Читать книгу Beyond the Synagogue - Rachel B. Gross - Страница 10

Although Jewish history in the Americas dates back to the earliest years of European contact with North America, the majority of American Jews are descendants of Central and Eastern Europeans who immigrated to the United States between the 1880s and 1924, often settling in urban ethnic enclaves like the Lower East Side. American Jews’ attention to these communal origins has increased steadily since the 1970s. Stories about Eastern European Jewish immigrants have become increasingly standardized by organizations such as Jewish genealogy groups, museums, publishers, and restaurants—and an expected emotional response to such stories has become standardized, too. Engaging with the standardized nostalgia for Eastern European Jewish immigration history should, I argue, be understood as an American Jewish religious practice.

Jews in many times and places have used physical materials and spaces to create communities with present-day co-religionists. This is certainly the case in the United States, dating back to the seventeenth-century origins of Jewish communities in the Americas in networks of Sephardi merchants.4 But items of Eastern European and immigrant Jewish nostalgia, such as the Eldridge Street Synagogue’s floorboards, do more than connect American Jews to their contemporary co-religionists. They are religious materials, providing powerful sacred meaning that actively places individuals in relation to past, present, and future communities. American Jews’ interactions with items and spaces invoke imagined communities that include both the living and the dead, providing meaning in the present by narrating the past. Through particularly American emphases on material culture and institutional organization, nostalgia—a wishful affection or sentimental longing for an irrevocable past—functions as religion for American Jews, complicating notions of a divide between Judaism, the religion, and Jewishness, the culture.

This book aims to shift where scholars and Jews identify American Jewish religion. Describing American Jewish nostalgia as an American Jewish religious practice matters, both because the term “religion” helps us to understand the practices and ideas that are meaningful to American Jews and because definitions of American Jewish religion have real-life implications. Religion is commonly understood by non-specialists to be a private set of beliefs and practices related to worship of a deity. In contrast, although belief in God is one aspect of Judaism, the existence of God may not be of primary importance to the religious identity and practice of many Jews.5 Religion serves to provide existential meaning, answering questions about life’s purpose. Jewish religion includes a broad variety of practices, both public and private, that connect Jews to present-day Jewish communities, inspire remembrance of ancestors, or involve traditional Jewish texts, rituals, or practices. Both explicitly and (more often) implicitly, such activities shape Jews’ imagination of past, present, and future Jewish communities and provide existential meaning for Jews.6

Since the mid-twentieth century, American Jewish communal leaders have worried loudly that American Jews’ religiosity is declining. These communal leaders define Jewish religiosity narrowly, in terms of practices that can be measured in sociological studies, such as attending synagogue, keeping kosher, or sending children to Jewish religious schools. In the decades since then, these fears have been seemingly confirmed in widely accepted social scientific studies that appear to demonstrate an American Jewish “continuity crisis” or a “marriage crisis,” the latter emphasizing communal fears about marriages between Jews and non-Jews.7 Dismay over intermarriage and its effects on Jewish religious continuity has been articulated in sociological language from the pulpit, by Jewish organizations, and in large-scale philanthropy. Proponents of the continuity crisis rely on divisions between activities seen as “good for the Jews”—largely those identified as religious Jewish practices, which these leaders want to encourage—and those activities seen as “bad for the Jews”—generally, cultural Jewish practices seen as encouraging secularism, assimilation, and intermarriage, which they want to discourage.8 These studies have guided the determination of which American Jews count, literally and metaphorically, and they have influenced the funding and aims of local and national Jewish communal organizations.

This book argues that the premise of American Jewish religious decline and the studies supporting a continuity crisis incorrectly identify the ways that Jews think about and practice Judaism in the United States. When Jewish communal leaders and sociologists distinguish between Jewish culture and Jewish religion, many of the ways that American Jews create individual and communal meaning in their lives are flattened or even erased. Rather than turning to—or turning only to—the institutions that have previously guided American Jewish communal life, such as synagogues, religious schools, Jewish community centers, and Jewish Federations, many American Jews are increasingly communicating Jewish values and ideas to their children by engaging with the products of museums, gift shops, restaurants, publishing companies, toy manufacturers, philanthropies, and other ostensibly secular institutions. These products are often described as Jewish cultural materials, but they are better understood as Jewish religious ones.

Religion is best understood as meaningful relationships and the practices, narratives, and emotions that create and support these relationships. Religious studies scholar Robert Orsi defines religion as networks of relationships among the living, between the living and the dead, or between humans and the divine, each of which may be highlighted to varying degrees in different contexts.9 While Orsi focuses on Catholics’ relationship to sacred figures, American Jews tend to emphasize other forms of religious relationships, such as between the living and their ancestors. “Whatever else religion might be, it is a way of describing structures by which we are bound or connected to one another,” explains religious studies scholar Kathryn Lofton.10 Understanding religion as relationships and structures makes families, communities, and memory central to religious activity.

Using this framework, religion may be found both within and beyond traditional religious institutions and rituals. A conception of religion as constituted by individuals’ relationships with families, communities, ancestors, and the divine allows us to see the significance of purportedly secular activities and organizations. It helps us consider how individuals who do not regard themselves “religious” make meaning in their lives, as well as how those who do see themselves as religious find meaning outside of traditional practices. The meaning-making work of religion helps people understand the world around them by construing or making sense of life events, relationships, and themselves. Jewish communal leaders and philanthropists bemoan the supposed decrease in American Jewish religious practice, but if we reorient where we look for American Jewish religion and reconsider how we define it, then we start to find a lot more of it.

In shifting where we look for American Jewish religion, I employ the lived religion approach of religious studies. The study of lived religion focuses our attention on the ways in which people enact their religious identities on a daily basis, through ordinary activities such as eating, cooking, shopping, reading, or entertaining.11 Most people do not recognize the practices of lived religion as religious actions similar to celebrating a holiday or reciting prayers; they are rather seen as the mundane practices that provide the structure of our lives or the leisure activities that we engage in throughout the week. Commerce, in particular, is often dismissed as a profane activity. But what we spend our money on often illuminates our values more than our words do.12 Certain commercial institutions and materials can inspire emotions, like nostalgia, that are commonly interpreted within established patterns. Using a lived religion approach, I contend that buying and selling certain items connects people to religious networks through affective norms. Buying a pastrami sandwich from a deli is an ordinary activity, but many American Jews understand the sandwich as a connection to other Jews past and present. It may remind them of other delis where they have eaten, perhaps with their families. They may think sentimentally of how Jews in the past have eaten, imagining that the sandwich links them to their ancestors. The nostalgia inspired by a pastrami sandwich, I argue, is part of American Jewish religion.

This book examines institutions and products that encourage the feeling of nostalgia for Eastern European immigrant pasts as an American Jewish religious activity, one that especially emphasizes the religious practices of remembering ancestors and creating community. For American Jews, nostalgia for Eastern European Jewish pasts functions as a mitzvah (literally, commandment). Mitzvot (plural of mitzvah) are the building blocks of Jewish religion. According to rabbinic tradition, there are not only ten commandments, but 613 divinely commanded mitzvot articulated throughout the Torah, forming the basis of halakha, Jewish law.13 In American Jews’ colloquial use, the term is even broader. Jews have long used the language of mitzvot to describe a variety of practices they consider sacred.14 In everyday speech, a mitzvah is both a divinely mandated ordinance and, more loosely, a good deed. Expanding upon biblical commands to honor one’s parents and to remember certain biblical stories, Jews have come to understand honoring their ancestors and remembering Jewish histories as mitzvot.15 American Jewish nostalgia for Eastern Europe fulfills and expands upon both of these mitzvot. Like other mitzvot, Jewish nostalgia has become both praiseworthy and obligatory for American Jews.