"I can't figure out what else we have to offer the world."
New York, November 12 - Heirs to an ancient tradition that has stood at the vanguard of human development for thousands of years and continues to foster achievement far in excess of what the numbers of its population might suggest, continued to discover this week that a connection with anything but the most superficial remnants of that tradition will, for mysterious reasons, not guarantee that they can carry the tradition forward.
Assimilated American Jews again faced the ongoing realization, some acknowledged today, that bagels, a few Yiddish words, Holocaust commemoration, and vague notions of "Tikkun Olam," which they construe only as the application of contemporary left-wing values, constitute everything important about Judaism, and will secure the continuity of the ethnoreligion.
"I'm wracking my brains, though," admitted Rabbi Timothy Lieberman of Temple Azaju in Tenafly, New Jersey. "For the life of me, I can't figure out what else we have to offer the world. Gefilte fish? No thank you - neither savory nor sweet. Hava Nagila? Faaaar too explicit in its Zionism, and Zionism smacks of Jewish particularism, which goes against everything progressive, so it can't be truly Jewish, can it? That leaves dill pickles, I guess."
"Oh, and a Hanukkah bush." He noted that until recently, Zionism also played a role, but progressive Jews have distanced themselves from Jewish sovereignty, both because it proved to be a bar to participation in coveted progressive spaces, and because it implies a level of commitment to Jewish history and peoplehood that grew inconvenient for those uncomfortable with religion-adjacent obligations.
Lieberman's dwindling congregation once numbered more than a hundred families. His predecessors in the position welcomed intermarried couples and even performed weddings of Jews to non-Jews, despite statistical evidence that such unions seldom, if ever, raise offspring committed to Jewish heritage, let alone educated in it. Now, membership at Azaju has declined to a mere two dozen households, all but one of them older members whose children and grandchildren seldom attend services or community functions.
"We don't understand what's unattractive about bagels and lox," lamented Selma Jacobs, whose father marched with Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr. "That should be all we need - sprinkle our conversation with 'putz,' 'schmutz,' and 'bubbe-mayseh,' lament the Holocaust, and place other minorities' causes before our own. It worked for me, and don't talk to me about not having any Jewish grandchildren. My children married non-Jews and none of them have any non-Jewish children because they decided not to have any children at all."
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