Why the Jewish Establishment Should Stay Out of the Chabad House
It’s a poorly kept secret in the Jewish community that most programming for young Jews is supported out of a desire to prevent intermarriage. The origins of the phenomenon are well known: studies in the early 1990s uncovered steep increases in intermarriage rates, sparking communal panic. In response, Hillel was reinvented as a matchmaking service, operating under the almost lewd motto, “Maximizing the number of Jews doing Jewish with other Jews.” In the years that followed, the language and strategies of the anti-intermarriage crusade were refined. It was renamed Jewish continuity, and helped attract support to projects like JDub, HEEB, Hazon, and New Voices, to name a few. At its best, Jewish continuity offers a vocabulary with which innovative young Jews can express the importance of a vibrant Jewish culture to older donors. At its worst, however, the anxiety surrounding continuity causes the community to let statistics drown out content, values, and ideology. Such is the case with the growing support within the mainstream Jewish establishment for Chabad’s activities on college campuses.
At this late date, everyone knows how friendly the Chabad rabbis are. Their success in reaching out to the unaffiliated is legendary. And so, despite the ideological differences that exist between them and the mostly non-Orthodox Jews who talk about continuity, some in the Jewish establishment have begun to advocate sending students to Chabad Houses in the name of continuity.
The best framework for understanding how the continuity-minded see Chabad is offered by Steven M. Cohen, the Hebrew Union College sociologist, in an introductory essay to a Chabad-supported study entitled “Home Away From Home” (Barry Chazan and David Bryfman, reprinted by Chabad on Campus International Foundation, 2006). Cohen, perhaps the foremost thinker on Jewish continuity, likens our generation’s Jewish identities to a playlist on an iPod. He writes, “Much as each individual listener can program his or her own [iPod] with individually selected melodies arranged in a personally determined order (or no order at all – shuffling is an available option), people today organize their identities in a fashion that is individually constructed and fluidly organized.”
Seen in this light, an average student’s relationship with Chabad can be a brief, low-risk transaction. The danger that a young person might somehow be “sucked in” by the emissaries and transformed into a black hat is effectively neutralized. All that’s left is the opportunity for a “meaningful Jewish experience” – a continuity buzzword – and a bit of informal Jewish education. The ideological disconnect is apparently a non-issue.
And yet, some elements of the disconnect raise serious questions. It should come as no surprise that at the Chabad house on a Friday night, the rabbi’s wife prepares the meal while the rabbi leads prayers and delivers a brief sermon, or that this arrangement trickles down to the experience of students who attend the dinner. According to “Home Away From Home,” which surveyed students at five campus Chabad Houses, female students attending the Friday night service would sometimes join the rabbi’s wife in the kitchen, while “Male students would often be asked to lead services or conduct blessings.”
Such a strict, institutionalized division between the role of the Jewish man and woman, with one toiling in the realm of prayer and the other in the kitchen, is anathema to the egalitarian ideals of the less traditional denominations. This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with the way the emissaries have chosen to live their lives. But as a Jewish experience to be shuffled into Cohen’s iPod, the message is problematic.
This is especially true because the Jewish student who attends a Chabad dinner is not just visiting the home of some nice religious couple. The theory of Chabad’s outreach relies on the idea that the emissaries exist as examples of an authentically Jewish way of living. A Chabad rabbi doesn’t invite you to his house to show you how he celebrates Shabbat. He invites you to his house to show you how it should be done. One message of a Friday night dinner at a Chabad House is that the role of the Jewish woman should be confined to making dinner.
One might argue that Jewish students aren’t quite so impressionable. It’s likely that savvy guests at a Chabad Shabbat dinner will have no problem contextualizing and compartmentalizing the experience, understanding the Chabad family as members of a highly traditional community whose lives need not be taken as models. However, if the larger Jewish community uses such a justification to get around the ideological differences, the entire exercise becomes perverse. The detached student arrives at the Chabad meal a gawking tourist, a visitor at the Jew zoo. Although objectification may be an inevitable side effect of the Chabad emissary’s project, it’s hardly appropriate as the basis for Jewish communal support for Chabad’s activities.
Of all the cultural and religious fault lines between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews, disagreements over the role of women in Jewish life and Jewish practice are among the most dynamic. Within the past few years, innovations like the egalitarian Orthodox minyan and the tri-chitza have pushed the boundaries on both sides. Such steps in the fight for gender equality are the product of difficult and protracted struggles. Under normal circumstances, the Jews who worry about Jewish continuity on behalf of the Jewish establishment know and value this, and agree upon the importance of passing what progress has been made on to the next generation. As they work towards continuity, however, they allow themselves to forget about what means are used to achieve it.
The appropriate response to the fears of intermarriage is not to throw Jewish experiences indiscriminately at young Jews, hoping something will stick long enough for them to circumcise their sons. Rather, it should challenge the community to rethink and to innovate, to be exciting and vibrant, to stand for something and not to compromise. In farming the work of continuity out to Chabad, the mainstream Jewish establishment throws away its own values, and wastes an opportunity to make real contributions to Jewish life.
