Posted By James Besser
Route 17: A Trend Since 1934
Newsweeklies have, over the years, increasingly looked to religion for trend stories, even cover stories, and as a religious Jew I happen to like it; it flatters me. Unfortunately, religion as a media genre is so unsophisticated that these articles often disappoint.
If a baseball reporter were to tell you there’s been a return to the stolen base as an offensive weapon, you can be sure the reporter and editor would be familiar with the different eras in which that was the case, such as the dead-ball era and the 1960s, as well as those eras when the stolen base was fairly dormant, and why. A sports writer would be too embarrassed to write a trend story if he only had a hunch about how baseball was played prior to the 21st century.
Nevertheless, in U.S. News & World Report (Dec. 13), “A Return to Tradition,” one can read about that trend without any indication about how traditional Jews were in 1970 or 1930 – or now.
Even when writing about tradition, journalists are infatuated with the new. The article tells us, “Even while drawing on deep traditional resources, many participants are creating something new within the old forms.”
So instead of examining why Jews attracted to tradition – defined by the dictionary as “the transmission of customs and beliefs from generation to generation,” and practiced in Agudah-oriented shtiebles, chasidic and neo-chasidic minyans, classic Young Israels—U.S. News & World Report mentions only two Orthodox synagogues by name and example: the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale “where you will see things that push the limits of Orthodoxy,” and Ohav Shalom, in Washington D.C., a synagogue whose rabbi apprenticed at that same Hebrew Institute.
So in all of the United States, the two Orthodox synagogues that we’re told exemplify the “return to tradition” both prefer to brand themselves as being as untraditional as they can be.
Now I happen to have a vast affection for Hebrew Institute, it’s my hometown shul. Despite what the article claims, “pushing the limits of Orthodoxy” is not even the shul’s greatest charm. But within a five-minute walk are three shuls – the Young Israel of Riverdale, the Riverdale Jewish Center, and a Chabad – that are rightfully successful, every bit as crowded on Shabbat and far more traditional. So why was Hebrew Institute chosen by the newsweekly as the embodiment of a national “tradition” trend when it doesn’t even claim to be the most traditional shul in its own neighborhood? Does even a story on tradition have to seek out the cutting edge instead of deciphering the allure of the old faithful?
And why are religious trend stories so singular in examining what young people are doing? The middle-aged can be religiously lost and found as well as anyone, and just as fluid in the religious choices. Regret, the onset of aches, and looming death provokes the soul more easily among the aging and the wounded than among the young.
Aside from general newsweeklies, even in Jewish newsrooms most journalists couldn’t identify trends beyond their personal experience, let alone into the “dead ball” era. Political writers, for example, can easily relate a New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 insurgency. Religious writers often don’t know history in quite the same way.
This week we celebrate Tu B’Shvat and JTA reports (Jan. 12), “Quite recently, young Jews in their 20s and 30s have seized upon the holiday, running Tu B’Shevat seders that are more explicit both in their call to environmental activism and their reliance on Jewish text.”
I went to those exact Tu B’Shvat seders more than 35 years ago, seders just as environmental and reliant on text, just as crowded with other “young Jews in their 20s and 30s.”
How can something at least 35 years old, and reported in newspapers in the 1970s, be declared a phenomenon discovered “quite recently,” except for the insistence on justifying almost all coverage of religion (other than fights and politics) by calling it a trend?
We’re told there’s a large gap between Jewish leadership and the masses and charitable federations are “not the unifying influence” they claim to be since they have only a “comparatively small number of contributors.”
That trendy observation is from The New York Times, May 30, 1934 (“Religion Among Jews Found To Be Waning”). Two days later, a gentleman named Sidney Simon wrote a letter to the editor asking whether those who determine Jewish trends had access to “such pertinent facts” as the synagogue attendance of young Jews, and their interest in Jewish studies, “say, thirty years ago, for comparison with the current situation?”
I wonder who remembers 1978. Mr. Simon wondered, in 1934, who remembers 1904?
“In New York and in other large cities today (1934) there are rapidly growing groups of young men and women who are attaching themselves to the synagogues,” he writes. “Already, their number far exceeds that of the young men and women who attended the synagogue thirty years ago.”
According to Mr. Simon, there was a return to religious tradition, back in Roosevelt’s first term.
It was 1934, hard times, and the letter-writer tells us that Young Israel’s employment office in lower Manhattan received “more than 10,000” applications” from young Jews who “in spite of the present economic situation will not accept work unless the employer will allow them to keep the Sabbath.”
Mr. Simon asks, “Does this indicate a waning of religious feeling?”
It indicates to me that a lack of memory among religious experts is a tradition all its own.
It reminds me that the old people I see on Bronx avenues, preparing for Sabbath, were young and unsure in 1934, many of their fathers without jobs, knowing what was happening in Germany (reported in the 1934 papers), not knowing if the Depression would last forever, or that war was on the way.
Those 10,000 unemployed, among others, had a Sabbath, traditional or not, after six days of soup lines and filling out job applications when there were no jobs.
I’d like to think they were invited for Sabbath meals; a tradition, even then.