A strange thing happened in Utah this week: Some 40 leading Jewish academics, writers, rabbis and professionals descended on the mountains of Park City, where, among other things, they built teepees.
Although the media wasn’t invited to watch the experiment, which was couched as a “team building” exercise by the outdoor company running it, plenty of kvetching could be heard afterward.
“God didn’t put me on earth to build teepees,” one attendee said. “Apart from schlepping these logs, I didn’t have much to do,” another said. And when facilitators voiced disappointment at how long it took participants to complete their task, a third promised to take it up in therapy.
Rob Eshman writes for the Jewish Journal Aug. 3:
I just spent two days listening to some of the most brilliant and famous Jewish scholars, rabbis and thinkers in the world discuss the question "Why Be Jewish?"
The Bronfman Foundation, which sponsored the conference last week in Deer Valley, Utah, is set to launch something called the Bronfman Vision Forum that will offer new ways to invigorate and revitalize Jewish life, and this conference was designed to help generate new ideas and programs, and, yes, more conferences. What an endearing and Jewish idea — that talking will save the Jewish people.
Among the 40 luminaries at the event were Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion; New Republic columnist Leon Wieseltier; French philosopher and author Bernard-Henri Levy; kabbalist Arthur Green; Rabbi Avi Weiss; feminist Tova Hartman; author Anita Diamant; historians David Myers and Jonathan Sarna; therapist Esther Perel; psychologist Wendy Mogel; and Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Westwood.
The names begged the question: if you could spend a couple of days at a mountain resort hearing these people teach, discuss and debate, why not be Jewish?
Eytan Kobre writes on Cross-Currents Aug. 17:
Why would Orthodox Jews, sophisticated and glib ones at that, at best sit docilely by, and at worst join in the gladiatorial frenzy, as their faith community, their families, their rebbes, their cherished beliefs, are singled out for public censure as immoral and as an octogenarian am ha’aretz feels entitled, having paid for the food, to boorishly rub his rejection of the essence of Judaism in his beneficiaries’ faces?
There are, it would seem, three possible answers. One is simple cowardice. Another is simple avarice, that is, fear of ruffling the feathers of the goose that lays the golden eggs they so hungrily consume. The Forward itself suggested as much, writing about the whole bunch of fearless intellectuals that “off the record, participants grumbled about the conference’s disorganization, lack of focus, academic arrogance and moments of sexism (the last being likely the fault of the conference’s Orthodox coordinator; you know how deeply sexist those kind are – EK). But no one wanted to step on another’s toes, and certainly nobody wanted to step on the Bronfman purse strings.”
In other words, the dynamic here may have been no different than that at play when, in the past, Orthodox Jews, to their great shame, sat by passively as Michael Steinhardt—another boor who confuses “philosophy” with “philanthropy”—appeared before a high society dinner—one marking Richard Joel’s retirement from the Hillel presidency to assume that of Y.U.!— in full Chasidic dress to nastily lampoon Orthodox Jews. Is there anyone who doubts that a comparable blackface performance would have gotten him thrown off every board he sits on?
