Whoever does not visit the sick is as if he spilled blood.” – Rabbi Akiva (Nedarim 40a, B. Talmud)
Our fellow Jews are sick. They don’t admit it. They don’t even know it. Yet the malady is grave. “The most destructive, painful, most contagious disease of all,” Rabbi Noah Weinberg, the founder of Aish HaTorah, said, “is ignorance. Ignorance perverts people and leads to wasted, counterproductive lives. Ignorance causes untold suffering – mistreatment of children, marital strife and suffering in a dead-end job.”
Who are these ignorant Jews? The highly educated, socially conscious, comedy-loving, Holocaust-honoring 1.2 million American Jews who identify themselves as Jews of no religion, according to the Pew survey. This group has been steadily growing for four decades and now includes one-third of all adult Jews born after 1980. Four-fifths of this group marry non-Jews. Only 8 percent raise their kids to be Jewish. The majority of them feel little or no attachment to Israel.
I call them ignorant because they’ve turned their back on something they don’t even know. Many have never been exposed to Judaism at all; others have experienced a diluted, dumbed-down version, and understandably found it uninspiring. I don’t blame them for consequently writing off the whole religion, but it’s like writing off sushi after trying a rubbery tuna roll from 7-Eleven.
I know about this because I was one of them. For years, I was proud to be Jewish, but I thought Judaism had nothing to offer me. I had received two messages from my parents:
1) Be Jewish to preserve the Jewish people.
2) Be Jewish because your grandfather died in the Holocaust. My mother is a child survivor of Theresienstadt, with lifelong health problems occasioned by her treatment there. Her father was murdered at Dachau, and most of her extended family was killed at Auschwitz. My father is a Chilean Jew who had to fight his way out of several scrapes with anti-Semites. We never owned a German car. We rejoiced when Israeli commandos rescued the hostages at Entebbe on July 4, 1976.
I sought spirituality everywhere but my own backyard.
And yet, Judaism was understood to be a chore. Temple was boring but obligatory a few times a year. My bar mitzvah was more of a performance than a meaningful experience. As I grew older, I sought spirituality in Eastern philosophy, meditation, endurance sports, jam bands, transcendental poetry and science fiction — everywhere but my own backyard.
Eventually I found my way back, thanks to a confluence of events. My grandmother died. I stumbled into the right shul. I got a taste of deep Judaism, and a constellation of secular myths exploded around me. I found that our ancient tradition spoke to me in innumerable ways, even while I remained scientifically oriented and modern. More to the point, I became a better husband, father, son, brother, friend and citizen when I became a practicing Jew.
http://www.aish.com/jw/s/Curing-Jewish-Ignorance.html
Our fellow Jews are sick. They don’t admit it. They don’t even know it. Yet the malady is grave. “The most destructive, painful, most contagious disease of all,” Rabbi Noah Weinberg, the founder of Aish HaTorah, said, “is ignorance. Ignorance perverts people and leads to wasted, counterproductive lives. Ignorance causes untold suffering – mistreatment of children, marital strife and suffering in a dead-end job.”
Who are these ignorant Jews? The highly educated, socially conscious, comedy-loving, Holocaust-honoring 1.2 million American Jews who identify themselves as Jews of no religion, according to the Pew survey. This group has been steadily growing for four decades and now includes one-third of all adult Jews born after 1980. Four-fifths of this group marry non-Jews. Only 8 percent raise their kids to be Jewish. The majority of them feel little or no attachment to Israel.
I call them ignorant because they’ve turned their back on something they don’t even know. Many have never been exposed to Judaism at all; others have experienced a diluted, dumbed-down version, and understandably found it uninspiring. I don’t blame them for consequently writing off the whole religion, but it’s like writing off sushi after trying a rubbery tuna roll from 7-Eleven.
I know about this because I was one of them. For years, I was proud to be Jewish, but I thought Judaism had nothing to offer me. I had received two messages from my parents:
1) Be Jewish to preserve the Jewish people.
2) Be Jewish because your grandfather died in the Holocaust. My mother is a child survivor of Theresienstadt, with lifelong health problems occasioned by her treatment there. Her father was murdered at Dachau, and most of her extended family was killed at Auschwitz. My father is a Chilean Jew who had to fight his way out of several scrapes with anti-Semites. We never owned a German car. We rejoiced when Israeli commandos rescued the hostages at Entebbe on July 4, 1976.
I sought spirituality everywhere but my own backyard.
And yet, Judaism was understood to be a chore. Temple was boring but obligatory a few times a year. My bar mitzvah was more of a performance than a meaningful experience. As I grew older, I sought spirituality in Eastern philosophy, meditation, endurance sports, jam bands, transcendental poetry and science fiction — everywhere but my own backyard.
Eventually I found my way back, thanks to a confluence of events. My grandmother died. I stumbled into the right shul. I got a taste of deep Judaism, and a constellation of secular myths exploded around me. I found that our ancient tradition spoke to me in innumerable ways, even while I remained scientifically oriented and modern. More to the point, I became a better husband, father, son, brother, friend and citizen when I became a practicing Jew.
http://www.aish.com/jw/s/Curing-Jewish-Ignorance.html
