Can Synagogues Revitalize American Democracy?

Michael G. Holzman

Rabbi Michael G. Holzman is the spiritual leader of Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation and creator of the Rebuilding Democracy Project. He was a 2020-2021 Fellow of the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.

Since childhood, I’ve idealized American democracy. One of my earliest school memories is of learning how to put my hand over my heart for the Pledge of Allegiance. On my fifth-grade trip from Miami to Washington, DC (by Amtrak!), the Lincoln Memorial felt like a temple, the Gettysburg Address looked like the words on the ark of my synagogue back home, and Arlington cemetery seemed the holiest of grounds. I remember standing up in my living room during the first Gulf War when Whitney Houston sang the national anthem. After college I applied seriously for only one job: a paralegal position at the United States Department of Justice. Every day, as I left my office, I’d look down Pennsylvania Avenue and gaze for a few moments at the Capitol.

Though I didn’t realize it then, American democracy resonated within because it fulfilled a certain Jewish narrative into which I’d been educated: God liberated us from Egypt to be a free people, governed by a system of ethics and laws, tasked with bringing the human project to fruition. My Jewish ancestors came to America seeking not only opportunity, but also justice, not only to be welcomed, but also to end the exile. I was raised in a Reform Judaism that had much earlier removed from its liturgy references to exile, not so much in rejection of Israel as in embrace of America. As I rode the Miami b’nai mitzvah circuit in 7th grade, the opulence I saw told the story of families that I’d assumed were all like my own, two or three generations removed from Ellis Island, demonstrating American Jewish arrival at some hotel or country club that had once excluded Jews. As much as I loved America, that love was intertwined with my Judaism.

Where Religion and Civics Meet

God was present at the American founding. The Declaration of Independence grounds its claim “that all men are created equal,” using theological language, “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Ever since, religious ideals have shaped our national ideas.

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish leaders like Isaac Mayer Wise, Mordecai Kaplan, and Moshe Feinstein expounded upon the alignment between Judaism and American democracy, created liturgy for American holidays, and provided halakhic reasoning on the obligation to vote. This “pro-democracy Judaism” continued into the 1950s, the high point of American religiosity. Dwight Eisenhower made explicit appeals to religious practice as a counter to Soviet Communism. “Our form of Government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith,” he said, “and I don’t care what it is.” If religion had become the ballast of our public life, Jews saw their religion as a public duty.

But Eisenhower’s version of White Protestantism exploded in the realities of the 1960s. Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy sought to make his Catholicism politically irrelevant by shearing any connection between religion and politics. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others civil rights leaders brought religion marching into political life. By the 1970s, religion’s role as ballast was replaced by either a desire to privatize religion entirely, or to march it into the streets as a driver of political action. Synagogues, like other houses of worship, became either silent or outspoken on political issues. This false binary, informed by the contemporary caricature of Kennedy and King—the former insisting that religion be private, and the latter demanding that religion speak to the public—creates a shrill rigidity.

For some Jews, Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 and the growth of its regional power have sealed a bond between Judaism and the American right and exacerbated the distance between the Kennedy and King approaches to the overlap of religion and civic life. Today, the heightened temperature of Israel issues, or American politics as religion, either frightens synagogues into silence, or drives synagogues into civic action. Earlier Jewish voices could avoid this binary. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, for example, made it a halakhic duty to vote regardless of how one chooses to vote. For Feinstein, we vote because it is a mitzvah to show gratitude to one’s hosts, and in America that is how we fulfill our religious obligation.

As it happens, synagogues were established precisely to facilitate the fulfillment of public mitzvot. Judaism as a religion can be practiced anywhere, but to do so in public we go to the synagogue. To re-establish religion’s role as democracy’s ballast, we must do so in public, as a collective. This means elevating the importance of the basic elements of our civic system to at least the same level of religious duty, if not a higher level, than specific policies about which we wish to apply our prophetic Jewish voices. By applying Jewish categories to civic behavior, we can resist the false polarity between a strident political activism that contributes to American toxic polarization and a neutered Jewish introspection that soon sinks into irrelevance. There is a third way: we can incorporate democracy into our religious practice. And the synagogue is the ideal place where that can happen.

Like many American Jews, I feel that national political problems are personal. I watch in dismay as the country that has been better for the Jews than any other in the history of the diaspora teeters precariously on disorder. We were supposed to ascend the upward slope of human history, walking behind Moses and Thomas Jefferson, Shifra, Puah and Emma Lazarus. Yet where American aspiration once mingled with Jewish hope, I now feel existential distress. Our tradition has an umbrella term to describe the kind of self-reinforcing, anger-fueled discourse that has become the norm in American politics and that portends destruction: sinat hinam, “senseless hatred.” As manifestations of political extremism—government shut-downs, impeachments, refusals to accept the legitimacy of elections, and not least the symbolic and physical storming of the U.S. Capitol in January—become normalized, the American story increasingly reminds me of the conditions that preceded the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

If the fragile state of our democracy provokes a special set of concerns for American Jews and Judaism, the place that brings together our people and our religion—the synagogue—ought to be a place we find solutions.

One Congregation’s Journey to Democracy

In 2015, the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation, just outside Washington, DC, began testing the hypothesis that synagogues can help address the problems of American democracy. Several trends converged to force our hand. After several years of avoiding open confrontation and concentrating decisions into a gradually shrinking circle of leaders, our synagogue governance simply broke. The institution found itself paralyzed by complicated problems and hard decisions, unsure where authority lay for which question. Meanwhile, the vitriol of national campaigns, culminating in the Trump/Clinton contest, provoked a new kind of derision and intolerance among members of the community. As a result, a growing number of members were unwilling to participate in programs because they felt that their political views were unwelcome. An even larger number told me that in fear of social ostracism they kept their politics carefully concealed. I began to counsel more and more couples, individuals, parents, adult children, siblings, and friends on how to maintain relationships across party lines. I would joke that interfaith weddings had become totally uncontroversial, but inter-partisan ones were totally unrealistic.

These divides had become personal as well. I was also in need of pastoral care. Political conversation had been a key ingredient to family dinners since my childhood, but over the decades, anything remotely related to public policy drove a deep wedge between my father and me. In 2015-16, our relationship suffered a total fracture over my discomfort with his gun ownership.

I assembled a “thinking group” and by early 2017 the synagogue’s role in restoring democracy began to crystallize during the lead up to the inaugural Women’s March. Synagogue staff made a quick decision to hire buses for the Women’s March, and congregants who attended the march were deeply grateful. But other congregants were angry, asking why we had not also hired buses for President Trump’s inauguration. I felt the suggestion was preposterous, as we had never hired buses for an inauguration before. Women’s rights seemed to me so critically tied to our Jewish values and imperatives that the action justified whatever glass we broke along the way. I replied, “If the same number of people want to attend the inauguration, we’ll hire buses.” This answer, which felt like a bureaucratic dodge, left me unsettled. I felt sure that we had done the right thing, but I also knew we had handled it the wrong way.

“The place that brings together our people and our religion—the synagogue—ought to be a place we find solutions.”

In retrospect, I see the terrible implications of my response. In my haste to march on Washington, I taught that minority voices count for less. I bought into a false equivalence between a political event, (the inauguration) and a moral one (the Women’s March). And I failed to confront the toxic partisanship that saturated both gatherings. I was blind to the complex meaning of that moment in the American story (including the complexities for Jews supporting either event—a Women’s March clouded by charges of antisemitism amongst the leadership, or the inauguration of a President who united his support for Israel with dog whistles to white nationalists). By hiding behind a bureaucratic answer, I had made a hash of citizenship and allowed the surrounding political climate to become the synagogue climate. I let my setting become yet another arena set by the rules of politics.

My final mistake may be the most embarrassing: I had succumbed to the seductive power of popularity. Going to the Women’s March would be popular. I knew it. In American religious life, including synagogue life, we fight a rearguard action against irrelevance every day. The dominant assumptions of modernity and secularism undercut the centuries of authority that religion had in public life. As our society has become more polarized and the issues we face become more urgent, the easiest way to feel relevant is to join the fray. My buses were full. Instead of seeing that a focus on the importance of democracy writ large might attract participants and invigorate congregational life, I bought into prevailing notions of popularity.

A few months later, a couple asked to meet with me about the synagogue’s religious school. I was quite fond of this couple, and I knew they leaned to the right politically. They arrived in a fury. Their young daughter reported something she had been taught in religious school that Sunday: Donald Trump was a modern-day Pharaoh and today’s Jews, like Moses, must stand up to the evil. I put my head in my hands and apologized. The father said: “It’s not just that my daughter was learning from my synagogue that my political decisions were now considered evil; it was that this was done in religious school. I don’t like Donald Trump, but if the synagogue is going to talk about politics, then we should do it like Jews, in rigorous intellectual debate. This is beneath us.”

The words “beneath us” were simultaneously biting and hopeful. An angry member of the community was condemning the behavior of a representative of the synagogue, and yet he still used the word “us.” The problem he posed did not concern the merits of either the Women’s March or President Trump. He was raising another question: what behavior is worthy of “us?”

On one level, the “us” referred to our synagogue. But “us” speaks more broadly to the way we see ourselves as a polity, a collective. He wanted “us” to share values that transform our relationship into a covenant. If the American collective finds itself fractured, can the synagogue as a covenantal “us” offer a measure of healing?

A Place to Incubate Democracy

A year or so after the bus episode, teens from my congregation approached me about hiring buses for the March for Our Lives, a student-led demonstration in support of gun control legislation. I had a chance for a reset. We created a highly structured ritual for public discourse where the Board members would attend and listen, but where no decisions would be made and called it a Congregational Conversation. The evening included song, silence, prayer, storytelling, study, conversation, and the ritual of responding to every speaker with the word shamati (“I hear you”), connoting the presence of God by reference to the familiar word Shema. At one point a high school student said: “Will everyone who has been through a lock-down drill please rise.” Some 40 teens and 5 teachers stood. A hundred adults remained seated. When the Board eventually voted to order the buses, even my most ardent gun supporters felt respected and heard. That evening, we discovered, was a way of incubating democratic practices into our synagogue community. Voices were heard and considered; everyone had a place to practice respectful disagreement.

Soon, a group of congregants met to write a covenant for future Congregational Conversations. To provide background, I did what rabbis do: I taught some Talmud about civil discourse. It fell flat. So I asked everyone to look up the Gettysburg Address on their phones. What followed was an interrogation of core American texts, read in the same way Jews read Torah: carefully, critically, and creatively. We decided to replace the regular Torah portion from Shabbat morning study once a month with a fundamental text from American history. Whether we are reading Jefferson or Reagan, we ask the same questions we ask of Torah: How do you relate to the ideas in this text? What does the text say about your self-image as an American? How does this text help describe what you want America to be? We close as we do each week, with Kaddish d’rabanan, the prayer for completing a section of study.

These experiences informed our response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. We created a Juneteenth Tikkun, an overnight online study that gave us time and space to explore the contours of American racism—our understanding, our emotions, and our obligation to act. We also created a tree mural in our lobby and invited participants to contribute their vision of what they wanted America to look like in thirty years (the timeframe it would take a tree to grow to maturity).

These are three examples of what became the Rebuilding Democracy Project, a way for us to discover tools for creative Jewish practice that speak to the urgency and complexity of the present moment, encourage a diversity of viewpoints, and incubate healthy democratic norms.

Spiritual Intentions and Civic Practices

Regarding the practice of mitzvot, Jewish tradition challenges us to invest in both concrete behavior (keva) and right intention (kavannah).

The practices of democracy, too, require both deed and intention, both the actions we take and the meaning we make. The Talmud says that a prayer without kavannah fails to fulfill one’s obligation. Likewise, our acts of civic participation fail when we ignore (or worse, snicker at) the meaning behind them. When our civic obligations become rote and lose meaning, the keva lacks the kavannah, and democracy suffers.

Citizenship, in other words, is a spiritual practice which solidifies our awareness of rights and responsibilities, inspires aspiration and motivation, and explains loss and disappointment. It does this by creating harbors for vulnerability, sanctuaries where the normal filters of judgement are suspended, and participants are able to discover meaning. The doing of a mitzvah changes how we are willing to perceive reality, even if it does not change what we perceive.

“The synagogue can house experiences that encourage us to think differently about our democratic norms, assumptions, anxieties and aspirations.”

Whereas a monarchy can be united by the symbol of the royal family, and an ethno-state by shared genealogy, America must look elsewhere for its unifying force. John Dewey, the quintessential American philosopher, writes that the whole democratic system rests upon a “vast mass of sentiments, many vague, some defined, of instincts, of aspirations, of ideas, of hopes and fears, of purposes.” Today, the structures, behaviors and institutions that once sustained this “vast mass” have desiccated into failed promises of liberty, self-governance, fairness, and competence.

The political theorist Danielle Allen argues that American democracy particularly depends upon the spiritual. The promise that we are each sovereigns in a democracy puts us in tension with the reality of sharing power. To find solutions, Allen points to rhetoric, habits and rituals that strengthen the bonds between us. “Democratic citizenship,” she writes, “requires rituals to manage the psychological tension that arises from being a nearly powerless sovereign.” Civic rituals—laying wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, naturalization ceremonies for new citizens, saluting the flag for the Pledge of Allegiance—mix spiritual elements to create this shared national meaning.

Ritual, friendship, dignity, and meaning are not concrete actions so much as spiritual intentions, and as citizens we must have the ability to bring them into reality. But we have lost those habits. To restore them, we can turn to the synagogue as the place for public fulfillment of mitzvot, and as a literal and figurative sanctuary to discover the good deed in doing a mitzvah. The synagogue can house experiences that encourage us to think differently about our democratic norms, assumptions, anxieties and aspirations. This happens both explicitly (as when a civic practice like a candidate forum is framed by moments of prayer) and implicitly (as when debate about a controversial national issue emerges through Torah study). In such moments, the synagogue offers a safe harbor within which to interrogate our national narratives and make sense of our civic identities.

This was the message I heard in the words “this is beneath us.” Our synagogues ought to be places where the public issues of the day are considered in ways that deepen, rather than cheapen, our citizenship. The prevailing rhetoric of American politics, the toxicity and vitriol that creates self-reinforcing patterns of demonization of the partisan other, are not acceptable within the sanctuary of the synagogue.

Practices for Synagogues to Revitalize American Citizenship

Every synagogue is different, of course, but the mechanisms we unearthed, described in what follows, can operate anywhere. These mechanisms are commonplace in synagogue life, but all too rarely connected to the health of American democracy. Seminaries, consultants, denominational bodies, conventions, senior leaders, mentors, activists, organizations, foundations, and academics accept that dichotomy separates the spiritual and religious from the political in American Jewish life. Our experience as a synagogue has taught us that this is a missed opportunity.

Pastoral Care

The first step in changing a dysfunctional political culture is to recognize it as a pastoral project. From that perspective what we experience as citizens in our broken democracy is grief, and the tools of grief counseling provide a pathway forward.

My synagogue had fallen into the trap that captures many houses of worship and religious organizations. We acted like the children of an addictive parent. We knew instinctively how to avoid the ire of those we feared. We cynically believed that the norms were so corrupted, and discourse so dangerous, that we avoided public conversation. Just like a family distorted by addiction, we had become enablers of the very behavior we feared, treating those with whom we disagreed as toxic, and then creating the conditions that encourages toxicity in the first place.

To change the dysfunction is a therapeutic project that requires a pastoral approach. Synagogues are places where the longevity of relationship and the limitless scope of responsibility means that care always outweighs judgment, hesed over din. Just as twelve-step groups create shared vulnerability which inspires personal growth, so too can a synagogue shelter our need to grow as citizens in a dysfunctional democracy. Synagogues empower clergy to fulfill pastoral roles and facilitate the acts of hesed that bind the community together. To apply hesed to politics means to treat the lived experience of an issue just as seriously as the moral, political, or partisan ramifications of the topic. When the time comes for polarized political conversation, pastoral relationships detoxify the moment.

Governance

The most unsexy features of synagogues as “legacy Jewish organizations” are the very things that contribute the most toward a healthy democracy. Synagogue committees, task forces, working groups, membership dues, a Board and its by-laws all train the skills of democratic leadership. More than a few recent articles and books (see the work of Yoni Applebaum, Yuval Levin and Timothy Carney) have mentioned Tocqueville’s observation that Americans practice democracy through local institutional leadership.

Local governance forces groups to clarify lines of authority and responsibility, systems for resolving differences, and ways of working through difficult problems. The Rebuilding Democracy Project has helped the entire leadership of the synagogue to breathe easier, because at each step of the process we know exactly how much authority the assembled group really must bear. The synagogue is the most common way to access this local leadership experience. For many in the Reform movement, leadership itself—even more than prayer or study—functions as a spiritual experience. This experience can be connected to the larger responsibility for democracy, elevating the work with a spiritual and moral frame.

Study

Study is about the search for personal meaning through interaction with the text and partners in the room. The Jewish practice of parshanut, tracing the interpretation of an idea from the Torah through various strata of Jewish history to the present, invites us into an intergenerational conversation. The Jewish approach to text depends upon the paradox that the text is simultaneously perfect and riddled with problems; the student finds meaning by reconciling the two. This makes parshanut ideal for this moment in American history.

With the Rebuilding Democracy Project, we focus on the work of interrogating the key narratives that describe American identity. Our habit of study favors personal truth-telling in our approach to texts, Jewish or secular. Scholarly and academic contexts serve only as a springboard for the creative instincts of the group. The goal is for the text to inspire a conversation about how we relate to America, using the text to initiate a pluralistic conversation about our national identity. For example, when we study Fredrick Douglass’ “What To A Slave is the Fourth of July,” the text provokes a contained conversation about the rage, shame, hope and fear of confronting a topic as complicated as American racism.

The essential narratives of America are under question: equality and fairness by the renewed visibility of racial injustice; opportunity and prosperity by growing inequality; exceptionalism and innovation by colossal incompetence; inclusion by flare-ups of nativism; and constitutionalism by the willingness to undermine the legitimacy of the legal system. A method to open these topics to complex and respectful conversation will release the pent-up pressure created by these contradictions.

Covenantal Relationships

According to the old joke, “Goldstein goes to shul to talk to God, Hoffman goes to talk to Goldstein.” But in synagogue, relationships are more than socializing. The greatest power in synagogue life is implicit in the longevity and complexity of communal belonging, and our curricular design enhances that belonging. Our congregation has participated deeply in local community organizing for more than a decade, so we knew the nexus between relationships and political systems, and we often spoke about how working together on a volunteer project was the best way to form social bonds in the community. But we did not connect social relationship to political relationship until the wheels came off the governance cart. We now make that connection explicit by regularly talking about the covenant we share, and the values that represent the institution. We start by handing out our “Covenant for Communal Discourse,” and close by inviting participants to edit the covenant.

Liturgy

The idea of a “spiritual container” for difficult conversations, an arena outside the broken norms of our customary political arenas (from the local school board to the halls of Congress), depends upon physical places where we can gather. The Rebuilding Democracy Project originated at a synagogue because we have rooms, symbols, calendars, objects, professionals, language, music, custom, art and humor that allow us to shape a container for tough conversations.

The Project originated at the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation in part because its two lead clergy are disciples of Lawrence Hoffman, who taught liturgy at the New York campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion for forty years. Hoffman believed in a holistic approach to liturgy, one that examined not only the text in the prayer books, but also the entire context surrounding the book, and how everything about that context could shape the power of the spiritual experience. When we think about the conditions that allow us to “do democracy well,” Hoffman’s philosophy guides our decisions.

Ritual gives language to the ineffable, to Dewey’s “vast mass of sentiments,” and shifts us from being trapped in what we think America means today to acknowledging what America has done and articulating what we hope America will be. Though these acts of imagination may feel naïve, ritual allows them to emerge without cynicism.

Democracy as Jewish Practice

A desiccated democracy adversely affects the Jewish community in several ways. First, Jews have become experts at the civic system, harnessing the tools of law, media, governmental leadership, electoral politics and community organizing to achieve policy goals. If broad trust in those institutions corrodes, the returns we have felt on generations of Jewish investment in civic expertise will fall short. Our connection to and support of American democracy will degrade because as civic tools are blunted, they do not produce the security and prosperity to which we have become accustomed.

Second, as democratic culture erodes, our conversations will become toxic within the community; the reinforcement loops of political radicalization will capture Jews with the rest of American society; and intellectual rigor will be overwhelmed by the perceived urgency of policy goals.

Finally, the Jewish community and the Judaism we have created on these shores incorporates narratives of American progress, inclusion, equality, and opportunity into our Jewish identity. As these narratives lose coherence, our American Jewish self-image will become confused, if not repulsive.

Churches, synagogues, and mosques outnumber schools in America by almost 3:1. There is no platform bigger. America has millions of men and women trained in the art of chaplaincy, the tools of spirituality, the nuance of ritual, and the interpretation of scriptures. But to activate these resources will require a paradigm shift.

A diminished democracy poses significant threats to American Judaism and Jews. But no less significant are our opportunities to contribute to a renewal of American public life. Together with other faith institutions, we can strengthen and sustain a civic spirituality through religious experiences like covenantal relationship, pastoral care, scripture study, and creative use of liturgy. Jewish takes on those customs, like parshanut, offer especially fruitful ways to meet the challenge.

By recognizing Jewish spirituality at the intersection of religion and politics, we can navigate the false binary of strident advocacy and inward-facing avoidance. As the toxicity of American political polarization increases and trust in our governing institutions decreases, the need for a third way—outside the partisan, political, or even moral polarities—grows ever more pressing. Practices of healthy citizenship—cultivating meaning through the mechanisms of community—can fortify this individual sovereignty against efforts both to demonize other individuals and to disrespect the whole.

This article appears in Sources, Fall 2021