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Rabbinic Open Forum -- In Focus

Welcome to In Focus where you will find hot issues and special topics for the Rabbinic Open Forum.

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The real test of any credible spiritual tradition lies in its ability to address the felt experiences of those who would turn to that tradition. The Jewish tradition, in particular, declares that whatever humanity experiences as exciting, vital and life affirming must be inside of Jewishness. And yet too many Jewish institutions, coming from very different ideological places, often miss the opportunity to do exactly what one presumes is their task: to engage the life of the Jewish people as they live it.

The recent debate over the "appropriateness" of celebrating New Year’s Eve and the turn of a new millennium is a case in point. That New Year’s Eve 1999 fell on a Friday night, the start of the Jewish Sabbath, created a moment of remarkable opportunity for Jews throughout the world. As a people, we have understood the importance of marking time for thousands of years. The first mitzvah, or commandment, to the Jewish People as they left Egypt was to create a calendar. The creation story is fascinated with the way that each day leads into the next, as time unfolds.

Of course, I understand the ambivalence that this transition provoked in some of us. Some asked, Since the calendar is based on a Christian counting, is it really "our" millennium? And what about the fact that New Year’s occurred on the Sabbath?

The answer to the first question seems clear. Of course it’s our millennium. It is hard to imagine the level of insulation that would be needed to prevent one from being touched by this transition. Our lives—personal, professional, institutional, communal, civic, political, technological—are shaped by our participation in a world in which the new millennium is being experienced as an important transitional moment. At the turn of the millennium, Jews have an opportunity to experience this transition in ways that bring the celebration inside Jewish experience. If Judaism is as vital and expansive as we, from across the denominational spectrum, say it is, how can it not have anything to say to its own or to the world at large about an event of such global significance?

Three of the major Jewish denominations responded in not unexpected ways. A major Orthodox organization forbade a kosher restaurant in Manhattan from hosting a New Year’s Eve Sabbath dinner that would have featured an open bar. The president of the organization, calling New Year’s a "Christian" holiday, described the dinner, according to The New York Times, as a "subterfuge for a New Year’s Eve party."

At the more liberal end of the spectrum, a major Reform organization declared, according to the same article in The Times, that the millennium "had no religious import for Jews." It urged its constituent synagogues to hold shorter and earlier Sabbath evening services so congregants could go on to their New Year’s Eve parties.

The Conservative movement’s response was to advocate for increased Shabbat programming within the synagogue that "recognizes" the new year by including a talk by a rabbi or scholar-in-residence. Although the approach accommodated their members’ awareness of the significance of the new year, it did not integrate the significance of New Year’s into Jewish experience.

From Orthodox to Reform, the one thing that we can know for certain from the article in The Times is that New Year’s Eve really mattered to many Jews. Unfortunately, the Orthodox group saw only the risk in taking part in a celebration with roots in the outside culture. The liberal movements lacked the imagination to see the religious significance of an event that turned millions of Jews and non-Jews to thoughts of life and its meanings.

The fear that drove members of the Orthodox community to focus on the "risks" of acknowledging the "Christian" New Year may have found its justification in the often painful history which is the story of the past 1,000 years of relations between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. For much of the past millennium, the "holiday season" was a time of pain and dread for many Jews. What is deeply troubling, however, is that this fear was also a reaction to an American culture that allows Jews unprecedented and unimaginable freedom—a freedom for which we prayed for the past millennium, and freedom for which our immediate ancestors crossed the globe.

The reaction of the so-called traditional camp was to erect high walls between its culture and the "temptations" of the outside culture, the way its oppressors once erected high walls between them and their Jews. In their fear, they insisted on calling "Christian" a holiday that is experienced as religious by a tiny minority of Christians. The biggest celebration takes place in Times Square, after all, not Manger Square.

But that is not to say that New Year’s Eve lacks religious importance, as the liberals suggest—especially if we dare to define religion not as the thing people do in their separate churches, synagogues and mosques, but as what humans do whenever they engage the meaning of their lives and their place in the flow of time. That’s why the liberal movements’ reaction to New Year’s was as inadequate as the Orthodox movement’s. If the Orthodox were saying the Jews have no place at a New Year’s celebration, the Reform were saying that the celebration of New Year’s has no place in Jewish experience.

In either case, we see a wall between people’s lived lives and the ability of religious leaders to create the language and symbols that bring meaning to those lives. And whether this wall is built on fear or a lack of imagination, millions of Jews who celebrated the new millennium could not help but see that, at a time crying out for religious articulation, their own religion had virtually nothing to say.

Jewish tradition has always made the bold claim that if something is part of human experience, it can be given expression within Judaism. That’s not to say that every "outside" influence is treated the same. Some we embrace completely, others we shape and modify. The Sabbath remains the Sabbath, which for many of us means a day of rest and renewal, when we fill our kiddush cups with wine on Friday night and bless ourselves and our people with life and abundance. Yet at certain moments throughout the year and throughout history, Sabbath is not only the Sabbath. This past New Year’s Eve was such a moment.

Copyright c. 1999, CLAL, The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership

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Copyright c. CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, 1999-2003