W hen I contemplate the sorry spiritual state of secular American Jewry one phrase comes to mind more than any other: “Victims of history.”
Entire generations of such Jews need only trace themselves back a few generations to find devout Eastern European ancestors. How then did they wind up as estranged from authentic Judaism as they are now? For so many of them it was that somewhere along the line a forebear of theirs bought into an ideology that promised a bright beautiful future for him for Jewry and for the world as a whole if only he’d junk that old-time religion and come out into the light of modernity. And so he did.
Fast forward 80 90 or 100 years to our times and nary a one of those utopian movements and worldviews even exists anymore. Unless that is we’re to count some old Workmen’s Circle club where when someone under 35 walks in the average age drops to 73. The dustbin of recent Jewish history is overfull with the detritus of such long-defunct causes.
The utopian siren song that the idealistic ancestor followed back in 1917 might have led to a complete dead end but the decisions he made back then have all-too-real consequences in the here-and-now of 2017. Whom he married how he raised his children and how he chose to live his life helped determine how the next generation and the one after that would turn out.
