In anticipation of Temple Micah’s new “adventure” – Rabbi Toby H. Manewith will start as the congregation’s first, associate rabbi in July – she and Rabbi Zemel recently sat down for a conversation with Vine editor Jodi Enda on some of the pressing issues of the day. The hour-long discussion was wide-ranging, but focused primarily on the state of American Judaism. It will appear in the Vine in two installments.

Vine: What are your views and concerns about Judaism in America today?

Rabbi Zemel: The area of concern is how we will maintain ourselves as a people of faith. Because, as painful as it is for me, lacking a common language, lacking shared food customs – that is, kashrut – and lacking either the outside-imposed or self-imposed mandate of blood – that is, only marriages in the tribe – I don’t think Jewish ethnicity has any real legs. And I look at those three things together. That’s why I think it’s wrong to look at intermarriage only. No one made us give up Yiddish when we got to this country. We did that totally voluntarily. We’re going to have to create a way to find a galvanizing, compelling theology and religious understanding for American Judaism. Maybe that’s beginning to happen when we use words like "spirituality."

Vine: How would you like to see that happen?

Rabbi Zemel: I’ll tell you my worries. I worry that rabbis aren’t learned enough to meet the challenge. I worry that rabbis in synagogue communities don’t think broadly about the nature of what we have to do. I think that seminaries haven’t created think tanks about how to approach that. Money in the Jewish community seems to go to what I think are very wrong-headed things. Despite all this, I remain optimistic because I think we have an incredible product, which is Torah.

Rabbi Manewith: Two reactions: Though the Conservative movement is dwindling in number, what they’ll say about themselves is that though they are fewer in number, there is greater depth. People who do remain involved in the Conservative movement over the past number of years have gotten to be more involved. I’m not sure in some ways that we can make up the breadth, but we can certainly make up the depth. So much of the time when I’ll meet people or speak to people who are in the late 20s, 30s even 40s who are coming to some life event – marriage or children – and they feel that Judaism has nothing to offer them, it’s because they’ve been given no depth before then. Almost everything that they mention wanting, Judaism provides or could provide, but no one has opened that door or given them that key before.

Vine: Is the situation any different in Reform Judaism?

Rabbi Manewith: What the Reform movement does in many cases, it looks at things with intentionality, which is a positive thing, looks at things not simply from a ritual standpoint, but from a "meaningfulness" standpoint. Reform Jews I think have a mindset of going toward the depth. I’m not sure that all congregations make it or that all individuals make it. But the Reform Jewish mindset of meaning is certainly there.

Vine: What do these 20-, 30- and 40- somethings say they want that Judaism doesn’t provide?

Rabbi Manewith: It’s not necessarily what they’re looking for, but the way they perceive Judaism. They perceive Judaism as a corporate entity where they come into a building and say a prescribed set of words.We often, especially in the last 50 or 100 years in America, have been so busy teaching our children the basics or the mechanics that we don’t teach an understanding of how to get to what’s beyond the mechanics – that there’s God there, or spirituality there.

Rabbi Zemel: I think about what Arnie Eisen (chair of Stanford University’s Religious Studies Department) once said to me: "Every serious Jew has to view themselves as a role model for every other Jew. And every Jew has to take upon themselves in America, where we are now, the goal of trying to move every Jew that they know a little bit towards a deeper center." I don’t want to use denominational labels. In America, I think there are two approaches to Jewish life. One formula works for a small minority that will never attract large numbers. And the other formula I don’t think has yet to be figured out in a complete and thorough way. The formula that works for a small minority is a segregationist agenda. It’s the agenda that is most easily identified with kind of black-hat Brooklyn, but you can see it in different ways everywhere. And the segregationist agenda also finds itself in Reform Judaism. It’s part of the survival instinct. So we’re going to send our kids to Jewish schools, we’re going to send our kids to Jewish camps, we’re going to fund Jewish programs and Jewish youth groups in a segregationist approach.

Rabbi Manewith: I’ve never seen anyone so angry as my group of friends last summer when the article ran in the New York Times about non-Jewish people subscribing to J-Date. Saying, "How dare you? This is for us!"

Rabbi Zemel: Being a committed liberal and a committed religious liberal who knows that there can be a very deep center to Jewish religious liberalism and it can be learned and inspiring, I think we’re only part of the way there to finding a formula for Jewish survival in an integrationist approach. I just don’t think we’ve totally figured it out yet.There are many, many obstacles, but two I think about a lot. Unfortunately, most rabbis that follow the integration-first approach like I do still want to have the approval of those who are segregationists. The liberals are always looking over their shoulders at the right wing. You can see this most clearly in the Conservative movement. But you can see it also very clearly in the Reform movement. To a great extent, we want their Hechsher (kosher) stamp of approval. I don’t. But you can see that a lot. The depressing thing is most elements of the segregationist community don’t understand and don’t give any credence to the integrationist approach. Not all, but most. In other words, we don’t live in a community where we agree that there are two paths to a living God. The second thing is….we have to talk a lot more than we do – and I try to talk about it a lot, but communally we have to – about the non-Jews who are in our midst. I think the best way to begin the conversation is with the children of interfaith marriages, to address what has to be their unease to a certain extent, to address even the slightest other signal they’re being given and bring that out into the open. Because if we’re integrationists, this is who we are. There shouldn’t be any shame of it. I’m not looking to count…It’s to recognize that to raise a Jewish child where one parent is not Jewish is different than to raise a Jewish child where both parents are Jewish. And we have not given that serious enough thought. The people that are thinking about it more are the people who think you can raise children in two religions. I don’t think you can do that…I have a rabbi friend who has a kid in his confirmation class who said to the rabbi, "I’m keeping kosher for Lent." We have to understand what that means. We have to understand what this child is thinking about. "I’m keeping kosher for Lent." We have to tackle that head-on.

Vine: Do most people in interfaith marriages raise their kids that way or do they pick one religion?

Rabbi Zemel: At Temple Micah and at Temple Sinai and at Adas Israel and at every synagogue, we see the ones who have made the Jewish choice. From the national statistics, we’re getting, I think maybe 30 percent, maybe even 20 percent, of the interfaith constellation. Many people blame rabbis like me and Toby. If we did interfaith marriages, they say, we’d get a larger percentage. I don’t buy that. If you’re a liberal, you respect everybody’s beliefs.

Rabbi Manewith: I’m dear friends with a rabbi who would be hard to classify, but somewhere along the segregationist (path). For a number of years we learned together once a week. My parents’ response to that was, "What a lovely person he must be – he’ll study with you?" There was absolutely no understanding that, for both of us, we had to take our values and meet in the middle. My parents have gone to synagogue regularly for 25 years, are both on the board of their synagogue, give charity regularly. And a few years ago, my mother suggested that she was a "bad Jew." I said, “What are you talking about?” (She said) they don’t do a lot of other things which other Jews do. They don’t keep kosher. Although they go to Shabbat services, if they have an errand to run on Saturday afternoon, they do it. The idea of judging yourself on someone else’s scale – judge yourself on your own scale. On your own scale, you’re doing a fabulous job.

Vine: How important are those things to keeping the Jewish community vibrant? Is it important for Jews today to keep kosher, or is it more important for them to feel comfortable with who they are?

Rabbi Zemel: I don’t think there’s a scale.

Rabbi Manewith: The kind of language which puts Jewish observance in a hierarchy is at the very least not helpful, but I think in many ways it’s not applicable. People who use terminology to suggest that one denomination or one belief system does more or is more or less, I think that, first of all it’s not helpful, many times it’s not true. It doesn’t do anyone any good. It doesn’t further any cause.

Rabbi Zemel: Yitz Greenberg said, "I don’t care what denomination in Judaism you belong to, as long as you are ashamed of it." (Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg is former chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, founding president of The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership and an Orthodox rabbi.) I think that has real wisdom to it. He also said a good Jew is any Jew that tried to be a better Jew.

Rabbi Manewith: He said an observant Jew is a Jew who observes their Judaism, however they interpret it.