Creativity, not Exclusivity

The knives are out again. The Orthodox establishment is condemned for annulling numerous Reform conversions and causing widespread despair and misery for the potentially thousands impacted; the non-Orthodox establishment is condemned for allowing numerous inauthentic conversions and wreaking havoc across the Jewish world. Who should we let into our exclusive club called the Jewish People? How difficult and unpleasant can we make it for people so that the wrong sorts are never allowed in?

Of course, whilst this impassioned debate about Jewish status is going on, in the real world, more and more Internet-Generation Jews are defining their Jewish identities on their own terms. They are creating Jewish summer festivals, Jewish record labels, Jewish intellectual salons and Jewish experimental congregations. They are developing innovative ways to help people connect with Torah, constructing Jewish websites and running Jewish events that build global Jewish connections, launching Jewish social justice initiatives that alter the Jewish calendar, and transforming everything we have ever understood by the term ‘Jewish music.’ They wouldn’t dream of demanding to know anyone’s Jewish credentials before letting them in; they simply invite anyone interested to encounter and experience the richness and creativity of Jewish life.

Rather than investing resources in buttressing walls and filling up sandbags to protect the Jewish community from all those horrible sociological realities out there, they are focused on creating a new reality inside. According to Steven Cohen and Ari Kelman’s recently-published report "The Continuity of Discontinuity," they don’t like being sold an agenda, they feel uncomfortable with social exclusionism, and they are bored by cultural blandness. Yet all-too-often, this is what they find within the Jewish community. So they create spaces for open conversation, they cross previously barred social boundaries, and they create their own Jewish culture. They might not affiliate, but don’t misunderstand that as apathy.

Of course, people will argue that Cohen and Kelman are talking about Americans, so their research has no bearing on young adults in Britain. They will maintain that we Brits are completely different. But are we? Do we really like being sold an agenda? Do we have no interest in fraternising with non-Jews? Do we experience Jewish life as rather bland or uninspiring from time to time? And have we not responded with a few innovations of our own? What about LimmudFest, the Jewish answer to Glastonbury? Or Jewdas, with its irreverent commentary on the British Jewish community and highly popular events? Then there’s YadArts, producing and commissioning new types of Jewish music and art. And Moishe House, taking Judaism out of its conventional locations and trying to create a new form of community. And I’d put Assif on the list too, bearing in mind its engaging approach to Jewish prayer, and the numbers of people it has managed to attract through its educationally inclusive and warm approach.

As Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams argue in their best-seller Wikinomics, the 'Net Generation' – those who grew up with the Internet as a norm rather than a novelty – function differently from their forebears. They have little faith in the "authoritative” or “authentic” view – they scrutinize and sift through information at the click of a mouse, and figure out what makes sense to them on their own terms. They don’t retreat into an individualized, lonely and closed world behind their computer screen – they collaborate and network in the vast array of communities online. And they are not content to be passive consumers – they increasingly satisfy the desire for choice, convenience, customization and control by designing and producing their own products and initiatives.

The truth is I don’t reject the importance of figuring out who is and who isn’t a Jew. We need to know who we are and what we stand for. But maybe the best way to do that is to focus more on encouraging the creativity and dynamism that is going on within our community, rather than investing so much time and energy on guarding the gateways in and out. The problem with spending all our time defending the walls is that when we do finally remember to check out what’s going on inside, we might just find that it’s empty.