When The Culture Exceeds the Religion

How is it that a religion whose culture is so strong and so successful still manages to turn off all but the most orthodox of us when it comes to the religious part itself?

Judaism is both a culture and a religion. Its norms tend to prioritize the very things that researchers have learned lead to consistent happiness: close relationships with other people and doing things that provide purpose and meaning.¹ Because Jews don’t believe in an afterlife or reincarnation, the reward for living a good life is living a good life. The more you prioritize the things that matter, the happier you will be and Jews tend to have a culture that prioritizes everything that truly matters — relationships, community, purpose, meaning. But we also have a religion that then fails to take those core truths and make them meaningful to most Jews inside of synagogue itself. 

The Jewish culture prioritizes family. It prioritizes children. It prioritizes interconnectedness, being with other people, celebrating with other people, mourning with other people, learning with other people. It prioritizes looking out for each other (and yes, boundaries are definitely an area our culture has challenges with). 

The Jewish culture prioritizes curiosity and learning. It prioritizes thinking unconventionally, challenging norms, using your mind to its fullest. We feel more alive when we’re engaged and thinking and not just going through the motions. Judaism strongly encourages that. Sure, everyone knows some of the great thinkers. Spinoza and Maimonides. Einstein and Marx. But in many ways, it’s the practice of encouraging anyone — even kids, especially kids — to just ask why is what really works. 

The Jewish culture prioritizes purpose and meaning. The concept of Tikkun Olam — repair the world — is core to who we are. Helping people through tzedakah (charity) is core to who we are. Contributing to society through science, through the arts, through ideas and learning, through government, through education, through industry, through technology is core to who we are. Not every Jew lives a purposeful life but overall, the culture consistently encourages us to spend our time and resources doing things that matter. And that generally leads to more happiness. 

But for far too many of us, the religious part of Judaism doesn’t follow suit. For a people who have produced a lot of great marketing and communications experts, the religious part of Judaism does a terrible job of taking what’s truly appealing about the culture and putting it front and center. 

Instead of services focused on the goals and challenges of daily living and how we can use the learnings of the Talmud and the Bible and Jewish history to think about them, we basically chant in a language we don’t actually speak where at least half of the prayers are just repetitive glorifications of god — even though an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent god clearly does not need our constant affirmation and validation. The service, the liturgy, the rituals of the religion are all too often boring, too rote, too intangible — and as a result, for far too many of us, effectively meaningless. 

And while Reform Judaism attempts to address these problems by making the service shorter and in English, from everything I’ve seen, it’s still mostly the same underlying concept as the traditional service, only easier. We need a different type of service altogether — one that constructively focuses on teaching people how to live better and happier lives. 

Why not have services that focus on tangible examples of useful life lessons? Why not make them interactive, make them more like workshops where people can get something out of it? Why not use real world examples that feel relevant to us right now? Why not take issues we face in modern day society that produce anxiety and challenges – whether it’s how to protect your kids on the internet or how to care about the world without letting it overwhelm and thoroughly depress you or how to structure your time to maximize the things that matter most – and find lessons in the Talmud, from Jewish scholars, from Jewish history to give people ideas and answers that they can actually use and put into practice? I know some synagogues offer programming like this, but I’m talking about making it the core offering, the main course — not something ancillary on Tuesday nights in the Greenberg Annex. 

Wouldn’t an interactive service that people find useful build more community than everyone just sitting there, usually bored, staring straight ahead? Even when you have a great rabbi, the service is still mainly a one way conversation. The rabbi’s sermon often is the highlight of the service, but it doesn’t have to always just be the rabbi doing the talking. So many people in our culture do so many interesting things that are relevant to how we live our lives right now. And most of them love attention (I certainly do!). Why not take advantage of that?’

If there are certain prayers or rituals that bring people comfort and joy, keep them. Maybe there’s a greatest hits compilation of the Shema and Aleinu and Adon Olam and Kaddish that are part of every service. Congregations can experiment with whatever ratio they want between traditional prayer and constructive, practical dialogue. And for people who like services exactly the way they already are, great. This is for people who aren’t getting enough out of the status quo. 

As a culture and an ethnicity, we have so much going for us. Any side by side comparison of our size  — 0.2% of the global population — and our contributions makes that clear. And yet when it comes to translating those qualities into religious practice, we fall woefully short.

Yes, I know our religion is 5,785 years old and you can argue that anything that lasts that long is fine the way it is. Perhaps. But I know I rarely want to go to synagogue. I know my kids never do. I know we can create a service and a structure that is more engaging, more useful, more rewarding and more attractive. 

Let’s take from the best of our culture — the very tenets that we know maximize human happiness, the very tenets that have made us so successful — and use them to try to make the religious part of our religion just as meaningful too.

1. As I wrote last month on my Substack, even in the middle of war, Israel was ranked the 8th happiest country in the 2025 World Happiness Report. The US fell to 24th in the rankings, the lowest in recorded history.