Downtown Judaism, In Our Own Image

photographs BY michael datikash

by Rabbi Niles Elliot Goldstein
Special To The Jewish Week

About a week after the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11, I walked through Ground Zero. It was during the Days of Awe. Before me was utter devastation: a wasteland of smashed buildings and shattered windows; hideous, fantastic pillars of twisted steel; plumes of smoke rising eerily from the rubble.
As a law-enforcement chaplain, I talked to cops, agents, firefighters and rescue workers from dozens of agencies and cities. I remember one K-9 unit, a sheriff’s deputy and his dog. Even though by that point all they were pulling out were bodies, his Labrador retriever wouldn’t let him sleep. Everyone there, whether human or animal, was focused on their work, on trying to serve.
I was moved by the acts of commitment and

expressions of love that permeated that hellish place. And I was astounded by the vision of so many people finding their deepest, most beautiful selves in the heart of such an immense void.
That experience was mirrored when my congregation, The New Shul, held our Rosh HaShanah services only a few blocks north of the terrorist attack, in a church in Greenwich Village. Several of our households had suddenly become homeless and were living out of luggage. Our children were stunned and scared, many having witnessed with their own eyes men and women leaping to their deaths onto the streets in front of them. Our adult members clung to their cell phones tightly, as if they were guardrails, waiting anxiously to hear news about missing friends, colleagues, and family.
I’d torn up my sermons days before. What we did instead was share our collective feelings and thoughts. People spoke, embraced one another, and wept.
Yet no one was alone.
As downtown Manhattan’s youngest synagogue, we had been in existence at that point for only a couple of years, but the fact that we’d created a community—and a sanctuary, a true safe haven — for those who now so desperately craved one was as palpable as it was profound. I felt a sense of intense pride in what we’d accomplished in such a relatively brief period of time.
After the horrors of 9/11, Lower Manhattan began to undergo great change, development, and growth — and that applied to the Jewish community, too.
Those who had been made homeless by homicidal Islamic extremists gradually began to return to their damaged homes. As new high-rise residential buildings started to go up, Jews from around the city began to move down from other areas. With more Jews now in need of more Jewish activities and communities, there was a slow but steady increase in Jewish life and institutions below 14th. Street, as well as a vitality and dynamism that I’d rarely seen in my years of working as a New York rabbi.
In close parallel with our own philosophy when we founded The New Shul pre-9/11, most of these post-9/11 initiatives strived to reflect both the creativity and the sensibility of the Jews who were attracted to these neighborhoods.
High-profile Jewish arts and culture festivals (in large measure due to the efforts of Michael Dorf) started drawing large crowds and taking place in unusual venues; Tribeca Hebrew created a new religious school that ran in the basement of a storefront; the Soho Synagogue, a Chabad-inspired congregation, threw lavish Kabbalat Shabbat cocktail parties; the 14th Street Y, under the auspices of the venerable Educational Alliance, worked to reinvent itself as an outpost of East Village hipness; the Downtown Kehillah, a multi-denominational consortium of downtown synagogues, tried to build bridges between communities; and the Jewish Community Project, a self-styled “alternative” version of the 92nd Street Y, emerged out of this same impulse and energy.
A few years have now passed. And with the shift in downtown demographics, there has also been a marked shift in mindset.
Most of the initiatives above share certain traits, characteristics that we had already deliberately lined into the fabric of our own community years before: a “come as you are” attitude, with a focus on inclusivity for all, regardless of belief or background; a grass-roots, egalitarian approach to Jewish life; a decentralized leadership structure; a tendency toward non- or post-denominational Judaism; multiple and diverse paths for expressing Jewish identity; an eclecticism in vision and in mission.
At the core of all of this, of course, was a general disaffection with, and a detachment from, the Jewish status quo.
Why else build something new?
These new Jewish institutions and initiatives have made some of the founding members of my community (and, to be frank, myself) feel a bit like grizzled pioneers — a very strange sensation for a young congregation like ours. But they’ve also made us feel that we are not alone in craving a new kind of Jewish community, one that is more reflective of the kinds of Jews we actually are — and that we want to be.
Yet, in my view, new problems have slowly, inexorably emerged. As a rabbi who has been able to bear witness to the changes in Jewish life in Lower Manhattan both before and after 9/11, I have the privilege of a unique and firsthand perspective. Working here in the trenches, I have to say that I do not like everything that I’ve seen.
“Committed” is not a word I would use to describe the typical downtown Jew in this post-9/11 world. We want some form of Jewish life, but we want it on our own terms, at times when it is convenient for us, and in small, easy-to-swallow doses. We don’t want a lot of expectations placed on us. We want to be entertained, not challenged. We want, as one person once put it to me, “just the fun stuff,” without any of the communal responsibility our religion associates with being a member of the Jewish people. We’re not into the serious exploration of Jewish traditions and texts, but we (and our leaders) are preoccupied with, almost obsessed by, the idea of “edginess.”
Moreover, our new efforts are beginning to fall prey to age-old problems: territorialism, politics, replication of one another, a lack of unity.
As someone who has served downtown Jews for nearly a decade, it is clear to me that we must remain as vigilant as ever, but in radically new ways. Anti-Semitism, intermarriage, and assimilation are not my biggest concerns.
My biggest worry is vapidity.
When viewed through the lens of history, Jews have always been engaged in the process of reshaping Judaism and Jewish life in our own image. So let’s make sure that image is one that remains creative and dynamic, but let’s also stay true to our tradition’s bold, countercultural roots — the roots that have made us who we are.
The Bible teaches us that there may very well be a time for all things under the sun, but now is certainly not the time to embrace the widespread narcissism, materialism and “you better give me what I want or I just won’t show up” sense of entitlement that is so much a part of American (and of Jewish American) culture these days.
Now is the time to fight those trends with all our heart, soul and being.

Niles Elliot Goldstein is the founding rabbi of The New Shul in Manhattan and the author or editor of eight books, most recently “Gonzo Judaism: A Bold Path for Renewing an Ancient Faith” (St. Martin’s). His Web site is www.nilesgoldstein.com.