CLAL on Culture Archive

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The "X" Files: Questioning the Culture of Crisis

By Jennifer E. Krause

A new generation of leaders is emerging. They are the young adults of a young century, often referred to as "Generation X" - a moniker assigned this group long before it had the chance to come of age. A Time magazine cover story from years ago insisted that the outlook for the children born in the 1960s and 1970s was grim. Generation X would be apathetic, generic, and unlikely to make a significant contribution. Yet the very same group once made famous by the media for the contribution it would not make has now come to be associated with the technology that is daily transforming the way we understand community, borders, communication, commerce, relationships, and ourselves. Even now, as the Internet fever appears to be breaking and the stock market catches its breath, the remarkable creative contributions that these young people have made and will continue to make in a variety of ways and settings must not be ignored. They are just one example of what this generation - my generation - can do.

Tom Beaudoin, author of Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X, explains that Xers are the children who became fluent in the languages of divorce, blended families, latchkey life, nuclear disaster, environmental catastrophes, highly televised political scandals, and acts of terrorism - all as they grew into adolescence. As a result, they developed an early cynicism, an aversion to sweeping social movements, and an innate mistrust of institutional authority.

Yet Xers have inherited more than a world of ambiguity and a culture in crisis from their Baby Boomer parents. In Spiritual Marketplace, professor of religion and society Wade Clarke Roof writes, "The boundaries of popular religious communities are now being redrawn, encouraged by the quests of the large, post World War II generations, and facilitated by the rise of an expanded spiritual marketplace." Xers have inherited a world in which the perpetual construction of one's religious/spiritual identity in an unlimited marketplace of ideas, truths, and experiences is a given. To borrow Roof's language, the Gen X spiritual quest is freely chosen and highly individual - a venture all one's own.

Growing into a world filled with choices has taught my generation how to dream big. This is a skill that becomes all the more important when we highlight the critical differences between current generations of American Jews and previous ones. On a very basic level, the rules, conditions, and options have changed. Jews in America today enjoy freedom, power, and affluence that our parents and grandparents - let alone Abraham, Miriam, or Maimonides - never imagined possible. Our ancestors were forced to build things, to forge new territory out of fear and disaster, at the whim of governments, Pharaohs, and madmen. Our parents and grandparents were forced to rebuild, to pick up the pieces of a people shattered and scattered, both literally and figuratively, by systematized hatred and targeted acts of violence. What a singular moment, then, to be at a place and a space in time when Jews can build because they choose to build.

My generation, along with those which exist on the cusp between Generation X and the Baby Boomers, will build from blueprints of its own design. And the way we do our building will be a direct result of the fact that, practically from our first breaths, we awakened to a world in which the revolution was not war, but the absence of one. Yet perhaps the most remarkable difference by far is what is at stake. In the absence of war and oppression, hatred and danger, a four thousand year old covenant may, for the very first time in history, have a real chance at changing the world.

The Jewish community recognizes that my generation is an important population to address, but seemingly for all the wrong reasons. It views my generation and so many others which it labels as living beyond the pale of "normative" Jewish life in much the same way that the Time magazine article characterized Gen X years ago - an apathetic, disinterested group that needs to be transformed, salvaged, awakened, and saved.

This view might explain why currently few if any opportunities exist for people in their twenties and thirties to seriously explore Jewish identity for its own sake. Existing programs geared toward young people tend to bear a suspicious resemblance to prom parties or high school youth group events and are almost exclusively linked to the search for a mate, as my generation is most often seen for whom it might potentially marry rather than for its potential. And while the search for a partner is an important and sacred endeavor in its own right, it is, nonetheless, only one part of a life journey.

In addition, our struggles to construct a meaningful Jewish identity do not end once we have found a life partner. In many ways, it is then that the stakes get even higher and the challenges more intense. Thus another gap exists for people in this age group who are married or in long-term, committed relationships and can find little in the way of serious opportunities for enrichment or exploration of their Jewishness until they have pre-school aged children and have joined a synagogue (and even then the offerings are limited).

The current programmatic offerings for this constituency tend to focus on what has come to be known as "Jewish literacy" or, as I like to call it, the "We're OK, You're Not" school of American Jewish programming. The message is "You are an empty vessel. Come to us and we will fill you with the knowledge you need to be the kind of Jew we believe you should be." More often than not, this approach misses the mark. Not only does it assume that there is one normative way to be Jewish, but it devalues the experiences and the intellects of the participants, and implies that Judaism is a perfectly whole entity without them or their contributions. This is a particularly grave misstep where the Gen X population is concerned. As Beaudoin observes, "Xers will not simply receive religious truth paternalistically from a religious authority. What counts as religious must meet the ultimate test: Xers own personal experience." Thus any program that denies the unique experiences, passions, and personalities of the participants leads them to an unfortunate conclusion. Whereas people might experience themselves as whole, highly successful, motivated, intelligent, and generally happy, the one place they end up feeling fragmented, ignorant, miserable, and unsuccessful is in a context that has been identified for them as "Jewish."

This is why we need methods based on the notion of "reach" as an alternative to "outreach." "Outreach" is about someone reaching out to pull someone in, while "reach" is about meeting people where they are, empowering them to decide where they want to go, and helping them find what they need to be responsive in their own lives and in the life of their communities. The Internet, which allows individuals to reach into any part of the world at any time, is a profound example of the human desire to extend our reach, to touch as much of life as possible. When God challenges us to "choose life" in the Torah, God appeals to this instinct implanted in every human being. It is this approach that enables a Jew - of Generation X or of any other generation - to see him/herself as a link in an infinite chain of an eternal covenant, to see his/her choices in the context of responsibility to the past, the present, and the future. Some of those choices may resemble those of our ancestors, while others will not, but they will all be Jewish.

When the Israelites were about to enter the Promised Land, God instructed Moses to send a representative of each tribe into Canaan to get a sense of what was ahead, to understand what it would take to make life a reality there. This was the culmination of a forty-year desert sojourn, the continuation of an even longer journey dating back to the birth of the covenant between God and Abraham. And at the very moment when they could see the land just over the next mountain ridge, they stopped to reconnoiter. The next step was just too important not to do so. But only two of those scouts - Caleb and Moses' successor, Joshua -- return confident and enthusiastic about moving the Israelites' journey forward. The others try to scare the Israelites with tales of giants and a land that devours its settlers. Yet Caleb cries: "We will go up. We will claim our inheritance. Surely we can make it our own."

In many ways we stand at this very same point today. The Jewish world sees Xers and so many others as risks and liabilities, and it springs into action based on that worldview. What the Jewish world does not see is that we have the real ability to respond to and change the world in a way that Jews have always dreamed of, but have never truly had the full capacity to do. It is in this sense that the younger generations are American Jewish life's greatest hope, not an expression of its greatest fears. Now is the time to harness these generations' promise because the next step is indeed an important one.

As I see it, the challenge of doing so lies not in the people themselves but in those who would pretend to know who "they" are, what "they" care about, and what "they" need. Right now, the Jewish community is filled with plenty of nay-saying spies and far too few Joshuas and Calebs. There are simply not enough people who are willing to say that the next step is scary but worth taking, that we have no choice but to move beyond the next mountain peak from the glimpse at the Promised Land to the Promised Land itself. After all, isn't this what we came out from Egypt to do? I believe that our greatest danger now is not "assimilation" or intermarriage or a decline in proficiency with the most basic texts, symbols, and rituals of our inherited tradition.

These are issues with which we must contend, in much the same way that our ancestors contended with them. And while they concern me as a rabbi and as a Jew, in my mind the real danger, the greatest threat to us as a people, is failing to recognize the time in which we are living for the moment of hope and opportunity it is. My generation has a critical role to play in this moment, but so does any Jew who believes that he/she can be part of ushering in a new era in Jewish life.