Bruce Springsteen, Jewish Futures, and the Myth of Authenticity

Bruce Springsteen gave the keynote address at the just ended South By Southwest (SXSW) Music Conference and Festival in Austin. The Boss’s remarks focused on the meaning of music in his own musical development. His entire talk can be found here at NPR. As I listened I heard him say something that gave me pause – so much so that I had replay it over and over again. About nine and a half minutes in he said the following words about music and the creative process:

Purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way of doing it. There’s just doing it.

We live in a post authentic world and today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It’s all just what you’re bringing when the lights go down. It’s your teachers, your influences your personal history. At the end of the day it’s the power and purpose of your music that still matters. (Please note that this is my own transcription. As of now there is no officially released transcript. The punctuation is my best guess – PE)

What blew me away was the phrase “post authentic world” and the idea that what we create is a reflection of our own journey. As I listened to this I realized that Mr. Springsteen wasn’t just talking about music.

All of us who care about the past, present and future of Judaism have been exploring how best to define what it means to be Jewish in the 21^st century. Rabbi Arnold Samlan (@JewishConnectiv), in his Jewish Connectivity blog has written about how the concept of connectedness can replace the traditional idea of affiliation. Different models of Jewish learning are constantly being experimented with. The 21^st century skills of collaboration and communal construction of knowledge and tradition are becoming part of the way Judaism is being taught and lived. Brick and mortar is being replaced by the virtual. The very nature of being part of the Jewish community is being redefined. We find ourselves in a new world where the idea of an “authentic Jewish life” is not only becoming harder to define, but in fact may become non-existent, and possibly irrelevant.

What does it mean to live an “authentically Jewish life”? A.B. Yehoshua, that Israeli literary giant and anti-diaspora curmudgeon, declared that Diaspora Jews “are partial Jews” because they don’t live in Israel. “In no way are we the same thing – we are total and they are partial; we are Israeli and also Jewish.” he pontificated recently. Does this mean that an Israeli Jew, going to the beach on Yom Kippur, is more authentically Jewish than a Jew living in New York attending High Holy Day services at B’nai Jeshurun? How about a Haredi living in Jerusalem forcing women to sit at the back of the bus or abusing a child because she is not dressed “modestly” enough? In the days of the Second Temple, who were the “authentic” Jews, the Sadducees or the Pharisees? Did Rabbinic Judaism claim the mantle of authenticity merely because they survived the year 70 and made it to Yavneh to write the history?

What is Judaism but the sum total of our people’s experience, reflected in the cultural contexts in which we find ourselves? There is no one way of being Jewish. We are a community/civilization that is always questioning, reflecting, arguing…and evolving. The hyper-Zionism of A.B. Yehoshuah, or the Talibanistic dictates of the ultra-orthodox do not define what an authentic Jewish life means. We, living our lives where we live it, do. Maybe this is the closest thing we can get to “authentic Judaism”.

As we all create tomorrow’s Judaism, maybe we might want to think about it in light of Springsteen’s words: It’s our teachers, our influences, our history out of which springs the muse that helps us write the symphony, the rock opera, the song, the rap, that will be the soundtrack for the Judaism of our children and their children. It’s the power and the purpose of OUR heritage that we are bringing to the world stage, today and tomorrow.

The music never stops.

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Peter Eckstein

Peter Eckstein began his career a Jewish educator in 1982 on Kibbutz Ketura, working with children of all ages and serving as the kibbutz Education Coordinator. In 1993 upon returning to the U.S. he became the Director of Education and Programming at Temple Israel in West Palm Beach. Currently he is the Director of Congregational Learning at Temple Beth David in Palm Beach Gardens. In addition, serves as the Technology Integration Educator for the Friedman Commission for Jewish Education.He was very active with the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education as programming co-chair, Shabbat chair and conference chair for several conferences. He has taught professional development for educators, Judaic adult education classes, and the Palm Beach County’s “Introduction to Judaism” course for those seeking to become part of the community. He is specializing in teaching educators how to integrate Education Technology into the Jewish classroom. He has also served on the faculty at URJ Camp Coleman as an informal Jewish educator.Peter is fascinated by how technology and experiential education will aid in the transmission of Jewish awareness to the next generations

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