Jennifer's Blog

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.

Grow­ing up Catholic, safety never crossed my mind as I entered Our Lady of Fatima Ele­men­tary or Sun­day morn­ing Mass. But soon after I enrolled in a Jew­ish con­ver­sion process two years ago, my world took a tail­spin into what it must feel like to engage in espionage.  

Within months of becom­ing a new Jew, my twins’ Jew­ish Day School alerted our fam­ily that they had received a bomb threat (a far cry from the paddle-weilding nun that I encoun­tered when I was their age). A few months later, the Jew­ish Com­mu­nity Cen­ter alerted us about another bomb threat that could affect our twins’ sum­mer camp.

Bomb threats at US schools and com­mu­nity cen­ters? For­give me, if I feel like I just woke up in Gaza. Why would reli­gious wor­ship in Amer­ica incite that kind hatred and vio­lence? It’s unfor­tu­nate, wrong and we must end it.

I never joined the CIA, FBI or Secret Ser­vice and have no plans to. But the bomb threats and bar­rage of shoot­ings like the one yes­ter­day where a lone gun­man in a hoodie shot two men as they entered morn­ing ser­vices at a North Hol­ly­wood tem­ple or the fatal shoot­ing of a six-year vet­eran of the Holo­caust Museum’s secu­rity staff, Stephen Tyrone Jones on June 10, 2009 only strengthen my resolve, my belief and my vision of a tol­er­ant future.

Luck­ily, Pres­i­dent Obama made a huge step for­ward when he recently signed leg­is­la­tion expand­ing fed­eral involve­ment in pros­e­cut­ing hate crimes. Finally, an Amer­i­can Pres­i­dent cared enough to pass leg­is­la­tion that will pros­e­cute any­one com­mit­ting a hate crime for sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion or gen­der, in addi­tion to race, color, reli­gion or national origin.

Most Amer­i­cans recall James Byrd and Matthew Shep­ard head­lin­ing the news in 1998. The media thrust both sto­ries into over­drive after they became vic­tims of bru­tal hate crimes: Byrd for race and Shep­ard for sex­ual orientation.

Inside our bor­ders, these cases are occur­ring less from ter­ror­ist groups and more from mis­guided, big­oted Amer­i­cans. All are base­less, uncon­scionable and either the result of uncon­trolled “gang” men­tal­ity as in the case of Byrd, Shep­ard or even the recent gang-rape of a 15 year old female at Rich­mond High School or a rifle-wielding white suprema­cist as in the case of Johns. And who

Bonus: You could very well help rid our soci­ety of intol­er­ance and hate crimes if you took a stand and said no to all.