String Theory
Winged by Ester Schneider
Proximity, Pluralism, and the American Eruv
Joshua Ladon
Rabbi Joshua Ladon is Director of Education for the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
As the American Jewish community emerges from the pandemic, many of us—newly aware of the frailty of the community’s dominant principles—are searching for a vision that centers Jewish thriving over merely existing. This pandemic, characterized by both radical stasis and dramatic change, prompts us to reflect about the changes we want. Having spent more than a year surviving, it is time to turn our attention to thriving.
The American Jewish community has been shaped by two dominant stories we tell ourselves: identity and community. The identity narrative speaks of cultivating individual Jewish identity as an inoculation against assimilation and promises a pathway to keep one’s Jewishness while contributing to the broader American story. Raised on this identity narrative, I was told that America has afforded us an unparalleled opportunity for participation in the dominant society while retaining some form of unique Jewish identity. The second narrative, emphasizing community, celebrates America for the opportunity it affords to construct insular Jewish communities so that we may practice as we wish. Both the identity and the community narratives reflect uniquely American notions of religious freedom. For the most part, these two stories have unspooled in parallel because the Jews that tell one story rarely interact with those who tell the other.
“The eruv offers us a way to envision a flourishing American Judaism tied to the flourishing of all Americans.”
The last eighteen months have laid bare the deficiencies of each of these stories. The restrictions of the pandemic made evident the extent to which the Jewish identity project is episodic and programmatic, its technology insufficient for creating nurturing and supportive communities. As programming migrated to Zoom, institutions that organize activities for Jews, and whose members participate by means of financial commitments, have struggled to stay afloat. “I don’t care that there are nineteen different ways for me to attend havdalah online,” a friend texted me, “when I am worried about my professional prospects and my family’s welfare.”
At the same time, more insular American Jewish communities responded tepidly, at best, to the mass protests against police brutality and systemic racism during the summer of 2020. Some communities and leaders offered pro forma statements condemning the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, but discussions in private social media groups told a story of communities deeply suspicious of (if not antagonistic to) anti-racist activism. These communities, secure in their Jewish identities, proved unable to “show up” when American society needed their voices.
Jewish flourishing today requires more than either a singular focus on identity or an unflappable commitment to community. I’d like to suggest that the eruv, a symbolic ritual enclosure made for the purpose of allowing activities which are normally prohibited on Shabbat, offers us a way to envision a flourishing American Judaism tied to the flourishing of all Americans.
Jewish Identity and the American Dream
The project of fashioning a Jewish identity has been central to active participation in American Jewish life over the last sixty years. A broad range of Jewish educational endeavors, across age ranges and denominations, has offered Jews ways to construct their individual Jewish identities and to shape their own Jewish stories. This approach has helped build a flourishing American Jewish educational infrastructure—and nourished my own development.
But the pandemic has illuminated the unintended consequences of this approach and revealed tradeoffs that have come to impede Jewish thriving. Jewish identity education helps people build their own Jewish narrative at the expense of amplifying individual experience over meaningful connection to others. Two books published in the early years of the last decade—Elie Kaunfer’s Empowered Judaism and Ron Wolfson’s Relational Judaism—called for reorienting Jewish life so that it is expressed through deep relationships with other people. A decade later, the Covid pandemic and overuse of video conferencing, the technology we employed to facilitate connection, has only sharpened the critique of identity education. When we encounter Judaism through a screen, when we start and stop the Zoom feed, we engage in what philosopher of technology Lars Lovlie calls a “Janus-faced” encounter. Moments of connection are punctuated by abrupt conclusions that amplify the distance between us and whomever we just encountered. The move to the virtual world has also deepened the “personalization” of the Jewish identity project. Individual home-bound Jews can now sample a global range of programming. In a sense, this is the natural conclusion of the modern turn from the birth of the individual in the age of enlightenment to rapid personalization in the dawn of digital age. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, social psychologist Shoshanna Zuboff observes that the internet has only deepened the notion that “the individual as the author of [one’s] life is the protagonist of our age.” Rapid digitization has brought into relief the starkness of Judaism as “personalized program”: a menu of opportunities curated by the user that can be clicked on and off. In this respect, it is a product of a secular orientation that amplifies the individual and further atomizes Jewish life.
This state of affairs, baked into the structure of the Jewish identity project, has been decades in the making. Since at least the late 1950’s, those who wished to ensure the continuity of the primarily non-observant American Jewish community have sought to strengthen individual Jewish identity. As Jews gained broader access to America, Jewish life became both more voluntary and less tethered to Jewish social obligations. Each individual Jew could do and become whatever they wanted. The historian of Jewish education Jonathan Krasner has observed that as far back as the 50’s, Jewish identity offered “a community on the threshold of acceptance” a way of articulating one’s connection to Judaism on one’s own terms. In The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity, historian Eric Goldstein likewise points to a shift that occurred around the time of the Second World War: if Jews earlier identified (or were identified) as part of the “Hebrew race,” now they embraced religious or ethnic categories. In the postwar years, however, neither ethnicity nor religion solved the challenges of American Jewish identity. Instead, Goldstein claims, Jews of European descent “focused on emulating the cultural patterns of their non-Jewish neighbors” while drawing upon “a more primordial understanding of Jewishness that had little to do with actual behavior, but which privileged blood ties and gave them a sense of connectedness as social boundaries changed.” (The 1950 Conservative responsum that permitted driving on Shabbat to attend synagogue can be understood in this light.) From this perspective, Jewish identity education has enabled individual Jews to feel at home while also feeling different, to include a Jewish element in their voluntary identities as suburban white Americans.
In the 1960’s, however, sociologists like Marshall Sklare and Joseph Greenbaum proposed measuring Jewish identity not by subjective signals but by external indicators. “Programs, school curricula and even cultural productions,” Krasner notes, “were increasingly viewed as interventions, whose success or failure were determined on the basis of whether they could move the Jewish identity dial.” The Jewish Experiential Book: The Quest for Jewish Identity, published in 1979, was one of the first collections of Jewish identity games and activities for educators. Its author, Bernard Reisman, explains that the book aimed “to help Jews today make choices about their Jewish identity which will be personally meaningful to them and also contribute to Jewish continuity.” His statement implies that “Jewish continuity” depends on the cultivation of individuals who feel Jewish. This assumption has shaped the study of American Jews over the last seventy years and speaks to why the project of Jewish identity is designed to feed the subjective personal desires of individual Jews while at the same time leading them to broader commitments to their communities and to subsequent generations.
“The type of community draws together the holy and the banal.”
In the decades since, two perspectives have come to define the study of the Jews. As the anthropologist Riv-Ellen Prell observes, one focuses on ways that “Jews themselves define and experience their Jewishness.” The other looks at norms that can predict “maintenance of Jewish commitments over time,” including “behavior, belonging, and building boundaries.” While Jewish institutional leaders and funders typically want to “move the dial,” pedagogies of Jewish identity are most often rooted in individual growth. Consider the range of Jewish opportunities that have developed for Jews ages 18-35 over the last two decades, including trips and weekend retreats. College students can travel to Israel on Birthright or on a spring-break trip with Hillel. In their 20’s, they can go on a learning retreat or an adult Jewish summer camp program. Anthropologists Moshe Kornfeld and Joshua Friedman call these “episodic” experiences “temporally and spatially discontinuous,” and note that they “often take place at a distance from their participants’ home communities.” The pedagogy of Jewish episodes heightens participant awareness and willingness to reflect on their own identities outside the confines of community “back home.” Kornfeld and Friedman observe that “episodic programs … operate by leveraging individual choice. Indeed, practices of individual self-fashioning often constitute essential components of the episodic program itself.”
In my own life, my experiences as a participant and as staff at summer camps, on Israel trips, and in youth groups shaped who I am today. These episodic experiences continue to guide my reflections on how I came to be who I am but did not in themselves provide me with a rich, encumbered community. Through a series of life decisions, serendipity, and circumstance, I became enwrapped in community. At some point, my Jewish environment came to outweigh my individual decisions as I lived out my Jewish life. This is the reach of community.
The Holiness of the Grocery Store: On Jewish Proximity
To live Jewishly requires geographic proximity to people who to some extent act and think as you do. This proximity facilitates participation in the events of Jewish collectivity (going to services, celebrating a seder) as well as an encompassing sense of community that is born of shared action, shared heritage, and shared values. Maimonides links the Biblical precept “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) with “all activities you would want someone to do for you,” including visiting the sick, caring for the mourner, ensuring dignified burial, providing for the orphan, and bringing joy to a bride and groom. These activities, the ebbs and flows of mundane life, ensure reflexive relationships. We sit together in times of joy and times of crisis.
Allow me a personal example: my wife and I had moved to Berkeley, California six weeks before our first daughter was born. In the weeks that followed, one member of our synagogue brought us meals multiple times a week for two months. Another volunteered to fold our laundry. People we didn’t know came to help us over and over. In return, we now do the same as often as possible.
This type of community draws together the holy and the banal. It is why evangelical Christians like Rod Dreher in The Benedict Option look to Orthodox Jews for inspiration in constructing a community bound by religious purpose. It is also why, throughout the pandemic, I could understand Haredi Jews who struggled to extract themselves from their suddenly dangerous community behaviors. I even felt pangs of jealousy. Jewish community shapes experience in ways that challenge our notions of the individual. While “Jewish identity” reflects a privatized affiliation, a life lived in an intentional Jewish community offers a broader conception of what counts as Jewish. Entrenched in community, one begins to see the ways religion expands beyond personal faith into relationships and everyday practices. This expanded vision of religion, focusing on what humans do together with the transcendent, offers an entry into what it means to be embraced and entangled in these relationships, to learn a language and adopt a sensibility that recognizes and is shaped by Jewish community.
Shabbat—famously described by Abraham Joshua Heschel as “a palace in time which we build”—offers the supreme example of that sensibility. But Heschel’s framing diverts our attention from the spatial and material elements that shape the practice of Shabbat, detaching it from the spirituality of place. According to Maimonides, “even an adam hashuv [a person of high rank] who does not as a rule buy things at the market or engage in household chores, should himself perform what is necessary for the Sabbath, for this is a way of showing respect” (Mishneh Torah, Shabbat 30:6). To obligate a person of high rank to enter the public square and partake in conventional Sabbath preparations requires a network of participants beyond the person of high rank. To have status is to live among people who recognize you, to inhabit a public space (the hustle and bustle outside palace walls) where you will be recognized. Maimonides imagines Jews as living in proximity and recognizes that banal activities in service of the transcendent are of spiritual value.
In December 2019, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack at the kosher market in Jersey City, Rabbi Tali Adler published an ode to the kosher grocery store:
It’s the place where, instead of finding lots of chocolate bunnies right before Easter, there’s a plethora of candy before Purim. It’s the place that stays open late on Thursday night because that’s when you’re up cooking late for Shabbos.
It’s the place where you go early before work on Friday morning and see dozens of people winding through the aisles, evaluating ingredients, checking lists, throwing an extra package of white candles into a cart because you’re running low and because here, in the kosher grocery store, that’s as much of an essential as dish soap.
And some weeks, when you remember, it’s the place where you can feel, in the chaos of erev Shabbat, that these people—so often women—are doing holy work as they buy what they need to feed their families for Shabbat, creating memories of special “Shabbos foods” that their children are going to grow up associating with holiness and Judaism and Shabbos, just as much as the melodies they hear in shul.
(“Why the Kosher Grocery Store is Just as Holy as Shul,”
Forward, December 18, 2019)
Adler, like Maimonides, ties Jewish life not just to keeping Shabbat and kashrut but to the infrastructures of lived Jewish community that expand into mundane activities.
Community does not wait to be embraced; rather, one is enfolded in its arms before comprehending one’s entanglement. In Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood, sociologist Iddo Tavory describes the public square, with its “non-kosher” smells and “profane images,” as a “moral obstacle course.”
Living an Orthodox life is being enmeshed in a system of laws and a moral organization of purity and danger. There are many things you can and can’t do, and so many more things you must be wary of… Orthodox Jews… were constantly summoned, brought into both interaction and existence as inhabiting a specific identification category.
One’s identity is reinforced by responding to the summons, and one’s response is conditioned by history and memory.
The same quality that enables communal embrace has other, less idyllic qualities. The embrace of community can create enclaves in which “the other” is either rendered invisible or perceived as a threat. But the pandemic has illuminated the ways our fates are inextricably tied up with those of our neighbors. It has taught us that Jewish thriving requires American thriving, and that we urgently need a model that joins close-knit proximity with open-minded pluralism. This is where the eruv, a uniquely permeable boundary created by the rabbis, becomes useful.
A Permeable Jewish Space
The eruv is both physical reality and a metaphor for Jewish proximity within American pluralism—an orienting structure for envisioning the next phase of American Jewish life. Its “open borders” both delineate a geographic area and allow those within to see “the other” without. By summoning neighbors into shared larger purpose, it is both symbolic and functional. The term eruv refers to both mixing, as in the eruv hatzeirot (the mixing of courtyards), and mutual responsibility (areivim). The term sets forth the aspiration of cooperation through reciprocity. As functional reality, the eruv consists of a wire that encircles an area, thereby integrating diverse spaces into a single “private” domain. Often using existing structures built by the larger society, such as power lines, the eruv establishes boundaries known to insiders but open to outsiders. Within the eruv, carrying objects (keys, medication, baby strollers) becomes permissible on Shabbat.
But the eruv also carries symbolic meaning. Rabbi Avi Weiss suggests that by transforming the public domain into shared private space, the eruv bears a “message of communal encampment, the message of peace and unity between all people.” More than a legal loophole, the eruv offers North American Jews an aspirational vision: it moves beyond the binary choice between atomized Jewish existence within the broader American context, on the one hand, and the exclusivity of insular community on the other. Just as an eruv requires ongoing maintenance, so too Jewish collectivity requires an ongoing, negotiated relationship with its neighbors. The eruv, with its focus on enriching our experience of Shabbat, weekly summons us to a higher purpose.
As a minority community, Jews have become understandably habituated to carving out safe spaces, enclosed bubbles of Jewish sovereignty. The eruv explicitly acknowledges the walls of our safe spaces as imaginary. We can stake a claim to space while engaging with a broader world and can experience both particularity and pluralism. But how, exactly, does this work?
“The eruv is both physical reality and a metaphor for Jewish proximity within American pluralism”
In her book Jewish Space and Place, Barbara Mann, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, describes a pickup soccer game between boys (mostly from a local Jewish day school) and girls. At the core of the girls’ team were three sisters, whose Spanish-speaking father coached from the side. The boys—assuming that the girls were not Jewish—began to speak in Hebrew as an attempt to hide their strategy. Mann, whose daughter was playing on the girls’ team, corrected the boys’ Hebrew, thereby disrupting the assumed division of Jews and others. Mann takes the encounter as an example of the way we live in neighborhoods and use spaces side-by-side. In the spaces we inhabit, we often see some people and not others. Neighbors make an appearance in our lives, as Nancy Rosenblum has written in Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America, when “we assign them standing in our personal, social, or sacred geography.” By comparison, she observes, “nominal neighbors are strangers; we may fail to see them at all.” Jewish thriving in America must rely on proximate Jewish communities that allow us to see our neighbors.
The halakhic evolution of the eruv shows the degree to which Jews were forced to navigate their geographic integration with non-Jewish neighbors. From the earliest mishnaic discussions of eruv, our rabbis expressed deep suspicion of living in close contact with non-Jews. “If one lives in a shared courtyard with a gentile,” says R. Mayer, “or with someone who does not see eruv as a valid legal category, [the eruv] is forbidden to him” (Mishnah Eruvin 6:1). In other words, the presence of a gentile (or even a Jew who sees the eruv as problematic) nullifies the possibility of creating an eruv. R. Eliezer b. Yaakov replies: “It is not forbidden to him until there are two Jews living together which forbids it to him.” For R. Eliezer b. Yaakov, the gentile does not count at all, unless there are two Jews sharing the courtyard with the gentile, at which point their presence together with the gentile nullifies the possibility of eruv. Everyone must agree with joining the eruv. But even if in the service of neighborly behavior the gentile agrees to this legal fiction, he has no legal standing to do so. “Nowhere does the Mishnah offer a solution as to how to circumvent the prohibition of carrying with a non-Jew in the courtyard community,” Charlotte Fonrobert writes. “The prohibition remains standing.”
Later, the Talmud proposes a model for living in a courtyard with non-Jews based on renting from the gentile neighbor. The Talmudic rabbis come to accept this model of “renting” while pessimistically listing reasons the non-Jewish neighbors may not rent their courtyard to a Jew: fear that the Jew won’t return ownership of the courtyard; fear that the Jew may practice some form of witchcraft; and the act of renting is designed to disadvantage the Jew.
Even in acquiescing to the creation of shared dwelling spaces with gentiles, then, the rabbis evidently hope to persuade the reader not to dwell among non-Jews.
Yet negotiating the eruv with one’s neighbors models a type of proximity and pluralism that America affords. Fonrobert observes that the requirement to “rent” from a non-Jewish neighbor or the municipality, as in the case of modern urban eruvin, forces Jews “to somehow explain the logic of their Sabbath law and ritual to outsiders, and not just any Sabbath law, but one that seems to enable transgressive behavior.” The halakhic requirement to rent draws Jews into relationships that lay bare the vulnerability of living as a religious person in a multi-ethnic society.
Much of the postwar American Jewish story has been based on liberal notions of acceptance and sameness. The model of eruv teaches difference and cooperation. Among observant Jews who live within an eruv’s boundaries, few need to deal seriously with this negotiation. At most, a community rabbi who oversees maintenance of the eruv will deal with the municipality. Yet this negotiation needs to realize itself as an aspiration. The eruv model inspires Jews to draw their neighbors into conversation about the intimate intricacies of particularistic practices and ask for participation and consent. It requires confidence, vulnerability, and humility.
Precisely here the reality and the metaphor of the eruv become intertwined. The eruv, built from a patchwork of existing structures and symbolic architecture, demands ongoing attention and upkeep. Legally, if part of the eruv is down, the entire eruv is down. Each part contributes to the health of the superstructure. For those of us rooted in the world of Jewish identity, the eruv shifts the communal gaze from the next generation (or the next demographic disaster) to the ongoing needs of weekly use. It allows us to transcend an obsolete binary choice between commitments focused internally on the Jews and those outwardly focused towards humanity. In the blueprint of Jewish holy space, the eruv reflects commitments that enable proximity and pluralism, such as commitments to civic life that benefit broad swaths of America. This is the blessing and opportunity of America.
For American Jews, as for other Americans, the pandemic has both amplified loneliness and clarified our longing for community. The pandemic can also illuminate how our flourishing is tied up with the flourishing of broader America, in ways that pose no risk to our distinctive identity. Now more than ever, the eruv, a space both bounded and open, can show us the way forward.
This article appears in Sources, Fall 2021
