The big lie and the inferiority complex

It is said that if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough it will be accepted as incontrovertible truth, and the liar may even come to believe it himself. Such a lie has been afflicting the Orthodox community for more than a generation. The haredi party line about Jewish life in America is that until their parents and grandparents came to these shores after the Holocaust America was a Jewish desert, a midbar shemama, and the bearded black-hatted Yiddish-speaking newcomers rescued us from certain doom. We who were born here, dress American, speak English without an accent and whose forebears proudly wore the American uniform while others were walking into gas chambers have bought into the lie and, as a result, are reluctant to raise our voices in protest against the abuses and usurpations being perpetrated on our right.

America was not, repeat not, a desert. We had an Orthodox synagogue here in New York when it was still New Amsterdam. Shearith Israel still thrives on Central Park West and W. 70 St. My daughter taught in its religious school. B'nei Jeshurun was founded in 1825 to serve New York's burgeoning Ashkenazi community and it still thrives. At the turn of the previous century the majestic Eldridge Street Synagogue was founded on the Lower East Side to serve the new arrivals from Eastern Europe. It is now undergoing extensive renovation ( http://www.eldridgestreet.org/ ). It is far from the only synagogue to spring up in New York at that time. Neighborhoods like Crown Heights and Brownsville were teeming with Jewish life. My alma mater, Yeshivah of Flatbush, was founded in 1927 to educate boys and girls who would be both Jewish and American. Its educational philosophy has not changed much since. And this was in New York alone.

My mother was born and raised in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Her father a"h arrived from Hungary as a prisoner of war in World War I (like many Jews of the time, he fought on the wrong side). Eventually he moved his family to Crown Heights to improve his daughters' marriage prospects (to my sorrow, he had no sons). The fact that he was willing to uproot himself in precarious economic times speaks to the viability of Torah in America long before the Holocaust.

Yes, there has been a flowering of Torah life in this country brought about by arrivals from Europe after World War II. So why am I complaining? Because we have lost our collective voice, and are too deferential to the newcomers and their rabbinic establishment. Because haredi triumphalism brought with it smugness and intolerance of other ways of living a Torah life. Because today if a boy wears a kippa seruga or if a girl wears pants, or we carry on Shabbat in our neighborhood eruv, or we identify ourselves as Zionist, or we pursue higher education, we are somehow not Jewish enough. We look for halakhic guidance to authority figures on our right who are not attuned to American culture, who might not speak English or even Hebrew. After Slifkingate, this position has become untenable. We cannot afford to defer to Torah authorities whose vision of Torah cannot accommodate external reality. We cannot accept the authority of people who counsel tearing pages out of books (Igrot Moshe Yoreh Deah 3:73). If we do, more and more of our best and brightest will give up on Torah life altogether. It is high time that we, through the Orthodox Union and the Rabbinical Council of America, stand up and proclaim that we are just as Jewish as the haredim, that our Torah scholars are every bit as good as theirs, nay better because they speak our language, are educated and understand where we are culturally. We cannot afford to maintain our inferiority complex, or Torah in the coming generations will be relegated to the status of a living fossil.