Why was God absent in the synagogues, and how has renewal reenergized synagogue life?
I don’t want renewal to be seen as a denomination, but rather as a process, as a moment. Any revitalization, any connection that we have with that which is beyond ourselves and in ourselves at the same time is a revitalization, and it happens to some people in Orthodoxy and some people in Reform, and even it happened to one young woman who was just ordained who was serving a community that was humanistic Judaism. She mentioned God and she was fired. There was this attitude that people had because very often oppression came connected with God — oppression by clergy, oppression by rabbis, oppression by people who couldn’t understand one generation. There was such a gap between one generation and the other, and they couldn’t bring God across. Another element: as long as we had three generations in one household, then the grandparents could talk to the grandkids because both of them had an enemy in the middle. But once it happened that we now have these nuclear families and single-parent
