How COVID Has Challenged Judaism

T he Jewish circadian rhythm reboots every September. The high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur bring many of us out of religious hibernation and back into contact with our communities. Their falling early this year allowed many to celebrate the holidays outside stodgy synagogues and amid open-air tents and the crisp fall air.

Unfortunately, that is perhaps the only upside that Jewish community leaders are finding these days. For the vast majority of American Jews, the pandemic has hit particularly hard a community already reeling from disconnection and dwindling numbers. According to a Pew Forum survey in 2020, nearly 80 percent of American Jews attended synagogues only on high holy days; these people are what many in the community jokingly refer to as “three-day-a-year” Jews. For them, the high holidays represent perhaps the only meaningful connection they share with the broader community in a given year.

The importance of shul attendance would be difficult to overestimate. It’s well documented that religious connection is crucial to one’s Jewishness. Those who participate in services remain considerably more attached to their Judaism and far more likely to marry Jewish, preserve a Jewish household, and raise Jewish children. Conversely, “Jews of no religion” exhibit alarming levels of nonaffiliation and disengagement. Despite the best wishes of such Jews to embrace religion through the proxies of Israeli music, Holocaust remembrance, and cooking latkes, cultural mortar alone isn’t strong enough to keep them (or, likely, their descendants) in the tribe very long. The unsurprisingly simple truth is that the locus of modern Jewish identity in the diaspora is the synagogue and the Torah. The farther that Jews stray from these constants, the less likely they are to pass along their faith or be active members themselves.

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If the religious connection of three-day Jews on the eve of COVID was tenuous at best, the pandemic has handed many of them a “get out of synagogue free” card. It’s far easier to justify those unsettling feelings about taking time off, putting on your tallit, and fasting during a pandemic.

This is causing alarm bells to ring in the ears of American Jewish leaders already struggling to keep their flocks together. As synagogues have been closed or limited owing to the pandemic, rabbis have been forced to “innovate” and cater to congregants. “People today are looking to Jewish institutions to satisfy them where they are,” Rabbi Howard Stecker of Temple Israel in New York told Pew during in-depth interviews. Nor is he alone. In the nearly three dozen interviews that Pew conducted with rabbis and community leaders, many spoke about the need for nimbleness and creativity in meeting the demands of disconnected Jews. One New Jersey rabbi leads religious discussions at a local bar — “Torah on Tap” — while another in Massachusetts created a monthly Shabbat service with drumming and meditation. Although well-intentioned, these initiatives paper over the deeper structural problems afflicting three-day Jews; they are simply Band-Aids on broken legs.

Stanching the flow of three-day Jews will not come through meditation or drumming. That’s because the American Jewish community is silently experiencing its most significant demographic reshuffle in history, bifurcating into the observant and the unaffiliated. Whereas there once were flourishing congregations of the Reform and Conservative movement sprinkled across the United States, today they are hemorrhaging members. A dark illustration of this comes from the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. The synagogue was composed of three separate congregations, two Conservative and one Reconstructionist, that share a building because they could not independently sustain themselves. The youngest victim was in his mid 50s, with the remainder being in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s. By comparison, the Orthodox community’s ranks are swelling, projected to grow from today’s 10 percent to 30 percent of all American Jewish in 50 years.

These warning signs have been blinking on the American Jewish horizon for some time now. “As the shine comes off the Zionist apple, religious Jews in America retain the option to seek solace in the abiding rituals of their faith communities,” Adam Garfinkle wrote in Tablet magazine in 2019. “But most nonhalachic [nonobservant] Jews lack such options, because ritual for them has long since become ceremony — performative displays for the sake of others rather than inward acts for the sake of self.”

COVID’s long-term impact on the precarious group of young three-day Jews merely exacerbated underlying communal tensions. Virtual and outright missed bar and bat mitzvahs alongside canceled Birthright trips are but some of the most significant coming-of-age rituals that will define this generation. Abundant research shows that Birthright in particular does a tremendous job recharging young Jews’ lost connections, building Jewish social networks among like-minded adolescents, and providing disconnected kids with a new religious perspective. Philanthropists acknowledged as much decades ago, shifting funding away from large organizations such as the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) and toward “specific initiatives” such as Birthright “to increase Jewish engagement.”

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Whereas COVID-19 represents a momentary setback for Orthodox Jews, for the rest of the community it will be devastating. Three-day Jews will become zero-day Jews: a lost generation of youth whose disconnection has been accelerated because of the pandemic. Onboarding them back into the Jewish community will be even more difficult following the loss of significant milestones in the education of Jewish youth. From personal experience, I can testify that attending your friends’ bar mitzvahs is far more relaxing than your own! Such joys cannot be re-created when you’re an angsty pubescent high-schooler: it’s reserved for the blissful ignorance of early-teendom. Likewise, the university-graduate ritual of Birthright and Euro-backpacking with Jewish friends loses its appeal once you’re a twentysomething, working full time, and confined to two weeks of paid vacation.

The timeless Jewish anxiety of keeping youth tethered to community and faith is no different this time around. Tevye’s anxiety for his daughter Chava in Fiddler on the Roof is as resonant for many Jewish parents these days as it was in the Pale of Settlement of tsarist Russia. Where Tevye used vinegar to keep the flock together (prohibitive social costs once did the trick), today American community leaders prefer honey. Summer camps, youth trips, Jewish day schools: you name it. None panned out. By 2021, Pew was reporting that twice as many Jewish Americans derived “a great deal of meaning and fulfillment from spending time with pets” than did those who said the same of their Judaism. The Jewish community might soon start turning to man’s best friend to lift sagging numbers.

American Jewish-community leaders are experiencing what the country, more broadly, is grappling with. The “nones,” as pollsters call them, the unaffiliated and unobservant, are growing faster than any religious group in America today. Across the board, American youth are turning away from religion at higher rates (although they usually rediscover it later in life). Despite all the “innovations” or Chabad delegations aimed at stemming the departure of Jews, little will change. Blameless community leaders struggling against the tidal wave of nonbelief are simply a bellwether of what the future of the American religious landscape holds. Wobbly youth will continue to spin out; remaining community members will be exclusively devout; and the once beautiful and flexible liminal spaces — where Reform and Conservative Jews call home — will progressively disappear.

Contrary to Alan Dershowitz’s foreboding essay in which he warned about “the vanishing Jew,” we will not disappear. American Jews are not facing extinction, but a subspecies of us certainly are. If enticing three-days Jews to return to the fold was difficult, stemming the flow of zero-day Jews will be even harder. Those demanding rabbinical nimbleness, the most vulnerable, will suffer disproportionately from COVID’s reordering of religious life. Complicated by the polarization that Israel creates both within and without the Jewish community, the key to American Jewish survival lies where it always has: inward. Today, the zero hour for American Jews to save the community begins with zero-day Jews.