Mishegas

Mishegaas

4 thoughts on “Mishegaas

  1. “…and they know virtually nothing about the grassroots religious movements that are home to most American Jews.”
    Is Yoffie implying that the Reform movement is grassroots?

  2. From Yoffie’s Forward article:
    “Nonetheless, the very next day he invited a Conservative leader to his official residence and announced that he had changed his mind about Conservative rabbis — although not about Reform ones, apparently.”
    Clever — play Conservative and Reform against each other. And the Israeli Conservative movement will go along with it in a second — they’re like the unpopular kid in middle school who tries to fit in with the cool kids by making fun of the even-more-unpopular kid.

  3. Mobius-
    Thanks for posting that “freeloaders” article. I hadn’t seen it before, and it’s just amazing in its ostrichlike willful cluelessness. Since these remarks were given at a board meeting, I wonder if they were even meant to be public. But if that wasn’t the intent, then the URJ should be more careful about what they puts on their website, so it’s their own fault.
    Rabbi Yoffie attempts to explore the various reasons why people are against denominations, but his classification conveniently leaves out any suggestion that the Reform movement bears any responsibility for creating the present state. He discusses the disaffected Conservative Jews (with whom I, as a disaffected Reform Jew, make common cause) but completely ignores the disaffected Reform Jews in his own midst. (While I share all of the critiques of the C movement, the one advantage that I think the C movement has over the R movement is that at least the C movement realizes that its educated young people are leaving.) I would understand this feel-good triumphalism at a URJ biennial (in front of a national audience), but if even the URJ board is hearing nothing but “Stay the course, you’re doing super!”, then is anyone going to address the Reform movement’s shortcomings? I invite Rabbi Yoffie and the URJ board to read what the disaffected Reform Jews are saying.
    If they’ve made the decision to triage my demographic because they don’t think we can be brought back to the movement, that’s their choice, but then they can’t go around criticizing the fact that we’ve found meaningful Jewish lives outside the denominations rather than fading into the majority of uninvolved American Jews.
    As for the “freeloaders”, I don’t think he’s talking about you and me, since we’re not actually using any movement resources; he’s talking about conventional synagogues that are unaffiliated. But if it’s wrong that nondenominational shuls are hiring rabbis who graduated from the denominational seminaries, and it’s wrong to start nondenominational seminaries, then nu?

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