Li • LI • LI • LI •
Getting From
Here 'lb There
Spiritual wisdom can only
be gained through hard work,
say the rabbis. The first step is
to acquire the necessary
`vocabulary.'
IRA RIFKIN
Special to the Jewish News
ttempting to connect with
life's transcendent quality is
difficult enough. Attempting
the quest without a road map
is near impossible. It's like
trying to cross a desert by relying on the
ever-shifting sand for direction.
The inner terrain has, however, been
well mapped. But that is not to say that
the guideposts are easily followed — be
they the traditional reliance on Torah or
the Reform emphasis on the prophetic
message.
There is wide agreement among leading
Jewish religious figures that contempo-
rary mainstream Judaism in this country
has lost much of its spiritual bearings;
that a great many American Jews have
become stuck in the desert sands.
"The current state of Jewish spirituali-
ty is weak," lamented Rabbi Menachem
Goldberger of Baltimore's Orthodox
Tiferes Yisroel synagogue.
"North American Jewry has largely
lost the sense of spirituality that makes
an ethnic group a religion," said Rabbi
Daniel B. Syme, vice president of the
Union of American Hebrew Congrega-
tions, the Reform movement's national
synagogue umbrella group.
"People have lost the vocabulary of
spirituality," added Joel Zaiman of Bal-
timore, rabbi of Chizuk Amuno Congre-
gation and president of the Synagogue
Council of America.
Judaism is not alone in this regard.
Leaders of other faiths bemoan similar
circumstances in their own religions. All
ascribe it to the breakdown of traditional
theologies, to the lack of an all-
encompassing, substitute philosophical
framework that satisfies the internal as
well as the external, while also explaining
the eternal.
Within Judaism, some blame the rab-
binate and religious institutions for this
state of affairs. Despite the devastation
of the Holocaust and the general secu-
larization of daily life, rabbis — Juda-
ism's teachers — should have been able to
infuse a sense of spirituality into Juda-
ism, at least within the walls of the syna-
gogue, the critics say. More time should
have been spent dwelling on how Jews
can connect with God, instead of talking
so much about the admittedly hard to ig-
nore survival issues of anti-Semitism, the
defense of the State of Israel, intermar-
riage and assimilation.
"Clearly, people aren't going to syna-
gogue regularly," commented Rabbi
Alon Tolwin, director of Detroit's Aish
HaTorah Center for Jewish Studies, an
international Jewish outreach organiza-
tion headquartered in Jerusalem. "The
question is, why?
"People don't abandon Jewish spiritu-
ality for no good reason. They do it for
the good reason that it has become mean-
ingless to them, and it's not their fault.
They do it because the purveyors have
failed in their role."
Others argue that the very character of
religious institutions dissipates the spiri-
tual. Los Angeles Rabbi Jonathan Omer-
Man, for example, said "spirituality by
its very nature is subversive, and that
presents a problem for institutions.
"The moment you institutionalize [spir-
ituality], it becomes something else," said
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
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