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Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
M
any of us have inherited an overarching
and often unconcious master narrative,
which I refer to as the “Humpty Dumpty
Narrative.” With uncanny precision, it echoes contem-
porary American Jewish communal anxieties about
qualitative and quantitative survival:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall –
There was a putatively whole,“authentic”
place where Jews once lived and belonged
(
Europe – the master narrative is thor-
oughly Ashkenazic).
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall –
Leaving Europe for America, and shifting
homebase to new shores, may even repre-
sent the “sin” of Jewish modernity.
But all the King’s horses and all the
King’s men could not put Humpty
together again.
American culture and ideology have driven
an unnatural and unholy wedge down the
middle of a once-integrated Jewish life,
leaving Jews and “Jewishness” bifurcated
between ethnic and religious dimensions,
hyphenated, truncated, and episodic. In
short, American Jewish identities are
broken in pieces. And now, all the Jewish
educators and all the Jewish professionals,
cannot seem to put Jewish life back
together again in America.
My graduate students are rejecting Humpty’s
tragic story of loss and wondering how change
processes and the politics of authenticity surrounding
Jewish identity formation might limit new questions
we could be asking about Jewish education. In class
we are learning to ask: How can we as Jewish educa-
tors navigate multiple and competing definitions of
authenticity? How do we relate and respond to the
boundary pushing? In other words, how do we make
explicit and transparent some of the stories Jews, lay
and professional alike, tell about themselves? How are
authenticity constructed and authority legitimized?
And ultimately, which versions of Jewish identity
formation are deemed good, strong, correct, and
generative, by whom, and why?
Here’s one way we’re experimenting: our students
identify one artifact of contested authenticity – some-
thing that pushes their Jewish boundaries in a
controversial, threatening, or problematic way – then
they analyze and examine their own personal and pro-
fessional strategies for how they might address this
boundary pushing.
Examples of such artifacts could include: Hal-
loween books featured in a Jewish school library; the
canine ritual of “bark
mitzvah
”;
an article extolling the
virtues of intermarried clergy; the text of a blessing
offered to all the non-Jewish spouses during High Holy
Day services by the senior rabbi; or a YouTube excerpt
of Rabbi Funye Capers leading his African-American
congregation in Shabbat services in Chicago.
Our students’ fascinating range of authenticity
artifacts include a UCSD Hillel campus promotional
condom that reads, "Israel: It's still safe to come,"
to a "Zen Seder" Haggadah from a group of "JuBu's," to
the Red Kabbalah string, to tattoos with Jewish themes
(
Star of David, a
cha
i, Hebrew word
Shalom
,
etc.).
I ask the students to bring to class responses to
these questions:
•
What is the advertent and/or inadvertent purpose
(
religious, physical, sociological) of the artifact?
•
What boundaries does it push? How, for whom,
and why?
•
What questions, feelings, and dilemmas does this
artifact raise for you, personally?
•
How, as a Jewish educational professional, do you
relate to this artifact? Where do you draw the
boundaries and how might you communicate this
stance to a group of congregants, learners, campers,
or colleagues?
Faculty provide critical responses to the students’
treatment of the artifacts, leading to a discussion of
the difference between “inauthentic” and “kitsch.”
There is frustration as well as appreciation for the lack
of definitive answers in the ongoing drama about what
constitutes authentic, authoritative identity formation,
and who gets to author it. One student imagines bring-
ing such an “authenticity inquiry” to her classroom,
where her own seventh-grade students would identify
things that seem marginal or on the boundaries.
Each generation’s leaders must accept their au-
thorial power to write new culture responsibly, which
is connected to our rich and varied past and simulta-
neously rooted in the ethical, social, and cultural
realities of the day. As Jewish educators, they must
continually define what it means to be a part of, and
apart from, America. But too often, Jewish leaders get
caught up in reinforcing unproductive strategies that
merely polarize the differences between defensive sur-
vivalists, on the one hand, who gird their armor against
change and loss, and daring transformationalists, on
the other, who do not call change loss, but seek it out
precisely as a mode of regeneration.
Liberal Jews want their boundaries to be porous,
but not too porous. An orienting metaphor of porosity
emerged in class that applies well to the social-scien-
tific study of Jewish identity formation as a whole:
Dr. Rachel Adler’s metaphor of a living cell, with a
semipermeable membrane. A cell has a way to let
things in from the outside and to let things out from
the inside, without being inundated or losing its integrity.
Words, metaphors, and narratives all shape our
understanding of the past and the present, and our
vision for the future. Through such stories and narra-
tive, we uncover the fluid nature of the field – how it
changes and how all the stakeholders in the field of
Jewish education – educators, students, parents, insti-
tutional leaders, and philanthropists – are responsible
for authoring or reinterpreting our story.
Revised from an article published in
Sh’ma: A Journal
for Jewish Responsibility
(
March 2010).
Authoring, Authority, and Authenticity:
The Storying of Jewish Education
Rabbi Tali Zelkowicz, Ph.D., RHSOE ’00, L ’02;
Professor Sara S. Lee Chair for an Emerging Scholar in Jewish Education, HUC-JIR/Jack H. Skirball Campus/Los Angeles
