A Proposal to Save Sephardism
As a native of Seattle, I know a Seattle Sephardic name when I hear it. So when I notices that Larry Azose wrote an article for a journal issue entitled "Insights from the Sephardic Experience" (text not online), I was piqued. By the time I was done reading Mr. Azose's article, I was very sad.
Throughout my childhood, I had the privilege of growing up in one of the world's few hybrid Ashkenazic-Sephardic communities. Many of my friends were Sephardic; I learned how to daven and bentch in Nusach Sephardi; I even got to live next to Rabbi Solomon Maimon, the heart of the Sephardic community for over 60 years.
Then I moved away, and when I came home, things seemed different. The Sephardic synagogues were having trouble picking Rabbis, and most of the institutions created in my lifetime were dominated by Ashkenazim. It made me sad, but I always held out hope for the future, that the current Sephardic children would come home and give their community new life
Larry Azose holds out no such hope. He points to all of what I mentioned, and even more: the dilution of Sephardic heritage that invariably accompanies Ashkenazi marriages, the inexorable pull of larger communities, and an overall failure to nurture their own leaders. He works to stem the time, but feels that it is too late.
He even went as far as to say that Seattle was the last American Sephardi kehila, a statement that surprised me, given New York and LA. But I talked to a schoolmate of mine, a member of the fabled Nathan family and a New York Sephardi himself, and adding affirmed what Larry Azose said. He also added the post-1948 expulsion from Arab lands, and subsequent grouping with Edut Mizrach, to Sephardism's woes. "It's incredibly sad," he said, "to see a thousand-year civilization draw to a close."
I'm not in a position to argue with the demographics, but I can propose an alternative frame of mind that has been done before, and should be implemented again.
German Jewry over the past two hundred years also suffered from assimilation and persecution, to the point that only oneYekkecommunity,more famous than large, remains. Yet German Jewry lives on in hearts of its descendants the world over, including my own. The relish in observing unique minhagim, the continuity in studying and following Rav Hirsch and other German gedolim of the past, and just mere kinship of meeting anotherYekkedown the street - these are things I feel, and have seen many others others do, far away from KAJ in Washington Heights. (Heck, my family isn't even from that community.)
I think this is the way for Sephardim going forward. The communities may fade away, but the attitudes may not need to be. We can teach each Sephardi child that is a bearer of a tapestry woven over millenia by people from the Rambam and the merchants of Constantinople, all the way down to their own parents; and that its customs, history, and attitudes have a place in Jewish continuity that nothing Ashkenazic will ever be able to replace.
If the next generation is so inspired, Sephardism will be beyond the reach of human geography. And who knows? If it goes well enough, Sephardi sub-communities may spring to life, too.
