Takeaways From Jewish Life In The Pandemic
There's room for Zoom, panelists at the virtual Jewish Funders Network International Conference agreed, but human contact is paramount.
Empty pews this past year: will worshippers come back to the synagogue?
Synagogue affiliation in the U.S. has been in decline over the last several decades, and 2020 -- the year of Covid -- saw congregational worship come to a sudden halt in early March.
Virtually no one came to services for the rest of the year, except virtually.
But Rabbi David Ingber, founder and senior rabbi of Romemu, the eclectic New York congregation that combines traditional liturgy with meditation and body movement, reports that membership this past year increased from about 700 families to almost 800, with some people joining from other countries.
“This past Shabbat,” the rabbi told about 80 participants at a session on Monday, the first day of the three-day virtual Jewish Funders Network International Conference, “a woman logged in to Shabbat services from London -- she found us on YouTube -- and shared a Torah insight for the first time.”
It was but one example, he said, of the broad reach and dramatic influence of Zoom religious services that, out of necessity, have become commonplace during the pandemic.
The topic of the one-hour session, moderated by Dan Senor, co-author of “Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle” and an executive at Elliott Management, was “Post Corona: Jewish Life After the Pandemic.”
Rabbi Ingber and Ariela Dubler, head of school of the Abraham Joshua Heschel day school in Manhattan, discussed what changes prompted by the pandemic will remain and what lessons can be learned from the past year of forced improvisation.
A key question for synagogues is whether worshippers will ever come back to services.
While Rabbi Ingber observed that “in a post-pandemic world, people will want to be together, in a sacred center,” he also noted that “synagogues will have to double down in technology and increase their quality quotient.” With worshippers able to “pick and choose” Shabbat services anywhere online, no synagogue is “assured of customer loyalty,” he warned. “They need a message of meaning and content.”
Rabbi Ingber noted that the Jewish people have always shown wisdom in resilience, most notably pivoting, after the destruction of the Temples in ancient times, from the rituals of animal sacrifices in Jerusalem to prayer wherever they are.
“We are a people, not a place,” he said.
The rabbi envisions a need for both high-quality online religious services that will continue to attract people from around the world, as well as local synagogues, particularly in smaller communities, that offer human contact so that people can “show up and be with others and be a part of a ‘we.’”
“After a Zoom shiva,” he said, “people need community to meet spoken and unspoken needs.” He added, though, that every synagogue will require “an online rabbi.”
Addressing the challenges schools have faced during an extended period of both in-person and virtual classes, Dubler, a former dean at Columbia Law School, noted of Heschel that “we are part of the pivot” in being flexible. She described the Heschel school year as “a miraculous roller coaster,” and credited Zoom classes with allowing students to continue learning from home and provide some memorable opportunities, like “meeting with” experts from around the world and interviewing an Israeli soldier at his base. But she firmly stated that “kids need to be in school.”
The return to the classroom is vital because it gives students the opportunity to develop relationships with teachers, she explained, though she said, “we won’t let go of the ‘silver lining’” of having online access to the wider world.
Dubler praised Heschel’s teachers for being committed to teaching in person. “They came back, and that was the game-changer,” she said.
Acknowledging that it has been “an uneven year,” she said many students and teachers are “struggling” as a result of the pressures of the pandemic and the shift between online and in-person classes. “We have learned from this experience,” she said, seeing that some students thrive online and others don’t. “We have to explore why.”
Dubler pointed out that Heschel benefited from having “enormous resources to open our school. Every school needs to reopen” in person, she said, “and we all need to think together on how schools can reopen.” She observed that “so many inequities have been raised” at a time when the country “opened bars before schools.”
In the end, it was clear from both the rabbi and the educator that for all of the benefits Zoom has provided during this chaotic time (including bringing together online hundreds of philanthropists from around the world, as the JFN conference is doing this week), nothing compares with the advantages -- in the classroom and the synagogue -- of social interaction and community.
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