Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

I am perplexed by the tortuous arguments that have managed to twist the so called “inreach-outreach debate” into hard disjunctive options. I have myself announced and implemented a public outreach program for the unchurched and persons of other faiths who are discontent with their inherited traditions and search for alternative faiths, including Judaism, that are more compatible with their intellectual convictions and spiritual yearnings.

Have I (or has any rabbi) lessened my energies toward my own congregants, including the "Seventh-day Absentists,” or softened the standards or programs of the synagogue for the marginal Jews?

To the contrary, when I explained on halachic and historical grounds the mitzvah of conversion to Judaism, a substantial number of members of the Board of Directors and congregation volunteered to serve on our Keruv Commission. And they have been Jewishly energized by the prospect of informing and embracing the seekers. Outreach is no conflict to inreach. They are complementary. Outreach has stimulated inreach.

Those who seriously investigate Judaism and contemplate becoming Jews by choice —and they are more numerous than we have been led to believe—come with questions that stimulate responses from the Keruv mentors.

There is no better way to learn than to teach; no better way to raise Jewish self-awareness than to learn how to answer the real questions of persons who seek identification with Jews and Judaism.

The questions these potential “Jews by choice” ask are far closer to the questions that our children and grandchildren ask either openly or sub voce. They are not only the "how" questions of ritual practice, but the "why" questions of purpose. They want to know whether Judaism has something to say to them and to the world that is of superordinate importance. They want to know "why" Judaism, or "why" be Jewish?

Educating and persuading the serious non-Jew is indistinguishable from the task to persuade and satisfy the spiritual needs of ourselves and our progeny. The stranger in our midst is not one who comes from without, but includes the native born within. Outreach and inreach are two sides of the same coin. In our open and free society we are all, de facto, Jews by choice. Opening the doors of the synagogue to non-Jewish seekers will only intensify our own programs, challenge genetic Jews to become aware of their unearned patrimony, and stimulate them to think and articulate with knowledge and pride the meaning of their Jewishness.

One Board member anxious to join the Keruv Commission and its instructions put it this way: "Rabbi, this is important not only because I want to know how to answer the potential convert, but because I want to know how to answer my own college children."

The issue of triage, the allocation and distribution of energy, time, and monies in the inreach-outreach controversy is fabricated because the cause and purpose of both are one. That interest may better be served by dealing forthrightly with the mission and purpose of Judaism than in the techniques and strategies relating to mixed marriage and assimilation. The focus on mixed marriage ought not to be our major concern.

I myself do not see outreach as an attempt to stem the hemorrhaging of our Jewish population. I do not see the non-Jewish seekers as replacements for our Holocaust losses, or as surrogates to bolster our demographic figures brought low by our inability to reproduce ourselves. I address them as human beings created in the image of God who have much to learn from its wisdom, ethics, and spirituality. And we have much to contribute to the advancement of Judaism.

From the perspective of Judaism, it is no less a mitzvah to cultivate and embrace Ruth the Moabite than to increase the loyalty and knowledge of Boaz. Therefore, to speak of wasting our time and energy to convert "them" as opposed to elevating "us and ours" introduces an invidious comparison. Unless, of course, the counter argument is based on the notion that "blood is thicker than water.” But this only brings to surface the subterranean xenophobia that in no small part lies behind much of the opposition to outreach, and especially to the unchurched non-Jew. I have heard it whispered out loud, by people who ought to know better, that Judaism is a matter of birth exclusively and that the non-Jew is incontrovertibly unconvertible. In the vulgar parlance of so many: "a shiksah bleibt a shiksah un a goy bleibt a goy.” This vicious metaphysical biologism is felt by too many of our native born and is experienced by too many non-Jews converted or about to become Jews. They ask of me repeatedly, "Rabbi, I'm not worried about the Beth Din or the mikvah or the circumcision. But I am worried whether I will be accepted."

The outer mission of outreach complements an inner mission to educate ourselves as to the true character of Judaism, and to dispel the vicious notion that Judaism is an elitist, exclusivist, private club open only to Jews who can enter only via the Jewish ovum.

An outreach program is self-educating. How many Jews know of the thirteenth benediction in the daily Amidah of our prayer book, which includes a benediction praising God the staff and the trust of the righteous for the g’rai tzedek, "the righteous proselyte"?

Outreach may remind Jews who live in a falsely insulated circle that it is the book of Ruth, not the book of Ezra, that our rabbinic sages chose to be read on the festival of revelation, Shevuoth. It is Ruth, the Moabite who converted to Judaism. It is a Moabite who according to the book of Deuteronomy "shall not enter the assembly of the Lord" who is the great-grandmother of King David.

Outreach is additionally important to overcome those xenophobic sources within our own tradition. which insinuates a metaphysical biologism distinguishing Jewish souls from the souls of the nations of the world, the latter which emanate from unclean husks that contain no good forever. One can sadly find that notion in the Tanya, the Chasidic classic authored by the founder of Chabad, Schnayer Zalman. In chapter six of that text we read that all the good that the non-Jewish nations do is said to be done only from selfish motives – "From the lower grades of the klepoth, altogether unclean and evil, flow the souls of all the nations of the world and the existence of their bodies, and also the souls of all living creatures that are unclean and unfit for human consumption.” That bias is carried on in Judah Halevy, for whom it is clear that "Those who become Jews do not assume equal rank with born Israelites, who are especially privileged to attain prophecy" (Kuzari 1:115). Accordingly, no other nation beside Israel knows the true meaning of the tetragrammaton, the meaning of God. In contemporary form, we find many of these sentiments repeated in Professor Michael Wyschograd's book The Body of Faith (1983). He speaks boldly in terms of Judaism's "carnal election.” God chose the root of election through a biological principle. Israel's election is transmitted through the body. God chose to elect "a biological people that remains elect even when it sins.” Against this there is the bulk of the rabbinic tradition that regards proselytism as a mitzvah and whose role is documented in Rabbi Bernard Bamberger's classic text Proselytism in the Talmudic Period.

Outreach may help cleanse the accretions of prejudice that have distorted the ethical character of Judaism, and that must be scraped from the spiritual body of Judaism. The "ger" is our mirror. We have only to look at the ger to discover the stranger is us. It will provide a shock of recognition that holds the promise of Jewish renewal. To reach in we must reach out and to reach out we will have to reach in. Reaching in in order to reach out is a double blessing. The ger, the stranger, whom we are mandated to love thirty-six times in the Bible needs a sustaining personal Jewish environment. Jews need Jews to be Jewish. The ger needs Jews to become Jewish. The sincere outreach to the unchurched without ulterior motive or subterfuge touches the nerve of Jewish meaning and purpose.

It is not paradoxical that reaching out to the unchurched will touch the unsynagogued as well. In-reach and out-reach are twin ambitions.

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