Hard economic times are continuing to force the organized Jewish community into retrenchment. It puts me in mind of a classic ethical question, posed in tractate Bava Metzia of the Babylonian Talmud: if you and a friend are lost in the wilderness, and you yourself are carrying a flask of water sufficient to sustain only one of you, what should you do with it?
Something like this situation is playing out in Boston right now. Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Boston chapter of “Federation” (wait for it…), announced on Thursday that they are pulling their funding from the Boston Bureau of Jewish Education. As the CJP allocation represents over 90% of the BJE budget ($1.2 million out of a reported $1.4 million), the BJE is now facing almost certain closure.
Growing up a Boston Jew, I was only vaguely aware of the alphabet soup that was the organized community. One winter Sunday a year, we would gather in the ballroom of the Park Plaza hotel, where we kids would serve as runners, hustling pledge cards between the phone banks and the clerks in the service of CJP’s massive fundraising operation. And my mother was always going off to some BJE meeting or another, which I knew had something to do with the ethno-religious education we were receiving, whether in parochial school or at the synagogue.
It’s only later on in life that people, if they take an interest, begin to comprehend the networks they were born into, the histories of the constellations they took for granted. CJP, though it has been restructured and renamed several times, is over a hundred years old. In the late-19th century, as immigration swelled the ranks of the American Jewish community, and, probably not coincidentally, anti-Semitic exclusion also increased, Jewish philanthropists began to develop strategies of pooling their resources and using them to create more sophisticated and progressive organizations. These central fundraising and allocation bodies became known as “Federations.” The first one, the forerunner of CJP, emerged in Boston, but the model took hold elsewhere, and today every major Jewish population center has at least one branch of its own.
Federation funders created Boston’s BJE in the early 1920s. As the first large scale generation of American-born Jews started coming of age, there was growing concern that these young people would be lost to assimilation without a cohesive program of Jewish education to sustain their identities. In its first incarnation, the BJE actually oversaw an extensive network of secondary schools, with special provisions for training qualified teachers and maintaining high standards through rigorous testing. The curriculum was largely secular-cultural, rooted in the Hebraist-Zionists ideology that saw linguistic and territorial nationalism as the new Jewish social glue.
A lot has changed already in the past century, mostly as a result of the fact that Jewish assimilation proved a juggernaut. The BJE school network collapsed in the early-60s. Jews were no longer interested in such an articulated system, preferring to rely on the unregulated (and fairly uninspiring) patchwork of congregational religious schools. Day schools—full-time programs offering secular education along with religious instruction—came on the scene for those more serious about their Jewish learning. The BJE became a service organization, focusing more on curricular development and teacher support than authoritative oversight. The transformation was not purely dictated by circumstances. CJP, the holder of the communal purse strings, had demanded the change be made.
It’s not that Federation doesn’t value education. In fact, over the past 20 years, recognizing that its own power will be diminished by Jewish attrition (not to mention its more altruistic commitment to the survival of the Jewish people), CJP has placed a lot of emphasis on Jewish learning as the key to “Jewish continuity.” The belief is that Jews will be more likely to remain Jewish if they experience tradition as a source of intellectually and spiritually compelling material. (This is in contrast to more commonplace efforts to scare Jews into belonging.)
In one sense, this parallels the thinking of the early-20th century and the search for a compelling educational program with which to foster Jewish identity. The difference is that now educators are dealing with a much more fractured community, and the diminished likelihood that anything as cohesive or coercive as full-on Hebraist-Zionism will take root. Today, it’s more a matter of selling something gentle and positive to discriminating consumers, adults as well as children.
The problem for the BJE now is not so much irrelevance as redundancy. Other organizations, says CJP, including Brandeis University, the Boston Hebrew College, the congregational-based programs, the day schools, and Jewish summer camps, are providing the same kinds of services. While it may have made sense to have a central educational entity back when it was running the show, nowadays it seems vestigial, and too much overhead to carry in a declining economy.
But the collapse of the BJE also indicates that nobody is quite sure what Jewish education is or should be doing these days. And some have even suggested that CJP has had it in for the BJE for some time, and that the current crisis is providing it with the perfect cover for the coup de grace.
But there is no doubt that Federation has less money than it used to, and is looking down the barrel of the very real prospect of having even less in the future. While, in the Talmud, Ben Petora said the water should be shared equally—better to perish together than watch your fellow die—Rabbi Akiva did not agree. Akiva, a staunch pragmatist, who had been an illiterate shepherd till he started studying Torah at the age of 40, eventually rising to preeminence before he was martyred, at the age of 90, by the Romans, said there was nothing shameful about looking out for number one. Though elsewhere he proposed that the essence of the Law was to “love your neighbor as yourself,” here he asserted that partial survival was better than a total collapse engendered by misguided charity.
The debate, both ancient and modern, is ongoing. We can only hope the times will make our choices less dire before too long.
