Thoughts on the “Wilderness”

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This week we begin reading the fourth book of the Torah, Bemidbar, “in the wilderness”. I’d like to reflect a bit on the theme of wilderness and what it might mean to us today. I’d like to drash it, literally, play with the meaning of the word “wilderness”, in three ways.

This was the Bemidbar/Shavuot dvar torah delivered to Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation (Bethesda, MD) on May 17, 2021. 

Aleph: Wilderness seems to be an apt metaphor to describe this past year of Covid-19 lockdowns and retreat from life as we once knew it. Often, we get a better perspective on an experience only when it is in our rearview mirror. This past week, I had my first, in-person gathering with a small group of people who are not family members. It felt a bit illicit, but wonderful. This weekend restaurants are opening back up at full capacity in Montgomery County. And starting next shabbat, we’ll have regular services at Adat Shalom for up to 110 people, while others can participate through Zoom. We are indeed emerging from a wilderness.

So, what have we learned? I went back yesterday to a British video that made its way around the world back when the pandemic first started. It was called the Great Realization. It shows a fable being read to a small child as he is put to bed by his older brother. Some of you may recall seeing the video when we had no idea whether the lockdown would last a month, a year or longer. The tale is read to the child decades into the future and it reflects on all that the world learned from the 2020 pandemic. It casts the pandemic as a consequence of all the ways that human civilization messed up in the first two decades of the 21st century. Environmental degradation; callousness to the poor and vulnerable; obsession with materialism; and addiction to mobile phones at the expense of human relationships. The “happy ending” of the fable is that, coming out of the pandemic wilderness, the world pivoted to a more human-centered, ecologically conscious, compassionate world. It should only happen to us!

It turns out that the wilderness/the pandemic became a moment of a great revelation. It is worth each of us taking stock of what we learned this past year. As difficult as it was, the radical change in routine was clearly a learning opportunity. It is important that we take some time to harvest that wisdom as it might change the way we live our lives going forward. Revelations, after all, come infrequently. They should change us.

Bet: Speaking of revelation, tomorrow night we celebrate the festival of Shavuot, the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Many Reconstructionists get hung up on whether or not the Torah was actually given by God to Moses as recorded in Exodus 19. That misses the point. Some of the biggest Truths in life, never actually happened. They were “realized”. And so it was, so it is, with the concept of revealed Torah.

Regardless of how observant you are (or are not), the “big reveal” of Torah is not the particulars of the 613 mitzvot, it is rather the notion that an ethically-driven, morally based society depends on people accepting that they need to surrender some autonomy for the common good. A society obsessed by individualism, untempered by a commitment to the common good will, ultimately, unravel. We have seen that, big time, during the pandemic. The people who refused to put on masks; who did not refrain from being in large gatherings; who called for the firing of public health officials for doing their jobs. And because of their selfishness, because of their refusal to surrender some of their autonomy for the common good, thousands died.

There was a piece in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago by an Israeli named Orly Halpern. She talked about how Israeli society accepted intrusions on their liberty for the sake of the common good. Centralized health records were shared with Pfizer in a deal cut early in the pandemic that assured that Israel would get a fast and plentiful supply of vaccine in return for data Pfizer wanted in order to study the vaccine’s effectiveness. Israelis respected the lockdown necessary to curtail the spread of the virus. Israelis were even OK with the national security services tracking every Israeli through their mobile phones in order to help with contact tracing. None of this could have happened in America. Israelis have learned that to survive, they need to accept limits on their rights and accept obligations that insure the survival of the state. It is called brit, covenant. In English, mutual obligation.  This is one of the key lessons of Shavuot and of Torah and perhaps, it is one of the gifts that Judaism can offer the world—how we need to surrender some of our autonomy in order to protect and preserve the common good.   

Gimmel: Throughout history, people withdrew from society and sought out the wilderness to find themselves, to hear some call or vocation and to discover their destiny. A sojourn in a wilderness was a common element to the life stories of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and countless others who brought wisdom into the world. The Morrocan-Israeli singer/songwriter, Shlomo Bar, has a song called Hamidbar Medaber, The Desert Speaks. What is so clever about the title of the song is that each Hebrew word has the same letters. Without vowels, they look identical. But this is more than a word play. The song title suggests that only in the quiet of the desert can we hear our inner voice, which may well be what our ancestors called, the voice of God.

The rabbis taught that the reason the Torah was given in the wilderness is so that no one could claim that Torah, Eternal Truth, belongs to any one people or any one place. Tour books notwithstanding, we don’t even really know where Mt. Sinai is. And that is as it should be. We don’t need to create a Temple in the place where Torah was given. We don’t need to plant a national flag. Torah is universal. It is without time and without place. It happens when we empty ourselves of all of our assumptions and open ourselves up to the universe and the universal Truths that the universe holds for us.

Even as I speak, the Holy Land of Israel is desecrating all notions of holiness. This is what happens when small-minded people and small-minded leaders make decisions and take actions that violate the deep wisdom of the Hebrew prophets. It is what happens when the children of Abraham forget the reason why Torah was given in the wilderness, not tied to any political entities.

Let us pray that we, that the world, can re-discover the holiness of the midbar, of the wilderness, and that in that wild but quiet place, we can find a Mt. Sinai that will teach us how to live more compassionately with one another and in harmony with our planet.

Me and Jewish Supremacy

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Several years ago, I was leading services at my congregation in the month of February and we dedicated the shabbat to Black History Month. In addition to my dvar torah, which was on the theme of “Racism in America”, we sponsored an afternoon of learning that featured a panel of three people of color, breakout discussion groups and then, a final, plenary session to assess the themes that emerged in the course of the day. Following the practice that has become standard in progressive circles for some time, the Jews and non-Jews of color who were with us were in one breakout group. The rest of the White participants were distributed into several other, all-White breakout groups. I expected some resistance to the way we divided the group and, in fact, it became a topic of conversation in our closing session.

This article appeared in the Times of Israel on February 11, 2021.  

The explosion of interest in understanding the roots of systemic racism in America since the killing of George Floyd has brought to the fore a shelfful of books, including Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy, that explain why we separated the attendees for their breakout conversations. We now better understand that rooting out racism in America requires every ethnic and religious community to look at its own cultural heritage and come to grips with the implicit bias that it might contain.  

This work is hard and it generates much resistance, even anger, from White people, many of whom, consider themselves the “good guys” on issues of race in America. I have both participated in and facilitated dozens of discussions on racism over the past few years and the mere mention of White privilege or White supremacy gets the White people in the room very worked up. Most Black activists have lost patience with spending time in these spaces. Their view is that unless and until White people are prepared to come to grips with how much the language, customs and practices of American society privileges White people and marginalizes (if not worse) people of color, it will be impossible to make any progress on eradicating racism in this country. It took me a while to get “woke” to this truth but once you see it, it becomes inescapable.

I brought this newfound consciousness to the Torah reading this past shabbat, which included Ex 19:5-6, the source for the concept of Jews as “the chosen people”: “If you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all peoples. Indeed, all the earth is Mine. You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation…” I am well aware of how it is possible to spin this passage in ways that soften it. Jews are the “choosing people”; Jews take it upon themselves to bring ethical monotheism to the world; Jews need to live in accordance with a higher standard of morality.

But that is not what the Biblical text says. It says that God selected the Jews to be his special people, choosing them from all the other people in the world. And I also know how many Jews seize upon the idea of Jews as the chosen people to support their belief that Jews are smarter, better and more deserving than gentiles.

I was raised in a traditionally observant Jewish home. Daily, I recited the morning blessing, thanking God for “not making me a gentile” (shelo asani goy). I also have a memory, seared into my mind, of my 5th grade Talmud teacher at yeshiva screaming at the Black custodian who brought in a tray of wine for kiddush on Friday afternoon, yelling at him for making the wine traife (unkosher) because it was touched by a gentile. I am hardly the first person to note how often Jews behave in cruel and insensitive ways in the service to upholding some Jewish law. My Talmud teacher was correct that there is an halachic prohibition against a gentile touching kosher wine, but his behavior was one of many experiences that I had which made me believe that there had to be a better way to be Jewish.

Perhaps this explains why I was drawn early in my life to the thought of Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. Kaplan’s teachings about Judaism as an evolving, religious civilization; on the need for Judaism to be centered on social justice; and a God who was a source for how Jews could realize their highest human potential, both ethically and spiritually, spoke to me. Even though the movement Kaplan spawned remains small, many of his ideas became central to the teaching of both Reform and Conservative Judaism.

Except when it came to his teaching about the chosen people. Kaplan rejected the idea outright for three reasons. His theology could not support the idea of a personal God who chose one people above all other peoples on earth. He saw how the idea of choseness was taken by both Christians and Muslims to argue that each, in turn, “replaced” the Jews as God’s chosen people. And he understood that such a replacement theology by other faith traditions would forever be a source that generated hatred, rejection and, if necessary, annihilation of the Jews. Yet, in a major study on “Reconstructionism and American Jewish Life” by Charles Liebman, published as the lead article in the 1970 American Jewish Yearbook, Liebman found that even as most Jews agreed with many of Kaplan’s ideas, they were not prepared to abandon the idea of Jews as the chosen people.   

We are becoming increasingly aware of how deeply tribal our world is. Throughout history, political leaders learned that one path to power was by promoting one group over other groups, who got portrayed as “dangerous” and a “threat to national survival”. Donald Trump used this strategy to win the U.S. Presidency and recruit a stridently loyal following. The hatred and divisiveness left in the wake of his Presidency has challenged the very basis of this country’s democratic fabric.

Even before the start of World War II, Mordecai Kaplan warned that ethnocentrism was what prevented religion from being a force for good in the world. It is not hard to cite how many people were slaughtered through the centuries in “the name of God” by fervent believers of all faiths. Kaplan believed that rejecting the chosen people idea would be one way to send a signal that some teachings of religion could be pernicious. Perhaps, he believed, other religions and cultures might also root out their own triumphalism that plants the seed for intolerance in the world.

Just as the feminist movement raised our consciousness about how male-centric language needed to be modified if we were to make society more equitable to women, so too, anti-racist activists have made us more conscious of how language reinforces implicit prejudice in people. In the mid-20th century, Mordecai Kaplan and his colleagues edited out ethnocentric passages in the Jewish prayer book. The blessing recited by Jews when they have an aliyah to the Torah, reads: “God…who has chosen us from among all the nations” (asher bachar banu mikol ha-amim). The Reconstructionist prayer book substituted: “God…who has brought us closer to serving the One” (asher karvanu l’avodato). In so doing, the prayer conveyed, not “privilege” but “vocation”. What is required of Jews who want to follow the Torah?

In a similar spirit, the first Reconstructionist Passover Haggadah, published around the same time, eliminated the passage that read: “God…pour out your wrath on the gentiles (shfoch hamatcha al hagoyim). For these heresies, Kaplan’s prayer books were burned at a public ceremony sponsored by the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada at the Hotel McAlpin in Manhattan in June 1945 and Kaplan himself was “excommunicated”.

Behind Kaplan’s liturgical changes was his deeply held belief that all religions were equally valid paths to Truth and righteous living. He saw how values central to Judaism, such as compassion, concern for the poor and vulnerable, care for creation and charity were shared by many faith traditions. What differentiated religions was the particular customs, ceremonies and liturgy used to clothe those universal principles. It is interesting that some 60 years after the public burning of Kaplan’s prayer book, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks published The Dignity of Difference (2002) which echoed many of Kaplan’s ideas about religious pluralism. Serving at the time as the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Sacks was heavily criticized by right-wing Orthodox rabbis in the community and he was forced to re-write certain “offending passages” and re-issue his book in order to remain in good standing, given his highly political position.

Many Jews today want to help rid our society of systemic racism and serve as good allies to communities of color. But in addition to the required “homework” that we have to do as White Americans to root out the many ways that White privilege reinforces the marginalization of people of color in all sectors of society, we also have homework to do as American Jews. The chosen people idea may strike us as benign and a source of ethnic pride. Yet if we understand the extent to which ethnocentrism perpetuates a belief in a hierarchy of human worth (Jewish superiority), then we must recognize that the idea of “choseness” is a barrier to a world in which every human being is seen as made in the image of God, worthy of respect and honor. In The Dignity of Difference, Jonathan Sacks challenges his readers “to see the face of God in those who are not ‘in our image’”.

I am not naïve. It is not likely that the Jewish world will follow Kaplan’s attempt to edit the chosen people idea out of our tradition’s lexicon. Nor am I under any illusion that, even if that were to happen, anti-Semites would suddenly think and behave differently towards Jews. But, in the end, religion should be about the raising of consciousness. If we think that Judaism can be a force for social transformation and harmony, we need to be more sensitive about the way we talk about the heritage that we love and what it implies about our neighbors who are not members of the tribe.

America: A Crisis of Faith

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I’m an old-fashioned news hound. I can’t start my day without reading the newspaper. The Washington Post is my paper of choice. And I read the hard copy that gets thrown on my lawn every morning around 5am. But then, as I start my workday, I work in a professional bubble of my own creation. I get no news feeds at all. Given how upsetting the news has been for the past four years, putting the news out of sight and out of mind once my day gets going has been an act of self-preservation.

On January 6th, I had a 4pm call with a rabbinic colleague. It started with him asking me: “Have you seen the footage of the U.S. Capitol being overrun by Trump supporters?” I was incredulous. My friend filled in a few more details, we agreed to proceed with our business and, when the call ended around 5pm, I left my study to watch TV for the next few hours.

This article appeared in the Times of Israel on January 14, 2021.  

It has taken a few days for some of the details to get filled in. The colossal failure of the Capitol Police to heed the warnings from the FBI about the threat posed by those who came to Washington to stop Congress from ratifying the election of Joe Biden as our next President. The heroism of many police who, badly outnumbered, tried to protect the Capitol and the legislators inside from an angry mob. The complicity of other police who aided and abetted the insurgents. The courage of members of Congress to come back that same evening to finish the business of certifying Joe Biden’s victory. The craven actions of other legislators who, even after living through an attempt to sabotage a democratic election through violence that cost five lives but could have taken many more, still voted to reverse the outcome of the election.  

Donald Trump’s culpability for, what can only be called, an insurrection, is beneath contempt. From the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017 to the sacking of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, he has given Presidential sanction to White Nationalists, Neo-Nazis, racists, anti-Semites and other purveyors of violence and hate. What has long lurked on the peripheries of American society has now been given a national spotlight. Who would have ever thought that these dark and evil forces would be championed by a sitting U.S. President?

I, like many Americans, find myself deeply rattled by the events of January 6th.  Is America a land of equal opportunity for all? Does the American justice system treat all people the same? Do we welcome to our shores, (in the words of Emma Lazarus, carved on the Statue of Liberty) “the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free?” Black Americans, living a totally different reality than White Americans, have long despaired of these American myths. For the rest of us, this new consciousness creates a crisis of faith.

The Talmud tells the story of Elisha ben Abuyah. Born to a prominent Jerusalem family, Elisha earned a reputation as a most promising, young, rabbinic scholar. It is told that he witnessed a young boy climbing a tree to take some eggs from a bird’s next. Following Jewish law, the boy chased away the mother bird before taking the eggs, showing a concern for the feelings of the mother bird. And yet, when coming off the tree, the boy was bitten by a snake and died. Having fulfilled a mitzvah for which the Torah promises a long life, Elisha witnessed the opposite and he suffers from a crisis of faith. Elisha abandons Judaism, becomes an apostate and from that time forth, is only referred to in the Talmud as Acher, “the other one”.

So much of our faith in America has been shaken. It is easy to despair. We could take Elisha’s path—by becoming cynical; by disengaging from politics; by demonizing all those who don’t agree with us. And each of those options will accelerate the erosion of America’s democratic fabric. No. Despair is not an option.

The Jewish community has a large stake in what is unfolding in Washington D.C. A significant number of Jews turned a blind eye to manifold examples of Donald Trump’s assault on truth and alleged criminal behavior because he was “good for Israel”. It is no different than Evangelical Christians who ignored the many ways that Donald Trump’s ethical behavior violated core teachings of the Church just because he could deliver a few, reliable conservative justices for the Supreme Court. The Jewish people paid a heavy price when a previously democratic country came up with all kinds reasons to allow a demagogue called Adolf Hitler to take over Germany. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s powerful video this week draws the obvious parallels between the rise of Nazism in Europe, which his family lived through, and the behavior of Donald Trump.

After four years of Trump’s Presidency, we have suffered tremendous damage to our country’s democratic institutions and principles. Within days of this writing, we will have a new President and a Democratic-led Congress. What is certain, is that the road back to an America that is worthy of cherishing, will require the commitment and energies of every person who cares about liberty, tolerance and justice.  

May we be equal to the challenge.

Wrestling with our Demons

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Genesis Ch. 32 contains the well-known story of Jacob’s night of wrestling the angel in advance of his reunion with his brother Esau. They have not seen each other since Jacob stole Esau’s birthright and ran away to save himself from Esau’s potential revenge.

It is tempting to use the story as a lesson about how two nations need to reconcile with one another. In our current, American moment, the story has some lessons about what it means to live in a divided country, when two factions see the world totally differently.  

This article appeared in the Times of Israel on December 6, 2020.  A version of this article was delivered as a dvar torah at Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation (Bethesda, MD). 

But instead, I want to look at the story in a more personal way. The literal reading of the text has us imagine that Jacob wrestled with a Divine Being, either an angel or God. Even though I prefer more allegorical readings of the Biblical text to explore deeper levels of meaning, even when taking the story literally, there is much for us to learn about human nature and ourselves.

Jacob stands at a crossroad in his life. The incident takes place at maavar Yabok, the fjord of the Yabok river, a tributary of the Jordan River, about 30 miles north of the Dead Sea. But Yabok may be a pun on the name Yaakov, and maavar can mean “passageway” or “transition” in which case maavar Yabok might mean: “Jacob at the crossroads of his life”! Jacob believes that he is destined to be the father of a great nation. This is a legacy passed down from his grandfather, Abraham, to his father, Isaac, and now to him. Yet, not unlike many individuals aspiring to greatness, Jacob wrestles with self-doubt. “Am I worthy?” He wonders if he is the legitimate heir to God’s promise to Abraham. Perhaps Esau was the rightful heir?

In the 1970’s, there was a commercial that ran on TV for Chiffon margarine. Suggesting that the margarine tasted virtually the same as butter, the punch line was: “It is not nice to fool Mother Nature”. Jacob’s memory of how he deceived his father to get Esau’s birthright likely haunted him ever since. Think: “It is not nice to fool the Master of the Universe”.

With this as backdrop, Jacob’s supernatural adversary—be it an angel or God– the night before his reunion with Esau, is a message to Jacob that he cannot fulfill his destiny without coming to terms with his “original sin”. His adversary confronts him to convey: You must take responsibility for the deception of your brother. You must find a way to own your subterfuge and reconcile with Esau.

In this version of the story, the adversary’s renaming of Jacob takes on great meaning. He goes from Yaakov, “the heel,” to Yisrael, “the one who wrestled with God” or, if you will allow, “the one who confronted an unpleasant truth that revealed something about his own dark side which he much overcome in order to be the father of a great nation”.

If we reject the literal version of the story and imagine that the struggle was a dream sequence—we know that Jacob is big on dreams—there is even more insight to be gained. One possibility, not at all far-fetched, is that the night before Jacob is to have his first encounter with his older, and physically stronger, brother, Esau, Jacob dreams that he is in a wrestling match with him. The wrestling match re-visits a struggle between twin brothers that started in the womb of Rebecca. Even in utero, Jacob tried to usurp his brother’s status as first born by grabbing his ankle so as to emerge first. Because he failed, he must trick Esau to win the coveted birthright of the firstborn from his father.

Jacob realizes that he falls into a trap that is so common to human nature. We believe that love is finite. We believe that life is a zero-sum game where a handful are “winners” and everyone else is a “loser”. Jacob’s mother and father help to perpetuate that insidious view of the world. It seems that Isaac has only one birthright blessing to confer, to the eventual horror of Esau, who comes to his father’s tent after the blessing has already been given to Jacob. And Rebecca, knowing that only one birthright will be conferred, conspires to have Jacob arrive first, posing as Esau. Jacob “wins” the birthright, but he pays a price in feelings of guilt for the rest of his life.

The dream is a chance at a reboot, a reset. This time, Jacob does not try to pull his brother back, as he attempted to do in the womb. Nor does he dress up like Esau to trick an aging and failing Isaac into getting the blessing of the first born.  In the dream, there is conflict between the brothers. As twins, they will compete for the love of their parents. They will always be compared to each other. As much as they may want to celebrate the success of the other, they will wrestle with the jealousy that their twins’ success will engender. And so, in the dream, they wrestle. But they do so face to face. Genesis 32:31 has Jacob say: ki raiti Elohim panim el panim vatinatzel, “I have seen a divine Being face to face and I prevailed”. My, more midrashic translation, would be: “I have confronted a hard truth about myself and my treachery, face to face, and am a better person for it.”

The conflict between Jacob and Esau is real and it will not go away. But it can be handled with more honesty and more compassion than happened when they were immature children. Most poignantly, in the dream, with the arrival of dawn, Jacob asks his adversary, Esau, to give him a blessing before he takes his leave. The blessing will not be stolen; it will be freely given by Esau, who will not begrudge his brother his aspiration to father a great nation. With age, they have known love and loss and they have matured. The next morning, Jacob will meet Esau, ready to ask forgiveness for what he did to him at their father’s knee. And they will reconcile, making it possible for Jacob, now named Yisrael, to fulfill his destiny.

There is yet a third version of the story that I want to suggest. This too, sees the story as a dream sequence. But the adversary is neither a Divine Being nor his brother, Esau. It is Jacob’s shadow self. Jacob is literally, wrestling with his own demons. All of the elements from the prior two interpretations are still in play. Jacob is anxious about his reunion with his brother. He has been haunted by his youthful deception of Esau. He suffers from feelings of self-loathing. He does not want his legacy to be “my Dad, the trickster”. Abraham and Isaac would expect better.

The dream of a wrestling match is an apt metaphor. In our consciousness, we are torn between our yetzer ha-ra and our yetzer tov, our evil inclination and our good inclination. Our evil inclination tells us: Don’t be a sucker.  You know what it takes to get ahead. What is a small little lie in the larger scheme of things? The ends justify the means. And our good inclination tells us: Do the right thing. Goodness is its own reward. You need to be able to look in the mirror and know that you have lived a life of integrity. Don’t sell your soul for a bowl of porridge.

This is the human condition. And, as we have come to realize of late, to our horror, goodness does not always prevail.

Except for Jacob, it does. Once he confronts his own demons in his dream, he knows how he has fallen short. And he knows how he must make things right with his twin brother, Esau. The text tells us that when dawn comes, Jacob has survived the night of travail. The wrestling match was not a physical one. It was a psychological one, and as such, far more significant for the person Jacob will become. This version yields yet another way to understand the verse: (Genesis 32:31): ki raiti Elohim panim el panim vatinatzel, “I have seen a divine Being face to face and I prevailed”. I would translate it as: “I have come to realize how strong is my yetzer ha-ra, my evil inclination. If I want to be worthy of the name Yisrael, Israel, I must find a way to keep it in check.” In this version, va-tinatzel is not, “he prevailed” but rather, “this is what it takes to be a spiritually mature person”.

The Biblical text tells us (32:33) that at the end of the night of wrestling, Jacob survives but is left with a wounded hip socket. He will now, forever, walk with a limp. Past misdeeds are never erased; at best, we confront them and learn from those mistakes. The scars left by those misdeeds become markers of our spiritual growth. When Jacob approaches Esau the next morning to reconcile, gone is the arrogance of his youth. His deep remorse is visible from across the field as he limps towards his twin brother. The physical wound represents Jacob’s ability to own his act of deception and the possibility, that his success, might have been built on a lie.

In a spiritually mature world, the ability to own the misdeeds of our past is a sign of moral courage and strength. The ability to repent and to ask forgiveness for our sins opens the possibility for severed relationships to be healed. We need to know this truth deep in our hearts because we live at a time when public figures weave elaborate webs of lies and social media provides the platform that allows those lies to be taken as truth. We need to know better.

Did Jacob wrestle with an angel? With Esau? With himself? Yes. All of the above. And it doesn’t matter. Because in each version he learns something about himself that allows him to be worthy of the name Israel-the one who wrestled with God. The one who wrestled with hard truths.

The next morning, Jacob limps to meet his brother. And by showing that vulnerability, Jacob and Esau are able to embrace, repair their estrangement and respect one another, even as they take different life paths.

A morality tale for us all.  

A Rabbinic Call to Uphold Truth and Democracy

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By Rabbis Sharon Brous, Laura Geller, Jack Moline, Sid Schwarz and Shmuly Yanklowitz

 

To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.  This political moment is a time for rabbis and clergy of all faiths to speak out forcefully to protect both truth and democracy.

At several times during the presidential campaign, President Trump refused to commit to accepting the outcome of the election should Joe Biden prevail. He set the stage to question the election outcome by saying that mail-in ballots invited fraud even though he presented no evidence to back up that claim. Election experts repeatedly cited elections going back decades in which fraud rarely even reached one tenth of one percent.

This article appeared in the Forward on November 9, 2020.

In a column published November 1, 2020 in the Washington Post, Benjamin Ginsberg, the Republican Party’s go-to election attorney who has monitored every election for the Party since 1984 wrote the following: “…Trump has devoted his campaign and the Republican Party to this myth of voter fraud. …disenfranchising enough voters has become key to his reelection strategy. Perhaps this was the plan all along. The president’s unsubstantiated talk about “rigged” elections caused by absentee ballot “fraud” and “cheating” has been around since 2016; it’s just increased in recent weeks.

Trump has enlisted a compliant Republican Party in this shameful effort. The Trump campaign and Republican entities engaged in more than 40 voting and ballot court cases around the country this year. In exactly none — zero — are they trying to make it easier for citizens to vote. In many, they are seeking to erect barriers.”

We stand now at a moment that many long-feared. Joe Biden has won enough electoral votes to be declared President-elect. In every other election in American history, the defeated candidate conceded the contest and, in so doing, committed to the peaceful transition of power that is the hallmark of a functioning democracy. Donald Trump not only refuses to concede, but he is engaging in rhetoric that invites his supporters to challenge the outcome of a free and fair election. Even worse, he has said things that encourage his followers to take to the street, raising the prospect of civil unrest and violence.

This is no longer a partisan issue. It is a moral issue. The message that needs to come forth from pulpits throughout America must emphasize three points:

  • Uphold the democratic principle of peaceful transition of power regardless of party affiliation;
  • Condemn in the strongest possible language public statements that might encourage Americans to resort to violence or may set the stage for ongoing undermining of legitimate American political institutions;
  • Allow the U.S. court system to adjudicate any claims of impropriety in the US election process and but refrain from public statements that encourage the spread of baseless conspiracy theories that puts the reputation and safety of public officials at risk.

Violation of any one of these three principles needs to be condemned forcefully and unequivocally. Members of the Republican party who are complicit with this strategy of President Trump, either by echoing these allegations or by their silence, must be repudiated by every patriotic American.

When President-elect Joe Biden launched his campaign for the presidency, he called it “a battle for the soul of America”. Many political pundits scoffed at the phrase, thinking it was too abstract to motivate the electorate. But there is ample evidence that Biden got it exactly right.

A Biden campaign that called on Americans to come together to take on the challenges facing our country and our world defeated a Trump campaign that promised four more years of fear and division.  True to form, in President-elect Biden’s acceptance speech on Saturday night he said: “I’m a proud Democrat. But I will govern as an American president. I’ll work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did. Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now.”

One of the many names of God in the Jewish tradition is emet, truth. Rabbis, regardless of their political views and/or affiliations, must be defenders of truth. Following Joe Biden’s invocation of Ecclesiastes chapter 3 that this is “a time to heal”, rabbis should speak forcefully to those who look to them for moral leadership, both Democrats and Republicans, that we must now re-commit to uphold truth and democracy as the pillars of our beloved America.

________________

Sharon Brous (Conservative) is the rabbi of IKAR in Los Angeles; Laura Geller (Reform) is rabbi emerita of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, CA; Jack Moline (Conservative) is the president of Interfaith Alliance based in Washington D.C.; Sid Schwarz (Reconstructionist) is founding rabbi of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, MD and a Senior Fellow at Hazon; Shmuly Yanklowitz (Orthodox) is the President of Uri L’Tzedek: Orthodox Social Justice based in New York. The opinions expressed here are of the authors and not of their organizations.  

Jewish Communities of Meaning: An Emerging Trend

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I have spent a considerable amount of time over the past 20 years in the synagogue transformation space.  I currently direct CLI, a two-year fellowship for rabbis on visionary thinking and change management. On our website, we curate a monthly synagogue innovation blog which includes some truly transformational ideas that are re-imagining synagogues for the better.

But notwithstanding the work that I do to help transform synagogues into vibrant spiritual communities, I am persuaded that, in the future, synagogues will no longer be the only platform where American Jews will experience Jewish life. This is why in 2015, I helped to launch Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network,  whose objective is to identify, convene and build capacity among a growing network of new models of Jewish identity and community.   

 

This article appeared in The Jewish Peoplehood Papers, Vol 26a, published by the Center for Jewish Peoplehood Education in September 2020. It was subsequently distributed by eJewishPhilanthropy on September 29, 2020. 

The premise of Kenissa is that, even as legacy Jewish organizations continue to lose market share, there is a growing ecosystem of new organizations and communities that are capturing the interest of next generation Jews who long for contexts of meaning that can enrich their lives. And while many Jews will find such experiences outside of Jewish contexts, a large percentage of Jews are more than open to having those experiences delivered in a Jewish key. I advanced this idea in an extended fashion in my 2013 book, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future.

The Kenissa initiative, an outgrowth of the book, has allowed us to support the emerging network of Jewish communities of meaning that are attracting Jews within one or more of the following six thematic frameworks:

  • Chochma – engaging with the wisdom and practice of our inherited Jewish heritage;
  • Kedusha – helping people live lives of sacred purpose;
  • Tzedek – inspiring people to work for a more just and peaceful world;
  • Kehilla – creating intentional, covenantal communities that bind people to one another and to a shared mission;
  • Yetzira – the human ability to imagine/invent/create ideas, science, art and culture.
  • Shomrei Adama–Pursuing a lifestyle that is ecologically responsible and sustainable, including new communal living arrangements.

These frameworks will be familiar to anyone who is actively engaged in Jewish life. Synagogues, JCC’s and even Federations, could likely categorize many elements of their respective programs into one or more of these themes. These legacy organizations helped to define Jewish life in the 20th century and they were the primary institutions that shaped the Jewish identity of American Jews during that time. Today, however, with some rare exceptions, those same institutions are having a hard time attracting next generation Jews to their programs.  The decline in membership at JCCs and synagogues and the dropoff in the number of donors to Jewish Federations has led to much concern on the part of the stewards of the organized Jewish community.

But one would be misled about the future trajectory of Jewish identity in North America if your only metric happens to be membership in legacy Jewish organizations. The social economy today is such that a person with a good idea can, without too much difficulty, use the organizing power of social media to gather Jews (along with their non-Jewish partners and friends because it is rare for the younger generation to be exclusive in the way previous Jewish generations were) to do, just about anything.

In fact, since 2016 Kenissa has been identifying and convening new models of Jewish identity and community and inviting them to be part of a national network of creatives who can learn from each other, partner with one another, and acquire the tools, skills and strategies to be successful entrepreneurs.

We have found that many of the entrepreneurs themselves tend to be bnai bayit, young people who benefitted from Jewish youth movements, camps, day schools, Hillels and trips to Israel. Yet they did not want to partake of their parents’ version of Judaism. Typical of millennials, passion for their respective projects grows out of their ability to own and re-mix Judaism in their own, unique generational and cultural idioms. Not surprisingly, the projects that they are launching attract next gen Jews in ways that much better funded legacy Jewish organizations cannot hope to do. Each represents a relatively new organization or community that is attracting Jews who might otherwise never affiliate with or even walk into a Jewish legacy institution.

There is certainly a narrative out there, supported by data, that suggests that Jewish life is in decline. Having worked closely with Jewish social entrepreneurs and their organizations for many years now, I see a very different story. Our database now lists close to 400 organizations that have been created since the year 2000. Many of them are attracting Jews who never previously had an association with any Jewish organization. On our website, you can read about how each community of meaning has succeeded in attracting people to their program. Despite the fact that most of the organizations we work with are small and under-resourced, legacy Jewish organizations have much to learn from these start-ups.

In the next phase of our work, we will be exploring how to build partnerships between these emerging communities of meaning and legacy Jewish organizations. Each could benefit from collaboration. Stewards of Federations, synagogues and JCC’s should not try to coopt these entrepreneurs and their organizations. They should provide financial support, organizational expertise, mentorship and then…prepare to do a lot of listening. The Jewish community is being reimagined in exciting ways. Pay attention.

Jewish life is not the only dimension of our culture that has experienced a flip from top down to bottom up. We are living in a “maker” culture—people want to have a hand in shaping the very culture that they consume.  There are many who will bemoan the weakening of Jewish institutions, the decline in affiliation rates with the organized Jewish community and the departure from longstanding norms regarding everything from intermarriage to gender identity to the relationship with the State of Israel. For sure, some of these trends are cause for concern. But this is not the Judaism of the last century; it is the Judaism of the 21st century. We have had numerous leaders of the Jewish community come to our Kenissa national gatherings and walk away deeply impressed with the passion and creativity of this next generation of Jewish leaders. 

I think that it is cause for celebration, witnessing the ways that Jews are engaged in the redefinition of Jewish identity and community.

Covid-19 Update:

What a difference a few months make! Our lives and the way we engage with institutions has been radically altered. And, at least from the vantage point of the U.S., it does not seem likely that we will return to our pre-Covid reality for at least six months, and perhaps, for a year or more.

The Kenissa Network continues to be active with weekly blogs, occasional webinars and periodic collaborations between Kenissa organizations because of the relationships that got built at nine national gatherings we held over the past five years. Yet other parts of our plan are on hold. Specifically, for the last two years, we hosted senior executives from about 20 of the largest Jewish Federations in North America. We wanted them to see, first hand, what we had been seeing: a group of social entrepreneurs, passionate about Jewish life, who were devising new ways of exploring Jewish life and community and attracting a good number of next Gen Jews to their programs. The vast majority of the organizations we invited were not known to the Federation professionals, even though most of them held the “engagement” portfolio for their respective communities.

Since “seeing is believing”, our plan over the next several years was to loop back to the Federations that sent us their senior staffers and to begin exploring with each community what it might look like to pro-actively reach out to these younger, edgier organizations and to explore some combination of collaboration, seed funding, skill training and/or cohort based leadership development. We had clearly succeeded in making the case for this agenda and the next few years were going to be our opportunity to advance this agenda, community by community.

This part of our plan is now on hold. These very same Federations are faced with trying to save their legacy institutions from imploding. Buildings sit vacant, fundraising is way down, valuable professional staff are being let go or drastically cut back. Ironically, many of the organizations in the Kenissa Network may prove to be more nimble than legacy institutions with budgets exponentially larger than their own. It may well be that as the Jewish community is forced to re-assess everything from scratch, they may find in the robust network of Jewish start-up organizations, new ways of manifesting the heritage of a 4000 year old tradition.

Longing for Face Time

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Every good sermon has at least one compelling metaphor. Here is mine for this evening; it is visual (a camera shot of the empty sanctuary).

When I learned back in July that Adat Shalom would only be holding remote services for the High Holydays, I was overtaken by a deep sadness that I felt in the pit of my stomach. It wasn’t a surprise and I think it was the only responsible course of action given the current state of the Covid-19 pandemic. And still, I found myself really bummed out. I was longing for face time, and I am not talking about the iPhone variety. Real face time, with each of you.

 

This was the Kol Nidre sermon delivered to Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation (Bethesda, MD) on September 27, 2020. 

I love the chagim. I love the liturgy and the music. I love the universal themes and the rituals that are particular to our tradition. I love seeing the Adat Shalom regulars as well as checking in with those who show up less regularly, but with whom I have had meaningful interactions over the years. I love the socializing before and after services and yes, maybe even a bit during services. I love the holiday meals (my wife, Sandy, is an amazing hostess and cook). And I love all the hugs. None of that is happening this year. And I miss it all very much.  

Given the scale of suffering that the pandemic has caused, my complaining about not having High Holyday face time may seem trite, or even somewhat indulgent. But maybe not. Because “face time” is a metaphor for something much larger.

Some of you know that the same year that I helped to found Adat Shalom, 1988, I also founded a national organization devoted to exploring the intersection between Jewish learning, Jewish values and social responsibility. It was called PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values. Our flagship program was called Panim el Panim, which brought Jewish high school students to Washington from all over North America for programs on Judaism and social activism. The phrase panim el panim comes from the Bible and it is used to describe Jacob’s experience of seeing God’s face in Genesis ch. 32. Later it describes the way Moses encountered God in both Numbers 12 and Deut 34. So, while the modern Hebrew word panim means “face”, the phrase panim el panim suggests a deep encounter, when you come to understand a higher truth about what it means to be a human being who functions responsibly in relationship with others. To me, panim el panim is an alternate formulation of the Golden Rule: vahavta lreacha kamocha, “you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. It is, in essence, face time that leads to “beloved community”, a form of community that we so desperately need today.

This kind of “face time” has informed the communal culture of Adat Shalom since its founding. The purpose of the community was not to sponsor shabbat services, educational programs, life cycle events and more. Most synagogues do that but it confuses ends and means. The purpose of every Adat Shalom event and program was to cultivate deep bonds of community and an ethos of chesed/lovingkindness to one another and tzedek/justice to the world. Services, onegs, classes were a means to an end. This was putting into practice a core Reconstructionist principle coined by our beloved, Rabbi Ira Eisenstein, that “belonging comes prior to believing”. It also is consistent with the teachings of Emmanuel Levinas, the 20th century French Jewish philosopher, who saw the Biblical phrase, panim el panim, as the way human beings cultivate a feeling of compassion and even love for the “other”, the fundamental building block of ethical living.

But I am afraid that this orientation to life is in short supply in our country today. And I believe that the manifold problems that we currently face—the pandemic, climate change, racism, poverty, the erosion of democracy– will get worse unless we make a major spiritual course correction. So, how do we do that?

I believe, as did the rabbis of our tradition, that human beings have moral agency. We have choice. And every day, each human being can decide either to exclusively advance their own interests or to act in such a way that shows concern, compassion and love for our fellow human beings and for creation. This is what our tradition describes as yeter ha-ra, the evil inclination and yetzer tov, a good inclination. These are Jewish terms for selfishness and selflessness. It is that simple. To my great sorrow, over the past few years, we have witnessed a situation in America where the evil inclination is ascendant and, as a result, every one of the crises I mentioned moments ago, is getting worse and not getting better. Alarmingly, that more selfish America, epitomized by the phrase “America First”, is like a contagion, spreading as quickly as has Covid-19. And it is seriously endangering our Republic.

The Bible seemed to anticipate periods of time when history would turn towards evil. Ironically, here too, the Hebrew word, panim, serves as metaphor. In Deut 31 God says: “I will surely conceal my face (haster astir panai) because my people have turned to other Gods.” The concealing of God’s face signals the breakdown of healthy societies and of social responsibility.

The philosopher, Martin Buber translates the hiding of God’s face, in Hebrew, hester panim, with the term “the eclipse of God” and he wrote a whole book with that title, published in 1952, to better understand the existence of evil in our world, including the Holocaust. Buber wrote: “When history appears to be empty of God, … it is difficult for an individual and even more, for a people, to understand themselves as addressed by God. … During such times the world seems to be irretrievably abandoned to the forces of tyranny.”

If that Buber passage sounds dark, it is intended as such. He was trying to make the case for God even in the face of the horrors of the Holocaust. The Yom Kippur liturgy seems designed to do something similar. First it holds up a mirror to all the ways that we have personally fallen short of living a moral and ethical life. In not so subtle ways it tells us that, because of our sins, we may not be worthy to live for another year. But then it tells us that we are capable of repentance and, if we do it with a full heart, there is the possibility of a return to a right relationship with others and with the society in which we live; in religious-speak: to once again merit to be panim el panim with God.

I don’t think it is as simple as fasting and reciting a few lines from the machzor. But, with every passing year, I become increasingly impressed how those ritual pieces remind us of the need for a course correction. And part of that course correction is relating to all people in the spirit of panim el panim, seeing the other in the fullness of their humanity.

Face Time is my shorthand for how we make our world a more compassionate and loving place. To do that, we need to be inspired by acts of hesed. Fortunately, such acts can be found virtually everywhere, made even more obvious against the backdrop of our current crises.

  • We saw it in the many stories we heard about doctors and nurses putting their own lives at risk, working 16-17 hour days to treat Covid-19 patients. Thousands of health care workers travelled to New York City at their own expense in March to volunteer their time with Covid patients. Some paid with their lives!
  • We saw it in the life of Congressman John Lewis who, from his early 20’s, was willing to sacrifice his life for the cause of civil rights in this country. And we saw it in the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg who, despite the discrimination she faced for being a woman early in her legal career, helped to re-write this country’s laws around gender equality.
  • We see it, week in and week out, in this holy community of Adat Shalom where we have created a culture of caring; where people show up for each other in such impressive numbers in times of illness, injury, loss and need. We have created a hesed culture that is so lacking in much of American society.

I truly believe that the antidote to the spiritual, moral and political decay of our country and of the world is more “face time”, treating each and every person we encounter as mirror images of the Divine. I am longing for that kind of face time, not only because this year I miss hugging you on the High Holydays, but because these days, our world is so lacking in that kind of caring between people.

This kind of face time is not only possible during a pandemic, it is a necessity! And we must extend it well beyond the people we know because we are all now more keenly aware of how much we have allowed our country to divide itself into tribes of race, religion, class, and country of origin. We simply don’t know one another well enough to warrant the term United States of America. I dare say, we must even extend face time to those who are on the other side of today’s political divide. I know that is a big ask; I am not even sure that I am capable of it. But we must try. Our country is in desperate need of some healing and it must start with people who can see the divine image in the face of every person who, to us, is “other”.

Do it for the sake of heaven; do it for the sake of humanity; do it for the sake of the world that you want to bequeath to your children.  

Gmar Chatima Tova, may you be inscribed for a year of health and spiritual wholeness.

Jews and Racial Justice: Making Amends or Avoiding Responsibility?

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David Axelrod, a former top aide to President Barack Obama often credited with masterminding his two successful campaigns for the presidency, recently published a column in The Washington Post that hit me between the eyes and sat heavily on my heart.

Axelrod and I about the same age. He was too young to have been active in the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, but he was deeply affected by the story and eager to believe the myth that the movement headed up by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., solved the problem of racial injustice in America.

 

This was a dvar torah delivered to Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation (Bethesda, MD) on June 27, 2020. A version of the talk was published in the Times of Israel on June 28, 2020.  

Axelrod was hardly naïve. He worked for Mayor Harold Washington, the first Black to be elected mayor in the city of Chicago. Axelrod helped open the city’s political process to communities of color, setting the stage for Washington’s electoral success. As a journalist in the early 1980s, Axelrod wrote about unequal justice and police brutality in America.

But he did not really have Black friends with whom he was close enough to ask and understand their life experience. The recent surge of public consciousness around racial justice got Axelrod to re-assess how he positioned himself on the issue during his very successful career. He wrote: “I thought I understood. Now I realize I did not. Not well enough. Not in the visceral way that comes when you truly imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes.” 

To which I say: “Me too”. I could easily trot out my activist resume and cite all the ways I have engaged in the issue of racial justice over the past 40+ years. But it falls far short of what the situation required and I am left feeling ashamed on two levels:

I am ashamed for the way that the richest country in the world has relegated Black and Brown people to a perpetual underclass status and refused to confront the systemic racism that makes a mockery of the belief that America is a land of equal opportunity.

And, more personally, I am ashamed of the fact that, like Axelrod, even as I was aware of how America has stacked the deck against Black Americans, putting into place what Michelle Alexander has called The New Jim Crow, it was not a high enough priority for me to demand action on it from my elected officials. Like many other Jews, I did it for Holocaust awareness. I did it for fighting anti-Semitism. I did it for Soviet Jewry. I did it for support of Israel. But I did not cash in my political capital for Black Americans. And of that, I am ashamed.

For the past couple of years, I was part of a Montgomery County Interfaith Task Force on Racism. We held forums throughout the county that brought together citizens of all backgrounds to speak about combatting bigotry and racism. Nobody came to these forums with White supremacist bumper stickers or Confederate flags. Everyone I met in these workshops seemed well intentioned and saw themselves as “the good guys” on this issue. Until, of course, the issue of White privilege came up. That is when all these, well-intentioned White folk, got very defensive.

When you read books like White Privilege, White Fragility or How to be an Anti-Racist, you realize that this is what allows our racist system to remain in place. Most White people are not prepared to realize how much they implicitly are part of a system that keeps them in a position of privilege at the expense of people of color.

Even more importantly, while saying all the right things in polite company and especially in carefully constructed multi-faith and multi-racial dialogue settings, most White people are not prepared to surrender any of the privileges that they enjoy in order to remedy centuries of discrimination against people of color. Many Jews fall into this very same pattern of behavior (and below, when I use the term ”we,” I am speaking as a ”White-presenting Jew”, which I am).   

  • We say we want to end racism, but we don’t want a Black family to move into our neighborhood;
  • We say we want to end racism but we won’t support busing to desegregate our schools;
  • We say we want to end racism but we won’t support affirmative action if it denies our son/daughter a slot at a prestigious college or professional school;
  • We say we want to end racism, but we are not prepared to be true allies until Black organizations pass every ideological test we create on support for Israel;
  • We say we want to end racism but we can’t bring ourselves to sign-on to critiques of over-policing because the police are protecting our synagogues and rarely, if ever, do police harass and/or kill Jews (as long as they look ”White”). Police harassment and, all too often, even killings, happens to Black Americans every day, in every region of our country, including here.

Let’s be honest. Even if we don’t identify as “White”, most Jews do pass as White and enjoy the privileges of being White in America. Jews, like most White people, have a host of reasons to deflect responsibility for America’s original sin of racism. I have heard dozens of arguments from White people denying that the privileges that they enjoy contributes to the oppression of Black and Brown people.  

But, in the end, I can boil all the arguments from a shelf-full of books on White privilege down to a poster that I saw at a Black Lives Matter rally I recently attended. It read: “Privilege is when you think something is not a problem because it is not a problem for you.”

Spend some time talking to Black people about the obstacles they face daily to access good schools, adequate housing, healthy food, proper health care, access to mass transit, equal treatment in our criminal justice system, and it is likely you will feel ashamed of the privileges that you enjoy and that are not available to people of color.

Contemplate the statistic that in the year 2020, the net wealth of an average Black family is only 10% of the wealth of an average White family in America.  Read the history of red-lining and how Blacks were denied the benefits of the GI Bill after WWII and you will understand how Black poverty is a consequence of state-sanctioned policy.

Or put yourself in the shoes of a Black child who is more likely to see police as someone who will harm them than as someone who is there to protect them—and for good reason.  “I can’t breathe” said George Floyd. “I can’t breathe” said Eric Garner. Blacks are telling us that the over-policing of their neighborhoods for decades does not allow them to breathe the air of freedom that should be possible for all Americans.  

Abraham Joshua Heschel said, famously, “Some are guilty; all are responsible.”

In this week’s parsha, Chukat, we read about the ritual of the Red Heifer. The purification rite prescribed using the blood of an unblemished cow to atone for coming into contact with a dead body. A midrash says that the purification rite is to atone for the sin of the Golden Calf. Interestingly, the requirement is not just for the generation that engaged in that idolatry. The rabbis believe that later generations bore some responsibility for the transgressions committed by previous generations. The Jewish tradition has an expansive understanding of culpability. That is what it means to be Jewish.

Reading the parsha this week, juxtaposed to an America that is finally getting woke to the transgression of racism for which we are all partly responsible, the meaning of the Red Heifer ritual hit me like a ton of bricks. Just because we have averted our eyes to the suffering of Black Americans for generations, does not exempt us from responsibility to remedy an injustice that has been allowed to exist for far too long.

And, yes, it may impact our privilege because freedom is never free.  

Synagogue Innovation in the Age of Corona

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I know that I am not alone in being impressed at how quickly the Jewish community was able to provide program content via the web as much of North America moved to “shelter in place.” As we begin to adjust to our new, surreal lives, more is being written about the shape of our post-pandemic world. My particular interest is the impact on spiritual communities in North America.

 

This article was published in eJewishPhilanthropy on May 11, 2020. 

For years I have been working with rabbis and synagogues to re-think how they can create more compelling spiritual communities.  In recent years, the main delivery vehicle for that training has been a two-year fellowship for rabbis called the Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI). CLI uses the discipline of adaptive leadership to equip rabbis with the tools to be change agents in their congregations. Adaptive leadership is, to paraphrase the title of the Ron Heifetz book that launched the field, leadership without easy answers. When situations are complex and desired outcomes are not always clear, leaders need to be nimble, bold and strategic. It would be hard to think of another time when adaptive leadership skills are more necessary than this Age of Corona. I have been gratified by hearing from a good number of CLI alumni about how the training they received in the program has better prepared them to respond to the current challenges facing North American synagogues.

One of the biggest obstacles to changing institutions is that the default posture of virtually all institutions tends to be stasis. Even when the actors in a system claim that they need and want change, there are dozens of ways that systems push back at those who take it upon themselves to introduce innovation. This is especially true in synagogues because those who are most committed to synagogue life highly value the way their particular denominational brand provides continuity with the past. This explains why the conservative impulse in religious institutions is so strong.

At Facebook, a motto was coined to encourage innovative behavior: “move fast, break things”. It has been coined in many entrepreneurial settings to encourage bold, risk taking. For many of the rabbis I work with, such risk-taking is challenging. The leadership of many congregations is made up of people who like the way things are done. Even if they don’t like everything, there is a certain comfort to continuity in religious settings. Innovation is definitely the road less taken.

Yet the Covid-19 pandemic is bringing change to our doorsteps. Virtually everything we have done, and the way we have done it, is up for grabs. That includes synagogue life. It has only been two months since most synagogues in North America closed their doors and took most of their programming online. Rabbis have been under enormous pressure to transition their worship services and programming to a medium in which they were less than expert while, at the same time, provide pastoral services to congregants who are anxious about their health, the welfare of loved ones and economic insecurity. Even so, rabbis are reporting to me that the attendance at their Zoom classes and worship are up between 20-50%!

Rabbis have become, literally, spiritual first-responders. Jews who are members of congregations are keenly aware of this fact and are deeply appreciative. It is also clear that the fear and social isolation imposed on all of us is making people value spiritual community in a way that has not been typical for most non-Orthodox Jews in the past. Combine these factors with a situation when so much is in flux, we stand at a moment when synagogues are capable of changing the way they have functioned far more dramatically than ever before. Below I will share three broad areas in which I am already seeing some changes becoming manifest. Many of the examples come from rabbis and congregations in the CLI orbit (current Fellows, Mentors and alumni). I put these forward as ideas that I hope more synagogues consider adopting.

  1. Take advantage of content created by others and look for opportunities to collaborate

Many rabbis feel like they have to “prove” the value proposition of their congregations since so many usual activities cannot happen. Many congregations are doing more programming now than pre-Covid! And that is on top of the increase in demand for pastoral attention. It is not sustainable.

National organizations like the Institute for Jewish Spirituality (IJS), the Hadar Institute, Limmud North America and others make available high caliber content and the demand is at an all-time high across the board. In April, Hadar experienced a 102% increase in downloads of their Torah commentaries and a 500% increase in people accessing their Zoom classes over the previous month.  IJS introduced a 30-minute, free daily meditation sit every day at 12:30 (ET) that draws 300 or so participants. Over 5000 people have signed up for IJS’ free Covid response offerings. Limmud North America, an umbrella for 18 community-wide Jewish learning festivals, transformed itself overnight into an on-line learning community. Their March 29th eFestival attracted 1200 people and another eFestival is scheduled for May 24th. In 2019, Limmud attracted 7000 participants at 13 discreet events. They will surpass that number for 2020 after five months.

All of these institutions had existing constituencies of course. They are now finding a much larger market. Synagogues should take advantage of the expertise and reach of such national organizations and make them a feature of what is offered to their own members. Synagogue life can be parochial. Why not use this opportunity to make Jews aware of some of the amazing content that is produced by national Jewish organizations?

An extension of this principle is the value of collaboration between synagogues. I have long argued that the business model of synagogues is flawed in that most congregations operate as private clubs exclusively for their dues-paying members. This is a 20th century model that is outdated. The Age of Corona has made it clear that we live in a global system. For the past month I have joined my daughter for her favorite Kabbalat Shabbat minyan in Israel (on Friday morning, of course).

Collaboration with other congregations is a win/win. Rabbis realize that don’t need to do everything and congregants get to experience other rabbis and congregations. Rabbi Arielle Rosenberg (Shir Tikvah, Minneapolis, MN) and Rabbi Monica Gomery (Kol Tzedek, Philadelphia, PA) reached out to a handful of rabbinic colleagues they knew across the country and, each day of Pesach, a different rabbi led a 30-minute, creative Hallel experience that congregants from all participating congregations could join. None of the participating congregations would have had the critical mass to do a daily Hallel but, collaboratively, they averaged 30 participants each day.

One of the most ambitious collaborations that continues to expand is Jew it at Home. It started as a conversation between rabbis at Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills and neighboring Temple Isaiah. As of this writing there are 30 partner organizations, 25 of which are synagogues. Each partner organization is welcome to offer unlimited numbers of programs on the platform. On Friday night and shabbat morning the platform offers an array of different worship experiences from partners. The programming quickly became so rich and robust that there are now channels to organize the offerings. These channels include learning, spirituality, book groups, film clubs, health and wellness, singing and more. There is no cost to log on to any program and members of all partner organizations can access programs any day of the week, from morning till night.

The early response to Jew it at Home has exceeded expectations. Rabbis need to overcome their concern that they will “lose” their members to other congregations. The early response has been encouraging. Participants feel Judaically enriched by the array of offerings and there is still the comfort of “coming home” to a program or shabbat experience at one’s own congregation.

  1. Time for Serious Inreach

There isn’t a congregation in North America that does not have membership that is under-engaged in synagogue programming. But the shelter in place reality that we all share does create a sense of isolation and a deeper need for community than ever before. A congregation’s ability to touch base with its members will make an enormous impact on the sense that the synagogue cares about them. I would encourage congregations to prioritize the members who are not participating in online worship services and classes.

There are many ways to do inreach effectively: a simple check-in to see if they have any needs that can be met by the congregation; an invitation to join some upcoming program; an inquiry about what kind of affinity group might interest them. Of course, any such inquiry requires diligent follow-up. The failure to follow up to an expressed interest will squander any good will that an inreach effort can generate.  

This is also an ideal time to tap into the gifts of members. Synagogues that move away from top-down programming and that allow members to be actively involved in offering content, makes a powerful impact on communal culture. It moves institutions away from being transactional and conveys the message that the community is on a collective journey of Jewish learning and discovery.

For any kind of inreach effort, a script with talking points is very helpful, as is a form to create a feedback loop to the rabbi, staff and lay leadership, where appropriate. The more widely this task can be shared (e.g. Board members, a special task force, etc.) the better. Congregation Bnai Shalom in Westborough, MA has put together a most impressive inreach effort called CBS Cares. Bnai Shalom’s rabbi, Rachel Gurevitz, is a wonderful resource if you want some advice on how this kind of initiative can be structured.

Synagogues often deliver their services and programming to a small fraction of their membership. Given that most people are still largely at home, this is an ideal time to reach beyond core members and connect with a broader cross-section of congregational households. If the conversations are conducted well and the results are thoughtfully reviewed by leadership, this effort can also open the door to a greater variety of programming than might have been the case previously and a significant uptick of members being engaged.   

  1. Slay sacred cows and innovate

This moment provides an unprecedented window to move synagogues away from practices and modes of operation that are dysfunctional and to introduce innovations that, in normal times, would likely have faced opposition. Leaders are given wide latitude to step into crisis moments and take action, often with far less resistance than happens normally.

I am seeing examples of this phenomenon within our, relatively small, CLI cohort. (I will not mention names so as not to compromise changes and innovations that are still “in process”). One rabbi of a large midwestern Reform congregation inherited a Friday night service from her predecessor, who is still a presence in the community as rabbi emeritus. She never particularly liked the service but it enjoyed a large attendance and changing it would have clearly upset a significant number of the regulars. Since the shelter in place order took effect, she now leads services from the sanctuary with her husband and it is livestreamed to the congregation. She has changed the music, shortened the service and included her children in the candlelighting and with the ritual blessing of children. The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. The service reflects much more who she is as a rabbi; rest assured, she will not be going back to the old service.

A second rabbi in our cohort has advocated for years to merge several congregational religious schools in his northeastern city. The demographics have long made such a move logical, but institutional jealousies have prevented it. Suddenly, the respective institutions are coming to the table and a merger is a likely outcome of the Covid-19 crisis. A third rabbi in our cohort has felt constrained by a communal culture she inherited that privileged lay leadership of worship services. In recent weeks, the new reality of Zoom services made her central to planning and leading services. She has been able to put her signature on the services in a way not previously possible. Again, the new worship style will likely outlive the shelter in place constraints.    

One innovation shared with me came from Rabbi Aviva Fellman, who adapted a practice that was created by a bereaved widow at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, TX soon after the shelter in place orders took effect. The deceased was a beloved, long-standing member of the congregation and everyone was heartbroken, not just by his passing, but by the fact that there would be no place for an outpouring of love for him and support for his widow. The widow suggested that on the way back from the cemetery, friends could pay respects to her, as the mourner, while in their cars in the congregation’s very large parking lot. Rabbi David Stern, Senior Rabbi at Temple Emanu-El described to me the scene after the funeral, with hundreds of cars lined up in two rows, well-spaced, providing a corridor for the mourners to drive through and be greeted and comforted by people standing in front of their vehicles.  He called it one of the most moving moments of his rabbinate. You can see a short video of this most creative, invented ritual at Beth Israel in Worcester, MA here. Rabbi Fellman calls it Hamakom Yenachem, the words said when attendees at a funeral create two rows for mourners to pass through.

A final example of innovation. Rabbi Joshua Lesser of Atlanta, GA set up a Facebook page that is called “Spiritual and Communal Responses to Covid-19”. After six weeks, over 7000 people had signed up, mostly clergy from every imaginable faith tradition. The FB page has multiple threads, serving a wide variety of needs. But most interesting to me are the creative ideas around life-cycle functions, liturgy and ritual. An occupational hazard of being a spiritual leader is that you quickly get accustomed to doing the same things in the same way, week after week (year after year?). But if religion is meant to reflect the lives we are actually living, the rituals and customs need to be dynamic and not static. I fully expect that the clergy who are now experimenting with inherited customs to make them more relevant and suitable to the Age of Corona will find people excited by the way religion can give meaning to their lives at this difficult moment in time.  

Looking Ahead

One technique of adaptive leadership is to engineer a disruption that destabilizes an institution just enough to create an opening for some needed change. The Age of Corona has created a massive disruption of every institution in the world, synagogue included. Rabbis and congregational lay leaders would be well-served by seeing beyond the crisis mode of the moment so as to think more expansively about how to make synagogues the compelling spiritual communities that they can be, long after the Age of Corona is over.

Pesach in a Time of Pandemic

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Pesach is a time of the year when I am, once again, overwhelmed by the beauty of our tradition’s sacred texts, liturgy and rituals. They are prisms of meaning. For generations, Jews used these sacred texts and rituals to give meaning to their life experience. More frequently than not, the life experiences of our ancestors were harsh and difficult.

It is no surprise that poor people and vulnerable populations are more deeply religious than are people who are affluent. When you have everything that you need, often far more than you really need, religion can become a leisure time activity. One more “activity” in a life full of choices.

 

This was a dvar torah delivered to Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation (Bethesda, MD) on April 11, 2020, shabbat hol ha-moed Pesach. Of course, it was delivered via Zoom. 

But when life offers you few choices, when you are “at risk” and vulnerable, religion is an “essential” activity. I am reminded of this every time that we take one of our Adat Shalom Service Missions to Haiti. People who often don’t know where their next meal will come from, who are in make-shift dwellings, who have little to no education and who will die young because health care is well beyond their means, will put on their one, nice (even elegant) set of clothes and spend hours together in song and worship on Sunday morning. Rabbis I work with around the country tell me that they are seeing double the number of people join their Friday night and Shabbat morning worship services on Zoom. People are thirsting for spiritual community at a time that they must “shelter in place” and the possibilities of contracting Covid 19 are making people feel vulnerable and scared. Religion can help us deal with loss and setback, including this pandemic and the impact of restricted movement and physical distancing, even from our loved ones.

This morning, I want to look at the festival of Pesach and the seder(s) that many of us experienced this week in light of the pandemic plague that has affected the entire world.  

Macro message of Pesach

The seder itself is structured so that we first re-enact and fully encounter the hardship of slavery before we celebrate the miracle of redemption. In the first part of the seder, we introduce matzah with the line: “ha lachma anya…” “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate”. But by the end of the seder, matzah is the bread of redemption; the break of resilience. It is what sustained our ancestors through the desert. But it is the same matzah; the same ingredients! What changed?

What changed was a spiritual transformation in how our ancestors understood their experience. They came to see that within suffering and loss it is possible to find resilience and hope. This is the healing balm of religion.

The theme of Pesach is m’avdut l’cherut, “from slavery to freedom; from oppression to redemption”. This become the signature master story of Jewish history as well, and our people have experienced this arc of redemption time and again throughout the centuries. The framework itself shapes our reality. It keeps us from dwelling on our troubles and sorrows; it forces us to lift up our heads to look at the rainbow on the horizon. Sometimes it even allows us to see a rainbow that is not there.

It should not then be surprising that when the Jewish people reclaimed its homeland in the Land of Israel, the national anthem that was written and adopted was called Hatikvah, “the hope”.

Two examples from the Seder

The seder gives us numerous examples of how ancient words and rituals can be prisms of meaning in light of the circumstances of our current lives. Let me cite just two.

One of the most beloved songs of the seder is the Dayenu. The passage breaks down the Exodus story into about 20 specific elements of the redemption and, after each, we recite, dayenu, “it would have been enough”.  If we got out of Egypt but did not get the Sabbath, dayenu. If we got the Sabbath and not the Torah, dayenu. If we got the Torah and were not able to enter into the Land of Israel, dayenu.

Really? Taken too literally, the prayer undermines essential Rabbinic theology. All the elements of our redemption are part of a package. I think rather, the prayer is better understood as a gratitude prayer in which we say that we appreciate what we get or have. Our natural inclination is to take for granted that which we have or get and to then to feel shortchanged for that which we don’t have. Looking over our shoulders with envy at what others’ have is a most unfortunate habit of the human mind that we need to work hard to overcome. Thus, comes the Dayenu prayer to remind us that abundance is a state of mind. If we are in a perpetual competition with everyone else on the planet over blessings, privileges and possessions, we will invariably, live with a sense of scarcity.

What an apt lesson for a time of pandemic. So much of what we love about life seems off-limits: gatherings with family, friends and community; organized group fitness and sports; travel; movies, concerts and entertainment; eating out at restaurants; a good hug. And yet, should we not “count our blessings?” My brother in law, Rabbi Eliott Perlstein, who serves Ohev Shalom Congregation in Bucks County, PA, joined us for our Second Seder. He shared with us an interpretive Dayenu that he authored for a time of pandemic. It included these lines:

  • If only I can appreciate that meaning in life is not only in “doing” but also in simply “being.”       Dayenu.
  • If only we realize that this virus recognizes no separation by borders, status, religion or race.       Dayenu.     
  • If only we can be inspired by those on the front lines, risking everything and become more giving and dedicated to the welfare of others as a result.     Dayenu           

Elijah Consciousness

The second Seder element that took on rich, new meaning this year was the Cup of Eliyahu HaNavi. In the Jewish tradition, Elijah the Prophet will be the forerunner of the messianic era. That is the reason that we invoke Eliyahu HaNavi during the Havdalah service that ends shabbat. We are taught that a well-observed shabbat provides us with a taste of what the messianic era will be like.

The ritual that accompanies Elijah’s Cup at the seder is to open the door for him. As a child, this was always my job. At ages 5, 6 and 7, I was thrilled to be the center of attention, for anything. But as I aged to the ripe “old age” of 10 and beyond, my cynicism took over. If Elijah is going to bring the Messiah, why does he need us to open the door for him? When lucky, maturity follows “eldering”. As a young adult I regained an appreciation for a ritual that had many layers of meaning. I was most taken by the one, perhaps taught by my father, that the opening of the door reminds us of an earlier passage in the Haggadah when we say, “let all who are hungry, come to our table and share our meal.”

This year, the ritual took on yet another layer of meaning. The messianic era, a better tomorrow, got ritualized by opening a door, suggesting a time, in the not too distant future, when we can exit our homes without fear of contamination or disease. Perhaps, that better tomorrow, a post-Covid “liberated world,” might also be hastened by a new consciousness that emerges during this time of pandemic. A new consciousness that makes us more deeply committed to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor, as we recognize how inequitably the suffering of our current crisis falls on low income people and people of color. A new consciousness that brings greater respect for the health care profession, for science and for expertise, much underfunded and, at times, even dismissed by people in authority. A new consciousness of how we need to dramatically reduce the carbon footprint on our all-too fragile planet.

For years, the practice at our seder table was to ask each person to pour from their cup to fill Elijah’s Cup. We thereby symbolized that a better tomorrow can only be realized if each of us gives something up for the common welfare of humanity. We so desperately need more of this Elijah consciousness today.

A Final Story

This reminds me of the following story. A prosperous and pious Jew in the old country had a dream a few nights before Pesach. Elijah the Prophet himself would be joining a particular family in a remote village, about a two-day journey by carriage. Excited to join Elijah for seder, the man was determined to make the trip. He prepared provisions for the journey as well as for the once in a lifetime seder with Elijah.

The man arrived at the home of his dream about an hour before seder time. The simple house sat solitary in a forest outside the nearest town. As he peered into the window, he saw three young children and their parents. It was clear that the family was poor. The walls were bare and cracked. The clothing worn by the family members were tattered and patched. Even the table, already set for the seder, had simple provisions. Matzah, a few potatoes and some eggs.   
 
The man started to berate himself for being so foolish and leaving his home and community for the seder. His dream of Eliyahu at this home now seemed preposterous. The man returned to his carriage and started to make his way to the nearest town, where he hoped to find a suitable seder for the festival.
 
After a few minutes, his mind’s eye filled with the faces of the young children in the house. After all, he thought, he had a full seder meal in the carriage. Doesn’t the Haggadah instruct us to share our meal with the hungry? The man turned his carriage around, parked in front of the house and knocked on the door. The youngest, a 5-year old boy, answered the door: “Tateh, Mameh. I told you. Eliyahu haNavi is here to join us for seder.” And the family enjoyed the most sumptuous seder of their lives!

The story reminds us that it is up to us to take the hardships of this time of pandemic and use it to bring about a better tomorrow for all humanity. The Eliyahu haNavi moment is in our hands.

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