5 Ways to Make Jewish Life Less ‘Clichéd’ from an Actual Millennial

Amram Altzman for newvoices.com

I am a Millennial. I say this proudly. I dance around Jewish tradition, modernity, and practice in a way that Millennials do. I whole-heartedly enjoy my status as a Generation Y’er. At the same time, however, I really don’t like how much of the conversation about how to engage my peers is fundamentally had by people who don’t seem to understand how our system works. And, as a self-confessed Millennial, I would like to share, in response to Rabbi Daniel Korobkin’s “Clichéd Judaism,” based on an article about how Christian Millennials are also facing problems engaging with religious institutions, five ways the establishment generations can make our Judaism less clichéd:

Understand that the world we live in is infinitely more connected than it was before: Our world is connected by the technology we grew up around, and that we have fully integrated into our lives. It connects us to people thousands of miles away, which we cherish. Our connectedness also means that we are more aware of the changing world around us, and are scrambling to find answers to questions about how we should treat the injustices we see in the world. We get to see, through photographs, blog posts, and tweets, a world that is far more complex than you told us it would be, and we need to digest that. Sometimes we come out with answers that you don’t like. We don’t want to take things at face value because in a world where everything can—and should—be thoroughly researched and fact-checked, we can’t just accept what you tell us as reality and move on. Our narratives about everything — history, Israel, identity — have all changed drastically because of the fact that we don’t want to take things for what they are.

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