Trading with the Gods
November 28, 2009
Fisrt in a series
When you agree to become Temple president, you start to ask a different set of questions: What’s the meaning of all this? Why do we have a synagogue, and what should it be doing? How do we serve the members? Starting this month and over the coming months, I’d like to share with you some thoughts that have arisen in response to asking these kinds of questions. Read more
Lessons of Recession
November 1, 2009
Yom Kippur Morning 5770 (2009)
Temple Emanu-El, Marblehead, MA
We all expected that the substantial and consistent growth of this Jewish community that’s taken place over the past two decades would only continue, but the rather sudden and extreme economic downturn has changed all of that. Times are tough, but still, Jewish parents are continuing to encourage their children to pursue higher education with the hope of their finding upward, economic mobility. But some kids – a lot, actually — are choosing to stay in college and graduate school simply because they can’t find work in their chosen fields right now.
Because of the shortage of jobs, towards which neither the local government nor the Jewish Federation can offer much assistance, our local Jewish newspaper has begun to run advertisements so that out-of-work community members might publicize their available skills.
The Union for Reform Judaism just distributed a guide entitled. “Financial Security for the Synagogue,” which offers budgetary suggestions as well as advice for attracting & retaining members, because synagogue memberships have plummeted in virtually every congregation. Even at Temple Emanu-El, home to some of the city’s most affluent Jews, membership has decreased by 44 percent. The precipitous decline in membership has resulted not simply from disinterest in synagogue life, but from the inability or unwillingness of many congregants to continue paying dues. Some members have formally resigned, while others have simply stopped dropped away.
So at its annual conference of the North American Reform Rabbinate, the comment was made: “We are suffering not only from financial depression; the depreciation on spiritual and religious values is evident at every hand… The religious life of the Jewish people, its manifestation in synagogue and home, is at a low ebb…”
The American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune reads the situation more gravely: “Judaism is badly in need of a major operation,” it writes. “Send for the ambulance – or the undertaker.”
The year is 1935, and all of this is part of the historical record of our American Jewish community at the time. (1) Oh, and the Temple Emanu-El I mentioned is the one in New York City. Here in Marblehead, we hadn’t yet come into being.
But it all sounds frighteningly familiar, for we are now living through the most significant economic decline since the Great Depression of those 1930’s. And keeping the wise truism of historian, Santayana front and center, that if we don’t learn from the past, then we are condemned to repeat it, I think it is crucial for us to learn from the past. What happened to the Jewish community back in that last, Great Depression, and what were the ramifications for the succeeding generations? How did the Jewish community respond to the grim conditions, and how might we do better this time around?
Of course, the Jewish community of the 1930’s was still becoming integrated into mainstream American life, particularly here on the East Coast. During the Great Depression, Anti-semitism forced Jews into very specific, economic niches, and Jews, like many minority cultures of today, needed to form their own banks, professional alliances, and even schools of advanced learning.
When the first so-called “Jewish” bank in New York City went belly-up in 1930, its closure left thousands of Jewish families and businesses devastated. At the time, most New York Jews had little connection to Wall Street, and the previous year’s Crash had little immediate impact on them. But the failure of the Jewish-owned Bank of the United States, which held the savings of nearly 20% of New York’s Jews, transformed the community both economically and psychologically.
“When a non-Jewish bank falls through,” wrote the Yiddish newspaper, The Day, “it is said that only an individual or an individual institution did not act as it should have. But when a Jewish banker and a Jewish bank go bankrupt, people right away create the impression that it is the downfall of all Jewish bankers and all Jewish people.” (2)
Of course, our current economic depression is taking place within a much different set of realities for the American Jewish community. With the exception of the large influx of Jews from the Soviet Union that started taking place a quarter-century ago, we are no longer a community of immigrants or children of immigrants, and in intervening years, we have established a much more diversified presence both socially and economically on the American continent. Nonetheless, some rather dire predictions are already being pronounced looking ahead to the aftermath of this current economic downturn.
Dean of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Steven Windmueller, a specialist on politics and American Jewish history, suggests that in the aftermath of the current economic upheaval, our American Jewish community will be forever changed. Looking forward, Windmueller believes that the political and economic clout of American Jewry will be seriously compromised as the result of the community’s being perceived as structurally and functionally weakened by the current crisis. He notes how the Bernie Madoff affair has not only caused the loss of anywhere between $600 million to $1 billion to our Jewish communal resources, but also the loss of confidence and trust in the management of our most essential philanthropic institutions. Windmueller believes that the impact of the global, economic downturn has already generated a significant increase in anti-semitism overseas, as seems to always accompany economic turmoil, and may be becoming more evident in the United States as well. He anticipates that many of our Jewish institutions will not survive this crisis, and many others will seek to merge or be acquired by stronger organizational partners. (3)
Our own community’s recent Task Force project, led by Carl Sloane and a team of Harvard Business School interns, has presented some of these same predictions, although their more hopeful reading of the landscape includes specific strategies that might result in healthier outcomes for our Jewish, communal future here on Boston’s North Shore.
In addition to surveying contemporary realities, I strongly I believe that we can and should learn from the past, as we make predictions and strategies for the future. There are three specific lessons from experience of American Jews during the Great Depression that, through my own studies, I think are crucial moving forward and through this most difficult time of recession.
First, it is recognized among all scholars and historians that as synagogue membership plummeted during the Depression years, and membership in Jewish Community Centers likewise dropped, Jewish education was left on the back burner of communal concerns. Historian, Beth Wenger, writes of the situation facing some of New York’s most prominent synagogues:
“During the Depression, student enrollments drastically declined. Without a steady income from tuition, synagogues had difficulty supporting programs and paying teacher salaries. In 1931, the Institutional Synagogue owed $9,000 in back salaries to teachers who remained unpaid for four to seven months at a time. Like many congregations, the Kane Street Synagogue could not fund a paid teaching staff and relied on volunteers (usually women) to serve as teachers in its Sunday school. Many professional educators denounced the practice of hiring unskilled volunteer teachers and were particularly incensed when congregations made school budgets the primary victims of money-saving efforts. Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox rabbinical organizations publicly protested the decisions of congregations and Federations to allot Jewish education secondary status in budgetary decisions…” (4)
Professor Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University, one of the foremost experts on the history of American Judaism, suggests that the losses in the realm of Jewish education were never regained, and that the impact of years of Jews poorly educated in their faith and traditions is a deficit we continue to pay in this generation.
There is no doubting our own congregation’s ongoing commitment to maintaining a strong Religious School, Youth Programs, and continuing education opportunities, and every member of this Temple helps to support our school through our dues and other contributions. Our Temple budget will not be balanced on the backs of our children. But even as the Temple leadership is doing everything possible to help families who are hurting financially to maintain their memberships, even our school cannot be completely exempted from budget cuts and salary freezes.
That is why creative solutions, such as our groundbreaking collaborations with Congregation Shirat Hayam are so important going forward at least in the near future. Interestingly, our decision to pool resources with Shirat Hayam in the hiring of our new Youth Director, Darren Benedict, as well as the trial merging our 8th Grade Service Learning classes, was one of the few places where Temple Emanu-El was mentioned in Carl Sloan’s Task Force report. In the area of education, we were singled out as a model to be emulated moving forward through this difficult economic climate. Therefore, as a community, and as families, let us learn from the past by staying firm in our resolve not to let the Jewish education of our children become a casualty of this day, and thereby, a liability for the future.
Professor Sarna has also written of how the American Jewish community turned markedly inward during the years of the Depression. (5) Rabbis and other communal leaders struggled to convince the local Jewish population to maintain their support for world-wide Jewish concerns. And I have to wonder, how might history have been different if we, on these shores during the ‘30’s were paying greater attention to what was happening on the European continent, as the Nazi Party was rapidly gaining momentum?
Looking both backward and ahead, I worry that we might be seeing a similar trend happening again today. I think back to last December. The war Israel was fighting in Gaza to protect her civilians under fire by Hamas terrorists may have been the first time when Israel has been forced to defend herself, and American Jews failed to mobilize much in the way of support. Oh yes, we had our rally here on the North Shore. Maybe two hundred people showed up. And we sent some Ipods to the Israeli soldiers and Game-Boys to the kids of Sderot. But other than those rather negligible expressions of support, we, like most American Jews, for the first time ever, pretty much let Israel go it alone.
As a Board Member of our local Jewish Federation of the North Shore, I don’t think I’m crossing any boundary of impropriety by sharing with you that discussions and research are on-going to explore the possibility of Directed Giving as part of the Federation’s campaign strategy. I support the initiative, and hope that it will help increase giving by allowing donors more of a say in how their contributions will express their values and priorities. But as I have shared with Federation Director, Liz Donnenfeld, and President, Robert Salter, I am concerned that the pressing needs of Jews in Eastern Europe, in South America, in the former Soviet Union, on the African continent, and of course, in Israel may end up getting shortchanged as a result. We must be diligent in communicating the ongoing importance of looking to the welfare of our brothers and sisters in other lands beside our own. And I think that history provides the sobering reason why this is so true.
Finally, looking back to the lessons of the Great Depression, we can find certain, positive outcomes for the Jewish community, that we might also learn from and hopefully emulate. As Jews had always done, throughout the previous two thousand years while living in diverse lands across the globe, the Jewish community did its best to care for its own.
In 1654, newly arriving Jews met significant resistance from New Amsterdam’s governor, Peter Stuyvesant, who feared that the new arrivals would soon become destitute and would drain the limited resources of the fledgling colonies. Meanwhile, the Dutch West India Company urged Stuyvesant not to expel the immigrants, whom they believed would be of great benefit to enlarging the new, local economy. After some negotiation, the three parties reached a compromise: Jews would be allowed to settle in New Amsterdam, provided they agreed to take care of their own poor and needy. This agreement came to be known as the “Stuyvesant Promise”, and it evolved into an accepted Jewish norm to reject government support and establish their own philanthropic and social welfare agencies. (6)
Here in America in the 1930’s, the “Stuyvesant Promise”, which for some 250 years had guided the sense of mutual responsibility among American Jews, ironically did not survive the Depression. The Jewish community had nowhere the resources to meet the significant needs of the day, and many Jews were forced to seek help from state agencies and welfare programs. But of course, individual Jews and organizations stepped up their efforts to plug the gaps. Some Yiddish newspapers began their own relief funds, and as I mentioned at the outset, a regular column in one Jewish periodical provided space for unemployed men to list their qualifications, under the headline: “Do You Have A Job For Him?” (7) Interestingly, this past summer, our own Jewish Journal of the North Shore mounted a similar campaign, but it has yet to bear much positive result.
Our Jewish Family Services, which knew remarkable success in the historic re-settlement of émigrés from the Soviet Union back in the 1980’s, simply hasn’t the capacity to manage the enormous needs of the current crisis. Nearly a half-million dollars in accumulated debt, I expect our JFS soon to be absorbed or merged into some larger institution.
However here, within our own congregation, perhaps in an ironic twist on the idea of the Stuyvesant Promise, the imperative of member-to-member assistance in time of crisis continues to take hold. Recognizing the pressing needs, on the more micro-level of our synagogue community, you continue to answer the call for help through our Hineynu Initiative, which was imagined and spearheaded by our President, Stuart Cohen, our Board of Trustees and professional staff nearly a year ago. This became our opportunity to pull together resources as a community within a community, and as a family of families. And I personally want to thank every member of our Temple who has responded – either by sending grocery gift cards, offering transportation assistance, volunteering medical advice, legal counsel, and employment guidance. As we say in our weekly Shabbat announcements: “Do you need help? Can you offer help?” That is the way we say to one another: “Hineynu – We are Here.”
During the Depression years, the ethical obligation that one community member should care for and support another, history has shown, was key to emerging safely from those years on both the individual and communal level. And so we can look for it to be in our current situation going forward.
Who might have imagined, back in 1935, the scenario during which I began this sermon, that in the aftermath of the Great Depression, a powerful spiritual revival would take hold in America, and that our Jewish community, revitalized, would engage in a period of growth and expansion unseen even in the years preceding the Crash? Might that possibly be what the future holds for us, as well, despite the dire predictions of what lies ahead for the American Jewish community?
This past March, as we were announcing the formation of our Hineynu Initiative, I shared a parable in our monthly Temple Bulletin, that I would like to conclude with on this day of Yom Kippur.
It is told of two woodchoppers who felled a tree that was over one hundred years old. Looking at the growth rings to determine the tree’s age, the younger man noticed that there were five very narrow rings. He concluded that there had been a five-year drought, during which the tree had shown very little growth.
However, the other lumberjack, a wise, older man had a different viewpoint. He contended that the dry years actually were the most significant in the tree’s history. His reason: because of the drought, the tree had to force its roots down farther to get the water and the minerals it needed. With a strengthened root system, it was able to grow faster and taller once conditions improved.
So do we hope and trust that these “dry years” will find us strengthening the very foundations of our congregation and community. The power to make it so is in each of our own hands, and history will have the final word as to how well we do. Let us stay the course on our commitment to Jewish education. Let us keep our eyes open to the situation of Jews world-wide. And let us continue to look to one another, and be there for one another to our fullest capacity, to help withstand whatever storms we might face.
In so doing, may future generations look back to what we were able to accomplish, and perceive this as likewise a period of strength and promise. Perhaps some scholars and rabbis of the future will look to this time, this community, and especially, this congregation to help discover ways to weather their own generation’s unforeseen economic crisis. Looking to the past, perhaps they, too will learn its lessons, and not be condemned, but blessed, to repeat it.
(1) See Beth S. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression. Uncertain Promise. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1996.
(2) Wenger, p. 14.
(3) Dr. Steven Windmueller, “The Unfolding Economic Crisis: Its Devastating Implications for American Jewry”. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, No. 47, 16 August 2009 / 26 Av 5769.
(4) Wenger, p. 191.
(5) Jonathan Sarna, “Reinventing American Judaism”, Reform Judaism, Fall 2009.
(6) Marc Dollinger, “Die Velt, Yene Velt, and Roosevelt’: The New Deal in the Jewish Community”, in Franklin D. Roooseveldt. The New Deal and Its Aftermath, Thomas P. Wolf, William D. Pederson, and Byron W. Daynee. p. 38.
(7) Wenger, p. 143.
