Those are meant to be all-encompassing terms, yet they describe the individual in such minimalist terms.
My father-in-law, a”h, always asked a person whom he met for the first time, vun vanet bist to? Where are you from? This was common among Europeans. You, your parents or your grandparents may have answered Tomachov (Poland), Sichel or Spinka (Romania), Fekete Ordo or Munkatch (Czechoslovakia), Sebir (Russia), Satmar or Szelizia (Hungary).
That one-word answer citing the city you were from could describe who you are, your family, your townspeople, your Jewishness. All this with just one word.
Many segments of our community emphasize interfaith dialogue. Jews and Christians reach out to each other with full-page ads, newspaper articles, seminars and luncheons. There are several Jewish groups interested in rapprochement with the Roman Catholic Church. We travel to Rome to pay homage. We invite Catholic leaders into our shuls and homes so they can learn more about us.
Then there’s the inter-religious dialogue between Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews. Our community of journalists, writers and thinkers expend countless words professing and parsing the Torah on such weighty issues as “who is a Jew,” intermarriage, agunot and divorce, ordaining women rabbis, and homosexuality. Weighty issues indeed.
Yeshiva University established the Center for the Jewish Future, its stated purpose “to reclaim its Centrist base amid Orthodoxy’s continued move to the Right.” Eugene Korn of the American Jewish Congress “is hopeful the Center for the Jewish Future will strengthen the bond between Orthodoxy and non-Orthodoxy.” YU is even establishing a Center for Ethics and the Future of Civilization.
We’re focusing heavily on the future. This is important. As the saying goes, “Our children are our future.” Yet it can be quite instructive to spend some time looking at the recent past.
We as a people rely heavily on our mesorah, our tradition. Is there a better and more profound example of a group identifying wth its past than the collective learning by millions of children and adults of the Torah, every day, every year, for generations? Doesn’t every ten-year old cite the story on Pesach of Jews keeping their levush, their distinctive clothing, as one of the reasons for their meriting redemption from Egypt?
It would be nice to establish a center to study intra-Orthodox problems. We’re so good at studying everyone else’s problems, so why not spend a little more time concentrating on issues closer to home? As the Mishna states, take care of your own townspeople before you help people in other cities.
We seem to have more than enough to keep us busy within our own Orthodox community comprised of shtreimels, black hats, gray hats, kipot sruga, and the many other categories of headcovering that presumably describe who we are.
What are the issues that bring these groups together, and what divides them? Why do we as a community of Orthodox Jews lack such a dialogue among ourselves?What many once considered to be one community has now become severely factionalized. Many Orthodox Jews in the Center are not so sure of their comfort level in that position. Is there, in fact, a Center that a person can be comfortable in? And how does that affect our decisions in selecting a shul or yeshiva and making shidduchim?
