opinion
Passover 2022: Are Jews Still
People of the Book?
BY SAMUEL J. ABRAMS
A pril 15 marked the beginning of Passover.

The centerpiece of this festival is the seder:
a festive meal designed to tell a narrative of God
helping remove an oppressed people from the
hand of the oppressors and making them a vibrant
nation. The seder meal often takes hours, involves
special food and wine, and includes various songs
and traditions.

These practices are done with the explicit inten-
tion of teaching Jewish children, as well as both the
Jewish and secular communities, about the story of
the Exodus, the core Jewish values of peace, liber-
ation, self-determination and the Jewish imperative
to work to make the world a better place for all. The
seder and the holiday of Passover itself are about
sharing stories with family and community.

And while Jews have long passed values and
traditions down through stories in countless books
like the Talmud, the familial and communal story-
telling of the seder is sadly no longer a norm today.

Jews in America are undeniably a people of the
book in terms of their strong and continued focus
on higher education, but the same cannot be said
in terms of their reading of religious texts or sharing
religious stories with family. Education has been a
top priority in the Jewish community for centuries.

In contemporary Jewish life, American Jews over-
whelmingly report, in numbers notably higher than
other faiths and cultures, that it is generally expected
that one will attend an institution of higher education.

However, Jews are far less likely to report engag-
ing with religious and philosophical texts or sharing
religious stories with family. Data from the Survey
Center on American Life’s new American National
BY JULIE PLATT
The Passover seder — during which communities
sit around the table, explicitly ask four questions,
and try to make sense of history and philosophy with
a special book, the Haggadah — epitomizes how
values are transmitted and better understood when
they are shared aloud with family and community.

By asking questions such as “Why is this night
different from all other nights?” and “On all other
nights, we eat chametz (leavened foods) and
matzah. Why on this night, only matzah?” partici-
pants in the seder have the chance to speak to oth-
ers and struggle to answer questions about life and
history. They also study, debate and ponder reli-
gious texts aloud, which in turn teach lessons and
contextualize the present from lessons in the past.

Sadly, at present, books and texts are not regu-
larly read in family settings nor are they central in
the lives of most Jews. The benefits of these prac-
tices to Jewish continuity are significant but will
be lost if only small numbers of Jews are actually
trying to share religious stories in family settings.

The efforts of the Grinspoon Foundation and its
PJ Library, which sends more than 220,000 books
that transmit varied cultural values and religious
ideas to families raising Jewish children each
month, could not come at a more important time,
but it may not be enough, especially when older
Jews have simply stopped the critical process of
storytelling and debating in recent times. So, this
Passover, perhaps we should ponder why we do
not read and discuss scripture, historic texts and
religious stories on a more regular basis. JE
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at
Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This
op-ed was first published by the Jewish Journal.

Let’s Talk About the Freedom
to Live in Security
I t wasn’t until Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker heard the
click of the gun that he realized something terrible
was happening at Temple Beth Israel in Colleyville,
Texas. The seemingly homeless man who claimed he
14 Family Life Survey reveals that a little more than a
quarter (28%) of all Americans say they shared reli-
gious stories with their families at least a few times
a month while growing up. But just 12% of Jews say
they read scripture with their families this regularly
while growing up, compared to 41% of Protestants.

With barely one in 10 Jews reporting that they regu-
larly read scripture or religious stories with their families,
this is hardly strong evidence that religious books and
stories are central to their lives whatsoever. Instead, the
Pew Research Center has found that Seders and food
are much more central to Jewish life today.

In fact, when members of the Jewish commu-
nity were presented with a list of various Jewish
practices and activities in a large national survey,
sizable majorities of Jews note that they have held
or attended seder in the last year (62%) or cooked
traditional Jewish foods (72%). But rates for other
traditional activities, like attending religious ser-
vices on at least a monthly basis (20%) or observing
dietary laws at home (17%), are much lower. Jewish
religious services are, incidentally, where books
like the Torah are publicly read, scrutinized, ana-
lyzed and interpreted, and few Jews in America
regularly engage in those domains as well.

These data should be troubling for leaders and
thinkers both within the Jewish community and out-
side the Jewish world. Reading and engaging with
texts and stories is far more than just a religious act;
it is an act of communal identification and means
by which to promote continuity of values and tra-
ditions. As sociologist Samuel Heilman observed
in “The People of the Book,” families and individ-
uals study and learn stories to become part of the
Jewish people itself. In turn, these actions provide a
“sentimental education” in which Jews gain a deep
understanding of the values of their tradition.

APRIL 21, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
was seeking shelter in the synagogue that morning
was taking the congregation hostage at the moment
their backs were turned to face the holy ark in prayer.

It took 11 excruciating hours for the rabbi and his
congregants, with the aid of law enforcement, to free
themselves and avert an even greater disaster.

As we celebrate Passover — a holiday that
demands every generation to relive the Jewish exo-
dus from bondage — the experience at Colleyville
stands as a sharp reminder of how intricately secu-
rity and freedom are linked. They are two sides of
the same coin: We cannot have security without free-
dom, and we cannot have freedom without security.

This horrible hostage-taking was just the latest in
a growing series of such violent attacks on Jewish
facilities, beginning at the Tree of Life Synagogue in



opinion
Pittsburgh in October 2018 and continuing through Poway,
Monsey, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Boston and more. And
this doesn’t include the planned attacks that have been
thwarted by law enforcement and good security practices.

These episodes all stem from a campaign of vilification of
the Jewish people and of the Jewish state that has gained
steam in recent years. Antisemitism is a virulent, mutating
virus that isn’t going away.

That is why the Jewish Federations of North America
have taken unprecedented action, launching an ambitious,
far-reaching plan to shield the entire North American
Jewish community from terrorist attacks and hate crimes
— a vision we call LiveSecure.

In 50 of 146 Jewish Federations across the country, there
are comprehensive, professionally directed security initia-
tives to aid the entire community. An experienced commu-
nity security director works with every Jewish organization
in the community on a coordinated plan, providing training
and critical security information in concert with the Secure
Community Network, our national security partner estab-
lished by the Jewish Federation system in 2004.

The security director also helps local institutions apply
for government security grants, which we have just suc-
cessfully lobbied Congress to increase from $180 million
to $250 million per year — and we are still advocating for
greater funding. LiveSecure will help expand these com-
munity security initiatives to every Jewish community in the
United States and Canada, and strengthen the ones that
are already in place.

At the end of March, Jewish Federations announced
the completion of Phase I of LiveSecure, raising a total of
$62 million and exceeding a goal of $54 million, which will
enable each and every community to launch or enhance
their local programs and enable SCN to serve as a resource
to each of these communities. Each community will match
the system-wide grant on a 2:1 basis. Together, we will
direct approximately $150 million in private philanthropy
to this challenge, in addition to the growing public funding.

Jewish Federations work every day to help build and
sustain flourishing Jewish communities — ones that are
healthy, safe, caring, welcoming and inclusive, educated
and engaged, involved in broader society and deeply con-
nected to Israel and the global Jewish people.

But we cannot encourage full participation in Jewish life
unless we are safe and secure. And true security requires
more than cameras and guards. What ultimately saved
the day for Cytron-Walker and his congregants was the
training they received from the FBI, local law enforcement
and SCN. It was the same training that the rabbi and mem-
bers of the Tree of Life credited with preventing the worst
antisemitic attack on American soil from being even dead-
lier. These activities must be coordinated and repeated,
year in and year out, together with constant updating of
physical security measures and information sharing.

In every generation, as the Passover Haggadah says,
evil-doers rise up against us. We now have 21st-century
ways to defeat them. We won’t stop until every Jewish
community on the continent is safe and secure, and thus
truly free. JE
Julie Platt is the national campaign chair of Jewish
Federations of North America.

Passover Themes, History’s
Bonds, Tie Our Struggles to
Those of Ukrainian Jews
BY SHULY RUBIN SCHWARTZ
E xactly 100 years ago, in April 1922, my
great-grandparents emigrated to the
United States with their four children, fearing
for their lives in Kremenets, a Russian city in
present-day western Ukraine.

My great-grandfather, Aaron Shimon
Shpall, an educator and journalist, recorded
his thoughts about leaving “the city that we
were born in and that we spent years of our
lives in,” acknowledging how hard it would
be “to separate from our native land, and our
birthplace and our father’s house.”
But he was clear that the Russia he knew
had “embittered our lives and saddened our
souls. If not for the 3 million of our brothers
who live there, it could be overturned along
with Sodom and Gomorrah and the world
would have lost nothing.”
Finally, after months of grueling uncer-
tainty, including one arrest and another
pending, my great-grandfather was reunited
with his family in Colorado before he and
his family ultimately settled in New Orleans,
where he served as teacher and then as
assistant principal of the communal Hebrew
school. The anguish of my family’s departure and,
I can only imagine, the feelings of refugees
all over the world in every era, is captured
in my great-grandfather’s diary: “Nobody
desired to go, but everybody had to go. We
all run, or, to speak more correctly, we flee.

And when somebody flees, there is no ques-
tion: ‘Where to?’ Where your feet carry you!
Where you have the possibility!”
The Passover seder — the Jewish ritual
observed more than any other — serves as
a symbolic reenactment of the journey of
the Israelites from slavery to freedom. The
Haggadah commands us to experience this
journey annually as a way of developing his-
torical empathy for all who are oppressed,
enslaved and displaced, and who hope for
liberation. As Jews, we have ritualized the
recounting of our people’s enslavement and
deliverance in part to cultivate a sense of
moral responsibility toward those suffering
in our own day.

This year, as we approach Passover, our
focus includes Ukrainians fighting valiantly
to defend themselves against Russian inva-
sion. Outraged by the violence, heartbro-
ken by the loss of life and appalled by the
destruction, we feel an obligation to help
the Ukrainian people by offering monetary
support and help with resettlement.

We are especially attuned to helping the
tens of thousands of Jews among them.

The bonds of history that tie our struggles
to those of Ukrainian Jews and their proud
Jewish president today are deep and, in
many cases, including mine, quite personal.

American Jewry has flourished thanks
to ancestors like mine who realized their
determination to seek freedom and escape
oppression. Thanks to their courage and
resolve, we are privileged to recount the
Exodus from Egypt each year as citizens
of a democratic state and to develop the
empathy needed at moments like this to help
others who fear for their lives.

For some, historical empathy for the plight
of the Ukrainian people might be compli-
cated by ancestors who suffered from brutal
antisemitism at the hands of Ukrainian neigh-
bors or whose ancestors’ murder at the hand
of the Nazis was abetted by local Ukrainians.

How can we square these complicated
emotions? In part, because we also know
that countless other Ukrainians fought in the
Russian army to defeat the Nazis, and that
Ukraine has changed greatly over time. The
Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, on
the site of the largest massacre of Ukrainian
Jews by the Nazis, is in the process of open-
ing and today, Ukraine is led by a Jewish
president. Most important, we quell our doubts
because the Haggadah reminds us not
to take our freedom for granted, pointing
us instead to activate our sense of moral
responsibility to help others who are fighting
to secure their own.

Our Haggadah prods us to recall our his-
tory so that it will conjure up our best selves,
so that we will do what we can to ensure
that the future brings freedom, safety and
security to all.

It’s a sentiment I believe my great-
grandfather would have shared. JE
Shuly Rubin Schwartz is chancellor of The
Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

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