believe in and observe nothing in particular. This is surely something portentous."

Those who think the Jewish community can be rebuilt on a secular rather than religious basis, Author Herberg warns, are deluded. A return to religious essentials is necessary, and it will call for "an earnest effort to seek out and gather the sparks of faith hidden among the fragments of contemporary Jewish existence. It involves the return of the rabbi from his present functions as administrator, political leader and popular lecturer, to his earlier and more authentic role of religious teacher and counselor. Most of all, it implies a synagogue interested primarily not in making itself dominant as an organization but in helping to make Judaism operative in the hearts and lives of the Jews whom it reaches."

* According to Herberg "the best information would seem to indicate that in 1949 the Conservative United Synagogue of America had 365 synagogues affiliated with it, the Reform Union of American Hebrew Congregations had 392, and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations 500, with an unknown number of congregations, largely Orthodox, unaffiliated."

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