Community and Society Archive

Welcome to Community and Society where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the changing nature of community and society in America today and on the challenges and opportunities these changes represent for the Jewish people in America at the dawn of a new century. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

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The Jewish "Community" -- Take Two

By Tsvi Blanchard

When I was growing up, I thought I was part of something called "the Jewish community". In my case, it was usually termed "the Jewish community of Rochester. For many others, and for me as well, that community had a "central address" and a set of interconnecting synagogues/Temples and agencies. We were indeed one.

I now see things differently. For Jews -- no matter where we happen to live -- there is really no such thing as "the Jewish community". Rather we have been making it up as we go along. Is this "bad news"? On the contrary, I think that we Jews will do better in the 21st century if we accept that as far as "the Jewish community" is concerned, we acknowledge that we are "making it up as we go along."

I want to begin with an explanation of these ideas and finish with some questions for you to respond to. Lets start with the term "community". The earliest human communities were defined by spatial contiguity. In nomadic tribes, the community remained together spatially even as it moved geographically. The group culture was homogeneous. Once you knew where someone lived, you also knew with whom s/he lived, how s/he lived and even what s/he believed about the world. These communities and their cultures were expected to meet nearly all of their members' needs from food and shelter to religion and healing. Clearly, there is no such "Jewish community" today.

Spatial contiguity no longer plays the same role in the formation of human communities. For well over two thousand years, a common faith or profession has also constituted communities. Jews have often been perceived as one faith community among many. Surely, given the diversity of beliefs and opinion among Jews, we can agree that this sense of "Jewish community" is also gone.

Once choice of religion and profession became the societal norm, the door was opened for communities to be formed on the basis of affinity. It is now possible to speak of communities whose members are connected by similar preferences or personal choices. There is a "health care community", a "financial community" and even a " baseball community." In these communities, members no longer necessarily live or even work near each other. What is important is that members share similar interests and concerns. Does "the Jewish community" share such common preferences, interests or concerns? I think not.

Community members also share a "community culture" with its unique rituals, language, dress code and means of communicating about shared concerns. In professional and business life there is far more diversity than there ever was. Nevertheless, people in "the health care community" or "the financial/ business community" or even "the rabbinic community" to a large extent share a unique jargon, a set of professional rituals and even dress code. Honestly speaking, in the geographical areas in which North American Jews now live, is there is a shared language, or set of rituals and practices which is powerful enough to justify speaking of "the Jewish community"? Again, it seems to me the answer is no.

At issue, here, is whether we all belong, in any meaningful sense, to a single Jewish community. I would suggest what we have today is not a single community but many communities. And these are very much smaller communities formed around, for lack of a better single term, "affinities". As with the larger North American society, such communities shift repeatedly in membership, rituals, roles, organizational structure, etc. And, individual members move in and out of these communities, often without changing geographical location.

Does this make "the Jewish community" an entirely meaningless concept? No. We still have the wish for a way of connecting and coordinating these ever shifting heterogeneous groups in ways that make the whole more than the sum of the parts. And this wish is meaningful and important. Our attachment to the notion of Jewish Peoplehood accounts, I believe, for our having persisted in this wish despite the lack of any uniform set of culturally unifying beliefs, practices or even ideals. A good part of this attachment derives from the current nostalgia for an imagined earlier world free from the often perplexing and painful fragmentation of our own social reality. As long as we remain attached in this way, we will have the task of constructing such a mutually supportive "community" of those of us who simply can't help experiencing ourselves as part of a ' Jewish People".

One last set of questions: In an age of cultural decentralization, is it wise for us to work to connect our small Jewish "groups/organizations" into broader communities and ultimately into something like "the Jewish community of X"? Consider the alternative of not trying to do so. In an age of economic and cultural globalization, would it be wise to abandon the task of trying to create synergistic connections between our "sub-communities"? Entirely open in my mind is the question of the form that this web of connections should take. Ought it to be an organization in the familiar sense? Or perhaps, we would be best advised to take the Internet as our model and imagine "the Jewish People" as a "virtual community" in which webs of shifting and self-defining human relationships are established?

What do you think?