I was a public school kid most of my life, but I was a highly-engaged teen at my suburban synagogue. I attended Hebrew High School by choice, and I had a wonderful teacher there who served as a kind of rebbe for me as I took my first halting steps into Jewish learning. My course selection each semester was easy - I just took Hebrew and whatever Mr. Kramer was teaching. 

For the life of me I can’t remember how, but one evening in a Talmud class we landed on the topic of denominationalism in Jewish life. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by either the origin or the destination - the Talmud is already a highly associative text known to make leaps across boundaries of chronology, geography, and sometimes logic, so the process of learning Talmud often leads to byways, tangents and diversions along the way that can feel as central as the text itself. As for the topic of denominationalism - it was the 1990’s, and as Jewish life increasingly mirrored the broader culture wars in the United States wedge issues like intermarriage, egalitarianism, and patrilineal descent were the hot topics of the day. Mr. Kramer, a lifelong learner, spiritual seeker, and inveterate optimist, offered us a vision of what could be: “Picture a synagogue with multiple floors. On each floor, there is a prayer space of every kind - Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, etc., but the building contains a shared communal space for Kiddush and meals. Why can’t we have a synagogue like that?” 

Mr. Kramer may have just been employing a teacher tool, distracting us with his thought experiment in order to steer the lesson back on track, but the simplicity of his vision and the sincerity with which he expressed it excited my adolescent imagination and has stayed with me. To speak of Jewish unity across differences in our hyper-partisan, polarized age may come across to some as naïve, but building a diverse Jewish community around shared values and practices is anything but impossible. It isn’t always easy, and creating a synagogue like this would create plenty of friction, but the answer might be simply just to do it anyway. I think it’s what we do at Schechter Bergen every day. I think our mission might be more pressing than ever.

The 2020 Pew Research Center’s Study of Jewish Americans, like the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey before it, was the cause of much hand-wringing in the organized Jewish world, but a closer look at its findings, I believe, helps explain why and how a school like Schechter mirrors the broader Jewish community as it really is, while anchoring and strengthening it within a set of legitimate and lofty organizing values. Take a few examples from the Pew Study’s “10 Key Findings about Jewish Americans”. “Like the overall U.S. population, Jews appear to be growing more racially and ethnically diverse.” While 92% of adult Jews identify as non-Hispanic white, the number among Jews ages 18 to 29 who identify as something other than white rises from 8% to 15%. For much of the 20th century, organized Jewish life in America and in Israel was dominated by Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe and their descendants. While the many Jewish “tribes” were separated from one another by barriers of geography and culture, in modern times and as the Jewish world has taken root in two major centers - North America and Israel - each has acted as its own kind of Jewish melting pot, with Jews from Africa, the Middle East, India, China, and Europe all beginning to intermingle and marry. Marriage between Jews and non-Jews is of course a factor of this diversity as well, but our membership has always been far-flung, with branches of the Jewish family all across the world and on nearly every continent. Our origins and center of gravity lies in the Land of Israel, but in this way, Jews have lived out the dual meanings of being an Am Olam - we are an eternal and global people. An Am functions as a joinable tribe based on descent and consent. You can be a Jew by birth, descended from Jews from one or another ethnic group, or you can choose to take on the destiny of the Jewish people as your own by means of conversion. The increased diversity of who a Jew is in America simply reflects the way it’s always been, and our school should only continue to embrace that diverse, global quality. While Jewish peoplehood can be more capacious in other contexts, and we all know that antisemites care little about which “side” your Jewishness runs on, we create a sense of unity across these differences by means of our commitment to the Halakhic definition of who is a Jew, not where on the map you trace your family’s story. 

Another major pole that props up the big Jewish tent we are striving to pitch is our commitment to Zionism. Before October 7, there was much discussion of a growing distance between diaspora and Israel, and an unsettling of the pro-Israel concensus, especially among young Jews. But even in 2020, according to Pew, “A large majority of U.S. Jews (82%) say caring about Israel is either “essential” or “important” to what being Jewish means to them.” There are practical and ideological reasons for this. If we have always been an Am and more than 7 million of the 15 million total Jews in the world live in Israel, it is only natural that we care about them, their safety, and their well-being, and that our natural sympathies lie with the first Jewish sovereign state in nearly 2,000 years. This connection runs very deep in our community, as many in our community were born there, are citizens, have family there, travel there frequently and we organize our time, energy and money around Israel and causes related to its flourishing. But as we recently taught the 8th graders, there have always been many Zionisms, and commitment to Zionism today need not correspond to any particular policy vision; any specific feelings for or against a particular Israeli government; any specific vision for how to create an enduring and lasting peace between the State of Israel and its neighbors. Before October 7, we rested on our laurels by assuming Israel's existence, the justice of Zionism’s cause, and the world’s acceptance of the enduring connection between the people of Israel and the Land of Israel stood on firm ground. Those days, clearly, are over, and the goalposts are moving as they relate to the Israel conversation this generation is stepping into. We need to get back to basics, and return to owning our power, our story, and our rights as a people. This at least one authentic way of understanding Zionism’s importance for us in America.

In other ways, our school also tries to buck the current trends in American Jewish life. Not every family in our community chooses to observe Halakha, and the Pew Study attracted headlines because of the growth of those who identify as “Jews of no religion”. Indeed, many might be uncomfortable with Judaism as a religion at all. It is true that religion in many quarters is in decline in America, and that, “U.S. Jews are less religious than American adults overall. About one-in-ten Jewish Americans (12%) say they attend religious services at least weekly in a synagogue, temple or less formal setting”. But as we know, Jewish civilizations have never been built around political organizing and fundraising alone; there has never been a great Jewish society that did not have great Batei Knesset and Batei Midrash - houses of prayer and houses of learning - at their center. Preserving the Jewish people for some is an end in itself, but in order to be an Am Olam (Eternal People) we must orient ourselves to a higher calling, an eternal mission. For Jews, this is Torah and our texts. Again, what we take from Torah and how we live it need not be the same. But the idea that it belongs to each and every one of us, and that it is best encountered in the original Hebrew has been a bedrock foundation of the Jewish people across time and space. It is a tree of life Le’Makhazikim bah - to those who grab hold of it. We strive to enable our students to do just that.

Our school’s namesake, Solomon Schechter, never intended to create a separate movement in Judaism; instead, his goal was to transcend their differences and capture a balance between the authority and beauty of tradition and the dynamism and fluid nature of the world in which we live. His goal was to capture an authentic Jewish heartbeat at the center of all the different Jewish movements, based in Hebrew language and critical Torah study. Sometimes the answer to the question, “How can we create an ideal communal Judaism that respects our differences?” is simply to do it. I’m so glad to be building that community together with you.