Interesting Times: We don't need a flood By SAUL SINGER Jerusalem Post | June 29, 2005 http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1120098353972&p=1006953079897
This newspaper has hosted an ongoing debate over the role of conversion in addressing Jewish demographic woes. In an editorial titled, "We need converts" that endorsed the findings of a recent conference of Jewish leaders and thinkers on the Jewish future, the Post concluded: "Shunning converts is not just un-Jewish. On the level of the Jewish people, it is suicide." Donniel Hartman, Lawrence Epstein and William Safire have written in these pages of the need to change Jewish attitudes toward conversion. Two of our columnists, Jonathan Rosenblum and Rabbi Berel Wein, have strongly objected. "Efforts to encourage mass conversion put the cart before the horse. Large and numerous are not Jewish terms of measure... An intense core can generate numbers - fewer than 10,000 Ashkenazi Jews in Rashi's time grew to 13 million by the Holocaust. But numbers will not generate purity," Rosenblum wrote. Wein observed that "widespread conversions may be considered innovative and media-popular. However, they are not realistic, practical and/or desirable." Readers of this column know that I'm on the pro-conversion team. Nor is it fair to paint our opponents as anti-conversion, since they both movingly recognize that the trickle of converts that refuse to be deterred by the hurdles we place before them continue to inspire and invigorate the Jewish people. Those who decry "conversionmania," as Wein calls it, instead claim there is no vast pool of non-Jews clamoring to become Jewish, and that "mass" conversions necessarily lower the standards of Jewish practice. It is remarkable to me that such fears are held by serious people, and are so widespread. What are people like me who see conversion as a critical part of the Jewish revival strategy really talking about? THE FIRST source of anxiety is based on a misunderstanding over how populations grow. World population growth rates have actually been decreasing for years, but remember when the population seemed to be zooming upward, creating a "population bomb"? It turned out that world growth had peaked at about 3 percent per year. For most things, like your bank account, growing at 3 percent is no great shakes. But in population terms it's really fast. It means, whether for money or people, doubling every 24 years. Let's say the Jewish people set a more modest goal: 2 percent annual growth. At this rate we would double twice by 2080: from 13 million today to 52 million. Presumably, a large part of this growth would have to come from above-replacement birth rates and from conversions within intermarried families of non-Jewish spouses and children. While many are rightly skeptical that it is possible to turn the intermarriage trend from a net drain on Jewish numbers into a source of growth, Wein and Rosenblum would presumably agree that we should try mightily, without reducing our standards, to convert within mixed families. Perhaps such consensus sources of growth could meet the full 2% goal, meaning about 250,000 added Jews worldwide each year. But what would be the harm if about half of this growth were to come from non-Jews who, out of the blue, wanted to join the Jewish people? If 100,000 people joined us each year, that would be 10 times the current inflow, and a significant chunk of the growth that we need; yet these newcomers would be less than one in 100 of the existing Jewish population. Hardly a flood. This number of converts also looks ridiculously low in relation to the number of Christians in the world - just one in 20,000. If just one in 2,000 Christians found that Judaism spoke deeply to them, that would mean a million converts each year. -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
