Questions New and Old for the New Year

Feeling like years have past instead only of weeks, I'm finally back in Philadelphia. Boston was a whirlwind experience, with bad luck and frustration turning into wonderful learning and a sense of possibility, and back into a sense of the limitations of time and space all in what really amounts to a few short days.

So rather than to offer some kind of set of abstract reflections on the holidays in total, instead I thought I would post a short list of the ideas with which I wrestled (either on my own or with colleagues and friends) over the last few weeks. As always, my thoughts are lists of questions that begat questions, that will probably beget other questions, perhaps one day I'll have answers, but maybe my role will always be to start, rather than end conversations...

THE CONGREGATIONAL LIFE CYCLE:
If congregations and communities grow like living organisms, than in their first few years they are in need of constant care and nurturing, but may also be surprisingly resilient. How do we nurture these nascent societal organism so that they grow to be healthy, strong and vibrant? What kinds of mistakes are critical and which are the ones that are just natural products of the growth experience?

HIGH HOLIDAY SYNAGOGUE ATTENDANCE:
Why do Jews, at astonishing rates, go to synagogues on the High Holidays? What is it about these days in particular that creates a sense of obligation about synagogue attendance? What does this say about the way Jews manifest their Jewish identities as functions of their participation in communities? Is the heightened sense of importance around synagogue attendance on the High Holidays an American construction? How? Why? If so, what does that say about how Jewish and American civilizations interact?

THE EVOLUTION OF RECONSTRUCTIONISM:
How does the method for reconstructing Judaism look different for this century than it did for the last? What does this mean for Reconstructionist ideology? Theology? How does this development (and ensuing tension) manifest at the RRC? Within the larger movement? How does the lack of a concrete way to articulate Reconstructionism today, distinct but not necessarily entirely separate from Kaplanian Judaism, complicate the movement and college's abilities to identify themselves and their goals?

THE FALLACY OF POST-DENOMINATIONALISM:
It seems to me that post-denominationalism is really a fallacy. Jews who say they are post-denominationalist all have (one would hope) coherent sets of beliefs and structures for practicing Judaism, and these beliefs and practices all fit somewhere on the greater spectrum of Jewish civilizational life. Movements represent benchmarks along that spectrum, so even if one stubbornly refuses to admit to belonging to a movement, their ideas nonetheless will fall somewhere near one of the movements on that spectrum. Refusing to identify and affiliate simply means a frustration with organizational structures, or unwillingness to be labeled, but it can't refute the existence of naturally occurring movement. So, what is my generation's obsession with post-denominationalism really all about? It seems that most of the achievements of this so-called movement toward post-denominationalism have been to open the eyes of denominationalists to see that their denominations have lost ideological integrity. By removing labels the post-denominationalists have succeeded not in proving the worthlessness of denominations, but instead in demonstrating how the movements themselves, hiding behind labels, have stopped doing the difficult ideological work necessary to constantly define and redefine their conceptions of their places (theologically, intellectually, spiritually and culturally etc) in the Jewish civilization as that civilization and the ones that surround it shift with the passage of time and developments of new ideas. Post-denominationalism challenges individual Jews and communities to do this necessary work by refusing to let us hide behind the comfortable labels of our movements. In the end however, this process can not, and should not, result in a Jewish civilization with one uniform approach to Jewish life, but instead should help Jewish civilization develop into a reemergence of Jewish denominations, perhaps in a new configuration and with new relationships with each other, but necessarily creating small focal points around which to create communities that span the spectrum of approaches to living within today's Jewish civilization.