Why humor is the best reaction to this year's Pew Survey.
My October 4th sermon at Congregation Gates of Prayer in New Iberia, LA.
During the High Holy Days, we discussed the topic of Mussar - the Jewish way of life that shines a light on the causes of suffering and helps us infuse our lives with happiness, trust, and love. “To do that,” Alan Morinis teaches, “we must walk the way of the soul, and Mussar has been developed to guide our footsteps.”
But this Shabbat, I want to take our focus from the micro of the High Holy Days to the macro, from focusing on bettering ourselves to thinking about how we can strengthen the American Jewish community.
Every ten years or so, to assess the state of American Jewry, an extensive survey is conducted to check our bench marks and see where our Jewish community is at large. American Jews are polled to figure out:
How many of us are there?
What denomination do we affiliate with?
What does it mean to be Jewish?
How many of us are intermarrying?
What do we find essential to being Jewish?
How attached are we to Israel?
On Tuesday morning I awoke to a Facebook feed littered with tens of posts that this year’s Pew “Poll Shows [a] Major Shift in [the] Identity of US Jews.”
Ma nishta na haShanah hazeh?” I thought to myself. Why is this year different from any other?
Some were distressed at the intermarriage rate: “71% intermarriage outside of Orthodox. Oy Vey,” one rabbi wrote. Even with the Orthodox, the number is still at 58%, an enormous jump from 1970 when only 17% of Jews married outside the faith.
Another lamented the increase in Jewish adults who identify as having no religion, nearly 22%- it jumps to 32% among millennials, or those born after 1980.
Yet another was shocked that 34% of Jewish adults said you could still be Jewish if you believe that Jesus is the messiah. I confess - I also find that rather shocking.
But the person who won ‘best Facebook response to the Pew Survey’ was Benji Lovitt, an American born Israeli comedian. In response to the frantic responses of the Jewish community, Benji wrote a parody article taking comedic swings at all of the denominations.
First the Orthodox: “The [Pew Research Center] was unable to reach a critical mass of [Orthodox] constituents, as they would not take phone calls from female pollsters,” he facetiously reported.
Next was the Reform Movement: “Seventy four percent of Reform Jews were found to really enjoy eating cheeseburgers. Surprisingly, this number rose to 86% among the rabbinical community.” Guilty as charged.
Then his own conservative movement: “Fifty-seven percent of responders who identified themselves as Conservative Jews claimed to have no idea what they stand for and had no further comment.”
And last but not least he said “54% of Jews believe that a Christmas tree has no place in a Jewish home between January and November.”
While Benji fabricated those statistics in jest, the most interesting REAL statistic in the Pew Study was that having a sense of humor is more important to Jewish adults than being part of a Jewish community, observing Jewish law AND, shockingly, more important eating Jewish foods. Having humor is nearly as essential to Jewish identity as caring about Israel.
So why is it so important for us to have a sense of humor, to take a step back and laugh?
For one, laughter is one of our best survival mechanisms. Every holiday the same joke returns: They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat. It’s a little morbid, a little celebratory and a little funny: It’s the quintessential Jewish joke.
During an internet comedy special, Jerry Seinfeld asked Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner about Mel’s famous film and play The Producers:
Did “you think there was a profound revenge for Hitler’s crimes in making fun of him?”
Carl Reiner responds first: “The very fact that he did the definitive work against Hitler in the world! That the musical played in Germany and was the biggest hit!”
Mel chimes in: “I don’t know if they really liked it or were just apologizing. I’m not sure.”
But even more profound than laughter as a survival mechanism is laughter as an affirmation of life. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (FREED-rik NEE-chuh) writes that one must learn to laugh at themselves. He teaches that ‘to laugh is to affirm life, even the suffering in life.’
Why then, is it so important, as Benji so wonderfully demonstrated, for us American Jews to be able to laugh at ourselves? I think the answer comes from mussar.
Having the ability to laugh at yourself, as Nietzsche called for, is essentially having an accurate self awareness, that is neither too grand nor too diminished. This is the definition of humility.
As the judgments on the survey rolled out in social media and trickled through the Jewish world, it occurred to me that there were far too many depressed oy veys and not enough ironic amusement;
There was too much “this is the end all be all indictment of American Judaism’ and not enough “Really? Twice as many people age 18-49 can speak and understand Hebrew than the generation before them. What a win for Jewish education!”
Instead of dwelling on the similarities that we share and can be built upon, we egotistically obsessed over our personal values that were not reflected in the survey.
C.S. Lewis wrote that, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” Being humble individually allows us collectively, as an American Jewish people, to collaborate, to hear other opinions and views, to synthesize new ideas and visions, to join forces and strengthen an American Jewish community whose foundation needs rethinking.
Our tradition teaches us that ‘A small deed done in humility is a thousand times more acceptable to God than a great deed done in pride.‘ But if our pride is too much to overcome and in ten years the results are devastating, at least we will agree on one thing, according to Benji: that bagels are delicious.