Jennifer Hanin . com

A dear friend of mine asked my thoughts on the arti­cle on emer­gent Jews posted yes­ter­day on CNN.com. Inter­est­ing enough, as a new Jew it wasn’t the arti­cle that raised my eye­brows but the 200+comments that fol­lowed it. I had to post a com­ment that accu­rately reflected my con­cern over the judg­men­tal com­ments I read there.

Some dogged Jews for not believ­ing that the Mes­siah was really the Mes­siah. Well, that’s an easy one. While the Mes­siah might be believ­able to Chris­tians, the premise is a bit hard for most Jews to swal­low. Most Jews rightly ques­tion the exis­tence of a “Mes­siah” when 6 mil­lion Jews plus two mil­lion oth­ers died at the hands of the Nazis. Or other tragic his­tor­i­cal events like the Inqui­si­tion estab­lished by the Holy Office. The Span­ish Inqui­si­tion alone sent 300,000 Jews into exile and pub­li­cally burned 32,000 oth­ers at the stake.

Some com­ments were sup­port­ive of young Jews express­ing their faith in their own way; how­ever, more were caus­tic, even sus­pect­ing these youths of com­mit­ting blas­phemy. I find it appalling how quick we are to judge rather than con­grat­u­late oth­ers for find­ing ways to wor­ship that work for them. Now am I sug­gest­ing that we all re-write reli­gious tenets? No. I’m sim­ply stat­ing that many times reli­gion is inflex­i­ble and does not grow in the same direc­tion as our soci­ety. This is why we have so many Chris­t­ian sects, four main Jew­ish sects and so many other religions.

An exam­ple of build­ing in flex­i­bil­ity and being cre­ative with reli­gion occurred per­son­ally about two years ago at the Con­ser­v­a­tive Syn­a­gogue we belong to. Our syn­a­gogue, Beth Yeshu­run, began hold­ing “Shab­bat Jam” every Fri­day night. This is a kid’s ser­vice that fea­tures a rock band. The Youth rabbi real­ized that kids these days are more inter­ested in rock music and found this addi­tion as an excit­ing way to lead a youth ser­vice. He was right. The ser­vice is wildly suc­cess­ful and atten­dance reflects this. Oth­ers are incor­po­rat­ing rap for Shab­bat ser­vices the same reason.

We all have to evolve on some level to keep up with a chang­ing soci­ety and many have failed to do this as evi­denced by the preva­lence of highly judg­men­tal and big­oted com­ments about emer­gent Jews posted on CNN’s site.

Mazel Tov to the hand­ful of review­ers who could see past the tat­toos and the Torah singing.

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