: Dan Libenson, Lex Rofeberg
: Judaism Unbound (Bound) Provocative Conversations About the Jewish Future with Visionary Thinkers and Practitioners
: Ben Yehuda Press
: 9781963475807
: 1
: CHF 7.50
:
: Judentum
: English
: 374
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

This book is for those of us who hunger for deep conversations about what Judaism is and what it is for, what Judaism has been and what it might become. Whether you read Judaism Unbound (Bound) on your own or with a book group, in small bursts or in a single sitting, these pages will open your mind to a whole new way of thinking about Judaism. If you have longed for a Jewish life that was more meaningful or for a Jewish community that was more welcoming, you will be amazed and inspired at the creativity and experimentation happening on the cutting edge of Jewish life. You will be empowered to imagine how you might write the next chapter in the Jewish story.


'Those concerned about Judaism's future will find plenty to chew on in these creative and expansive dialogues.'
-Publishers Weekly

Introduction


Genesis


At this writing, theJudaism Unbound podcast has been listened to over two-and-a-half million times since we released the first episode on March 4, 2016. Because we had a sense that we were starting down a significant road, we titled that first episode “Genesis.” And just as God destroyed the first Creation in a flood, we destroyed our first episode and re-recorded it. Even that early in the history of the podcast, it had already evolved.

In the months before we launched the podcast, we had been putting together an outline for a book we wanted to write about the future of Judaism. By that time, a bunch of relatively small organizations that made up what was being called the “Jewish innovation ecosystem” had been having some success for about a decade with initiatives aimed at engaging “unaffiliated” Jews. The science fiction writer William Gibson once said that “[t]he future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed,” and we wondered whether those organizations’ work represented a Jewish future that was in fact already here. Perhaps a book that wove together a theory of the future based on what was gaining traction in the present would help accelerate a process of broader Jewish transformation. A new version of Judaism would emerge, built around a new ecosystem of institutions that would better resonate with what we have called “regular Jews.”

The 2013 Pew Study of Jewish Americans had been published just about two years before we started work on the book. Its blockbuster finding was that 22% of Jewish Americans were what it called “Jews of no religion”—people who answered “none of the above” when asked what religion they were but who had Jewish parentage and/or otherwise considered themselves Jewish. While many Jewish communal professionals expressed concern that this number was so high, we believed it distracted from the much higher number of what might be called “Jews of low religion.” Our hypothesis found substantial support years later in the second iteration of the study, released in 2020, in which additional questions were asked. While the proportion of Jews of no religion had risen to 27%, even more interesting was a finding that an additional 27% claimed that Judaism was their religion but replied “I’m not religious” to a question about why they didn’t attend synagogue. Essentially, 54% of American Jews explicitly stated that they were “not religious,” and most of the rest didn’t seem interested in the offerings of the existing landscape of Jewish organizations.

While Pew’s findings were consistent with our belief that conditions were right for a new version of Judaism to emerge, we decided we weren’t ready to write the book we had envisioned. We knew how we’d frame the book—we were confident about the historical analogies we’d make and the traditional mythic stories from the Jewish tradition we’d invoke. For example, we felt like forty years of wandering in the wilderness was a powerful way to talk about the patience tha