Lately, I’ve been speaking at synagogues around the country about emerging trends in 21st century Judaism. I often start with the well-worn joke about a Jewish castaway rescued on a desert island. His rescuers note he’d built not one but two synagogues — why, they asked. “Well,” he replied, “one is the synagogue I go to — and the other is the one I wouldn’t be caught dead in.”
This was the model of many twentieth-century synagogues: defining themselves against one another in terms of movement, class, and background. Fighting within themselves over every ritual variation, and often splintering into “breakaways.” It was certainly the model I grew up with in the 1980s.
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