Parents who care deeply about Judaism and create a “Jewish” home have always been key to assuring a vibrant Jewish future. Nowadays, Jewish intermarriage rates in the United States stand near 50% and only half of Jews in America feel that being Jewish is very important to them.* Continuity has thus become a primary anxiety among leaders of a community now numbering 6.4 million or 2.2% of America’s population. * Despite a broad range of interventions, worries about the community’s prospects remain, and indeed a new one has arisen.* Will the American Jewish community turn inward and diminish its historic commitment to tikkun olam, mending the world?

Study of Torah — not just the Five Books of Moses, but the entire body of writings it has spawned — stands as a central pillar of Judaism. When a prospective convert asked Hillel to teach him the Torah while standing on one foot, the sage famously answered, “What is hateful to you, don’t do to your neighbor. The rest is all commentary. Now go and learn it.”* Maimonides summed it up this way: “Of all the commandments, none is equal to the importance of study of the Torah. Indeed, the study of Torah is equal to all of them, for study leads to practice.”* The bond between study and practice — practice of ritual and ethics — remains crucial. Consider the training of children to become a bar or bat mitzvah (literally, a son or daughter of commandment). It includes Jewish study as well as projects devoted to tikkun olam, mending the world.

Over the millennia Judaism placed great value on study well beyond Torah. As the Talmud suggests, much could be learned about God’s wisdom from the study of nature. “If the Torah had not been given we could have learnt modesty from the cat, honesty from the ant, chastity from the dove, and good manners from the cock who first coaxes and then mates.” Thus, many of Judaism’s most influential scholars of religious subjects were experts in other fields. Maimonides (1135-1204) and Nachmanides (1194-1270) were famed physicians. Levi ben Gerson (1288-1344), and Judah Lowe ben Bezalel (1525- 1609), the Maharal of Prague, were mathematicians and astronomers. In modern times, Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993), the great Modern Orthodox teacher and scholar, received a doctorate in philosophy from Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University before he immigrated to the United States. Adin Steinsaltz (1937- ), editor of a groundbreaking new edition of the Talmud, studied physics and chemistry at the Hebrew University.

Still, the confrontation with modernity has posed more than a few challenges to Jewish learning. Modernity opened the way for large numbers of Jews to obtain a secular education, but it also ushered in a steep decline in the study of traditional Jewish texts. The reaction in Eastern Europe was to expand the world of traditional learning, to create schools, yeshivot, that would exclude secular education completely. Such schools are flourishing in ultra-Orthodox communities in the United States, Israel and elsewhere. An Orthodox scholar pointed to the philosophy behind this position, “Let goyim [a term for non-Jews that actually means “nations”] be physicians; for a Jew there is nothing else but the study of Torah.” A life devoted to full-time study had long been a possibility for only a few of a community’s most talented students. Today, in Israel, it has become the norm among ultra-Orthodox men, only about 30 percent of whom work. Opponents of this cite the Mishnah, Judaism’s first law code:

The study of Torah together with an occupation is an excellent thing, for the pursuit of both of these [together] keeps sinful thoughts from arising, while any study of Torah without some kind of work must fail in the end and is conducive to sin.*

In certain circles, the wisdom of the Mishnah has apparently been superseded.

For millennia ritual practice was universal among Jews. Ritual passed from one generation to the next as reliably as children learned the language of their parents. Indeed, ritual was the language of Judaism. With modernity, sectors of the Jewish community began to view ritual selectively. In its 1885 Pittsburgh platform, the Reform Movement announced that “We recognize in the Mosaic legislation a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its [ancient] national life in Palestine, and today we accept as binding only its moral laws, and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such as are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization.”*

Reformers believed that Jewish ethics was worth passing down, but most of Jewish ritual was not. But what is Jewish ethics and how was it to be passed down? First, it turns out that Judaism’s moral laws are hard to differentiate from ethics in general. Second, it appears that the framework of ritual provides an irreplaceable means of inculcating the ethical values we hold most dear. Take the Passover Seder. Seder means ‘order,’ a key ingredient of all ritual. But the Seder’s goal is not ritual for its own sake. The Haggadah explicitly states the goal: “In every generation each individual should feel as if he or she had personally come out of Egypt.” It’s hard to imagine a better vehicle than the rituals of the Passover Seder for teaching the next generation to value freedom and social justice. And if you really want to extend the lesson, observe the rituals further — try not eating bread during the week of Passover and eating only from dishes that have never come into contact with leavened products. It’s not easy, but it creates an indelible impression on children.

Arnold Eisen, now Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, wrote a penetrating study on the role of ritual in the contemporary Jewish community. It happens to conclude with a discussion about the Passover Seder.

A Seder for all its adaptation to changing circumstances, promises (and often delivers) a measure of authenticity unavailable at the steakhouse. It constitutes a traditional framework that links Jews to a history which demands that life be serious. Stepping into the ritual constitutes a statement about identity, particularly when one knows that the Haggadah — like Jewish history — inevitably makes claims upon its Jewish performers. . . . Ritual has always offered comfort and reassurance as much as challenge and reproof. And, arguably, it offers many American Jews more than that.*

Raising children in a home and community where Jewish ritual is a natural part of life may not guarantee that they will pass their traditions down to another generation, but without ritual, the chances are slimmer.