For Rabbi Eric Yoffie, “Torah! Torah! Torah!” is definitely not an old World War II movie.
In fact, the president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations has been known to fire this terse, three-word reply back at questions about his goals, followed by the equally terse “Educate! Educate! Educate!”
In his four-plus years at the helm of the Reform movement’s congregational arm, Yoffie has repeatedly stressed putting a greater emphasis on the Torah in the everyday lives of Reform Jews, even calling for a “revolution” in the way synagogues worship at the movement’s last national biennial convention.
The state of Yoffie’s “revolution” will be the focus of his speech before the Reform movement’s regional biennial convention in San Jose, which runs today through Sunday. Reflecting on the site of the convention, Yoffie sees the Bay Area as one of the strongholds of Reform Judaism.
“This is a metropolitan area where Reform congregations and Reform Jews are really a dominant presence in the community,” Yoffie said Tuesday during an interview from his office in New York. “Another thing is there are not one but two [Reform resident summer] camps in the area, so there is a particularly strong youth presence. That, again, is a source of great pride to us.”
Beyond that, however, the rabbi believes the Bay Area’s congregations face “the same issues, the same concerns” he’s seen throughout the rest of the country. Yet he’s happy to report that past conditions leading him to decry Reform Jews’ “crippling ignorance” seem to be changing for the better.
“I think it’s going extremely well, actually,” Yoffie said of his call for more participatory, inspired worship services. “It’s not simply because I said it, but because it reflects what is a very broad and deep concern in the movement about the need to see changes in this area. Reform Jews want to pray.”
Yoffie stressed the need for a partnership between congregational lay and religious leaders. He suggested congregations’ boards of directors meet with their rabbis and cantors for “in-depth discussions” on worship practices. He also suggested that members of a congregation’s ritual committee attend services at a number of other synagogues, taking mental notes all the while.
At the heart of it all, though, lies the Torah.
“We’ll put the Torah at the center of our concerns,” Yoffie said. “There’s no magic wand here, but we’ve instituted a whole series of projects and many times we’ve followed the synagogues rather than the other way around.”
For example, a UAHC suggestion to study the Torah on the eve of Shavuot has now been adopted by more than 500 congregations, according to Yoffie.
Jews don’t necessarily need a rabbi to interpret the Torah in their everyday lives, he continued. The UAHC has produced books and a CD in an effort to rekindle the practice of Torah chanting, and created texts aimed at leading laypeople through Torah reading. A weekly “Torah community” e-mail is sent to 5,000 homes and congregations across the nation.
“Torah ought to be infused into all aspects of adult life,” Yoffie said. “Torah study is not just something that happens at Tuesday night adult education classes. It can happen at every committee meeting: the budget committee, the education committee, ritual committee. We need to make Torah study an ongoing part of life.”
Yoffie has put together a multiple-year program in which 18 congregations nationwide “go through the process of looking at how they function, with worship as the prime prism through which they try to undertake the process of synagogue change.” Locally, San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El is one of the 18 congregations.
Yoffie’s push for renewed emphasis on the Torah, worship and making congregational services more of “a participatory sport” than a spectator one, comes at a time when the movement is feeling the pinch of too few rabbis, cantors and Jewish educators.
“We’re working really hard on that,” Yoffie said. “We’re working much harder in the recruitment area, for example. Hebrew Union College is working hard in the area of recruitment. The Jewish camp system produces most of our Jewish professionals, but instead of waiting and hoping for people to apply, we have to do what we’ve been doing for the last year or so, which is get people in there to actively encourage them to become rabbis and cantors and Jewish educators and so on.”
Yoffie said the UAHC is in the process of creating programs to educate lay leaders to “pick up enough skills to be helpful” in congregations unable to fill leadership holes.
“There are a lot of things that need to be talked about,” said the rabbi. “Mostly, what we need to do is have a change of culture. We have to create a mindset of higher expectations. We have to help people recognize that study takes place in a variety of ways and a variety of settings.
“By and large, the pattern has emerged that Jewish leaders don’t require anything in their heads when it comes to Jewish knowledge,” he continued. “I think congregations have to start changing in that regard.”