Enriched by diversity

Elsewhere on this web site you will find our recently adopted guidelines for the role of non-Jews in our community. These guidelines are the recommendations of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation and will serve as our interim policies until we have taken the time as a community to explore the issues involved and study traditional teaching at length.

"Why," you may ask, "do we need these guidelines any way?" And also, "Where do they come from?" I want to use this space to answer both those questions.

First - why? Why create a set of guidelines to regulate the distinction between Jews and non-Jews in our community?

As Reconstructionists, we understand Judaism to be an evolving religious civilization and we see ourselves as partners in this evolution. We recognize that the traditions and teachings of Judaism which we hold dear must adapt to current realities in order for Judaism to be a living, vibrant way of life.

Non-Jews have been a part of our communities throughout history -starting with Rachel and Leah's handmaids who bore sons to Jacob, thus creating the tribes of the Jewish people. A great multitude of people were said to have left Egypt with the Jews during the Exodus and joined in the destiny of our people. Having people in our communities from divergent backgrounds is nothing new to us.

However, in the past generation, a demographic shift has occured in our community. Jews in North America, bolstered by new found freedoms and levels of acceptance, have intermarried with non-Jews at an accelerating rate. Rare is the Jewish family that does not have some members who are non-Jews. Non-Jews are our spouses and partners, our children, our grandcildren, our in laws and siblings. All of them have relationships to Jews and a desire to be involved in some aspect of Jewish life - either for a specific event (like a bar or bat mitzvah or a baby naming) or as a long-term commitment to the raising of Jewish children and participating in
our community.

This is a blessing. The different background of our community serve to enrich all of us. The energy and enthusiasm of committed non-Jews is awe inspiring. I have, on more than one occassion, thanked the non-Jewish parents of our students for what is, by definition, a higher level of commitment to raise a child in a foreign culture as opposed to your own. I believe that the diversity of our community speaks well for us and our future.

At the same time, many of us care about the definition of who is a Jew and the perpetuation of Jews as a distinct and unique people. We want to know that there is something valuable, different about being a part of the Jewish people. As a minority in a predominately Christian world, we feel threatened when the lack of boundaries blurs lines to readily and risks making us as Jews invisible.

Anthropoligists have shown us that groups without clear boundaries rarely survive. They also have taught that too rigid boundaries lead to ossification. The tension for us is to determine when boundaries should shift and when they should be permeable. To do this in a thoughtful, traditional-informed, values based way is what makes us a Reconstructionist community.

The guidelines we have adopted are the recommendations of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federations's Task Force on this issue. After two years of study, the members of this commission, both lay and rabbinic, Jew and non-Jew, people like you and me, made these recommendations on the basis of the values they belive most reconstructionist communities hold: inclusivity, but also integrity; democratic decision making and a commitment to living in community.

Eventually, we at Agudas Achim will follow a similar process for coming up with our own guidelines - some which will be similar to the ones adopted here, others which might end up looking quite different. but for now, we have accepted the thoughtfulness and integrity of the Reconstructionist process to give us operating guidelines to help us navigate the boundaries in our own community.

If you have any questins about these guidelines or the process that was used to derive them, please do not hesitate to callme or send me an email.

L'Shana Tova
Rabbi Elyse

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