A few years ago, I had a frightening experience. The leaders of the Reform Movement gathered to hear Jewish teens talk about their lives. They were the cream of the crop— youth group leaders from all over the New York area. At first, they spoke about how much they loved Judaism. And then their tone got much darker.
The teens told us that they had Jewish friends who were taking drugs and dying by suicide. “We tried to help them,” the teens said. “We tried to get them to join the youth group. But our friends told us, ‘Why bother? Our parents never got anything out of being Jewish.’”
The youth group leaders were blunt. “Our friends are looking for meaning,” they told us, “and they’re not finding it in Judaism. And when they get desperate, when they feel alone, they do terrible things to themselves. If you want to help these kids,” the youth group leaders told us, “create a Judaism that helps them find meaning.”
Teenagers aren’t the only ones looking for meaning. More and more Jews are describing themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” When you ask them their religion, they say “none.” And more and more of these people are finding meaning in other areas of life.
There have been many efforts to create communities for the “nones,” to create rich Jewish communities where questioning is encouraged, where dogma is non-existent, and where spiritual growth is an essential part of life. But we need to look at the underlying needs that are not being met by more conventional Judaism. And perhaps, the most important question: Is this trend towards “spiritual but not religious” the beginning of a tectonic shift, similar to what happened at the birth of rabbinic Judaism?
If we are at the beginning of a tectonic shift, how can we encourage it? How can we get the ball rolling so that our children and our children’s children can create a vibrant new Judaism? How can we empower them to create something that we can’t even imagine?
More than anything else, the “nones” are looking for meaning. They’re trying to figure out “Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose in this world?”
The Jewish psychologist Viktor Frankl survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp during the Holocaust. Frankl interviewed the people in the camp, and he discovered that they were asking the exact same questions: “Why am I here? What is my purpose?” And based on his experience, he proposed an entirely new theory of psychology. Life, he said, is not primarily a search for pleasure or a search for power. Life is a search for meaning.
And ultimately, he said, the search for meaning is not a journey that we can take alone. Meaning comes from knowing that we are part of a community and we have a responsibility to that community.
In the end, said Frankl, we discover something unique that we can do to create a better world, and we dedicate our lives to a community that shares our vision. The “nones,” Frankl might say, are having trouble shaping their vision and finding communities to support them.
Frankl’s search for meaning is the story of the Jewish people. From the moment that God told Abraham, “Go out from your land,” to the moment we stood at Mt. Sinai, we have always had a vision of a better world that gave our lives meaning. And to one degree or another, study, prayer, and acts of kindness have always been part of that vision.
But over the last century, that vision has become less powerful. Many Jews are searching for meaning, but they are less likely to find it through identifying with the Jewish story. There are many explanations for this—the rise of science, the Holocaust, living in a multicultural society. But through my research, I discovered another reason—a reason that comes from Narrative Science.
Narrative Science is a relatively new field that has been embraced by therapists, social scientists, neurosurgeons, and a variety of other disciplines. Like Frankl, narrative scientists believe that human beings construct meaning by telling each other stories.
According to narrative scientists, we all have stories that guide the way we understand our lives. Individuals have stories. Businesses have stories about how their company was started, about the company’s mission, and about the heroes that exemplify the company culture. And so, too, entire peoples have stories about who they are.
But stories never last forever. Victims of serious head injuries forget who they are and are forced to reconstruct entirely new stories. People who lose their homes to fires are forced to reconstruct their stories. And to a large extent, the Jewish people have been forced to reconstruct our story after the Holocaust.
Narrative scientists have a term for this phenomenon. They call these stories “broken stories.” Wolfgang Muller-Funk, a scholar who studies broken stories, says that when stories become broken, the people who are affected experience a sense of loss, a sense of isolation, a sense of being out of step with the past.
All of this, says Muller-Funk, can be summarized by a single German word, “Bruch.” But, according to Muller-Funk, Bruch has an additional meeting. It refers to a sense of hope, a sense of opening a new door, of a new, more compelling story that is about to emerge.
In many ways, the Jewish story is broken. There are Jews who have lost hope, Jews who’ve lost a sense of agency, and Jews who are struggling with traditional God language. But this is not the first time that the Jewish story has broken. The story of our people broke when the first Temple fell, and it broke when the second Temple fell, and in each case, a new, more compelling story emerged.
I believe that we are in a process of Bruch. And I believe that parts of our new story have already been written. The job of our generation is to create a tipping point, to help the new story come together. And Narrative Science gives us clues for how to do that. No one person can create a tipping point. If a new vision is going to emerge, we’ll need to work together.
Rabbi Art Grand was recently ordained at AJRCA. He is a long-time leader of the Reform Movement and a former chair of the Reform Movement’s Commission on Worship, Music, and Religious Living. Rabbi Grand is currently serving as an adjunct rabbi at Congregation Beth Shalom in Napa, California. He is married, has two grown children, and has had previous careers as a theatrical lighting designer and a software engineer.