This website has one primary purpose – to help stop and hopefully reverse the attrition of Jews from the American Jewish community. Many others are trying to do this too; some are trying to make Jewish prayer services more interesting and others are focused on improving Jewish education.
Those are laudable efforts that I agree with. However, those efforts only reach those who are actively in the Jewish community at the present time. So many of our numbers are not in the Jewish community, never go to prayer services and never attend Jewish educational classes. In other words, current efforts are like preaching to the choir and not connecting at all to everyone else.
So how do we reach them?
My hope is to reach them through the books I am and will be writing. Perhaps this website will also help. I hope so. I start from one basic assumption: If you have a product and it is not selling, you either have to change the buyers or you have to change the product.
Obviously, it is easier and more effective to change the product than to change the buyers. I believe Judaism needs to change or we will continue to lose huge segments of our Jewish family for as far as the eye can see. Nothing happening today is reversing the trend, which experts say is continually costing us 50% of our active membership.
Obviously, after a few decades of this, our numbers will be even more severely reduced, to where we are statistically insignificant. A few decades ago, the Jewish community constituted 4% of the American population. Today it is less than 2%.
Please see the Philosophy page for my current views on how to reach our lost Jews and keep the ones we still have. This is an ongoing work and I do not claim to have all the answers. I hope that answers on that page will improve with education and discussion.
As we, together, explore this important topic, your input, views, and comments are essential. I want to hear from you whether you agree or not…especially if you disagree, as we all have to start finding common ground from which to build anew. I hope that together we can find an answer to this problem that really works. If we don’t, who will?
My most recent posts will appear below this article on the Home page. Please look there whenever you come to this website. For all posts, past and present, and comments on them, go to the right sidebar under Categories, where posts are listed by topic.
Please register on this website and join the discussions. We need your voice and your efforts!
Sincerely yours,
Martin Vesole
