CHAZAQ’s Torah Talks #7: Rabbi Chanan Gordon - Will Your Grandchildren be Jewish?

welcome welcome to yet another edition of ttt tuesday's timely torah talks kazakh's amazing tuesday program today we have yet another special guest a very dear friend rebecca gordon all the way from los angeles welcome how are you doing wonderful rib yaniv it's an honor and a pleasure as you know i've had the the honor of uh speaking on behalf of hazak and what can i tell you a uh a a deep pleasure to be back in the hot seat tonight ah welcome thank you very much for joining us i actually met the rebel in aries israel and eritsa kodesh on the a few years ago together with israel and uh to be a very very interesting uh interview and we're going to be discussing will your grandchildren be jewish so let's jump into it the research article that you co-authored with richard horowitz has become one of the most cited publications on the topic of into marriage can you first give us a context of how the concept was developed until the famous democratic chart first appeared good pleasure so just for the audience um i i'd come back from yeshiva uh at that point in time my co-author richard horowitz was i believe the president of asiatore international and he had in his mind he pictured in his mind how he wanted uh the research to come out i had uh barkhashem you know a a background in research in academia and was it it was a terrific partnership we in 1990 every 10 years roughly there's a major census or survey that's done um in america and usually one of the jewish organizations of the federation or in the most recent one the the pew report sort of piggyback on that to get an idea of uh what's happening with sociological and demographic uh trends so what we did was we took not only the 1990 national jewish population survey we took the raw data we got permission to get the raw data we hired some of the top uh sociologists people in sociology and demography so that people wouldn't point fingers at us and saying that we are imposing our view and what we thought was going to take maybe eight months years later we finally for the first time it first uh was published um in moment magazine in 1996 uh we specifically wanted a publication that wasn't you know so-called a toro publication to give it credibility and literally within a few months uh my former professor from harvard reached out to us asked for permission to put our demographic charts in his book the vanishing american jew and it's uh it's clear that it's snowballed i think the one thing i want to tell your viewers which is very interesting the overriding rosh yeshiva that we consulted with was revyakov weinberg satsaw so rabbi weinberg told us as long as you are completely accurate in other words footnote things don't don't exaggerate you're going to have broken and siata destroyer with this research and it seems that the roshashiva's bracha was making because we've it's been translated down to i think 11 languages it's appeared in uh many publications and rav masha shiraza told the the the former head of akuros israel before he passed away he insisted that we do a full-page ad in the new york times part of the americad's first campaign so it seems that the bracha was making and uh you know it seems to have really hit a raw nerve with many many people unbelievable amazing amazing what do you think was unique about your publication that captured the imagination and caused it to become so well known it's an excellent question so i think a picture paints a thousand words right we uh you know we're learning in in the partials now about the carbonus if a person does a transgression why don't you just tell them to go to the base of mikdashian and say vidue but they have to put their hands on an animal they see the animal being consumed the whole thing the ritual when you see something it has such an impact on you that the power of the eyes so this picture this the whole article was really done to capture this picture and this graph in this chart paints a thousand words when anyone sees the different denominations starting from you know less affiliated secular to reform conservative and showing three generations later what the potential future is of each of these denominations based on criteria uh that we're going to discuss it's very difficult and not to be impacted you know if one has any any desire to have jewish you know uh descendants could you bring that closer to the screen sure so so you have to the left well that is secular yeah okay so we have to the left each uh each uh showing essentially 100 people and we're saying the next generation based on the inter marriage rate of each denomination and the number of children per family if we freeze all things being equal what are what is the chance of the generation in the first column having jewish progeny having descendants wow that and it's look at that look at the orthodox community there's no question um that it's organizations like hazak and we can discuss this that get a tremendous amount of credit for the the disproportional growth on this side of the orthodox and for people who've moved over and i'll talk about that in a moment who didn't grow up with a strong torah background who are reconnecting with their strong jewish heritage wow according to your research um what are the main factors causing non-orthodox american jews to face a threat to beautiful so i i will say like this the two main factors that are causing denominations that are not orthodox unfortunately to face a a extinction is the inter-marriage rate and the num and the the average number of children per family if we just take the most recent pew report in 2013 we can we summarize it into one sound bite of non-orthodox marriages from the year to 2013 were inter marriages 71 percent just that alone should give people a pain in the gut and then you compound that by the following when you do sociological or demographic trends the one criteria that we have to factor in is called zpg which is called zero population growth meaning if you are if a family has less than 2.1 children per family then they are below replacement rate meaning that the mortality is higher than the replacement so the only denomination that has an average a number of children per family more than that is more than 2.1 is the orthodox so imagine if i took a glass and put it in the sun and and walked away by the end of the day the water will evaporate that you know you don't have to do anything so what's happening unfortunately is the non-orthodox uh the most of the non-orthodox jews are not having enough children to replace the people that are that are dying and then you add on that that the majority of them intermarry you can understand why organizations like have their hands full 100 100 wow that is uh that's so sad that is so sad so you and mr hearts have published three versions of your article will your grandchild be jewish based on national jewish surveys that have been done early done every 10 years or so right what findings do you see in the most recent research that you did based on the pew report that were not major factors 10 years ago what's the difference 10 years ago beautiful so there are a few things but one of the major factors that we saw in the most recent research which is as you well said uh the pew report of 2013 is that there's a large percentage of people that are not getting married or they're getting married very late in life so unfortunately we live in the western culture which is and pop culture has got an emphasis on career you got to do this you got to have a certain amount of followers on instagram and by the time you turn around you're 45 years old and you miss the whole purpose instead of putting the big rocks in first so one of the biggest things that we saw is people either not getting married for shalom or getting married much later automatically that means the fertility rates go down because they can have less children so that's a huge thing that we saw one of the big tragedies we also saw in the most recent uh peer report is that 62 of american jews that were that were interviewed as part of the peer report said that being jewish is is a matter of culture the whole concept of the fact that we are descendants of the greatest national revelation and the almighty gave us the instructions for living is not in their conscience it's like you know some guys play baseball some guys are jewish and it's very very sad and i think part of the reason uh is that the average american jew if you're a male that their judaism stops at the age of 13 and if you're a girl at this at the age of 12. so they have a very superficial understanding of yiddish guide and unless they have the source of someone from kazakh uh you know being able to transition them from a public school and really understand the beauty of judaism unfortunately most of them land up to be a statistic that's so sad is there any silver lining to your article is it all doom and gloom and all sad and all depressing give us some light okay so i i we can't uh we definitely can't depress the your audience in fact this there is definitely some silver lining and i want to share a few with the audience firstly the what we found with the pure report found is that out of 5 million 250 000 jews in america eight and a half percent were what we would consider observant or orthodox but here's the kicker out of that eight and a half percent about 30 percent of those were were not raised orthodox again eight and a half percent of the jewish population were identified as orthodox but 30 percent of those people were not raised orthodox which means which means 100 which means i believe the following and i think you know me uh well enough i'm spending a lot of my time ruby and eve on campus speaking to people i think i see a lot of the secular kids out there you know they ascend up the ladder and realize you know it's leaning against the wrong wall they walk around with a huge void and they turn around in fact this it can't be the purpose of life is to get into an ivd school and you know and have a photograph of an nba player there's got to be more there's no purpose they don't feel a reason that is the num what you just said is is the number one thing i want to quickly tell your viewers a story one of my kids went on a yeshiva outing to san francisco san francisco has the golden grave bridge this is crazy when i heard this and it took me a while for it to register as part of the tour they went to the golden grave bridge and there were two gentlemen that are sort of doing shmira guarding the bridge and one of the kids said you know what's what's your job and he said and it's and if if if you're going to hear a big huge from your audience it's now that one of their main jobs is to make sure that people don't get on that bridge and jump off their job is to avoid people committing suicide so one of the the kids said i'm sure people jump and some of them don't succeed and you know when you when you jump down and swim and you say them what's the main reason when when they come out of the river and you ask them why you did this and without fail all of them said there's no meaning there's no purpose in our life a human being cannot live in this world without a sense of to what end so the silver lining is the tremendous amount of people are re-evaluating their commitment to yiddish guy hashem that divine you have to outline the problem in the very clear terms but what's the solution what can we do to turn the numbers to be even more uh you know to to keep their jewish heritage and and and to bring them back to torah and positive commandments what do you suggest so i want your audience to know that that nobody from hazzard gave me a script no one told me to say this rabbi marov did not say but the number one thing is the impact that you can have in terms of a a jewish education during their formative years which is usually uh elementary school pro high school the difference between a kid going to public school versus a kid during their formative years having exposure to torah is the most profound thing uh a lot of the research by silvia black fishman uh alvin schiff uh a lot of the top sociologists claim show very clearly the difference between a person who had a during their formative years a experience of torah that was warm that was loving as opposed to unfortunately a lot of the schools you know the impression that judaism is this rigid thing and okay hashem's are standing on a cloud waiting to give you assets so a jewish day school education number one jewish day camps is is a also has a tremendous ratio we found that youth programs are very powerful uh campus programs when when a lot of young students are searching and then subsidized trips to israel but there's no question that the work that does by helping young people be exposed and realizing uh that that the richness and the beauty of our heritage is probably the most profound way that you can impact that you can ensure that you're part of the solution and not part of the problem oh wow that that that just gave me such such inspiration and and i want to let the the large audience all around the world uh let them know that that where i'm speaking right now is the hazak headquarters located in jewel avenue in queens in new york and in this area alone there's over ten thousand jewish kids that go to public schools ten thousand kids now what makes this community different than many other communities is the fact that they're mostly from traditional homes they're from the bukharian uh background and uh to bring them back is easy meaning they're not against yiddish they're not against judaism it's just that unfortunately they just don't know any better because the communist russia took it away from them so we've seen our success of bringing them back unbelievable but it's not just our community here in queens we've our our yeshiva placement division upstairs they work all around the country even in canada other other countries i'm happy to announce that we're already very very very close to the one thousand mark of kids and we're not satisfied we're not satisfied we want to do more we're ready willing and able to bring back every single holiness shama and whoever cannot make it to you for whatever reason you know we have for them we have after school programs we have sunday school programs we have teens division programs unfortunately they're in public schools but after school let's try to be in the car with them and we've seen tremendous amount of attack success during these types of programs even though they might not have been in yeshiva background but thank god we see that there has been a a a great uh kirby closeness of for these kids to become closer to dakota i mentioned already background i got to share with you something cute someone just sent me a message i do in there and uh and one boy told someone can you take a picture of me um behind the yeshiva so the guy's like why would i take a picture behind the issue he's like because the shotgun said i should have a shiva background that's beautiful these numbers are researched they're real this is this is the future we need to wake people up we need everyone to get involved with kiru with bringing our fellow brothers and sisters that are fired to bring them close and there's so much programs so much amazing organizations all over all you have to do is reach out and behave we're ready willing and able to do everything and anything to help you're from los angeles yep you told us about the need for inspiration stepped up in brockton we've put together so many amazing virtues amazing i know that god bless robbie from our office staff unbelievable our events managers organizing events virtually for basically every single state that is unbelievable everyone that is ready willing and able and wants we're ready will enable we have gordon so inspiring could you leave us sure one final message one final thought for our broad audience all over the world with pleasure so i here's what i see as someone who speaks a lot on campus as somebody speaks to uh both famous people and you know the uh the average person what people don't realize i want to just there's two points people are so drowning in social media and what they don't realize is that social media i'm sorry i'm joking what people don't realize is that while they've got this follower and this thumbs up there's millions of lonely people out there it not not everyone perhaps is going to be rabbi yaniv marov and start a unbelievable organization but a smile showing a little bit of warmth it breaks through that there's so many people that tell me rabbi the reason that i came to this is you stopped and you showed some sensitivity you showed some care there's so many lonely people out there that's number one number two i'll tell you one one thing that someone pointed out and i think it's true i think the reason i college bahu navigated my career so i was surrounded by and represented in different capacities famous athletes and famous celebrities is because when i really got to know these people that everyone would know they lonely dysfunctional people and it was it was unbelievable how they looked they looked at me and they were looking through the yarmulke and they felt with all their palaces and their private jets it's a whole i have a void i am what can i do now and it's amazing that we have in our backyard the treasure we've got the instructions for living we all know the very final destination what what we have with us the instruction for tarakram and organizations like is the gps to help us make sure that we do a little less recalculating and make sure that this journey is meaningful and purposeful and we can ignite a little spark in this dark world to to have hopefully bring some warmth and touch all our disenfranchised brothers and sisters embarrasses him as we go through pesach as we go through places i think that the constrictions uh mitraline comes from his cherished mates which means restricted there's so many of our brothers and sisters that are so restricted because they just don't know it's a little greeting a little a little touch of the beauty of torah and the shackles come off the pinterest ignited and bears the shame with everyone touching someone their cousin their friend we can all make sure that when we do our next research business hashem we'll see a very different chart and we'll see people coming back to torah in droves amen wow that is amazing we should marry to see the mother completely speed in their days and bring as many people closer to torah and go closer to mitzvot and closer to the god and it should be very easily invariably normal thank you very much thank you for keep up the good work rev beautiful thank you thank you you