The kind of writing about American Jewry I find most depressing isn’t that which emanates from the pens of those antagonistic to authentic Judaism, but rather when an honest writer actually grasps the desperateness of Jewish communal decline and casts about in futility for a way out of the predicament. That’s the feeling I had while reading Gal Beckerman’s recent review essay in the New York Times covering five new books about the American Jewish past, present, and future.

The essay’s title — “American Jews Face a Choice: Create Meaning or Fade Away” — in effect says it all, implying there’s a binary choice to be made, with only the “creation of meaning” capable of staving off Jewish oblivion. The problem with that isn’t just the characteristically modern presumption that meaning can be manufactured ex nihilo. Far more disturbing is the title’s unspoken implication: That the existence of a third option — a Jewish way of being that is and always has been suffused with the most profound meaning, and fills its practitioners’ lives with the same — is never even considered.

The first of these books, Steven Weisman’s account of how Judaism became a thoroughly American religion, describes how in the late 19th century the Reform movement profoundly redefined the meaning of being a Jew. Its leading clergymen declared at a pivotal 1885 convocation — in Pittsburgh — “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.”

The Jews’ role in America, Weisman writes, “would be to promote a social gospel… to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.” And well over a century later, that remains “how a vast majority of American Jews think about what it means to be a Jew in this country.”

The fact that Judaism and the social justice movement continue to be indistinguishable is precisely a major theme of another new book, by well-known sociologist Jack Wertheimer. He writes that a “rich, complex, and at times, contradictory religious system has been reduced to a set of vague slogans — ‘Justice, justice, shall you pursue,’ ‘Made in God’s image,’ ‘Love the stranger,’ and ‘Repair the world.’ ”

As for actual religious practices, Wertheimer says contemporary Judaism has become a “cafeteria religion” in which “picking and choosing only those morsels of Judaism that seem personally appealing is the new — and perhaps only — norm among Jews.” (It seem that if a critique of the liberalism that masquerades as Judaism were to get a hearing in heterodox quarters, it would more likely be Wertheimer’s than the similar case made in Jonathan Neumann’s To Heal the World?, if only because  Wertheimer is a big-C Conservative, while Neumann is an Orthodox small-c conservative.)

But apparently not everyone agrees that labeling Judaism a “cafeteria religion” is at all a pejorative. Witness the third book considered in this essay, authored by Harvard law professor Robert Mnookin, which asserts, according to the reviewer, that “it no longer makes sense… to use matrilineal descent, or any descent really, to determine who is a Jew. If you feel yourself to be a Jew, you get to be one.”

In other words, that very notion of “cafeteria religion” with which Jack Wertheimer derides the inconsistencies of heterodox Judaism, is for Robert Mnookin a cause for celebration, with Judaism resembling not merely a cafeteria but a “Big Tent” inside which

the table is set with a smorgasbord of Jewish values, music, food, traditions, rituals, spirituality, language, philanthropic causes, and connections with Israel. At this table some will nibble; others will feast. But all will have options and none will be turned away.

In Mnookin’s conception of things, the smorgasbord analogy makes sense. But a cafeteria costs money to eat in, while the spread in the Big Tent is free — and isn’t religion all about satisfying your needs, nibbling, or feasting at will on an obligation-free, take-it-or-leave-it basis? To him, what is Yahadus, G-d’s greatest gift to humanity, anyway — chopped liver? Just so.

Toward the end of his essay, Gal Beckerman turns reflective, writing that the Pittsburgh massacre made him

stop and consider, for the first time in a long time, my own American Jewish identity, what it adds to my life…. there was something sad about identity flaring just in these moments of defensiveness and grief. I want a Judaism that also offers positive sources of meaning, for the boundaries between sacred and profane that it creates to enhance and elevate my day-to-day existence in the modern world… I fear without this “added value,” to be crass about it, my two young daughters won’t have anything to hold onto.

He contrasts two services his unaffiliated family attended during the recent High Holidays. One was at a Reform temple where the

sanctuary itself resembled a theater and the service was performed from a stage, the cantor singing the entire operatic liturgy himself as the audience passively looked on, eyelids drooping, only perking up when a cello briefly joined in. The English prayer book helpfully offered up poems, including one by Robert Frost, which the rabbi read flatly for what seemed like perhaps the thousandth time.

The other service was “participatory, as raucous as a megachurch,” at “a New Age-y, slightly neo-Hasidic, experimental, post-denominational congregation,” with “half a dozen musicians… including a Palestinian man with an oud (who at one point would offer a Muslim prayer in Arabic)” and a “rabbi, wrapped in a prayer shawl… who used a direct and personal tone, tinged with a rhetoric of self-help. At one point, he ‘asked anyone who had been “othered” over the past year to come up and participate.’ Under a canopy of prayer shawls, congregants stood with their arms around one another, swaying.”

Beckerman observes that this latter service was

strangely more moving than any religious ceremony in recent memory…. I say strangely, because it also felt completely ridiculous, a silly amalgam of plucked rituals and forced feeling. But the ridiculousness was, in its way, hopeful, and allowed me to tie together the two High Holiday experiences. Because even though that Reform service — performative, decorous, (a cello!), incorporating English — did nothing for me, it had also once seemed ridiculous. To a 19th-century Jew, it must have appeared preposterous — until it wasn’t.

Reading this essay was an experience of mixed emotions. It’s difficult to watch from afar as someone you care about, a brother Jew, tries to free himself from an apparently sealed room — one millions of Jews have been confined to by ignorance and religious dead-ends — trying all the doors, only to find them locked, and failing repeatedly to try the one, unlocked door leading to freedom.

But I also felt, to borrow Gal’s word, hopeful. His experience shows a way forward for those who may be drawn to Torah observance but find the thought of introducing its elements into their thoroughly hyper-modern lives simply too… outlandish.

No doubt there have been many baalei teshuvah who felt that way when first encountering a Torah life so at odds with their cultural assumptions and values, so foreign to their entire milieu. Yet they pushed past the discomfort to explore it, sensing that after having their fill elsewhere of contrived Judaisms, of “plucked rituals and forced feeling,” they’d finally found something real, emotionally and intellectually fulfilling.

For them, one might say, authentic Judaism had “appeared preposterous — until it wasn’t.”

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 736.

Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com