The Changing Realities of the
North American Jewish Community
Address to the Conference: "Ramah at Forty: Retrospect
and Prospect," Jewish Theological Seminary, 1986
Daniel J. Elazar
Ramah and the New Epoch
When the first Ramah camp opened its doors on Lake Buckatabon
near Conover, Wisconsin in 1947, the world as a whole and the
Jewish people in particular were on the threshold of a new
historical epoch. The modern epoch that began in the middle of
the 17th century, had produced a secularized world whose
environment was dominated intellectually and practically by a new
science and radically new technologies; an economy organized on
capitalist principles, expressed either through private
enterprise or a state capitalism often masked as socialism, and
featured the spread of democratic republicanism as the desired
form of government. It was the epoch of Europe's great frontier
which placed the cutting edge of development in the new worlds of
the Americas, southern Africa, and Australasia. As an epoch, it
was marked by great revolutions -- in England at the beginning of
the epoch, in the United States and France at its climax, and in
Russia and Central Europe at its end.
For Jews, it was an epoch which brought an end to Jewish
corporate autonomy and the emancipation of individual Jews so
that they could and did enter society as individual subjects or
citizens of their respective states. Jews underwent a population
explosion from an estimated two million in 1700 to over 16
million in 1939. The epoch featured unprecedented Jewish
migration -- from east to west in Europe and across the oceans to
the new worlds, especially the United States of America. The
modern environment, in turn, produced religious reform and
reaction, assimilation and nationalist revival.
After 300 years, the modern epoch collapsed in a generation-long
gotterdammerung which began with the First World War, found
expression in the inter-war period through anti-democratic
revolutions of the Left and the Right which reshaped the globe,
and culminated in Nazism and World War Two. For Jews, it brought
the Holocaust, in which the Jewish people was more than
decimated, losing one in three, not one in ten. At war's end,
the American Jewish community was by far the largest and most
powerful in the world, the principal beneficiary of a migratory
trend which had occupied much of the modern epoch that in any
case had brought the transfer of Jewish populations from the
centers which had existed at its beginning to new lands that were
virtually unknown 300 years before. The great Jewish communities
of Eastern Europe were no more, either destroyed or under
Communist rule. Western European Jewry was barely able to begin
rebuilding in the aftermath of the Holocaust and then only with
American Jewish assistance. In Eretz Israel, the other dynamic
center of world Jewry was in the midst of a struggle for
independence which would culminate in the re-establishment of an
independent Jewish state the following year to mark the beginning
of the post-modern epoch for the Jewish people and, indeed, the
world.
Camp Ramah was both a product and a manifestation of a number of
these trends. The proximate impetus for the first camp came from
a group of voluntary leaders, Jewish educators and rabbis in
Chicago and the Midwest who saw the necessity for American Jewry
to assume its new leadership role by producing a new generation
of Jewishly educated Jews, at home in Hebrew and Jewish sources.
Hebrew-speaking camping, the form of their effort, was a product
of the combination of the Zionist revolution and the American
middle class experience, which made the revival of the Hebrew
language the key to Jewish learning and the camp environment an
appropriate setting for pursuing that revival and all that went
with it. Camping felicitously combined the "back to nature"
normalization which was so much a part of Zionism and the style
of an emerging American Jewish affluence. At the same time, it
was clear that the thrust of Camp Ramah would be toward producing
a Jewish leadership for the American Jewish community. Whatever
the camp owed to the Zionist ideal, it was not informed by a
Zionist ideology, unlike most of the other intensive Jewish camps
that preceded it.
In 1947, the American Jewish community was just on the threshold
of "making it." While in retrospect we can see that the outlines
of the subsequent American Jewish community were well in place by
1947, at the time, neither the American Jews nor anyone else knew
that such was the case. Jews were uncertain as to whether the
anti-semitism of the 1930s would continue to be a factor in their
lives and block their advancement in American society or whether,
as did happen, Nazism had so discredited anti-semitism as an
ideology that the doors to American society would open before
them, individually and collectively, in undreamt-of ways. The
Conservative movement, too, which had enjoyed steady growth at
the expense of Orthodoxy in the previous generation was just
about to "take off" as it did in the 1950s to become the dominant
religious movement in American Jewish life. Finally, the American
Jewish population was still expanding, albeit at a slower pace
than in the previous several generations and demographers could
see that even though the absolute population was growing, the
percentage of Jews in the total American population was already
declining. Still it was a period of growth.
Since 1947, the Ramah movement has weathered the first generation
of the post-modern epoch and all the changes it wrought in Jewish
life, in the USA, and in the world, and the first third or so of
the epoch's second generation. It is not my task to describe the
growth and success of the Ramah movement. Others have done that
very well. In my opinion there is no question as to its success.
It was probably the most important institution founded by the
Conservative movement since the founding of its original
components before World War One. It is my task to examine the
present environment in which the Ramah camps must function and to
try to project forward to see what that environment is likely to
be like over the rest of this generation. In carrying out this
task, it is my responsibility to be as realistic as possible;
even to err on the side of emphasizing the difficulties
confronting American Jewry in general and the Ramah movement in
particular, so that those whose task it is to guide Ramah will be
properly alerted as to what lies ahead of them, to capitalize on
the opportunities available and to develop means to
counterbalance the problems.
The Second Generation: Where We Stand
Forty years after the founding of Ramah, the post-modern epoch
has imposed its own reality on Jewish life. Israel is now the
central Jewish reality - the only place in the world where it is
possible to lead a complete and authentic Jewish life, "warts and
all." I believe that the American Jewish community is vibrant
and creative and capable of sustaining itself. But for all of
the positive reasons that American Jews proclaim with regard to
their integration into American society, it is not and cannot be
a comprehensive community. Moreover, the "Bavel and
Yerushalayim" argument of equal centers was historically only
valid when Jerusalem was in alien hands and there was no Jewish
state in Eretz Israel. American Jewry is integrated and secure
beyond its wildest dreams, even though, for better or for worse,
Jewish fears for their security have not disappeared from
American Jewry.
The price of that integration has been that American Jews have
become more like other Americans, particularly other Americans of
their socioeconomic status. This means more assimilation,
more secularization and the acquisition of habits previously
considered "un-Jewish." This in turn leads to increased
intermarriage as a new generation which is culturally less Jewish
is at the same time more American and more easily able to find
common language with non-Jewish partners of otherwise similar
backgrounds.
At the same time, Judaism in North America has flourished.
Institutionally, in level of activity, in membership, in giving,
and even in scholarship. A real minhag America has emerged in
the form of an American Jewish religious style which is now in
the process of being formally institutionalized in the
Conservative Movement. This style is authentic to the American
Jewish situation, but by the same token, it seems to be
increasingly different from the Jewish way of life in Israel and
for that matter in the rest of the diaspora. As always, it is
"the best of times and the worst of times." And we should not
overemphasize either side of that equation.
Demographics
The basis for all of our analysis must rest on the demographic
trends in the American Jewish community since 1947. The Jewish
birth rate is down to at least one third and perhaps as much as
one half of what it was then and 85 percent of the total Jewish
population of the United States is over the age of 16. For the
past few years we have had an artificial mini-boom in the
birthrate, as the children of the 1960s who married late, have
their children at the same time that the children of the 1970s
who married earlier are having theirs. But that should not fool
us with regard to the long term trend. In the last few years
there has emerged an "optimistic" school of demographers of
American Jewry, to counterbalance the "pessimists" at the Hebrew
University. As Sydney Goldstein has pointed out, there are
problems in judging who is right, the optimists or the
pessimists. But it is clear that even if everything the
optimists claim is correct, it only means that the American
Jewish birthrate is the same as that of the mainstream Protestant
groups in the United States, which means that it is probably not
up to replacement levels. Except for a brief
period that will begin toward the middle of the next decade, one
can simply expect that there will be a smaller total population
upon which Ramah, or any other Jewish institutions oriented
towards young people, can draw. This has already been reflected
in the precipitous declines in enrollment in Jewish schools since
the enrollment peaked slightly over two decades ago.
Somewhat counterbalancing this trend is the increase in
enrollment in Jewish day schools, including Solomon Schechter
schools. Today, some 25 percent of those Jewish children
enrolled in Jewish schools are enrolled in day schools, which is
way up from the figure two decades ago. To the extent that
Camp Ramah is a natural extension of the Schechter experience and
is the movement camp for those schools, it will have a stable and
perhaps even growing population upon which to draw.
Counterbalancing this are cost factors. The cost of day school
and camp, which now comes to between $5,000 and $6,000 a year per
child, is increasingly forcing less affluent families to make
hard choices and if those choices have to be made, camp will be
eliminated, so that day school can be retained on the grounds
that the children would require private schooling of some kind in
any case, while camp is a luxury.
With regard to afternoon schools the issue is not as clear.
While the day schools have grown, Conservative afternoon schools
have deteriorated, offering fewer hours of instruction now than
ever before. What influence this has on Ramah recruitment is not
entirely clear, since if left alone it might mean that fewer
young people will be interested in going to Ramah. On the other
hand, if exploited, Ramah can actively campaign to increase its
enrollment on the grounds that it is even more necessary as a
supplement to supplementary Jewish education than at any time in
the past.
Socio-Economic Changes
In its early days, the Ramah camps offered Jewish children an
opportunity to get out of the city and do something interesting
with their peers during their summer vacations at a time when few
Jews travelled. This meant that the greatest competition for
potential campers' interest were other camps or stationary
vacation areas near the great American cities - "the Shore," "the
Catskills," "Michiana," or the like. An exciting camp program in
a nice outdoor setting with interesting peers could compete
easily against those attractions.
Today the situation is quite different. As the American Jewish
community has become affluent, vacation travelling, summer and
winter, has become the norm. Affluent young Jews can expect to
go to mountain and beach resorts for skiing and water sports.
After a certain age, which is dropping all the time, they can
expect to travel abroad, either with their parents or with their
peers. In other words, the competition confronted by summer
camping, not only Ramah, has become fierce. Nor is it only a
matter of competition for time; it is also a competition for
money. Young people who can travel from home during the summer
on short trips may prefer to use their resources for that instead
of for camp. Moreover they and their parents may prefer a summer
trip and a winter trip rather than spending relatively high fees
for a single camping experience.
Even those who are more interested in camping want to combine
travel and camping in the summer, so that the two month session
discourages them. This was discovered early on in California
where, as is usually the case, the national pattern was
originally prefigured. California's response was to introduce
single month sessions, which, of course, cuts the effectiveness
of the camp program but does open it to a larger population.
The same trends towards affluence and the activities of the
affluent have lowered the maximum camping age. In Ramah's early
years it was expected that children would be campers through high
school graduation, then serve two years as junior counsellors and
finally become counsellors during their last two years of
college. Today an increasing number of young people do not even
want to be at camp past the age of 16, preferring other summer
vacation activities. Moreover, staff salaries, always low
compared to opportunities outside of camp, have become even
less competitive for those who need to earn money during the
summer and not attractive at all to those who do not.
The impact of all this on Ramah has been maximal or will be,
since the camps draw most heavily on affluent, upper middle class
populations or from families with high Jewish commitment who send
their children to day school. In the early days, Ramah's fee
structure was such that it drew from a far broader population
base, but once fees were increased in the early 1950s the
complexion of the camps changed. Today those people who can
afford to send their children to Ramah can also afford to do all
the other things which are offered in an affluent society, while
those who cannot afford the benefits of affluence also cannot
afford Ramah. In the early days, synagogue and other scholarships
softened the impact of high fees on families of modest means.
Have those financial aids kept pace with the rise in fees? If
they have not, scholarships no longer serve to modify this
situation. Serious attention should be paid to the possibilities
of increasing such financial aids.
All this is exacerbated by the divorce rate and the emergence of
so many single parent families or multiple family ties. This is
a pattern for the Conservative Movement as a whole since its
congregations were built around the nuclear family. (The
movement developed in the only place where and during the only
two generations in human history when the nuclear family was
dominant.) It is an even more serious problem for Ramah. To
give just two examples, summers are times for children of
divorced parents to be with the other parent. Single mothers are
even more economically disadvantaged and can less afford extra
expenditures. It may even be that disruption of families leads
to diminished religious observance and Jewish concern.
With regard to staff, it is easy to recommend the payment of
higher salaries but it is also equally clear that there have to
be other incentives, since salaries are not likely to ever be
competitive monetarily.
A serious effort must be made to identify target groups and what
would serve as incentives for them. This is particularly
necessary since for many years there was an emphasis on staffing
at least the upper echelons of the camp with rabbinical students
who were encouraged to spend their summers in the Ramah
environment to further their socialization into the Conservative
Movement, if not their education, and who were given preference
over other potential members of the camp staff who were not
pursuing rabbinical training. This policy, whatever its
benefits, also had a negative effect that extended beyond Ramah,
in that it weakened a major tool for the development of serious
nonrabbinical leadership in the Conservative Movement. It is my
understanding that now it is much more difficult to recruit
rabbinical students for Ramah. For that reason, and for the sake
of the movement, the policy needs to be reevaluated and new
directions for recruitment explored.
Responding to Hedonistic Individualism
Perhaps the greatest environmental problem confronting all
religious movements today is the emergence of hedonistic
individualism as an acceptable and attractive "lifestyle." While
this is a worldwide phenomenon, it is more pronounced in the West
and most pronounced in the United States where it was apparently
born and where it was able to capitalize on certain elements in
American culture to acquire a patina of ideological justification
as if it were the kind of true liberty and pursuit of happiness
for which the U.S. was founded. We all know what hedonistic
individualism is about; its essence is the legitimation of
individuals' pursuit of what is personally convenient and
pleasurable at the expense of all else. This is not the place to
go into the origins of hedonistic individualism. However, its
implications for society and especially for Judaism must be
confronted. Hedonistic individualism is neo-paganism, avodah
zarah, to put it bluntly.
There are strong tendencies in non-Orthodox Judaism in North
America to accept elements of hedonistic individualism as part of
keeping up with the times. One of the hardest tasks today is
distinguishing between useful and necessary changes and being
trendy in accommodating hedonistic individualism. Since the
latter is so pervasive in American society, and has been since
the social revolution of the 1960s, it is impossible for any
Jewish institution to escape confrontation with it. Since it is
especially oriented toward the youth culture, it is especially
difficult for youth-oriented institutions to avoid having to do
so.
Ramah has been faced with this problem for nearly twenty years.
It has gone through several kinds of responses to it. Up until
now, those responses could be ad hoc. But hedonistic
individualism is now becoming a vested ideology taken for granted
by people who used to know better. It embodies a set of policies
that flow from it which religious institutions, especially those
serving youth, will have to confront more directly.
The present worldwide struggle between fundamentalists and
modernists in part revolves around that confrontation. Indeed,
the fundamentalists' willingness to recognize the problems of
hedonistic individualism and to combat them, is one of the
reasons why fundamentalism has become attractive to people who
would otherwise not accept the fundamentalists' obscurantist
views of the world. This is equally true in Judaism. One of the
great strengths of Orthodoxy and one of the reasons why many
secular Jews are willing to tolerate Orthodox demands is because
it presents itself as a serious means of combatting hedonistic
individualism. Non-Orthodox movements, on the other hand, have
not been convincing in that regard.
The development of a Jewish religious movement which can occupy
the vital center by combining judicious progressivism with
faithfulness to first principles and that can resist hedonistic
individualism is extremely important to prevent Jewish life from
unfortunate shifts to one extreme or another. To do so, however,
one needs to explore and develop authentic Jewish responses in
both directions. Perhaps the Ramah camps have a role to play in
doing so.
The Conservative Movement
Ramah's demographic problem is further compounded by what has
happened to the Conservative Movement. In the years of Ramah's
development, the Conservative Movement was in its period of
highest growth and was going from strength to strength. That
growth came to an end in the early 1960s, not only for the
Conservative Movement but for all mainstream religious movements
in the United States. For the next decade those groups suffered
a steady decline which, at least for the Jews, stabilized in the
mid-1970s.
On the other hand, as early as the National Jewish Population
Study of 1971, students of American Jewish demography discovered
that the Conservative Movement, which was particularly strong
among second and third generation American Jews, dropped off
considerably among Jews who were fourth generation Americans or
more. Since this phenomenon was first identified over
15 years ago, the percentage of fourth generation Jews and beyond
has grown and the trend forecast in that study has become a
powerful one. In the round of local Jewish population studies
undertaken by the Jewish community federations since 1980, the
percentage of Jews identifying themselves with Conservative
Judaism has dropped, in some cases precipitously, while the
percentage of Jews identifying with Reform Judaism or no movement
has increased.
Today it fair to say that the Reform Movement is probably the
largest of the three movements in the United States, with the
Conservative share continuing to drop. In its early days the
Ramah camps, or at least some of them, tried to attract Jews from
all movements, but from 1952 onward the emphasis was shifted to
attracting people from Conservative congregations. As the Reform
and Orthodox Movements developed their own camps, this tendency
was reinforced so that today the Ramah camps depend upon a strong
and vital Conservative Movement in order to maintain a base on
which to draw campers. That base is now eroding.
There is another dimension to the relationship between Ramah and
the Conservative Movement which has to do with the interplay
between the two. While in one respect Ramah is recognized as one
of the crown jewels of the Movement, it is also perceived as a
source of problems. The pleasure felt by the Movement's
leadership at the raising up of cohort after cohort of
Conservative rabbis and educators, not to speak of better
educated baalei batim, is matched by dissatisfaction of many
congregational rabbis who feel that Ramah generates rebellion in
the ranks of their youth - rebellion against normal
congregational life, against the formal prayer services which are
the centerpiece of congregational activity and, in some
cases, against the synagogue itself.
This tension has never been resolved; it probably cannot be. By
and large it has been a productive one for the Movement. Even
the establishment of secessionist havurot which belong to the
Conservative community, but not necessarily to the Movement
proper, has given Conservative Judaism renewed vitality. On
the other hand, it has also led to a certain "bleeding" away from
the Movement into Orthodoxy. While all the evidence is that the
number of Conservative Jews who move into Orthodoxy is relatively
small in the total picture and is far fewer than those who move
into Reform, by and large they are former Ramah campers and
represent some of the strongest products of the Movement's
educational system.
On the other hand, Ramah has been the model for the development
of an authentically traditional Conservative Judaism. It is not
surprising that the most successful Masorati congregations in
Israel are those founded by Ramah products whose nusach tefillah
and religious practice is based on the Ramah model as is the case
in the American havurot. The mainstream in the Conservative
Movement has developed very different models of prayer and
religious observance which, while authentically American, raise
problems for many traditional Jews. The Ramah influence has been
confined to the peripheries of the Movement, but while peripheral
in one sense, in another it is the cutting edge of what could be
a truly masorati Judaism.
The Conservative Movement, more than any other, is characterized
by a great gap between its elite and its mass membership -- in
standards of religious behavior, in Jewish knowledge, in
rootedness in Jewish culture. This in itself is a problem which
the Movement faces. Ramah is clearly an institution of the
elite. That is why it is an integral part of the Jewish
Theological Seminary, not of one of the other agencies of the
Movement. It can even be said that it was an attempt on the part
of the major elite institution and its supporters to broaden the
base of the elite through introducing the young people from
Conservative congregations to elite Conservative Judaism through
a camping experience. Not surprisingly, from the first, it
tended to attract a disproportionate share of its campers from
among the children of the Movement elite. Nevertheless, it still
was able to play that attracting role with considerable success.
Much of the conflict between Ramah campers and congregational
rabbis is the result of this success. Once recruited into the
elite, these young people come to share the elite's
dissatisfactions with the forms and institutions developed to
serve the mass membership. Those Ramah products who remained
seriously Jewish ended up with a narrow range of choices. Either
leave the Conservative Movement and seek a Judaism more to their
liking in Orthodoxy or to develop their own institutions within
the Movement, which is what the havurot are. In a few cases they
were able to find congregations congenial to their demands or to
establish such congregations, particularly in university
communities.
On the other hand, the Movement, dominated by rabbis and
congregations, has tended to reject the creations of the Ramah
alumni, and see the havurot as a threat to the mass based
organizations and their leaders. This has directly affected
rabbinical and congregational support for the camps. (Most of
the support which the camps have gotten has come from a
relatively small number of rabbis who have risen above this
narrow perspective to understand the true importance of Ramah.)
This is also one reason why Ramah's influence on the Conservative
Movement has been less than it might have been, had the Movement
made more place for its alumni, or at least been more hospitable
to those alumni trying to make a place for themselves.
On the other hand, Ramah has done no better than the rest of the
Movement in articulating an ideational framework for a
Conservative Judaism. Nor has it tried to do so systematically.
This is not meant as criticism. There is much virtue in the
organic development of a Conservative version of tradition that
has occurred. It is also clear that at some point there has to
be a systematically articulated set of premises which are
recognized as part and parcel of any movement. In this respect,
Elliot Dorf's little book, Conservative Judaism, prepared for
USY, is a model.
Perhaps this is an issue that should be confronted more by staff
than by the campers, but somewhere in the Ramah movement it needs
to be confronted. At a time when Orthodoxy is intellectually
vibrant and actively redefining itself and its concepts, albeit
in a rightward moving way and the leading Reform intellectuals
are actively engaged in building a new liberal theology, the
Conservative leadership can do no less if the Movement is to
flourish. Part of the excitement of Orthodoxy and its appeal to
the most serious Jews is to be found in this commitment, in its
own way, to an intellectual quest, whether through Habad with its
Tanya mysticism, religious Zionism, or even the neo-Nietzschean
ideas of Satmar.
In its greatest days, it was the Conservative Movement or at
least the Jewish Theological Seminary which was the source of
ideas for American Jewry. The great contest between Mordechai M.
Kaplan and Abraham Joshua Heschel reflected the Movement's
intellectual vigor. That vigor has now passed to Orthodoxy and
to Reform.
While the Ramah camps have been vitally important to the
Conservative Movement, they have not been properly represented in
Movement councils. This is in great part because the Movement
essentially has two components. The Jewish Theological Seminary,
which serves the Movement as a modern adaptation of a Lithuanian
yeshiva, and the congregations which are organized into the
United Synagogue. Under this arrangement there is room at the
decision-making table for an organization of rabbis and for other
bodies as auditors, but there has been no place at the table for
non-congregational bodies, must of which are subsumed under the
Seminary in one way or another. That has been the case with the
Ramah camps. The end result is to deprive the Movement of the
contribution of a significant constituency, most of whom do not
find a place in the Movement through the accepted channels.
Even those who find a place in local congregations or in the
Seminary proper rarely become involved in the Movement. I would
hazard a guess that this is partly because the channels are
inappropriate to them. As the Conservative Movement moves into
its second century, it should be broadening its base to provide
direct representation at the highest levels for other
institutions such as Solomon Schechter schools and Ramah camps.
Another change that is occurring within Conservative Judaism is
that what was once a single movement may now be dividing into
parties. However divided internally among five or so different
countrywide institutions or organizations and hundreds of
independently-governed local congregations the Movement was,
there was only one way to become a Conservative Jew and that was
to affiliate with one of its recognized institutions. With the
changes that have taken place in Conservative Judaism since the
1960s, it is very likely that what was once a movement is
becoming a community, or in Hebrew, a mahane (camp), which
embraces more than one organizational framework. Thus, most of
the independent havurot in North America are not officially
members of the Conservative Movement, but in fact almost all of
them are comprised of Conservative Jews and they do represent an
expression of Conservative Judaism. If the Union for Traditional
Conservative Judaism separates itself further from the official
organs of the Movement, we may well get another movement within
the Conservative community or mahane.
That is not necessarily a bad thing. Such divisions may offer
greater choice for people who are attracted to Conservative
Judaism and as such may strengthened the Conservative approach to
Judaism in the way that Orthodoxy, which is very divided, has
been strengthened by the existence of many different, yet equally
legitimate, ways to be Orthodox -- Hassidic, Haredi, modern
Orthodox, religious Zionist and so forth. If that turns out to
be the case, the Ramah camps will either have to serve the whole
Conservative community or close to it, or face competition. It
is possible that the Ramah camps would serve as bridging
institutions, at least for the foreseeable future, but this will
require their own adaptation to new forms of pluralism within
Conservative Judaism.
Another task that lies before the Movement is to break out of its
North American, one might even say United States centered shell.
Of the three branches of Judaism, Conservative Judaism is the
most United States-bound. Even in Canada it has had relatively
limited success. In part, that is because of the uniqueness of
the American situation and the fact that the Conservative
Movement was developed in response to that unique situation. In
part it is because too little effort has been made outside of the
United States. In that sense the Conservative Movement is
ethnocentric in an archetypically American fashion.
The evidence for this can be found in those cases where even a
modest but real effort has been made in other parts of the world.
Argentina is the best example. There the efforts and dedication
of one man launched a movement where none had existed before, in
a Jewish religious desert crying for some appropriate form of
Jewish religious expression. The Conservative Movement today is
the most dynamic religious movement on the Latin American
continent and at least institutionally has conquered whole
communities like Chile. Camp Ramah has become part of that
effort as well.
Both Israel and Europe seem to be ripe for some growth for
Conservative Judaism, although neither will be as easy as
Argentina, since neither is a religious desert. Israel, indeed,
has a vital and vibrant Orthodoxy. The Movement will have to pay
special attention to Israel and other Jewish communities over the
next generation, if only because as the world grows smaller, any
Jewish religious movement that does not have a strong presence in
Israel and is not really worldwide will lose ground.
There is already a very significant Camp Ramah presence in
Israel, mostly directed toward serving North American young
people, but with the beginnings of a serious Israeli program as
well. It will be different than the standard American camping
experience. Israelis will not send their children away to
two-month overnight camps. Indeed, overnight camping, except for
very short periods, may not be appropriate to the Ramah
experience in Israel, but there can be a real Ramah experience
for Israelis if one is designed with Israel's needs in mind. So
too, as more open expressions of Conservative Judaism emerge in
the Scandinavian countries and Britain, Ramah will have to
consider a presence in Europe as well.
Cultural and Educational Environment
Perhaps Ramah's greatest failure has been in its failure to raise
a Hebrew-speaking community within American Jewry or an
indigenous American Jewish high culture. The two go hand in
hand. In its very earliest days that was part of the Ramah
dream. In all truth it was a dream abandoned at the beginning of
Ramah's great expansion when other values were placed higher on
the scale of priorities. This change was reinforced by
environmental pressures. From the Conservative Movement, the
pressure to produce a generation of Conservative Jews, from the
American Jewish environment a subtle or not-so-subtle pressure
against the emphasis on Hebrew, from American society as a whole,
the overwhelming influence of American culture. Thus, for better
or for worse, in the days when there were Hebrew plays at Ramah,
they were usually translations of Broadway hits and rarely
involved independent Jewish cultural creativity.
Perhaps it is too much to expect the development of
Hebrew-speaking camps in the American environment. On the other
hand, with the combination of day school and Israel experiences
now available to more and more children at a younger and younger
age, in theory in should be possible to raise a generation of
Hebrew-speaking Jews in North America who are able to appreciate
a Hebraic high culture, even if they cannot themselves contribute
to it.
There is another dimension to this. When the Ramah camps were
started, the only Jewish camps that really could compete with
them were the Zionist camps, Massad and the two study camps
affiliated with the Boston and Chicago Hebrew teachers colleges.
Today all three religious movements have camps, at least equally
Jewish in content and thrust. Moreover the Jewish community
camps have also begun to emphasize Jewish programming. Thus
Ramah is in a more competitive situation than it ever was. Part
of that competition is overcome by the relationship between Ramah
and Conservative Movement schools. That may be sufficient. On
the other hand it is clear that the search for Jewish
authenticity is a great part of the interest of young people in
their Jewishness, especially the kind of young people to whom
Ramah appeals. Its offering the best possible models for Jewish
authenticity is an appropriate response on the part of the
Movement.
The Impact of Communications and Transportation Technology
Perhaps the most critical environmental change confronting us all
is the technological revolution in communications and
transportation. Jewish life in the last generation was
transformed by air travel and particularly the jet plane which
made any settled part of North America accessible to any other
within a matter of hours and which made Israel accessible to the
Jewish world on a regular and continuing basis. This
generation's revolutions will be in the field of communications.
While the direct impact of cybernetic communication on Ramah is
not likely to extend beyond greater ease of communication between
New York and the camps, or even among the camps themselves, and
lowered costs for preparation of materials, there is another
dimension to the transformation which is of great significance
and that is that the world is becoming even more interconnected
than ever, almost literally wired together, or better, tied by
radio waves transmitted through satellites. From a
communications point of view, this may indeed produce something
like Marshall McLuhan's "global village," but it also seems to be
making possible the survival of ethnic groups in a wider variety
of settings and in an environment which is increasingly
hospitable to pluralism, out of necessity, if not out of choice.
These technological changes are ending the last vestiges of
American self-containment, as the economy of the United States
becomes an integral part of the world economy, subject to
vicissitudes as well as gains. The same thing will be true of
American Jews. By and large, the American Jewish community has
lived in a kind of splendid self-containment, linked to Israel
where it wanted to be, occasionally to other diaspora Jewries,
usually on a benefactor to recipient basis, but ultimately
assessing reality from a very self-contained perspective.
One consequence of this for Jews for example is to believe that
the patterns evolved by American Jewry are the accepted or
dominant patterns of contemporary Jewish life. To give one
concrete example, because only 10 percent of American Jews are
Orthodox, while something like 80 percent identify as either
Conservative or Reform (whether or not they are members of
institutions of those movements), American Jews assume that
Orthodoxy is a small minority in the Jewish world and that
non-Orthodox Judaism is by far the dominant mode. Yet when
viewed from a worldwide perspective it turns out that no matter
what measure is used, serious identification without active
commitment or nominal commitment, more Jews are Orthodox than
Conservative and Reform combined.
The Ramah camps were among the first Jewish institutions to
respond to the jet age through the mishlahat program bringing
Israelis to staff the Ramah camps in North America and by
establishing a Ramah in Israel. There will undoubtedly be ways
in which Ramah will have to adapt to the new communications age
and the resultant shrinking of the world, including the Jewish
world.
Conclusion
The Conservative Movement has now entered into a critical period
in its development, one in which its elites are preoccupied with
changes in ideology and practice and its masses seem to be fading
away to Reform congregations or to nothing. The external
environment in which it operates has changed, making many of its
basic institutional approaches obsolete and it has lost its
previous intellectual preeminence in Jewish life. Ramah is
likely to be very much affected by the struggle over ideology and
practice, particularly the latter. It is likely to be less
affected by the shift of peripherals away from the movement, no
matter how numerous, although that does reduce the population
from which it can draw. With regard to other environmental
changes, I leave it to others to discuss whether dealing with
children from single parent families, divorce and remarriage, and
the like will affect the camps.
As suggested above, Ramah has played a major role in shaping
elite Jewish practice. The question remains as to whether it can
contribute to the resolution of the ideological issues
confronting the Movement.
One of the principal hidden ideological struggles in the history
of Ramah has been the struggle between the camps as movement
camps and the principal of clal yisrael. This too mirrors a
struggle within the Conservative Movement which has prided itself
on its commitment to clal yisrael, but which in the course of
time has had to become increasingly concerned with its own
institutional identity. For its first five years, Ramah
functioned on a clal yisrael basis, but from 1953 onward, it
became much more Movement oriented.
In recent years the Movement has taken another giant step toward
separating itself as a distinctive approach to Judaism, while the
bulk of the Jewish people have less patience for such divisions,
even if they must make their choices among them with regard to
their affiliations which are often nominal. This puts the
Movement and the camps in something of a dilemma. Reform has
somewhat solved this problem by trying to develop a uniquely
Reform Jewish perspective only in a very narrow sphere of
religious ritual and social action. Orthodoxy claims to speak
for all Jews. The Conservative Movement is left somewhere in the
middle with a not-sufficiently-defined position.
Another environmental change is the shift in emphasis on the part
of American Jews as to what is important for being Jewish.
During the heyday of Conservative success in the first postwar
generation, American Jews emphasized the triple melting pot
theory, that is to say Judaism as a religion in the American
sense. Toward the end of that generation there was a revival of
ethnicity which while initiated by blacks and southern and
eastern European ethnic groups was heartily embraced by the Jews.
In the end it turned out that for most American ethnics it was a
transient phenomenon, part of their final integration into
American society on equal terms, so that Jews once again proved
exceptional. Today, in fact, much of Jewish identification is
political. Jews who are not seriously religious, who do not have
any significant ethnic culture remaining, show their Jewishness
by participating in Jewish community organizations, fundraising
for Israel, or political demonstrations on behalf of Jewish
causes whether Israel or Soviet Jewry or Ethiopian Jewry or
whatever.
One of the prime characteristics of the post-modern epoch is the
emergence of an institutional world Jewish polity that competes
for the talent and attention of the kind of people that Ramah
tries to attract. Ramah, as part of a religious movement, has
been a representative of the keter torah at a time when the keter
malkhut has become more powerful than at any time in the past
2000 years.
Ramah was developed at the time when religious identity was
paramount and indeed went somewhat against the stream in its
initial emphasis on Hebrew culture, which is one reason why that
emphasis soon was replaced by religious study and practice. It
never really was swept along with the ethnicity movement and it
has developed no tools for dealing with the new politicization of
Jewishness. One of the most exciting arenas of Jewish activity
today in a relatively nonreligious age is Jewish politics and the
Jewish world is now completing a political reconstitution which
has given adat bnei yisrael, or the world Jewish polity, an
active institutional framework with increasingly widespread
opportunities for leadership and involvement, it may be that not
even Ramah can ignore this new reality, even though its main goal
is in the religious and educational spheres. Perhaps Ramah has
to consider how to produce educated Jewish leadership, not only
for the congregations and other institutions of the Conservative
Movement, but for the world Jewish polity. It may be that it
should not attempt to deal with the latter directly, but the
possibility should be considered.
The sum and substance of the foregoing is that the Ramah movement
must now function in a transformed environment, the majority of
whose characteristics make it more difficult for Ramah to
continue along established paths but others of which offer the
movement an opportunity to become part of an overall system of
Jewish education and expression in which the best that Ramah has
to offer can find room to grow even beyond the camp environment.
If the tides of demographic and socioeconomic change and the
trends in the Conservative Movement make Ramah's situation more
difficult, the growth in day schools, the easier travel to and
from Israel and the emergence of a means of continuing
Ramah-style Judaism beyond the camping years give Ramah something
that was previously lacking. To the extent that Conservative
Judaism can generate an authentic Jewish expression of its own,
not merely a series of compromises with a basically hostile
environment (rendered all the more hostile because it seems so
supportive), Ramah must be the place where it is developed. That
is the challenge which faces the Ramah movement for its next
forty years.
