Alef: The NEXT Conversation

Dispatches from Moishe House: Meet Joshua in Hoboken

by Joshua Einstein

My name is Joshua Einstein and I have been a MH (Moishe House) Hoboken resident for almost 5 years. It has been an incredible adventure in friendship, programming, and community building. When I first applied I was post collegiate and as an only child I really needed to get out of my parents’ house. As things worked out I would land a job and an MH in the same week. Most residents move into pre-existing houses, my roommates at the time and I were new to Hoboken and had to build an indigenous social network from the ground up. Sure, Hoboken has a shul and sure that shul had a Jewish club that was focused on social events in bars but we weren’t there just for drinks and shul just isn’t my scene.

See, I’m not against the concept of god. I believe there probably is a god. It’s just that as an agnostic I know there is no way for me to confirm that god exists. Moreover, the secondary questions of whether or not god gave anything to any group of humans seems rather pedestrian. Every religious group thinks god spoke to them and gave them something unique. As such, religion matters not to me, nor does theology, services, spirituality, the soul, prayer or religious tradition. In my almost 5 years in town I have been to the shul less than a dozen times, Baruch Hashem.

So what makes me Jewish? The answer is simply our people, history, and shared culture. The religion element is a historical addendum. Religious Judaism has been a convenient vehicle for the transmission of our shared culture, the propagation of our amazing experiment through history, and for the inculcation of Jewish peoplehood. In and of itself, religion has no value, that doesn’t mean I’m against people having religion, nor that religious people are inherently anti-intellectual or unintelligent. It does mean I do not plug into the religion of the Jews – Judaism.

When we moved to Hoboken I wanted to create a new Jewish community rooted in Jewish history and interested in exploring the world intellectually. We were in Hoboken to make a new Jewish scene and we were here to do it deliberately. To some degree we have succeeded. Part of intellectualism is a healthy dose of skepticism and the community we have built and been built by is definitely skeptical. Perhaps it’s our Greater Hoboken Area (GHA) origin’s (most of our community is from New Jersey with many others from the tri-state area), that comes with some inherent cynicism genetically pre-programmed into those in our region. It may be an outgrowth of the Jewish neuroticism that requires we look for a motivation behind mere meaning or the minority status of outsiders that makes Jews supra-naturally inquisitive. I know not the reason, but whereas many Jewish groups are obsessed with defining themselves by action, by posting a thin film of Jewish identity over the broad agenda of making the world a better place, we are just the opposite. The community we have created (and been created by) in Hoboken is in command of its Jewish identity, knowledgeable of our shared history, fluent in our culture and without the larger agenda of transforming the world.

As a contrarian and agitator I am naturally unsatisfied. It is as if my MH community has settled in an unhappy medium in which it is comfortable with intellectual challenges but uncomfortable when considering turning those challenges into actions. That the intellectual world does not exist in the abstract makes this a fundamentally untenable position. Moreover, it is also an anti-intellectual position because it is inherently and patently false. The question is how to connect our community’s inquisitive minds and intellectual notions with actions? How do we, at MH Hoboken, connect our salons, facilitated discussions, informal and impromptu debates regarding the economy, politics, homelessness, security, inflation, Israel – the Jew and the world around her/him, to some sort of action?

To this I do not have an answer. I welcome any and all suggestions.

Photo by pauldwaite, licensed under creative commons.

3 Comments »