It looks like the perfect Christmas service: the church decorated with white poinsettias, congregants in their red finery standing and swaying to carols, an interpreter for the deaf translating the music into sign language. After the singing ends, the congregation calls its pastors to the dais to honor them with a "love offering" - kind words and a Christmas bonus.
So what's strange about this picture? Well, three of the inner-city church leaders are Jewish - or were born Jewish, and they have accepted Jesus Christ as the messiah.
"I was born a Jew. I didn't change my religion. I simply changed my relationship with Christ," Steve Fatow, the 48-year-old senior pastor who found Jesus at age 22, says during the service. He recalls the glory of celebrating his first Christmas after always having always felt cut-off, as a Jewish boy growing up on Long Island, New York.
Other members of his team at Trinity Church, a charismatic New Testament congregation, include pastors Neil Silverberg, 43, and Ed Rosen, 53. They share a generally secular background, although Rosen, before his bar mitzvah, laid tefillin and wore tzitzit.
This trinity of pastors are among a half-dozen or more Jewish-born church leaders in Knoxville, Tennesse. Two of them, a couple who headed the liberal Unity Church, moved on to other pastures. Still, other Jews by birth are married to ministers here, and many more have sought a rainbow of different religious and spiritual paths. The stream of "hyphenated Jews" passing through Tennessee's third-largest city has included Jewish-Sikhs, Jewish-Buddhists, Jewish-Mormons, Jewish-Baptists and Jewish-Unitarians. Many more simply remain unaffiliated with Jewish institutions. They fall into the 55 percent of American Jews whom the National Jewish Population Survey found belong to neither a synagogue nor a community organization.
"It is worrisome, particularly when we ask ourselves:'Why are we concerned with the unaffiliated in the first place?'" says Dr. Egon Mayer, a member of the National Technical Advisory Committee on Jewish Population Studies that oversaw the 1990 survey. "We're partly concerned about continuity of institution, and of course we're also concerned about the state of self-understanding of people who are unaffiliated. But clearly, from the vantage point of institutional Jewish life, the fact that the majority of identifiable households are not part of the system is a source of concern."
Mayer, executive director of the Jewish Outreach Institute in New York, notes that we tend to be just like our parents. At a conference on "The Unaffiliated Jew" sponsored by the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, in 1995, Mayer observed that childhood education and upbringing often herald adult choices. He said that "it turns out when you ask people how they identify themselves in comparison to how they were raised, many people say: 'Yes my parents were Jewish but they were both Communists,' or: 'They were both Unitarians and that's how I was raised.Õ Ó
Mayer has a theory: age, marital status, and parenthood predict when Jews will return to the fold. "Nobody seriously thinks about 20-year-old college students as unaffiliated, even though they technically are," he says. "They're more likely to be what I would call pre- affiliated." He remarks that behavior changes with age. "About half the people who were unaffiliated before their 30s and before they were marriedand had kids, have all of a sudden affiliated."
Judy Brietstein, 48, fits perfectly into Mayer's theory. Brietstein grew up in the Amalgamated, a Socialist neighborhood in the Bronx. Her father attended an Orthodox synagogue, but her mother rebelled against Jewish tradition. Her siblings are so "un-Jewish," she says, they have celebrated Christmas. "My oldest sister, who's really a half-sister, would have a pancake breakfast on Christmas morning, by the tree. Does that tell you anything about how un-Jewish I was raised?"
As a child, Brietstein participated in the Workmen's Circle youth league. Her recollections of Judaism pertain to food: the smells of knishes and women baking for the bazaar. In 1969 she hitchhiked to California and sampled a smorgasbord of happenings: yoga, meditation groups, Sufi dancing, communes. She happened to encounter "singing Rabbi" Shlomo Carlebach at one of the spiritual gatherings, and he later performed her wedding. "I just remember hearing him sing," she says. "It just kind of struck a chord and brought back memories." Carlebach's soulful melodies stirred a long-buried sense of roots.
But she didn't plant herself on Jewish soil for a long time. She and her husband moved to a famous commune in Tennessee and lived off the land. Their sojourns next led to a small city where her 3-year-old daughter would come home from a church nursery school and talk about the devil. "It wasn't too long after that we moved to Knoxville," Brietstein, a Realtor, recalls. "I felt at that point, because my second daughter was born, that the synagogue was top priority. Something clicked and we got involved very soon after."
Looking back on her reconnection with Judaism, she observes that with two young children, the family was ripe for the experience. "I think if you come in as a young family or as a single," she muses, "where you have other people that are in similar places as you, and you connect with them and do things together in a spiritual way, that can be very meaningful."
Rabbi Zalman Posner, whom the late Lubavitcher Rebbe sent South nearly 50 years ago to head an Orthodox congregation, has noticed a similar pattern in Nashville, Tennesse. While more people have intermarried, more have balanced the seesaw by sending their children to Jewish day schools. "When it came to their children's identity, they made a pretty decisive turn - they want them to be in an intensive Jewish environment," he says. "That is an encouraging thing."
The rabbi divides unaffiliated Jews into two categories: those who abandon the fold altogether and those who leave their synagogue. The former bothers him. He explains: "It's Judaism that becomes a point of concern. If they leave the congregation there can be a thousand different reasons, social reasons, personal reasons, the rabbi, all different kinds of reasons."
After World War II, North Americans broke their ties to old Jewish communities in the center cities, he notes. The exodus to the suburbs meant children lacked the connection with a broad Jewish life that earlier generations had. "So what was a tremendous achievement for the parents who grew up in the 30s, in the Depression years, and their determination that their children were going to have a better world, was a marvelous thing," Posner says.
"Their kids are going to go to college, get every degree that they want and go into professions. And they're going to have financial security, which is very nice, when you compare it to not being hungry, not being worried about a job," Posner continued. But the children, who have a car at 16, a TV set in their bedroom, and access to a ritzy country club, realize that life must offer more. They explore other paths, thinking classical Torah Judaism has nothing to offer.
An example is Judaica artist Arnold Schwarzbart, who investigated possibilities varying from Zen Buddhism to Russian mysticism. He was born in Russia in 1942 to a family more committed to social justice than religious observance. "I grew up in a house where a nice ham was tradition. My parents went to shul on High Holidays only, but no other time," says the past president of his synagogue in Knoxville.
The turning point came when he discovered Jewish mysticism. A student of philosophy, physics, zoology, and chemistry who earned one of his two undergraduate degrees in architecture, he was always enthralled by the big questions. "I think mysticism concerns itself with the big questions," explains Schwarzbart, "like why we're here, is there some sort of order to the universe? Is there the notion of other realms of existence? Is there the notion of a divine source of everything?"
Ironically, his studies of Jane Roberts' Seth material - information believers say is channeled from the other side - laid the foundation for his growing Jewish education. "It represented a vocabulary and a context from which I could then approach the Jewish mystical literature," he says.
Schwarzbart and his wife, Mary Linda, keep a kosher home, host large Shabbat and festival dinners, attend services regularly, study Jewish texts, stay active in a variety of Jewish organizations, help bring scholars-in- residence to town, and serve as the force behind a Talmud Torah class that has met for years. This, from a man who once found contemporary Judaism dry as dust and barren of spiritual insight.
Rabbis and lay leaders say such an encounter with Jewish education can help stem the tide of drifters. As Mayer reports, of Americans with nine or more years of Jewish education, 37 percent remain unaffiliated, as compared with 69 percent of those with no Jewish education. Posner says Judaism contains the fire the unaffiliated often seek in other quarters; if only they knew to look. "It's both emotion and brains," he says of the heritage. "It's hands and feet. It's everything. The total person is involved."
Rabbi Yehoshua Kahan, former religious leader of Knoxville's Conservative synagogue who now serves as assistant director of a Safed-based learning center, adds: "There's a kabbalistic idea of gathering up the sparks that were trapped in the husks, trapped in the stifled places throughout the world. Those sparks are ideas. Those sparks are souls. Those sparks are Jews who've come and gone.
"That doesn't mean everything they come back with is kosher or can be made kosher. But it's not the case that Jews who have been elsewhere have to come back with their tail between their legs. Rather, their experiences and their ideas may lend new insights to Jewish teachings and practices."
[Published in the Jerusalem Post, January 13, 1997]