 | |||||||||
| |||||||||
| |||||||||
|
 |
| ||
 | ||
|
| |
| ||
Advertisements
Old Stories
September 10, 1998
Insiders, Outsiders
By Marlene Adler Marks
Rabbi Norman Mirsky, whose idiosyncratic blend of sociology and theology was one of the great delights at the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College, died suddenly last week and any tribute comes too late. At 61, oversized in both girth and wit (he once punned that a Hebrew tongue-twister could be called "a Jewish tornado"), he was never a household name (except among those who attended his beloved minyan at Temple Isaiah in West Los Angeles). His writings, notably a collection of musings and sermons titled "Life on the Wire," never got a wide circulation.
Yet, arguably, Mirsky's contribution to our understanding of contemporary American Jewish life -- that is, the Jewish life most of us live -- stands up to those whose scholarly contributions fill pages of bibliography. For Mirsky was among the first to comprehend that the real dynamism in Jewish life -- the untapped source of its strength -- was to be found along the "fringe," the people and ideas most likely to be cast as marginal Jews if not pariahs.
He was concerned with how Jewish religious texts and communal institutions treat women, gays, converts, alcoholics and addicts, and how they responded to those in need -- the ill and abused. In this, of course, he was the bearer of bad news that an upheaval was at hand, and many conventional thinkers resented him. For too long, Jewish life was in its own state of denial. You need only go back a decade to find evidence of Ozilla and Chana ("Ozzie and Harriet"), the limiting self-delusions we Jews proudly told each other: we had no alcoholics or gamblers, no wife-beaters or child molesters. Rabbi Mirsky's message was that these outsiders not only exist, they are us.
Today this "divergence theory," the idea that the real life of a people often takes place "backstage" in behavior that is shamed and hidden, has just about transformed the modern synagogue. Each High Holiday season we update this concern for the outsider. Women, gays, addicts and converts have all been brought inside the liberal Jewish community, while attention shifts to new groups including singles and single parents. As a general principle, Jewish life today is obsessed with inclusion, whether it's those who can't afford a ticket, or those who don't understand text.
Some credit for this broader consciousness must belatedly go to Mirsky , who trained two generations of Reform Jewish leaders to bring the outsider in. His students included Lydia Kukoff, an early pioneer in Jewish by Choice; Rabbi Denise Eger of Congregation Kol Ami; and Marcia Cohn Spiegel, a nationally recognized leader in the fields of alcohol abuse and family violence.
Nevertheless, Mirsky never felt congratulatory at the pace of social progress. He worried that there was a correlation between the ordination of women as rabbis with the decline of temple sisterhoods, the volunteer corps that makes synagogues work. And he surmised that despite the greater acceptance of gays in Jewish life, homosexual rabbis might still remain "closeted" to keep their jobs in mainstream congregations. Until the end, Mirsky acted as a spokesman for the outsider, who would always be with us.
I was privileged to share some time with Mirsky, to grapple over breakfast with a mind that could understand Darwin's impact on Judaism, and argue that "early Freud" approved of circumcision as a form of Jewish "destiny-building." We briefly considered co-teaching a class on America as seen through the eyes of John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, Grace Paley and Philip Roth. He would have done an update on Woody Allen, who he long ago defined as both an exemplar of Jewish ethics and theology, and a social aberration. It's my loss that the class won't be taught.
After attending memorial services for Mirsky last weekend, I came home to consider the plight of the Jewish outsider, but in a new light. I had just finished reading, in a recent New York Review of Books, Garry Wills' astute analysis of the Jewish condition, "How Odd of God." Wills quotes the grim prophecy of sociologist Samuel C. Heilman, who divides contemporary Judaism into two doomed groups: "heritage" Jews (the lox-and- bagel Jews with memory but no substantive education) and "active" Jews (those with education but prone to social isolation.)
The "heritage" Jews will increasingly find their Jewishness progressively less important, Wills quotes Heilman. Meanwhile, the active Jews, those who observe their religion, are becoming ever more "peripheral to American life."
I wondered what the optimistic Professor Mirsky would make of this rigid two-party construction, which writes off the vital convergence between Jews and America. The evidence, it seems to me, is the opposite: today's so-called "heritage Jews" contain the women, gays, converts and one-time outcasts who are helping create an American Jewish spiritual revival. As for the Orthodox, just last week Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, changed the course of the Lewinsky scandal when he chastised Bill Clinton for "immoral" acts in the White House. Mirsky would have relished these new "outsiders," but knew better than to write them off as "peripheral to American life."
Marlene Adler Marks is senior columnist of The Jewish Journal. Her class, "Writing from Heart and Soul," begins Sept. 12 at the Skirball Cultural Center. Her e-mail address is wmnsvoice@aol.com.
Post your comment below!
Tags and Sharing
Tags
Share This Story
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Google
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Technorati
YahooMyWeb
Discussion
We welcome your feedback. Please share your views and insight in The Jewish Journal Reader Forums.
Privacy Policy
Your information will not be shared or sold without your consent. Get all the details.
Advertisement
COMMENTS
We welcome your feedback.
Privacy Policy
Your information will not be shared or sold without your consent. Get all the details.
Advertisements
| ||
 | ||
|
||
| ||
Advertisements
More like this
| ||
Site SectionsNewspaper
Serving a community of 600,000, The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angles is the largest Jewish weekly outside New York City. Our award-winning paper reaches over 150,000 educated, involved and affluent readers each week. Subscribe here. © Copyright 2010 The Jewish Journal and JewishJournal.com | ||
|
