Leafy,
affluent Park Slope embodies the challenge facing modern American
Jewry: Though many Jews live there, few are observant. So it was no
small feat when Rabbi Andy Bachman took the helm of Congregation Beth Elohim
in the Brooklyn neighborhood eight years ago and began attracting a
vibrant congregation of Jewish atheists and agnostics, as well as the
more traditionally religious.
Drawn
by big-name book talks, family-oriented religious classes and the
rabbi’s teaching that to be Jewish is to do good in the world,
membership doubled to more than a thousand families. The Reform
synagogue drew young literati like Jonathan Safran Foer and catapulted
to national attention as a model for what might bring some of the
nation’s millions of Jews who are unaffiliated with synagogues back to
the fold.
Recently,
however, Rabbi Bachman shocked many in his congregation and in Jewish
circles by announcing that he was stepping down from the pulpit and out
of Jewish leadership to help New York’s poorest, regardless of their
religion.
“I
think that I deliver really good and really inspiring sermons about
social justice, but is that really enough?” he said recently in an
interview. “It’s crazy to think that’s enough. In order to maintain my
sense of integrity and to keep the flame burning strongly about my
commitments, I knew it was time to step away.”
His
decision was deeply personal, but also touched on vexing questions at
the center of Judaism’s future in this country as modern Jews — the
secular, the unaffiliated, the questioning — grapple with what it means
to be Jewish and what role a synagogue should play in that identity.
Nationally, synagogue affiliation is falling as American Jews
increasingly decide they do not need to live out their Judaism in a
religious context.
Rabbi
Bachman, 51, has spent a lifetime pondering such questions. Raised in
Milwaukee as a wholly secular Jew, his main links to his Jewish heritage
were his paternal grandparents, who cooked sour kugel and sweet
blintzes and spoke of the family’s Belarussian roots. Yet when his
father died in 1983, Rabbi Bachman did not even know how to say Kaddish,
the Jewish blessing over the dead. He felt compelled to take his Jewish
heritage more seriously, and that exploration ultimately led him to
become a rabbi.
“I
was a typical modern Jew who had an identity crisis, and rode it out,
and built a whole career out of it,” he said with a smile. “What an
embarrassment.”
But
in the last two years, he began feeling constrained within the
synagogue. He had always wanted to do good in the world, he said. Before
pursuing the rabbinate, he considered becoming a journalist or working
in government. Becoming a rabbi allowed him to channel his idealism in a
Jewish way.
Pre-eminent
among Jewish values in his mind, he said, is the call to do justice.
And he had come to a point where he felt that he could do more by direct
action than by giving sermons about it. “The calculus of how I wanted
to spend my hours every day changed,” he said.
Rabbi
Bachman spent months fretting over his decision, worried that it might
cause doubt in others. Indeed, congregants peppered him with questions
after he posted the news on his personal blog in March. He said one
asked him: “You are leaving the pulpit, have you had a crisis of faith?
Have you decided there is no God?” Another asked: “Does this mean
Judaism has no value?”
“There
is no crisis of faith,” he said he had responded. “In a way, it’s just a
crisis of wanting to be more effective at doing good in the world.”
Yet
Rabbi Bachman admitted to grappling with the idea that he should devote
his life primarily to the service of other Jews, something he called
his “sense of responsibility to the broader Jewish community.” He is not
alone.
Reform
Judaism, which is the largest denomination in American Judaism, has a
long tradition of social justice and activism, but it can be a challenge
to persuade many liberal, modern Jews of the need to live out those
values in a Jewish context. So Beth Elohim reached beyond the
denomination’s traditional boundaries to build its synagogue, hosting
cultural events for secular Israelis, celebrations for young Brooklyn
Jews seeking a sense of belonging, community service projects and
popular book talks featuring authors like Paul Auster and Don DeLillo.
Simultaneously, it opened its doors to more religious Jews and began
hosting egalitarian Orthodox services.
“Andy
is wisely a rabbi who saw the broader landscapes of Jewish life, and
built bridges to help people come in,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the head of
the Union for Reform Judaism, said. “And that’s the wave of the Jewish future.”
By
2012, Rabbi Bachman was appearing on national lists of top rabbis
produced by publications as diverse as The Jewish Daily Forward and
Newsweek. And yet, privately, after days of teaching or officiating over
funerals, he found himself nagged by a question: “Who is in greater
need that I can help?”
When
Hurricane Sandy hit in October 2012, he mobilized Beth Elohim to begin a
mass feeding program. The synagogue kitchen was transformed into a
feeding center that served some 185,000 meals over a year and a half.
Then budget cuts hit the temple this year, and it had to retrench,
including eliminating several jobs and suspending the feeding program.
Some in the synagogue were anxious that its finances were not keeping up
with the pace of change.
Although
Rabbi Bachman’s announcement that he would leave at the end of his
contract in June 2015 came at the same time as the cuts, he said the
timing was coincidental. Most congregants have been supportive of his
decision, although there has also been sadness and unease.
“Andy
has been there for us when we really needed him, so we are sad and
disappointed,” said Laurie Geller, a temple member for 20 years.
Rabbi
Bachman, who is working on a book about Jewish identity, emphasized
that serving the broader world was simply expressing his faith in a
different way. “I will always be a rabbi,” he said. And following his
example, he said, his congregants should not build a wall around their
Judaism in an effort to preserve it.
After
all, he added, Moses himself was worried about Jewish continuity, but
according to the Jewish tradition his fears were allayed when God
miraculously brought him to visit the classroom of Rabbi Akiva, a famous
Jewish sage of the first century A.D. At first, Moses could not
understand the lesson, because it was in Aramaic, but eventually he
heard the rabbi say: “This is the law given to Moses at Sinai,” and was
comforted.
“If
Moses didn’t understand Akiva, my presumption is that we will probably
be O.K.,” Rabbi Bachman said of the survival of Judaism. “I might not
recognize it myself if I were to come back and look at it in a couple
hundred years, but as long as there is Torah at the center in some form,
I guess we will be O.K.”
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