I don't find "Jewish time" so amusing.
I arrived at 6:45pm to the West side branch of the Reform Wilshire Blvd Temple to take in a 7pm lecture by historian Jonathan Sarna. I owed him a copy of my new book, Yesterday's News Tomorrow.
I slip it to him while he's engaged in a conversation with two distinguished Jews. He holds my handshake and gives me his full attention for a minute. He talks about an article he'd read about my life. I was flattered.
The program began at 7:20pm. That is 20 minutes of theft from everybody who arrived on time. I have little patience for people who are five minutes late to appointments with me. Luckily I carry books with me everywhere so I don't waste this time. Still, I resent the theft.
There were three introductory speeches before Dr. Sarna took the stage. A bare-headed Harvey Fields (once the most highly paid rabbi in Los Angeles, about $300,000 annually counting allowances, until he stepped down a couple of years ago) gave a windy talk (read the whole thing) full of cliches and empty rhetoric about American Judaism's "magnificent history."
Rabbi Fields said that like most of the audience he was filled with worry for the future of America given Tuesday's elections.
The median age of the audience is about 60. Typical for a Reform crowd. A lot of old biddies with implausibly dyed hair.
As soon as rabbi Fields said about Dr. Sarna -- "he worked," I knew he would follow with the cliche "tirelessly," which he did.
I heard loud sighs around me as the rabbi wandered on.
Dr. Sarna takes the stage and immediately captivates with his energy and good humor. I'm disappointed that I've already heard many of his jokes. I've already read his book American Judaism. I fear the evening will be a waste, but Dr. Sarna pops in stuff I don't remember.
Peter Stuyvesent, the governor of New Amsterdam when Jews settled in the city in 1654, studied for the clergy in Holland until an incident with his landlady's daughter sent him fleeing back to the New World.
Dr. Sarna reads his speech but he knows it so well, and delivers it with so much energy and fun, that he holds my attention. He talks about Cohens coming to America and turning into Kerrys. "Remember him?"
I believe Dr. Sarna is a conservative, but I doubt that more than 1% of the audience knows that. Most of the crowd, I'm sure, assumes that any Jew who appears kind and decent is a liberal Democrat.
Dr. Sarna says that in 19th Century America, opponents of mixed seating called it promiscuous seating. Looking around at the crowd, I bet there's more action going on at an NCSY Shabbaton or a Stern College kiddish than here.
I'm hoping that Dr. Sarna winds up his speech with a hearty exhortation for Jews to have unprotected sex in hopes of replenishing our numbers (not that unprotected sex amongst 90% of tonight's crowd would result in anything more dramatic than a pulled muscle). Perhaps a bon mot from Chaim Amalek that hyper-educated Jewish women use their vaginas as toys while Palestinian women use their's as cannons. But no such luck.
During question time, an old woman rises and says all the Christian talk of the past election makes her nervous about American Judaism. If such Jews were truly nervous about such matters, they might try studying the Torah and observing the mitzvot as their Moral Leader does.
Dr. Sarna says culture is not an effective way of transmitting Jewishness over the generations. Religion is more effective. Yiddishism was one of the great failures of 20th Century American Jewish life.
He's asked about the vibrancy of American Orthodox Judaism. He says beware triumphalism from any of the denominations. We've seen Reform and Conservative triumphalism. Now we hear it from the Orthodox. But the Orthodox:
* Lose more of their young people than do Reform or Conservative (in percentage terms) because Orthodoxy is so hard and America so tempting
* Lose their best and brightest to Israel
* Fight amongst themselves
