Terry Sent me

a note the other day, asking me to look at this article from the Straight Dope. He asked (without giving it away) if I noticed the same thing about it he did; as it turns out, I did not.

Terry noticed how comical and sad it was that the people at the Seder didn't actually know what was going on, and couldn't explain it to the children. What's in some ways equally sad is the fact that I didn't notice that at all. I've become so used to the idea that the average American Jew knows less about their own heritage and faith than they do about African traditions that I can't even tell when the ignorance is as blatant as in that article.

I'm a minority of a minority. I'm one of precious few Jews left in America that practices daily, knows something of our heritage, and is raising his children in those traditions. Your average American Jew participates in his faith perhaps three times a year - a Passover seder, trips to services on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and Chanukah. I'm almost tempted to leave that last one off, given how close it is to Christmas for many Jews.

Oh, people will tell me "there are a lot of Conservative and Reform Jews out there who practice regularly, what are you talking about?" I answer two things to that. First, those numbers are terribly small, and shrinking by the year. I grant you there are active members of those denominations, but it's a well defined trend that kids raised in those denominations are barely aware they are Jewish. They get next to no Jewish upbringing, and it's no surprise that they don't associate Judaism with any actual practice.

My second answer is the one that might offend people, but I don't much care. As far as I'm concerned, there's precious little about Conservative and Reform Judaism that involves the actual practice of the faith of our ancestors. Call them Judaism if you like, but I won't. When you discard the Rabbinic explanations for the written words of the Torah; when you argue (as most Reform do) that Judaism (and by extension, God) needs to adapt to our modern needs instead of the other way around; when you treat your faith and its tenets with contempt, I won't call you a practising Jew. A misguided one, perhaps. An apostate, when I'm feeling especially irritated.

But Judaism? No. Sorry. Uh-uh. Not Judaism in my book. Our purpose on this earth is to follow the word of God as laid out in the Torah - both the written and oral law. We are to be a light unto the nations by our devotion to God and His word. We are not here, whatever the lefties think, exclusively for "Tikkun Olam." Yes, we are supposed to "Repair the World," but you can not - I repeat, CAN NOT - do that at the expense of the mitzvot commanded us by God. All the social justice in the world doesn't help if you're missing the other parts of our mission. Prayer, Torah Study, charity, and daily observance of the mitzvot are out responsibility. Without those, the rest is an empty shell.

So the ignorance of the seder participants is not surprising. I should have seen the sadness in it as Terry did, but as I said, I'm so used to it I don't see it anymore. It's not their fault - American Jews have been steadily drifting away from observance for more than 100 years, and these people have never been taught anything. When returnees to the faith are struggling to reconcile their past with their desire for more observance, they are often told they were like "Tinok Shenishba" - essentially a babe in the woods. There is no point in beating yourself up over something you had no control over. When you're brought up with nothing, you can't be expected to know the mistakes you are making.

Even the last great barrier of American Judaism "well, of course you're going to marry someone Jewish, right?" has fallen by the wayside. Intermarriage rates are enormous, and for good reason. Why would a person listen to a parent arguing for a Jewish marriage when Judaism means nothing in the house? At this point in our experience, so many of the parents themselves married non-Jews that almost no one makes the attempt anymore to keep the marriages between Jews. By halacha, so many Jews are considered not Jewish (because their mothers were not Jews), that we've lost millions to intermarriage.

I was most surprised, in the article Terry sent, that the respondent actually wrote as if he knew something. I don't know if it was research or his own knowledge, but he got most of it right. He clearly doesn't believe most of it - he refers to it all as "folklore", which I heartily disagree with him on. But the ignorance of the participants in the Seder? Too common at this point to be novel. It's very sad, and if not for the small segment of the population in the US dedicated to remaining true to Torah, I would imagine there would be no Jews at all left in this country within a century or so from now.

Sorry to be depressing, but this is where we are.