A Minister Returns Home To A Temple – OpEd

During the 1920’s and 1930’s, Political Anti-Semitism became widespread from Eastern Europe to Great Britain and the USA. While some Jews reacted to this by joining far left wing political organizations, more Jews reacted by joining Jewish organizations and synagogues.Now Anti-Zionists seem to be doing it again.

A recent survey by Tufts University political scientist Eitan Hersh found thatJewish students feel social pressure to take a stance on Israel, and that while some are actively hiding their Jewish identity, a larger number are more actively asserting it.

Also the first two decades of the 21st century saw a major rise in the number of people in the USA who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” which now stands at 26% of the total American population, up an amazing nine points from 17% in 2009.

However, something similar seems to be happening now among the tens of thousands of young Jewish parents who are married to non-Jews. About 42% of married Jewshave a spouse who is not Jewish. Among American Jews who have gotten married since 2010, that percentage rises to 61%.

Yet Introduction to Judaism classes have reported major increases in students. In the UK the Liberal Jewish movement is experiencing a surge in conversions to Judaism. Liberal Judaism reports that 139 people registered to go through its conversion process in 2021. The number is double the 2019 total of 70 and a significant rise on the 93 registering in 2020. About half had some Jewish ancestry, half none at all.

The same doubling is found in Los Angeles where Benjamin Wright, the Associate Director of the Conservative Movement Introduction to Judaism Program told me that the annual number of conversions in the 10-years pre-pandemic averaged 300; and rose to 650 for the year (July 2022-June 2023).

Debra Nussbaum Cohen writes in the Forward newspaper (8/3/24) about interviewing Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Brooklyn, about how the Hamas attack on Israel changed her life.

It led Levy-Lyons to quit her role as spiritual leader of theFirst Unitarian Congregational Societyafter a dozen successful years there, and to quit the ministry and her association with Unitarianism altogether. She’s now focusing on studying to become a rabbi.

Levy-Lyons is Jewish, something she discovered only in her 20s, when a cousin let the family secret slip. It was something her parents had worked hard to deny. Her family lived as many do, as American atheists.

Leaving Unitarianism is a big step; her adult life has been bound to Unitarianism since she was ordained a minister in 2007. Levy-Lyons met her husband, Jeff Lyons, when she was interning in her first pulpit, and he was on that congregation’s board. They bonded over their shared Jewish heritage, which neither, at the time, was involved with. It was when they married, also in 2007, that she reclaimed her family’s original and unmistakably Jewish last name: Levy.

Many rabbis have struggled with how to navigate the strong — at times conflicting — views of their congregants about the war in Gaza. But for Levy-Lyons, it has been a life-changing crisis.

After the war began, members of her left-leaning Unitarian congregation pressed her to issue a statement condemning Israel without qualification for the deaths in Gaza caused by its war against Hamas. But she just couldn’t do it. As a Jew, she sees the war in a more nuanced way than many of her congregants, she said. She also found herself suddenly feeling isolated from the progressive left, of which she has long counted herself a part.

The terrorist attack on Israel and ensuing war forced a reckoning with her long-muted Jewish identity. To her surprise, she found herself dealing with internalized Jewish trauma.

“It’s ironic,” she said, “given that my entire life I didn’t think antisemitism was a thing in this country anymore. Then October 7happened. It was the reaction from the progressive left in this country that has been startling and terrifying,” she said.

“Suddenly, I just started to only feel safe around Jews. I sense that people have some suspicion of me because I’m Jewish, and people wonder if I’m the ‘right’ kind of Jew or the ‘wrong’ kind of Jew,” she said.

On March 22, Levy-Lyons sent her congregation of 1,200 adults a letter about the war. About 10 percent of members of her congregation have Jewish background. In her letter she wrote: “When I found out that I was Jewish in my 20s, it felt like an unalloyed gift. I was heir to this gorgeous tradition of spiritual practices, rituals, music, and texts, dazzling in their breadth and depth. I believed that antisemitism was mostly a thing of the past, oddly unaware of how it had quite literally shaped my entire life.

But on October 7, 2023 my people were slaughtered again — some of them peace activists and environmentalists, parents and children, Jews very much like me and my family except that the vagaries of history and fate had landed them there instead of here. I am two degrees of separation from people who were murdered or taken hostage on that day. Over the months since, I have discovered that I am Jewish for the second time. I have realized that I am heir, not only to the beauty of the lineage, but also to the trauma.”

The letter took congregants by surprise. Two weeks after sending her letter, Levy-Lyons sent another letter to her congregants. In it she resigned.

She had written into her contract with the congregation (which, like many Unitarian Universalist congregations, does not like to be called a church) that she would get Saturdays off, except in the case of a death or wedding.

She and her family are Sabbath observant, she said, and active members of Romemu, the Jewish Renewal congregation on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Unitarian Universalism is numerically shrinking,according to datacompiled by the Unitarian Universalist Association. The denomination is about half the size it was in 1990, when it had nearly 114,000 members. In 2008 it was 54,000. According to the Pew Research Center, Unitarian Universalists comprise just one percent of Americans. Jews account for 1.9 percent. Christians are nearly 71 percent.

The views of progressives, including those at First U, is that “if you are not calling for a ceasefire you are complicit with genocide,” she said. “Either you are for Palestinian liberation and condemning Israel, or on the side of white supremacy and imperialism, colonialism and genocide.”

“I don’t believe these are the only two options,” Levy-Lyons said. “But I felt my congregants viewing me that way. The progressive left is speaking with intense moral authority, and I feel the collective pressure of it. I was suddenly being seen as part of the problem.”

Unitarian Universalist ministers with Jewish backgrounds are not unheard of. But Levy-Lyons appears to be the only one (so far) who decided to leave because of the war in Gaza.

Now that she has left, Levy-Lyons is focusing on two projects — in addition to, with her husband, raising their 13-year-old twins.

And she has been in rabbinical school, albeit until now on a very part-time basis. Levy-Lyons enrolled in the Aleph ordination program of the Jewish Renewal movement a few years ago, but had time while working as a full-time minister to take only one course each semester.

Now that she is free of those responsibilities — her last workday was June 31 — she is taking four classes a semester.

According to a 2008 Pew survey, one in five Christians in America believe that non-Christian faiths cannot lead one to salvation. That number soared to 60 percent for white evangelical Protestants who attend church once a week.

But a survey of over 35,000 Americans in 2008 found that most Americans agree with the statement: many religions – not just their own – can lead to eternal life. Among those affiliated with some religious tradition, seven-in-ten say many religions can lead to eternal life.

This view is shared by a majority of adherents in nearly all religious traditions, including 82% of Jews, 79% of Catholics, 57% of evangelical Protestants and 56% of Muslims. (U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2008, Pew Research Center.)

Thus, in 21st century USA most Christians, Jews, and Muslims have rejected the ‘only one truth’ religious mind set and believe in the Qur’an’s pluralism teachings: “For every one of you did We appoint a law and a way. If Allah had wanted, He could have made you one people-nation, but (He didn’t) that He might test you in what He gave you. Therefore compete with one another to hasten to do virtuous deeds; for all return to Allah (for judgement), so He will let you know [about] that in which you differed.”[Qur’an 5:48]

Non-Orthodox Judaism welcomes all non-Jews who desire to become Jewish; even from Reverend To Rabbi.