Few ideas exercise such superficial appeal as the belief that the major threat to the Jewish people today is our small and ever declining numbers.
And few ideas are ultimately more counterproductive and potentially dangerous.
Michael Freund’s “What if we were 32 million strong? But we aren’t” (May 15) is the latest example of what is by now a familiar genre in the Jewish media. The bulk of the column consisted of depressing statistics about the Jewish people’s declining numbers — both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the world’s population.
On the eve of World War II, for instance, Jews constituted eight of every 1,000 people in the world; today the figure is two per every 1,000.
In part that decline is a consequence of the Holocaust, without which, Hebrew University demographer Sergio Della Pergola estimates, the number of Jews today would be approximately two and a half times its current number.
But only partly. In absolute terms, the Jewish population has continued to decline since the Holocaust.
What Freund failed to do, however, was to explain why numbers, per se, matter.
He asserted “to live up to our national mission as Jews, we need a much larger and more diverse ‘team’ at our disposal.” Yet he never defined that mission, or explained what he means by a more diverse team, or in what way greater numbers would help us fulfill that mission.
At most, he invited us to contemplate the “cultural and spiritual riches” that would have been produced but for the Holocaust. But those cultural and spiritual riches will not be replaced by tracking down every obscure tribe in the world that has an oral tradition that they are one of the Ten Lost Tribes; doubling our numbers in that fashion will not double our number of Nobel Prize winners.
The only source for our mission, the Torah, informs us explicitly that our mission has nothing to do with our numbers: In Deuteronomy it says, “Not because you are more numerous than all the peoples did HaShem desire you and choose you, for you are the least numerous of all the peoples.”
This obsession with numbers is based on confusion between cause and effect.
Many of the steps taken as a consequence of that obsession amount to no more than putting ineffectual Band-aids on the symptoms, while allowing the disease to rage untreated.
Never have U.S. Jews faced fewer obstacles to the practice of their religion or so few threats to life and limb. Yet the number of U.S. Jews has remained unchanged for 50 years, despite the arrival of more than 500,000 Jewish refugees in that period. And of those counted as Jews by the demographers, 20 percent are not halachically Jewish.
Lower rates of marriage have contributed to the demographic stagnation, but by far the biggest contributing factor is intermarriage and dropouts from the community.
Our declining numbers are indeed a source of pain, but the reason is not the numbers themselves but what they tell us: Being Jewish is simply not that important to most Jews today.
The measures taken to address the declining numbers, while ignoring the causes, are, at best, a waste of time and money, and, at worst, only exacerbate the downward spiral.
Jewish federations in the United States are forever announcing new initiatives in Jewish continuity. Such efforts are presumably based on the assumption that it is important that the Jewish people continue to exist.
Yet that is the very question never addressed by any of those continuity efforts: Why is it important that the Jewish people continue to exist?
Worse, the nature of those efforts — singles nights, “edgy” magazines aimed at youth who hated Hebrew school — only emphasize the opposite. There is nothing really important about being Jewish.
The more desperately we run after young Jews — no matter how far they stray and whom they marry — to assure them that they and their children are still members in good standing of the tribe, the more we convince them how worthless that membership is and how unworthy of any sacrifice on their part.
The easier the terms of conversion have become the lower the percentage of non-Jewish spouses opting for it. That is hardly surprising. Why should we expect any large number of non-Jews to rush to join a religion that plays no significant role in the eyes of the vast majority born into it?
Little of the rapid growth of Islam has to do with conversions (and whatever else one might say of Islam, it definitely plays a significant role in the lives of many of its adherents).
On a happier note, the decline of American Jewry is projected to reverse itself at mid-century due to the growth of Orthodoxy, little of which has to do with conversion.
Let’s try this as a rule of thumb: A religion whose foundational texts and basic tenets are unknown to most of its members, whose rites and practices are observed by few, and which is of so little significance in its members’ lives that well over 50 percent marry members of other faiths is fated to diminish.
Instead of worrying about the numbers, and wasting time and money on far-fetched quick fixes for declining numbers, it is to those deficits that Michael Freund should direct his well-meaning efforts.
Jonathan Rosenblum is the Israeli director of Am Echad, an agency that aids Jews in the former Soviet Union. He is also a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, where this piece first appeared.