Yo Tai Ren

Where will the next revolution in Jewish life take place?

The Israelis would say Israel, the America Jews say America. I say China.

That’s right, laugh at me, make a joke about take-out food. Get it out of your system.

Now, consider this:

We all know the Jewish world is casting about for ways to reverse a declining population and increased intermarriage. At the same time, we all know that China, the world’s most populous country, is opening up economically, socially and even religiously.

But with the exception of a tiny handful of academics and thinkers, most of our far-sighted Jewish professionals dismiss a China Plan as the same kind of pie-in-the-sky folly most Jewish leaders regarded say, a Jewish state in 1896.

But Christians know better. The Communist Party crushed Protestant and Catholic churches when it took over in 1949.

“Between 1949 and the decline of Maoism,” wrote Joshua Kurlantzick, foreign editor of The New Republic, in a Nov. 28, 2004 Washington Post look at Christianity in China. “The Chinese Communist Party eviscerated the country’s traditional culture and institutions, denigrating Confucianism, ancestor worship, traditional family structures and classical Chinese education and arts….

“Then, in the past two decades, the Chinese people have been tossed into a capitalist maelstrom of the most social Darwinist kind, with a paucity of social safety nets and an abundance of consumption. The government has tried to foster a new ideology based on Chinese nationalism, but it has not proven overwhelmingly popular. Shocked by the rapid transition of Chinese society, unconvinced that capitalism alone can provide a fulfilling life, and divorced from traditional culture, many younger Chinese have been turning to religion.”

Experts believe that there may be as many as 90 million Christians in China. “Indeed, not only Christianity but also many other faiths — Buddhism, Taoism, Islam and qi gong offshoots like Falun Gong — are gaining new adherents in the Middle Kingdom,” Kurlantzick writes.

Now, there are 1.3 billion souls in China. Which Jewish leader wants to tell me that by teaching Judaism there, not even one tenth of 1 percent of them would be drawn more deeply to the faith? And what is .1 percent of 1.3 billion? 1.3 million — the Jewish population of New York City. If Judaism can’t appeal to a fraction of an intelligent, motivated population searching for answers in the maelstrom of modernity, what does it have to offer any of us?

“If Judaism were evangelical, it could take more than 10 percent of the Chinese population and be more popular than Christianity,” professor Avrum Ehrlich of the University of Shandong wrote me by e-mail.

The Australian-born Ehrlich, an ordained rabbi, Cambridge educated academic and former Israel Defense Forces soldier, is a faculty member at the university’s Centre of Judaic and Inter-Religious Studies and editor of the upcoming book, “Jews and Judaism in Modern China.”

“The Jews have inspired religions in every continent — Christianity, Islam, socialism and some of the tenants of democracy and capitalism — and there is no reason why we should not be involved in the emergence of a new Chinese ethic which inevitably must emerge from the absence of a moral code here presently,” Ehrlich said.

There is a miniscule Judaic presence in China now. There is a Chinese-language Web site about Judaism (www.jewcn.com), and Shandaung University sponsors (www.cjs.sdu.edu.cn). Professor Xu Xin, a pioneer in Judaic study and translation, established a China Judaic Studies Association and in 1990 opened an exhibit on Judaica at the Nanjing University Library, which drew huge crowds, as did a 1993 exhibit sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center linking the Nanjing Massacre to the Holocaust.

Still, compare this to the ongoing missionary efforts and dozens (if not hundreds) of Chinese-language Web sites sponsored by evangelical Christian groups around the world. China has an Internet population of 103 million, second only to the United States. Ehrlich was in the midst of designing the only multimedia Jewish Web site for China when his funding for the project fell through.

I am not suggesting the Jewish equivalent of Christian evangelizing. For one thing, we Jews are bad at it. We seem to be able to market everything – Levis jeans, Starbucks coffee, Hollywood movies — but our faith. For another, evangelizing is forbidden in China.

In fact, our distaste for evangelizing can work to our favor in a country that has cracked down severely on Christian sects that traffic in conversion. What we want is to diffuse knowledge and awareness of Judaism.

Ehrlich wrote: “Judaism is not imperialist or evangelical, it has never colonized land not her own or set up nations in countries outside of its national birthright.

“This attitude serves as reassurance that a Jewish presence in a country such as China is not threatening to its national ideologies, structures or sovereignty,” he wrote. “In this respect, Judaism can be an important agent and advocate of China preserving its own uniqueness.”

Ehrlich believes that Judaism can offer the Chinese a way to “accommodate the primacy of the family” in the face of sweeping social and economic change. “Judaism with some alterations would be very attractive to the Chinese,” Ehlich concluded in his e-mail, but Jewish leadership has consistently rejected the possibility of outreach.

Judaism’s survival, its ability to pass its values to future generations, has always depended on its willingness to confront and absorb sweeping changes – from the Enlightenment to the State of Israel to, now, the opening up of China.

It’s not crazy. It’s next.

The Chinese-language Web site about Judaism is www.jewcn.com. The Shandaung University sponsored site is www.cjs.sdu.edu.cn.