The Jews: Next Year in Which Jerusalem?

(7 of 11)
Jews—she concluded that "in a sense, each Jew has his own Torah, and I am working out mine." Among other observances, she keeps a kosher kitchen and a fairly strict Sabbath.

Jew and convert, a growing number of young people are joining the college-based havurat (fellowship) movement and similar experimental Jewish communities. Different from the culture-oriented Judaic studies programs, the havurat have communal houses or meeting places where Jewish students gather to study the Torah, Hebrew and other Jewish subjects and to celebrate the Sabbath and festivals together. Though they pledge no formal adherence to strict Halakhah, the students can, like Joan Koehler, be edifyingly tough on themselves. Some communities observe their own kind of kashruth (kosher laws) by vegetarianism, at least on the Sabbath. At Boston's Havurat Shalom, one of the pioneering communities in the movement, members live close enough to the house that they can walk to Sabbath services—even if they might use cars for other purposes during the day.

These communal experiences reflect a new interpretation of an ancient keystone Jewish concept: membership in the mishpochah, a family of both blood and faith whose dining table is also an altar. It is a family on familiar terms with God—so much so that members can chastise him, as Tevye does in Fiddler on the Roof. One great Hasidic rabbi, Levi-Yitzhak of Berditchev, once warned God, "If you refuse to answer our prayers, I shall refuse to go on saying them." It was Levi-Yitzhak, too, who one day addressed God in exasperation: "Master of the Universe, how many years do we know each other? How many decades? So please permit me to wonder: is this any way to rule your world?" God is sometimes seen as a sort of puzzlingly eccentric grandfather. One Jewish story tells of a rich man praying for money to start a new business, and a poor man, next to him, praying for food for his starving family. God tells an astonished angel to grant the rich man's petition, explaining that he sees the poor man every week, but he has not seen the rich man in three years.

The warm circle of the mishpochah became considerably extended as Jewish history progressed; in time it included the entire shtetl, the Jewish village. Now a number of Jewish thinkers would like to define that concept in a special way that embraces the Jewish people as a whole. Among the most influential is a cross-denominational group of theologians and philosophers who have become known as the "Covenant theologians." Loosely organized, stressing their common beliefs rather than their differences, the group includes such names as New York Reform Theologian (and Sh'ma Editor) Eugene Borowitz, Conservative Theologian Seymour Siegel of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Orthodox Theologian Norman Lamm. What they mutually try to promote, explains Siegel, is the idea that Jews "are not a people like all other people, nor a religious society promoting certain metaphysical principles and ideas, but a group joined together in relation to God."

Irrelevant Lines. One of the first issues the group has tackled is the central question of revelation. According to older attitudes, notes Jakob J. Petuchowski of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, "once you discovered that Moses didn't write the whole