The Complicity Trap

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Because it is Kol Nidre, it seems appropriate to start with a confession. But my confession will be made much easier based on an informal poll of the room: How many of you read Superman comic books when you were growing up?  My confession: At the age of 10, I avoided books like the plague and virtually all I read were Superman comic books.

 

This was a sermon delivered on Kol Nidre, October 2019, at Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation (Bethesda, MD). Rabbi Sid is Adat Shalom’s Founding Rabbi. 

Now in Superman’s universe there is a planet called Bizzaro in which everything is the reverse of how it should be. Beauty is hated; ugliness is revered; it is a crime to make anything perfect. The planet itself is not round, but a cube. And everyone’s behavior, at least by earthly standards, seems to be insane.

Now my parents thought that I was totally wasting my time reading Superman comic books. Imagine the joy I now feel that I can tap that experience to find a word that describes America in the year 2019. Bizzaro.  A world in which tax policy is used to expand the gap between the rich and the poor; the Environmental Protection Agency bans the use of scientific evidence that suggests that our climate is in crisis; homeland security is advanced by separating immigrant children from their parents; and energy policy is being driven a commitment to increase the market share of the oil and gas industry when the rest of the world is trying to promote renewable energy. Welcome to Bizzaro world, USA.  

One thing that seems to mystify even conservative leaning columnists is that so few prominent Americans are willing to challenge even the most absurd statements and actions of Donald Trump.  This “Hear no evil; see no evil; speak no evil” phenomenon seems to afflict leading Republican office holders; business leaders; high profile clergy and more.

I now imagine a roadsign that says: “Danger: Self-Righteousness Ahead”. It is easy to start finger-pointing at all the “bad guys” on the other side of the aisle.

But before we get too smug and self-righteous about criticizing those with whom we may disagree, let’s be clear. The behavior that I am describing here knows no political boundaries. It afflicts all of us. It is called complicity and we all fall into the complicity trap.  “Complicity” is the association with or participation in a wrongful or unethical act. It comes from the same French word, complicite, as in the word “accomplice” but it is far more subtle. If you were an accomplice to a bank robbery, you would be breaking the law and subject to a legal penalty, likely jail time. Complicity is not illegal primarily because, using the language of our High Holyday liturgy, it is not an act of commission; it most often is an act of omission or inattention.

But I want to suggest during this season of repentance, that some of the greatest injustices of our time exist because of complicity. For every overt immoral or unethical action by an individual, the net result of that action is made worse by thousands of acts of complicity. Here, I would suggest, that none of us escapes culpability.

 

I. Let’s look at two examples, gender bias and the climate crisis  

  • THE ABUSE OF AND ONGOING GENDER BIAS AFFECTING WOMEN

There are so many ways that our consciousness has been raised by the MeToo Movement about the abuse of women and ongoing gender bias in our society. In the high-profile cases, like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, we know that hundreds of people were well aware of their behavior. Some were enablers but many more were simply silent in the face of men with money and power. Such complicity allowed the sexual abuse of women and underage girls to take place. But to highlight such cases takes us off the hook too easily.

A good 50 years after the feminist movement gave voice to the ways that women faced discrimination in so many facets of life, we still find many forms of gender bias in the workplace and beyond. In a recent study of over 7000 corporate executives appearing in the Harvard Business Review, it was found that women outscored men on 12 of 16 criteria determined to be critical to being successful leaders in the private and public sector. And yet, men continue to claim over 80% of CEO positions, women are consistently paid less than men for the same work, and women continue to face all kinds of gender bias and harassment in the workplace. Such inequities persist only because too many of us choose to remain silent, and thus complicit, in the perpetuation of the old boys’ club that runs so much of our society.

Some 20 years ago I was responsible for organizing a panel of three speakers at a convention.  My third invitation went to a man, the third man I was inviting. That man asked me who else was on the panel. When it turned out to be two other men, he refused the invitation. He challenged me to find a suitable woman to take his place, feeling that it was unethical to suggest, even if only by implication, that men were the only experts on the panel’s topic. It was a lesson that I have taken to heart ever since. But what made the biggest impression on me was the integrity represented by that individual who refused to be complicit in perpetuating a system that continually puts men in the spotlight and consigns women to the shadows.

When I ask myself the question: Have I shown similar principle and courage to avoid being complicit in systems that perpetuate injustices not only towards women, but towards people of color, LGBTQ identified individuals or people who are differently abled? … I fear that I come up way short. I, myself, slide into the complicity trap, despite my best intentions.  

  • THE CLIMATE CRISIS 

A second example of how complicity works is the climate crisis. Even as evidence of global warming becomes more obvious by the day, we are moving backwards on constructive action to address the crisis. The US pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords signed in 2015 by 195 countries is but one of many examples.

On this day of reckoning, we are challenged to take some ownership of our own complicity on the climate crisis we are facing. Rabbi Fred has been a great teacher and role model for us on this issue, as recently as his sermon of last week, “Being Good Ancestors”.  Take note: Americans are only 5% of the world population but we consume 24% of the world’s energy. The lifestyles that we choose contribute to that number big time. Here are three concrete things every one in this room can act on:

  • Every utility company now offers options for consumers to acquire power from renewable sources. Make that choice for your own home even if it might cost a few more dollars a month.
  • Reduce the amount of meat and dairy in your diet and try to eat locally grown produce. The food industry is rapidly changing because of the changing eating habits of consumers. This will make a huge difference on our climate.
  • Even as the Trump Administration weakens fuel efficiency standards for the auto industry, you can choose to buy fuel efficient vehicles or electric cars.

On a macro level, the climate crisis needs to become one of the top three issues on which you vote for candidates for public office. When Al Gore ran for president in the year 2000, despite his record as a climate activist, he was convinced by his advisors not to make the environment a central feature of his campaign because the polling showed that it was not that important to voters. That has to change because public policy can change the climate habits of entire societies. Consider just three examples that put the US to shame:

  • In Sweden, 99% of solid waste is recycled or turned into biogas;
  • Germany has committed to become totally carbon neutral by the year 2050 and is passing legislation to reach that impressive goal;
  • In Denmark, high taxes on cars has resulted in 60% of people commuting to work by bicycles.

This summer I stood on the spot in Stockholm where one, Greta Thunberg, began her weekly Friday protests in front of the Swedish Parliament for more direct action on climate change. She was only 15 years old when she started doing this in August 2018. In March of 2019, inspired by Greta’s example, 1.4 million high school students from 112 countries left their schools to demand more action on the climate crisis. Thunberg was also one of the speakers at last month’s UN Climate Summit. As an act of principle, she decided to travel to NY on a zero emissions boat instead of flying. Now, in what is being described as the Thunberg Effect, thousands of Europeans are forgoing air travel for trains to reduce their carbon footprint on the planet.

Greta Thunberg, age 16, proves that with enough commitment and social conscience, one can avoid falling into the complicity trap.

 

II. The Price of Complicity

Jews, more than most, should know the price of complicity because we have paid that price in the not too distant past. Hitler’s final solution could not have succeeded to the extent that it did without massive complicity all around the world. There is considerable documentation of the complicity of the Poles aiding and abetting the Nazis in the roundup, deportation and killing of Jews. The Vatican was also complicit with the Nazis, making it extremely difficult for clergy of conscience to provide safe haven for Jews during the war. Even President Roosevelt faced accusations of complicity for refusing to authorize the bombing of train tracks to Auschwitz and putting harsh limitations on the admission of Jewish refugees to the United States. No one can even quantify the number of Jewish lives that were lost as a result of these three examples of complicity.

But just as with my examples of gender bias and climate change, in a sea of complicity there are always examples of courage and conviction. My summer travels put me in two places where such examples are celebrated today. In Stockholm there are two prominent monuments dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg. One is outside of the Great Synagogue and the other is in front of the Swedish Foreign Ministry. Wallenberg volunteered for the assignment to go to Budapest where he began to issue Swedish passports to Jews, helping them avoid deportation to Auschwitz. He also got funding to rent 32 buildings in Budapest which he declared Swedish territory and thus, exempt from Nazi edicts. All tolled, Wallenberg was reported to have saved the lives of some 10,000 Hungarian Jews. At the end of the war, Wallenberg disappeared, apparently captured and killed by the Soviet Army because they suspected that he was working with the CIA.

A similar story of courage and conviction is told in Denmark. The rescue of Danish Jewry is a remarkable story and is often held up as an example of what can happen when people stand up against tyranny. In 1943, a German diplomat in Copenhagen learned of plans by Berlin to deport the 7800 Jews of Denmark to concentration camps. He shared the information with the head of the Social Democratic party who then shared it with Rabbi Marcus Melchior, the chief rabbi of the Danish Jewish community. On the day before Rosh haShana, Rabbi Melchior told the community not to come to synagogue the next day but, instead, to leave their homes and go into hiding. Within 48 hours, most of Danish Jewry were being hidden by friends and neighbors. When the Nazis started their roundup, they found empty houses. Over the next several weeks, Sweden agreed to accept all Danish Jews to their shores and all kinds of boats were organized to ferry Jews from Danish fishing villages to Swedish territory. 7300 out of 7800 Danish Jews were rescued this way. Consider the contrast: Over 3 million Polish Jews perished during the Holocaust, abetted by the complicity of deeply anti-Semitic Poles. Yet only 102 Danish Jews were killed during the war. This is the stark price that Jews paid for complicity.  

 

III. The Jewish Moral Imperative

Few of us are faced with the life and death choices that confronted a Raoul Wallenberg or the Danish citizens who risked their lives to hide Jews. Yet we all know that our actions have consequences. Less obvious, is how our inactions have consequences as well.

Numerous Jewish texts instruct us to avoid the complicity trap that so often ensnares even the most well-intentioned people. Here are three:  

  1. In Deuteronomy ch. 22 the Israelites are commanded: lo tuchal lehitalem, “one is prohibited to turn away”. The original context is about the obligation to return lost property that one finds but the rabbis extended the law to an obligation to be responsive to any moral challenge. The rabbis were aware that human nature is pre-disposed to “look away” when faced with a difficult situation. They thus commanded: “Looking away is not an option.”
  2. In Leviticus ch. 19 Jews are commanded: lo taamod al dam reacha, “you may not stand idly by while the blood of your neighbor is being shed”. This commandment speaks directly to the obligation to intervene when others are in danger. For Jews who have been involved in human rights work all around the word, this verse has been a clarion call.
  3. Perhaps my favorite saying in this activist genre of Judaic teaching comes from Pirke Avot, the Ethics of our Ancestors (2:5). B’makom shayn anashim, tishtadel lehiyot ish, “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.”. Of course, the literal, gendered translation is not only harsh on the ears but not fully expressive of the spirit of the Mishna. As many of you know, for more than 20 years I ran an organization called PANIM that was committed to teach Jewish youth about social activism through the prism of Jewish values. We put a far more accurate translation of this Mishna on the back of PANIM T-shirts that we gave to each participant. It reads: “In a place where there is no one of moral courage, strive to be courageous.” (hold up T-shirt).

 

IV. The Eternal Dissent

Religions, not unlike nations, are at their best when they are able to influence their adherents to a certain ethos that then becomes an aspirational way to be in the world. Kenya’s national motto is “Harambee”, Swahili for “we all pull together”. Liberia, a country settled by former Negro slaves from America, has a motto that says: “Love of liberty brought us here”. In contrast, and this will be most meaningful to Star Trek fans, the motto of the evil Klingon nation is: “Capture and oppress as many people and planets as possible”. Choose your motto!

In graduate school I read a book by prominent Reform Rabbi, David Polish called The Eternal Dissent. He makes the case that the national ethos of the Jewish people is to be a dissenting people, asking the hardest questions of God, of each other, and of the nations in which they would reside. David Polish would suggest that the motto of the Jewish people is: “In matters of conscience, do not shrink from dissent.” This tendency, well documented in Jewish history, did not always make the Jews popular. Quite the contrary in fact. But it did create in us a healthy resistance to the complicity trap. This dissenting nature is part of our Jewish legacy. Let’s own it!

The 18th century English philosopher, Edmund Burke said famously, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”. Closer to our own tradition, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said: “Some are guilty; all are responsible”.

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My friends. We live in a time when much of what we cherish about this country is at risk. Democracy itself is being threatened. There are many who, fearful of the future and goaded by a strong, authoritarian leader, will dutifully conform and comply.

But Jews must take the road less travelled. It is the road of courage and conviction. We must have the moral tenacity to ask the hardest questions, to dissent and act on it when necessary and to resist the human tendency to fall into the complicity trap.

As we fully embrace the spirit of Yom Kippur, this day of atonement, reflection and resolve, may we have the strength to do what must be done. Let us take upon ourselves an 11th commandment: “Thou shall not be complicit.”  To be a Jew at this moment in history calls upon us to speak truth to power. May we, in the year ahead, summon the courage to do just that.

Re-Imagining Jewish Communal Life

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I have spent a considerable amount of my professional time over the past twenty years in the field of synagogue transformation. In my book, Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews can Transform the American Synagogue, I argued that the American synagogue was stuck in a model that developed in the two decades that followed World War II. That model—the synagogue center—was well suited for Jews who were moving into suburban neighborhoods and who found themselves living among Christians for whom church affiliation was a highly-regarded American cultural norm. Jews, wanting to be good Americans, built and joined synagogues and it fed an explosive growth of Jewish congregational life. 

 

This article appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on May 1, 2019.

For a whole host of reasons (detailed elsewhere), that synagogue-center model is at risk today. The aging and shrinking of the memberships of those institutions is taking place across the country. There are synagogues that are thriving today but they have accomplished this by evolving into very different types of institutions. Books, articles and field work by the likes of Larry Hoffman, Ron Wolfson, Amy Asin, Hayim Herring and others have pointed the way for strategies that are far better suited to the 21st century Jewish community. In my own work with rabbis, congregational lay leaders and rabbinical students, I use the term “covenantal community” to describe the next stage of the American synagogue. The Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI) is a two-year fellowship for rabbis who are being trained to bring elements of this new thinking into their communities and CLI’s monthly blog on synagogue innovation (which can be subscribed to at no charge) features some of the best ideas and most successful innovations happening in synagogue spaces across North America.  

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 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.   

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 my 2013 book, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future. The Kenissa initiative has allowed us to support the emerging network of Jewish communities of meaning that are attracting Jews within one or more of the following five 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.

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 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.

We like to call the groups that we convene “emerging communities of meaning”. And in that spirit, Kenissa itself is constantly emerging and evolving. We started the project with a certain concept of how the themes cited above related to each other. But then we started to invite the participants themselves to re-imagine the themes and we invited them to create an original graphic. What resulted was a deluge of creativity that got everyone totally buzzing.

We have now posted on our website over 20 of these original graphics, with a brief commentary by the Kenissa Network member who created it. Each is, essentially, a commentary on the nature of contemporary Jewish life in North America and the aspects of the Jewish heritage that animate the Jewish community.

The graphics represent astounding creativity. Even as there continue to be rabbis, scholars and Jewish communal professionals who have the standing to write articles and books on the nature of Jewish life, we are living in an age when, increasingly, Jews with no official “standing” are defining for themselves the meaning of being Jewish.

Jewish life is not the only dimension of our culture that has experienced the 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 marriage to gender and the meaning of family. Yet there is also reason to celebrate the ways that Jews are engaged in the redefinition of Jewish identity and community. These emerging Jewish communities of meaning reflect exciting new energy that should not only be celebrated by those who care about the Jewish future but also financially supported.

So I invite you to visit the gallery of graphics to stimulate your own thinking about the nature of Jewish life. Ponder the graphic and its symbolism. Read the commentary by the creator of the graphic. Imagine how you would portray the relationship between the themes.

This is how we will re-invent Jewish life together.

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Comments appearing on the eJewishPhilanthropy site:

Yashar koach to Rabbi Sid Schwarz. Chai Mitzvah has been part of Kenissa for a number of years and we have had the good fortune to attend a number of gatherings of these emerging communities. Each time, I leave with a renewed faith in the power of Judaism to allow each generation to claim ownership of our long and rich spiritual and cultural legacy. We need to work harder at building bridges between our legacy organizations and these emerging communities to both continue learning from each other and continue the multi-generational dialogue that is so critical for a healthy and robust Jewish community.

                                          Audrey Lichter, Executive Director, Chai Mitzvah

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Yashar koach Rabbi Sid!  I so appreciate the way you name, make space for and embrace what is current in the Jewish landscape. Through your encouragement and efforts many of us are able to revel in the sense that Judaism is thriving amidst the changes that are taking hold. Thank you for being a champion and for being open and curious about what is possible. I look forward to continue to build, grow and evolved together!

                                           Keshira haLev Fife, Kesher Pittsburgh

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Totally agree that we have to cultivate “bottom-up” models of Jewish life, both in emerging and longstanding communities/organizations. The more we own our Jewish lives, the more energy we’ll devote to sustaining Jewish traditions and values, passing them along and making them relevant to future generations. Kudos to Rabbi Sid and to all of the CLI and Kenissa participants for your devotion to this work!

                                               Roger Studley, Urban Moshav

Jews with a Mission

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When I accepted an invitation from the Israeli organization, Tevel B’Tzedek, to travel to Haiti a few months after the devastating earthquake in 2010 and to do some teaching for their disaster-relief team on the ground, little did I know that it would lead to one of the most fulfilling projects of my rabbinic career. The Israelis were doing amazing work under the most difficult circumstances, as Israelis have done all around the globe in similar situations. My contribution was to bring some Judaic context to the work taking place in one of the poorest countries in the world.

As it turned out, the interest in my teaching went beyond the Israelis. At a time when Jews are at risk in many parts of the globe because of rising anti-Semitism, Haitians treat Jews as if they had just walked out of the pages of the Bible. Haitian Christians identify powerfully with the story of the Israelites coming out of Egyptian enslavement and being led by God to the Promised Land. It reflects their deepest aspirations for themselves since Haitians have not only been victimized by natural disasters, but by 100 years of political tyranny and a dysfunctional civil society.

This article appeared online in Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations (Reconstructing Judaism) on February 19, 2019.

In several of my presentations to Haitians, my translator was a young minister named Johnny Felix. In his early 30s and with a smile that can light up a room, Pastor Johnny founded a church and a school in Leogane, literally out of nothing. I spent some time in his community and with the students in his school, and felt that with a little help, Pastor Johnny could actually make a big difference in the lives of these children. Less than 50 percent of Haitian children go to any elementary school at all!

Upon return home, I spoke about my experience from the bimah of the congregation where I am the founding rabbi: Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, Md. I proposed that we undertake a project related to Haiti with the primary mission of supporting Pastor Johnny’s NICL School, which at the time served 150 children in kindergarten through sixth grade (the school has now grown to almost 200 students). So as not to repeat the mistakes of so much post-disaster aid that is common in our society where tons of money comes into a poor country and then, within a year, all aid dries up, the requirement was that families commit to five years of funding at a relatively modest level of $100 annually.

Adat Shalom’s “Haiti Project” is now going into its seventh year. More than 100 Adat Shalom households now contribute $100 a year for five years, which allows us to support Pastor Johnny’s NICL School in Leogane. We call them “Haiti Partners.” As a result of this generosity, we are able to send between $5,000 and $8,000 per year to fund scholarships for student tuition, purchase equipment for the school and underwrite the school’s core budget. Pastor Johnny, who has almost single-handedly created the NICL school and a congregation in Leogane, said to me that Adat Shalom was sent to him by God. As much as that might hit our ears a bit strangely, there is no way to do the work that Pastor Johnny does day in and day out against overwhelming odds without such a “leap of faith.”

But what started out as a fundraising project with an interesting “development world” angle to it changed markedly a few months into our first campaign. A member of Adat Shalom named Pam Sommers approached me and said: “I already signed up to be a ‘Haiti Partner.’ I want to go to Haiti and do hands-on work on the ground like you did, Rabbi Sid.”

I responded: “You find a minyan of Adat Shalom members who are willing to go as well, and I will commit to lead the trip.”

Wouldn’t you know it? Pam got 16 people to go, a combination of adults and young people between the ages of 14 and 30.

In December 2018, I accompanied the fifth Adat Shalom Service Mission to Haiti. We now go every other year during winter break, when the weather is bearable in Haiti and kids in the United States are out of school. Every mission has had a wonderful mix of youth and adults. The families who have brought their children talk about it as the best thing they ever did with their family in terms of values learned, time spent and sense of fulfillment achieved. One family signed up with a bit of anxiety since this was going to take the place of their annual family trip to Cancun during winter break. Several years later, the family still talks about their Haiti experience. The trips to Cancun are more or less forgettable.

We have brought Pastor Johnny to Adat Shalom twice for visits to interact with our community and with our Torah School. His first visit in 2014 was the first time he had ever been on an airplane. Each time he joined me on the bimah, he taught some songs in French and English, and shared with our community how much Adat Shalom was a lifeline for the students of his school. In turn, Adat Shalom members are extremely proud of the project. In our foyer, there is a wall dedicated to the project with photos from our missions. One member wrote me a note saying that she herself could never participate in a mission because of the physical demands of the mission, but she is so proud to be a member of a synagogue whose social action was as expansive as supporting a Christian school in Haiti.

The conditions in Haiti are not for the faint of heart. Our accommodations are very modest. The work is hard—hauling cement, moving rocks, painting, bending rebar. Even in December, it is well into the 90s and humid. But we have accomplished so much. During our 2011 and 2012 missions, we worked side by side with Haitians to build houses in Lambi Village to provide shelter for those whose homes collapsed during the 2010 earthquake. In 2014, we went back to Lambi Village to visit. The community was thriving. We were greeted like royalty, each family eager to show us their homes. During the construction, we made makeshift mezuzot of plywood to give to each homeowner. Wouldn’t you know it? The mezuzot were displayed prominently in each home! Guess how that made us feel? Oh. And they also kicked our butt in a game of soccer.

At Pastor Johnny’s NICL compound, we have accomplished a minor miracle. Over the course of two discreet missions, we broke ground and then finished a third structure on the school’s modest campus. Half of it will serve as a dining hall for the students. The second part became a computer lab with 15 work stations—something almost unheard of in this rural part of Haiti. It was made possible because we first funded a solar tower to provide the school with a constant source of electricity. When we first started working there, the school was making do on three to five hours of electricity a day. One of our mission participants had been inspired to fund the creation of the computer lab, which was a major boon to both the students and faculty of the school.

Another proud creation of our Adat Shalom mission was the creation of a vegetable garden that we dedicated and named “Gan HaMazon.” When we dedicated it, Pam Sommers’s husband, Fred Pinkney, actually made the dedication speech in front of the students of the school in their native language, Creole. Many of the 200 students in the school are food insecure, so we focused our attention on that aspect of community development. On our 2016 mission, we ran a day camp from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. every day for 50 students of the school since it was vacation time. (These families are not going to Cancun). The focus was on how to work in the vegetable garden and food preparation.

On each mission, in a variety of settings, we work side by side with Haitians, and we use that opportunity to gain insight into the challenges they face in their lives. In so many cases, we walk away inspired by the dignity of the Haitians who live in circumstances that are close to what would be our worst nightmare.

The experience is always a deeply spiritual one for us. Every evening after dinner, we gather in the dorm where we stay. We use the time to share the highs and lows of our very intense days, and then to enrich our experience by studying Judaic texts and values from a sourcebook that I put together specifically for our mission. The conversations are wide-ranging. How can Americans be most helpful in a country where poverty, illiteracy and illness are so widespread? How can we help Pastor Johnny and the NICL school become self-sustaining? What are the ethical ramifications of our lives of privilege when compared to the deprivation that is the lot of most Haitians? On our last day, every person has a chance to share something they learned during our mission: a) about how to be most helpful to people in a developing country like Haiti; b) about Judaism and their Jewish identity; and c) about themselves. More than a few of the mission participants talk about the experience as “transformative” and “life-changing.”

When all is said and done, spiritual practice is about connecting to something greater than ourselves. Our mission participants, who may or may not be interested in prayer or meditation, feel much more deeply connected to the Haitians with whom they work, with all of humanity, with the mystery of being by engaging in the practice of literally loving their neighbors as themselves. I know that I, too, have grown immensely from the experience. Much of my activism has focused on tzedek—trying to effect changes in programs and policies through political advocacy. Yet to ground that commitment in acts of hesed (lovingkindness), spending time face to face with some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, is to understand something about one’s own humanity and the common struggle for human dignity that crosses all lines of race, nationality and religion.

I believe that our service missions represent the very best of what we can and should be doing as a Jewish community. The participants become a tightly bonded team during our challenging days on the work site, and we became a family in our “down time” at the dorm. With each passing day, we become more inspired to give of ourselves to help those who have so little, but who live their lives with great dignity and with deep faith.

Finally, we take great pride in “walking the talk” of Torah. We aren’t just talking about Jewish values; we are living those values every day. In a sermon I once delivered at Pastor Johnny’s church on Sunday morning, I said that despite the differences in nationality, race, religion and socio-economic status that separate us and the Haitians who were our hosts, three things tie us together. Both communities are faith communities committed to hesed, acts of lovingkindness; tzedek, acts of justice; and shalom, acts that advance spiritual wholeness and peace.

At a time when synagogues are losing market share and Next Gen Jews are deeply ambivalent about how much they are prepared to identify as Jews, I can testify that this kind of service mission is a game-changer. Synagogue leaders should think seriously about sponsoring both domestic and international service missions. It allows Jews to act on their values and also serves to connect Jews with the most vulnerable people in the world, a central teaching of Torah.

Confronting Patriarchy

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The testimony of Christine Blasy Ford to the Senate Judiciary Committee followed by that of Brett Kavanaugh captured the attention of the nation. We know that the surfacing of various accusations against Brett Kavanaugh by several women and the corroboration of his party-going and beer drinking during high school and college was not sufficient to deny him a seat on the Supreme Court. The consequences of Justice Kavanaugh taking the ninth seat will be felt for decades to come. Yet I am more interested in what we learned about our country during the vetting process and what light Judaism can shed on that process.

This article appeared in The New York Jewish Week on October 10, 2018.

There was plenty of outrage to go around. The Me-Too phenomenon has mobilized women across the country in ways we have never seen before. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center reports that one in five women will be raped in their lifetime and that one in four women will experience some form of sexual abuse by the age of 18.  These are shocking numbers and they have not changed much over the last couple of decades. What has changed, however, is the willingness of more and more women to come forward to share their stories. Christine Blasy Ford may go down as the Rosa Parks of the Me-Too movement, paying a heavy personal price to tell her story in the most public forum imaginable. Calls to women resource centers all over the country skyrocketed in the days following Dr. Ford’s testimony. If she could brave such risk to tell her story of abuse, many women concluded, so could they.

The hearings and their aftermath exposed the ugly side of patriarchy, on both sides. We were reminded how often young women suffer sexual abuse, assault and even rape in silence. The feelings of shame, of guilt and fear of what it would take to press charges against a man and how authorities will handle such an investigation, condemn most women to a lifetime of silence. Every one of these barriers to speaking out is a result of a patriarchal society and the assumptions that it plants, not only in the minds of men, but in the minds of women as well.

Similarly, the outing of drinking and party culture in the Senate hearings pulled back the curtain on a pattern of behavior that all too many boys and men are more prepared to boast about than to feel ashamed for. Getting women drunk and engaging in sex against their will is a felony, not a sport. The fact that we have a President who himself boasted of taking liberties with women without their consent, simply reinforces some of the most heinous manifestations of a culture that allows men to set the standard of behavior and makes women into victims.

Confronting patriarchy and its consequences takes work. Those of us who identify with non-Orthodox forms of Judaism should give some thought to the ways we have tried to adapt a patriarchal tradition to the mores of contemporary life. Two examples are sufficient to make the point. For generations the blessings of the morning’s pesukay d-zimrah included this line, “Blessed are You, Sovereign of the universe, who has not made me a woman.” Of course, this line was only to be said by men. In the same place, women were to recite instead, “Blessed are You, Sovereign of the universe who made me according to Your will.” Most non-Orthodox prayer books today offer one blessing, to be said by both men and women, which thanks God for “making us in God’s image”.

While traditionalists will drash the original prayer as acknowledgment of “the special status of women in Judaism”, feminists have helped us realize how, instead, this is simply one of the myriad of ways that a patriarchal culture denies women an equal place in the social order of a community. My “aha” moment in recent weeks is to realize how the original prayer was a way for men to not even attempt to identify with the female experience. The paraphrase of the prayer might as well be: “The woman’s experience: Not my problem, thank God”. Patriarchy rules (double entendre intended).

Second example: Jewish law prohibits a woman from singing in front of men based on the belief that a woman’s voice might stir up erotic thoughts in the minds of the men within earshot. The fear is that a man might act on having been aroused by the voice of a woman. This law is called kol isha, the voice of women. Here too, traditionalists will drash the law as a way to protect women from harm and evidence that men are weaker (in terms of impulse control) than women. But what a classic example of “blame the victim”, having the potential victim be saddled with social constraints because men can’t control their impulses. The ethos behind the law led women to be denied all manner of public roles in Jewish communities. Patriarchy rules (again).

Over the last 50 years, major strides have been made to strip the patriarchy out of Judaism. This is happening even in parts of the Orthodox community today. While we have a long way to go, we are a better community for it. I would argue, it has also allowed Judaism to come closer to a core tenet of Jewish theology: the understanding that every human is made b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. Women’s voices, so long denied, have enriched the spiritual lives of millions of Jews precisely because of their ability to understand Torah in ways that men still can not fully access.

I used to think that Judaism could benefit from adopting social and cultural mores from American society. Perhaps, the modest progress we have made to strip patriarchy out of Judaism, can provide us sorely needed wisdom for the work we must now do to strip patriarchy out of American society.

Staying Sane in a World Gone Mad

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It seems appropriate to begin a Kol Nidre sermon with a small confession. The standard conversation starter in American society is: “How are you doing?” How many times are you asked that question each year? Hundreds of times. Maybe more. There probably is an App that can count it, but please don’t tell me what it is. I’m really not that interested.

In any event, I, like most of you, respond to most, if not all of these inquiries by saying. “Fine”. I’m good”. Maybe even, “Great”.  But here is my confession: I am really not OK. In fact, if you took the question far more seriously than is usually intended by the person greeting you, the only way you could say “I’m good” and be truthful about it is if you were Rip Van Winkle and you just woke up from a two-year nap.

Truth telling moment: How many of you share my sense that there is something terribly wrong happening in the world? Raise your hand. (pause) This is a good thing. If I had less than half the room raise their hands, the rest of this sermon is irrelevant and I’d call it a night.

The problem my friends is that core assumptions that many of us held about America and its institutions, about what is right and what is wrong, are simply no longer consensus positions. Everything seems to be up for grabs. And when our core assumptions are under assault every day, we begin to have doubts about our future, the future of our country and the future of the world. This is a far larger problem than who is in the White House, or who controls Congress, or who will sit on the Supreme Court. This is an existential crisis—something that challenges our faith in the future and our faith in humanity.

The Challenge

My guess is that each one of you could come up with a dozen examples of things taking place over the past year that have shaken you to your core. This is not the time or place to dwell on matters of public policy. There are other forums for that. But I do want to cite just a few examples as a way to illustrate the crisis that we are facing:

  • Item: In the face of overwhelming scientific evidence about climate change, people who are climate change “deniers” occupy positions of significant power and influence in our country. We are the only country in the world that is not now a signatory to the Paris Climate Accord and the federal Environmental Protection Agency is reversing environmental protection regulations at an alarming pace.
  • Item: In the face of Congressional inaction on immigration, the Trump Administration enacted the most mean-spirited and cynical policy of family separation at our southern border. Children as young as 3 years old were taken away from their families and moved hundreds of miles away, held mostly in detention centers. People fleeing for their lives from Central America were offered a deal: withdraw your request for asylum, which is guaranteed by international human rights law, return to your country regardless of the risks you might face and you can get your children back. Administration officials have bragged that this policy is “working” in that fewer people are coming across the border.
  • Item: While mainstream media may not get every story right, the Founding Fathers of this country understood that a free press is the cornerstone of democracy, acting as a check on the excesses of government. We now have a President who, unhappy with the coverage of his policies, declares that the press is “the enemy of the people.” In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City he stated: “What you are seeing and what you are hearing is not what is happening.” Mind-boggling!

Now I am well aware that some rabbis are refraining from wading into these waters for fear of offending some of their congregants. While I might sympathize with their dilemma, for me, this is not even a close call. I view these matters as fundamentally Jewish and moral issues and it is from that—rabbinic– perspective that I want to speak tonight. Let me start with the three items just cited.

On climate change: It is worth remembering that one of the first commandments in the Torah is addressed to Adam who is told by God that his responsibility towards the earth is “l’ovdah ul’shomrah”, to both work the land and to protect it. To allow the fossil fuel industry to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on what has been called “anti-science” so as to protect their profits, sets the stage for ecological catastrophe. Nor is that catastrophe a century away. Look at the news; people are literally drowning in ecological catastrophe as we speak. Our responsibility is to pass on to our children a world that is better than the one we inherited. We are failing in that objective, big time.

On immigration: We are hearing heart-wrenching stories from our southern border. Let us remember: we were those refugees only one generation ago. And we’ve seen this movie before. What starts out as linguistic defamation—Hitler called Jews “vermin” and a cancer on society; Mexicans were called murderers and rapists by then-candidate Trump—sets the stage for total de-humanization of the targeted population. Enough of the public is convinced that the supreme leader is protecting them from danger that they allow public officials to do whatever it takes to get the job done. The end, they would argue, justifies the means. Nothing can be further from the Torah’s teaching that we believe that every human being is made in the image of God; that every person, regardless of race, religion or place of origin, has infinite value.

On journalism and truth telling: Here too, history is instructive. Autocrats stay in power by controlling information. Nazi Germany proved that you could sell the public on the “big lie” if you said it often enough and you have it come from people in authority. Communist Russia allowed for no free press. All news came from the state organ which was called Pravda, the Russian word for “truth”. In Pirkei Avot, Ethics of our Ancestors, we have a Mishna that adorns the beams of our sanctuary at Adat Shalom: Al shlosha dvarim haolam kayam, “On three things is a society sustained…”. Al ha-din, al ha-emet, v’al ha-shalom, “…on the rule of law, on speaking truth and on pursuing peace.” So basic is the truth principle in Judaism that emet, the Hebrew word for truth, is one of the many names for God in the Bible—el Emet.

So how do we reconcile the gap between what we have been taught is good, and sacred and true and the direction that our country and the world seem to be going?

Two Responses

We need a strategy for staying sane in a world gone mad. Let’s consider two: Go private or resist.

1. Go Private. When the public square turns out to be too much to bear, many people take refuge in the private, personal sphere. People can choose to spend their time and psychic energy on family, friends, work, hobbies, sports, entertainment, etc. and shut themselves off from the craziness going on in the world. On the surface, it all sounds well and good. But it is also problematic.

Judaism teaches in Deut ch. 22: lo tuchal lehitaleym, “you may not turn away”. It appears in the context of someone losing an object. You may not have played any part in a person losing an object. Yet still the Torah says, if someone is suffering a loss, you are not permitted to just walk on by. A Jew is not permitted to “opt out” from the troubles of the world. Judaism teaches us to engage pro-actively because we must care about the suffering of others. Period.

How much moreso if one’s entire society seems to be going in the wrong direction. If every person decides to go private, the consequences could be disastrous. Yale history professor Timothy Snyder wrote a short book soon after the election called On Tyranny that became a surprise bestseller. He urges Americans to heed the lessons of history. He writes: “The European history of the 20th century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands.” Overstated? Maybe. Worth heeding? Without question.

2. Resist. I have to admit, this option appeals to me on many levels. It appeals to my activist impulse. It feels consistent with how I understand the teachings of Judaism. It allows me to channel my outrage and my anger in more constructive directions.

Several Jewish organizations have taken leadership in the resistance. Most prominently, Bend the Arc: The Jewish Partnership for Justice, the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, and Truah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. Locally, Jews United for Justice, led so ably by our own Jacob Feinspan, has been doing amazing work as well. I have personally given money, signed onto campaigns and shown up for rallies with all of these groups and I have tremendous admiration for their leaders, most of whom are good friends of mine. I’ve also gotten involved with the Poor People’s Campaign led by the Rev. William Barber. If you have never heard Rev. Barber speak or heard about the Poor People’s Campaign that he leads, I urge you to check him out on You Tube. An African American pastor from North Carolina, William Barber is a voice every bit as powerful and prophetic as was Dr. Martin Luther King.

But I also have concerns about the strategy of resistance. First, not unlike the challenge facing the press, the list of issues that require focused organizing is overwhelming: tax policy; public education; racism; voter suppression; mass incarceration; LGBTQ rights; women at risk; poverty; environmental protection; DACA; militarization of our police departments. That is only a partial list. Each issue deserves laser-like attention and there is not enough money or people power to go around. A citizen of conscience can quickly become overwhelmed.

Second, I find it hard to strike the balance between having a sense of urgency—which seems highly appropriate given this moment in history– and the emotions of anger and even hate that get stirred up in me as I engage on any of these issues. Part of this is built into the fabric of electoral politics. Democrats are counting on the electorate to get angry enough about the direction of the country that they will turn out in big numbers in the coming elections. The sad lesson that we learned in the 2016 elections is that anger and hate are far more effective at getting voters out than messages of hope and promise. It is a sad commentary on the human condition and it explains why politics has become so negative and nasty.

Upon reflection, though, I am troubled by a resistance strategy that results in one side demonizing the other side. It strikes me as a Catch 22 that is inconsistent with Judaism’s highest aspirations.

A Better Way

So where does that leave us? I promised you a way to stay sane in a world gone mad. Back in July I was in a pretty dark funk. In the space of one week, the Trump Administration implemented its policy of separating children from their parents at the border; plans were announced to “celebrate” the one-year anniversary of the hate march in Charlottesville, this time to take place in Washington DC; and Antwon Rose, an unarmed black teen, was shot dead by a police officer in Pittsburgh. Going private seemed irresponsible. Resistance seemed futile.

We had plans with friends for dinner and a movie and I announced my strong desire to see the Mr. Rogers film, “Won’t you Be My Neighbor?” Our friends indulged me.

Now I have to admit, in our years of raising three children, we never turned on Mr. Rogers. Sesame Street was our show of choice. The brief glimpses of Mr. Rogers that I might have seen as we flipped channels struck me as kind of square, simple and—don’t laugh–childish. I now understand that I was not wise enough as a 30-something year old Dad to see that what Mr. Rogers had to offer might be precisely what the world needs—simple human kindness.

One scene in the movie illustrated the way that Mr. Rogers weighed in on an issue that has divided our nation for two centuries—racial discrimination. Police officer Clemons was a regular character on Mr. Rogers and he was Black. In one scene, Mr. Rogers is soaking his bare feet in a plastic kiddy pool. Officer Clemons walks into the scene and Mr. Rogers says, “Isn’t it hot today? Officer Clemons, why don’t you come sit beside me and put your feet in the pool?” Officer Clemons does just that. He takes off his shoes and socks, puts his feet in the pool, next to the feet of Mr. Rogers.  The scene made me think of the throngs of angry white people jeering and threatening the life of James Meredith, as he broke the color barrier entering the University of Mississippi in 1962. Or even more horrific, two years earlier, when Ruby Bridges, a black child, age 6, walked into a previously, all-white elementary school in New Orleans. The photos of angry white people screaming and shaking their fists at a 6-year old girl, is a stain of shame on America. It struck me that the scene in the kiddy pool, with Officer Clemons was an entirely original and profound form of “resistance” to the legacy of white racism in America. It was resistance, Mr. Roger’s style.

At the end of the scene, Mr. Rogers lovingly dries the feet of Officer Clemons, a powerful Christian practice, started by Jesus, in which a person in a position of power shows humility by engaging in an act that might otherwise be done by a servant for his or her master. You may remember that soon after the election of Pope Francis, one of his first acts was to travel to a prison outside Rome where he washed the feet of 12 prisoners.

“Won’t you Be my Neighbor” is filled with similar scenes of simple human kindness. Watching it at a time when our country seems to be in a downward spiral of anger, hate and mean-spiritedness, left me crying like a baby.

Fred Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister, shared his favorite story when he gave the Commencement address at his alma mater, Dartmouth, in 2002. The story speaks volumes. I want to share it with you.

“Have you heard my favorite story that came from the Seattle Special Olympics? Well, for the 100-yard dash, there were nine contestants, all of them so-called physically or mentally disabled. All nine of them assembled at the starting line, and at the sound of the gun, they took off. But not long afterward, one little boy stumbled and fell, hurt his knee and began to cry. The other eight children heard him crying. They slowed down, turned around, and ran back to him. Every one of them ran back to him. One little girl with Down Syndrome bent down and kissed the boy, and said, “This will make it better.” The little boy got up, and he and the rest of the runners linked their arms together, and joyfully walked to the finish line. They all finished the race at the same time. And when they did, everyone in that stadium stood up, and clapped, and whistled, and cheered for a long, long time. People who were there are still telling this story with great delight. And do you know why? Because deep down, we know that what matters most in this life is more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping others win, too. Even if it means slowing down and changing our course.”

Conclusion

My friends. In the coming days, weeks, months, and, I dare say, years, there will be times when to stay sane you will have to go private, seeking the sanctuary of home, family and friends. There will be other times when you will mobilize yourself to be part of the resistance, choosing the issues that matter most to you and determining the best way to spend your time and resources to make a difference in our troubled world.

But, this evening, I want to urge you to re-double your efforts to practice chesed, random acts of simple human kindness, one to the other. Practice the Torah of Mr. Rogers. It happens to be a darn good definition of teshuva, repentance: “Deep down, we know that what matters most in this life is more than winning for ourselves…even if it means slowing down and changing our course.”

The only way for Jews to respond to a world gone mad is to rebuild the world we want to live in on a foundation of human kindness—chesed.

May it be true for all of us in the coming year.  Shana tova.

This was a sermon delivered to Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation, Bethesda, MD on Kol Nidrei, 2018.

Jewish Communities of Meaning: Ideas Matter

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I recently was invited to make a presentation to deans from eight different rabbinical seminaries. The topic was how to better equip their students with some tools so that they can be more successful at driving innovation in the institutions that they will serve in the future. I observed that when I founded a synagogue (Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, MD), and a national educational foundation (PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values) in the late 1980’s, there was neither grant money available for Jewish social entrepreneurs nor customized training programs for the handful of us who were trying to build new organizations. Today, there are several pots of money available to Jewish social entrepreneurs and numerous options for training. These are developments to be celebrated.

Note: This article originally appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on May 15, 2018.

When we launched Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network in 2015, it was with the express purpose to do more than just replicate other communal efforts to provide training in the hard skills of fundraising, board development, branding/marketing, taking projects to scale, management, etc. As necessary as those skills are, we believe that we, in North America, are witnessing a sea change in the way next generation Jews will access the core values and content of the Jewish tradition. We are not trying to build a better phone, a faster computer, or a more fuel-efficient car. We are exploring new ways to pass down a sacred heritage in a cultural context in which conventional religious institutions are distinctly out of favor, especially among millennials.

We distinguish the way we are building out the national Kenissa Network from most programs designed to support Jewish-content social entrepreneurs in three ways. First, we take as a premise that many Jews today resonate to core values of Judaism if delivered in a culturally relevant manner. Not only do we reject the Jewish-lite approach; we believe that the more authentic the Jewish content is, the more compelling it is to next generation Jews.

Second, we have identified five core themes that we think animate most of the organizations in the Jewish innovation ecosystem. We often call these themes “portals” because they are the passage-ways that Jews will take to encounter Judaism on their own terms. It is this understanding that yielded our initiative’s name, Kenissa, the Hebrew word for “entrance-way”. The themes/portals are:

• 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;
• Yetzira – the human ability to imagine/invent/create ideas, science, art and culture;
• Kehillah – creating intentional, covenantal communities that bind people to one another and to a shared mission.

Having identified these themes, we set out to identify discrete sectors in the Jewish community that are using one or more of these themes to create new models of Jewish identity. They include groups focused on Jewish learning, social justice, spiritual practice, eco-sustainability, the arts and new models of spiritual community.

When we invite the “creatives” who are building organizations focused on one or more of these themes to join the Kenissa Network, they often find the initial gathering disorienting. We are bringing together people with very different approaches to Jewish life, Jewish practice and Jewish identity. In fact, most of the leaders we invite tend to know fewer than 10% of the rest of the people in the room. And yet, at the end of our three-day Consultation, they share a powerful commonality of purpose. They recognize that, despite their differences, all take their Judaism very seriously and all understand that their ability to succeed may benefit from the support, wisdom and insights of the other people in the Kenissa Network.

Third, the Kenissa initiative places unique emphasis on covenantal community and what it takes to create such cultures. I wrote about the idea of covenantal community previously in these pages and won’t repeat it here. Because we believe that “the medium is the message,” we design the National Consultations that Kenissa convenes to model covenantal community. Part of the strength of the national network we are creating owes to the fact that, in three days, we can take a “company of strangers” and forge a relational community of leaders who are eager to stay connected to one another and to the mission of Kenissa. Among the array of communities of practice that Kenissa sponsors year-round, one on “covenanting” and one on “communal culture” are extremely popular. Most of the leaders that we invite have not even thought about these issues before they come to our gathering.

Most of the institutions that characterized the Jewish community of the past 50 years are transactional in nature. Nobody saw anything wrong with such institutions as they reflected the cultural patterns of American society of the times. But 21st American culture has moved decidedly away from top-down organizational structures towards networks and do-it-yourself (DIY) cultures. Institutions stuck in the 20th century paradigm are destined to lose market share and fade into irrelevance. Yet just because an organization was created in the last ten years does not prevent founders from defaulting into dysfunctional organizational cultures. They are just mimicking the organizational patterns that are most prevalent in our community. Among the most important value propositions that Kenissa brings to this field is our use of the concept of covenantal community to explore how to create healthy and generative organizational cultures.

We can summarize the three features of the Kenissa Network outlined above in two words: Ideas matter. Anyone who visits our website will find a rich set of commentaries on the state of the American Jewish community and the ideas and values that inspire this generation of Jews to connect to a sacred, ancient tradition. Every Monday we post a new commentary that anyone can receive by signing up for the Kenissa blog. Members of our Kenissa Network also are invited to create graphic representations of the five themes at the core of our Kenissa framework. While we started with one Venn diagram as a way to help our leaders enter into conversation with one another, we quickly discovered that our leaders had their own ways to understand their work in the context of the Jewish tradition. We invite you to visit our gallery of new models of Jewish life and to read their creators’ commentaries on those models. We believe that you will find it a most mind-expanding experience.

We are growing the national Kenissa: Communities of Meaning network in a very intentional way. We believe it represents the new face(s) of American Jewish life. If you are a social entrepreneur who is working in one of our five themes/portals, we invite you to register your project here, which will make you eligible to be invited into the Network. We invite 50 founders/leaders into the Network each year. If you are working in the organized Jewish community and you want to explore how your institution can benefit from the Kenissa Network or partner with some of our projects, contact me at RabbiSid@Hazon.org.

Faith and Service in Haiti

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When I accepted an invitation from the Israeli organization, Tevel B’Tzedek, to travel to Haiti about a year after the devastating earthquake in 2010 to do some teaching for their disaster relief team on the ground, little did I know that it would lead to one of the most fulfilling projects of my rabbinic career. The Israelis were doing amazing work under the most difficult circumstances, as Israelis have done all around the globe in similar situations. My contribution was to bring some Judaic context to the work taking place in one of the poorest countries in the world.

As it turned out, the interest in my teaching was not just from the Israelis; the Haitians that were being trained by the Israelis were eager to learn from a rabbi as well. At a time when Jews are at risk in many parts of the globe because of rising anti-Semitism, Haitians treat Jews as if they had just walked out of the pages of the Bible. Haitian Christians identify powerfully with the story of the Israelites coming out of Egyptian enslavement and being led by God to the Promised Land. It reflects their deepest aspirations for themselves since Haitians have not only been victimized by natural disasters, but by 100 years of political tyranny and a dysfunctional civil society.

This article appeared in The Peoplehood Papers 21, published in May 2018 in a special issue on ”Social Justice and Peoplehood”. The journal is published by The Center for Jewish Peoplehood, based in Israel and headed by Dr. Shlomo Ravid.

In several of my presentations to Haitians, my translator was a young Christian minister named Johnny Felix. In his early 30’s and with a smile that can light up a room, Pastor Johnny founded a church and a school in Leogane, literally, out of nothing. I spent some time in his community and with the students in his school and felt that with a little help, Pastor Johnny could actually make a big difference in the lives of these children. Less than 50% of Haitian children go to any elementary school at all and the most successful schools are mostly church-sponsored.

Upon return home, I spoke about my experience from the bima of the congregation where I am the founding rabbi—Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, MD. I proposed that we undertake a Haiti Project with the primary mission of supporting Pastor Johnny’s NICL School which now serves 200 children from K-6th grades. So as not to repeat the mistakes of so much post-disaster aid, the requirement was that families commit to five years of funding at a relatively modest level of $100/year.

Adat Shalom’s Haiti Project is now going into its sixth year. Over 100 Adat Shalom households contribute $100/year for five years which allows us to support Pastor Johnny’s NICL (New Christian Institute of Leogane) School. As a result of this generosity we are able to fund scholarships for student tuition, equipment for the school and underwrite the school’s core budget. We have worked closely with Pastor Johnny on issues of budgeting, management and the importance of sustainability. Since we have started the relationship, we are pleased that tuition revenue has increased by over 50% as a percentage of the overall school budget. On more than one occasion, Pastor Johnny has said that Adat Shalom was sent to him by God. As much as that might hit our ears a bit strangely, there is no way to do the work that Pastor Johnny does day in and day out against overwhelming odds without such a “leap of faith”.

In December 2016 I led the fourth Adat Shalom service mission to Haiti in six years. We now fill the 20 available slots easily, with half the delegation made up of young people, ages 15-25. It is hard to capture the power of the experience in words.

Our work over the years has been varied. We have prepared meals for a massive soup kitchen operation. We laid concrete foundations and built houses. At Pastor Johnny’s NICL compound we created a vegetable garden that we dedicated and named Gan HaMazon, the “garden of plenty”. Many of the students in the school are food insecure so we focused our attention on that aspect of community development. On our last two missions, we raised the funds for and provided much of the labor to build a third structure on the school’s campus. Part of that facility will house a computer lab with 15 work stations while the other part will become a dining room for the students. In each venue we worked side by side with Haitians and we used that opportunity to gain insight into the challenges they face in their lives. In so many cases we walked away inspired by the dignity of the Haitians living in circumstances that are close to what would be our worst nightmare.

The experience was also a deeply spiritual one for us. Every evening after dinner we gathered in the dorm at Notre Dame where we lived. We used the time to share highs and lows or our very intense days and then to enrich our experience by studying Judaic texts and values from a sourcebook that I developed specifically for our mission. The conversations were wide ranging. How can Americans be most helpful in a country where poverty, illiteracy and illness is so widespread? How can we help Pastor Johnny and the NICL school become self-sustaining? What are the ethical ramifications of our lives of privilege when compared to the deprivation that is the lot of most Haitians? More than a few of the mission participants talked about the experience as “transformative” and “life changing”.

Taking on the project at Adat Shalom did require some conversation. Some wanted to be sure that our service missions would not be “missionary” in the way some church ministries use missions to proselytize. Others, reading of the how ineffective the $13.5 billion in aid has been in Haiti, shared their own reservations of our commitment of time and money to the country. But the testimonials from mission participants over the years has made almost everyone into a believer. Our micro-philanthropy, focused on one institution, has been most gratifying as people see the progress we have made at NICL. One congregant wrote me a note saying that she herself was not capable of going on a mission but she was so proud to be a member of a synagogue whose commitment to justice extended to a place like Haiti.

As a rabbi our service missions represent the very best of what we can and should be doing as a Jewish community. The participants became a tightly bonded team during our challenging days on the work site and we became a family during our “down time” at the dorm. With each passing day we became more inspired to give of ourselves to help those who have so little but who live their lives with great dignity and with deep faith. Finally, we took great pride in “walking the talk” of Torah. We weren’t just talking about Jewish values; we were living those values every day.

There is one arena in which I have become something of a proselytizer. I believe that service missions need to be a bigger part of how the Jewish community, and synagogues in particular, engage in tzedek work. Such work can be done in one’s own community, of course. But it becomes a whole other kind of experience when done by a group for a week to ten days, be it in Israel, in Rwanda (where some of our synagogue members spend time at the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village), or in Haiti. Not only does it build strong social bonds among participants but it provides for the kind of cross-cultural learning that could never be conveyed in a classroom. Hundreds of churches understand the importance of service missions as a way to transmit the values that they cherish, both to their members and to the people that the missions serve. The same could be true for synagogues.

In the sermon I delivered at Pastor Johnny’s church on Sunday morning I said that despite the differences in nationality, race, religion and socio-economic status that separate us and the Haitians who were our hosts, three things tie us together. Both communities are faith communities committed to chesed, acts of lovingkindness; both are committed to tzedek, acts of justice; and both are committed to shalom, acts that advance spiritual wholeness and peace.

Many Jews would jump at the chance to live out these values under the auspices of a Jewish organization. To the extent that we know how many Jews, especially of the younger generation, are motivated by social justice, Jewish institutions should find ways to build these kinds of hands-on service missions into their year-round programming.

Outside In: Jewish Education that Matters

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Jon Woocher and I both grew up on the South Shore of Long Island. His father was my childhood dentist and our parents were friends. Ironically, we did not know each other from our childhood; we only discovered that connection when we began to collaborate as professionals.

Even before I knew Jon, his book, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews, which came out in 1986, had a big impact on my thinking. He understood, as few others did, that a religious heritage could manifest itself not just in people’s patterns of religious observance, but also in their civic behavior. In fact, if our metrics were synagogue attendance, belief in God, and religious observance, Jews would be described as among the least conventionally religious ethnic groups in America.

Yet Jews are, arguably, the most civically engaged ethnic group America has ever seen. That is true both in the way that the Jewish community organizes itself (e.g., the Federation system, ties to Israel and world Jewry, educational institutions, social service agencies, and thousands of Jewish non-profits serving every cause under the sun), as well as the way Jews are over-represented in the social, political, and civic institutions that underpin American society.

This article appeared in Gleanings, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 2018 published by The William Davidson School of Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The issue was titled, “Jewish Education to Help Us Thrive” and was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Jonathan Woocher, one of the leading figures in Jewish education of the past 50 years.

When PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values was founded in 1988, Jon headed up the Jewish Education Service of North America (JESNA), and I asked him to serve on PANIM’s Advisory Board. His enthusiasm was precisely the kind of validation that a young social entrepreneur needs. A few years later, JESNA would become the cosponsor for PANIM’s Jewish Civic Initiative, what would become (at the time) the largest Jewish service-learning initiative in the country. Our working relationship continued for over 25 years, a time he reflects upon in the chapter he wrote for my book, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future (2013). Jon’s chapter, entitled, “Jewish Education: From Continuity to Meaning” argued that the key question facing the field of Jewish education today is not group preservation but rather conveying a sense of personal meaning.

PANIM’s mission was to inspire young people to assume leadership roles on the local, national, and international stage and to be activists on issues of concern to the Jewish people and to the world at large. The methodology involved integrating Jewish learning, Jewish values, and social responsibility. In effect, PANIM was a beta test in using Judaism as a vehicle for individuals to live thriving, meaningful lives.

It is worth reflecting on how PANIM attracted thousands of Jewish teens to a fairly serious Jewish educational program at a time when the vast majority of teens were not flocking to such structured Jewish educational programs as Hebrew high schools or synagogue post-confirmation classes. One, the program was billed as a “trip to Washington D.C. to explore politics, social justice, and service.” This is what got most of our participants to sign up. Two, we planned the experience to be personally transformational. Our aim was for PANIM to change the way that these young people would forever understand the relationship between their Jewish identity and their responsibility to the world. We were, in effect, following Jon’s prescriptions for what Jewish education and should be aiming for.

A key principle that guided our entire educational methodology was this: Every concept had to be developed from the outside in, not from the inside out. An “inside-out” methodology assumes that a Jewish value, a biblical quotation, or a Jewish rabbinic text will have inherent significance to students. That is the approach that typifies most Jewish educational strategies in conventional Jewish institutions. We, however, made no such assumption about our teen participants. In fact, we assumed that they came to us skeptical of the relevance of Jewish texts and values. The outside-in methodology had a different starting point: “How does X (e.g., human rights, poverty, discrimination, climate change, war, hunger, refugees) affect the world you live in and how can you make a positive difference?”

Few things are more motivating to a teenager than to be empowered to make a difference in the world. PANIM’s programs ended with meetings on Capitol Hill and with members of Congress. We challenged teens to exercise their democratic right to petition public officials. The primary tool they had for these meetings was the information they garnered during our policy sessions. Given that virtually every public policy issue has a moral/ethical dimension, the integration of Jewish wisdom was therefore organic and welcomed. Every educational unit we developed and curriculum we published integrated the wisdom of the Jewish tradition with analysis of social and political issues that would dramatically impact the world these teens were about to inherit.

We didn’t have to preach Jewish pride to our teens; rather, they instinctively understood that their heritage included generations of wisdom about how we need to repair a broken world. Thus, they learned that Jewish people were among the most politically engaged citizens of America. Jews learned the hard way what can result when political regimes don’t protect the most vulnerable among us.

Jon often used the term “civil religion.” It involves asking, “How will Jews behave toward each other with people of other faith and ethnic backgrounds and with the people and institutions that lead our society and the world?”

Every Jewish school, synagogue, and organization would do well to take a step back and ask whether or not they are advancing a Jewish framework that matters to their respective constituencies, and how they can practice “outside in.” This is what gives people a sense of meaning and purpose. This is what releases the power of Judaism to help people flourish and thrive. When this is offered by Jewish institutions, the identity and continuity questions take care of themselves.

The Passover Spirit-Compassion First

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Note: These were remarks given at a Pre-Passover Vigil held in front of the Embassy of Israel in Washington D.C. on March 27, 2018.

I am Rabbi Sid Schwarz. I am the founding rabbi of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, MD; a life-long Zionist and a Board member of Truah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.

Three nights from now, we will sit at our Seder tables. The Seder tells our people’s master story which begins with our ancestors being slaves in the land of Egypt, in Africa. The triumphal moment in the story is the recounting of our ancestors’ redemption from slavery, allowing them to travel, through the desert to the land that God promised to Abraham, the land of Israel.

The Seder is both an historical re-enactment and an ethical charge. Some years, we test our imaginations to make it a re-enactment. But that has not been the case the last few years. The world today is flooded with refugees, over 60 million. Each and every one of them is looking for their Promised Land, a land in which they and their families can be safe. In the past decade over 50,000 Africans facing war, oppression and death in their home countries crossed the same desert that the Israelites crossed in the Passover story—the Sinai–and entered into the State of Israel.

Israel is not the only country in the world facing this dilemma. But it may be the only country in the world founded on the principles of the Hebrew prophets. “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him/her as yourself for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Lev 19:34).

In the Haggadah we read: Kol dichfin yatai veyachol –“let all who are hungry, all who are needy, come into our homes and eat.” This is the ethical charge of the Passover Seder.

Jews are rightfully proud of the state of Israel and its accomplishments. It is a country that has been settled by and built by refugees. After WWII, Israel offered a refuge to the Jews of Europe who were decimated by the Holocaust. In the 1950’s Israel took in Jews from Arab lands. In the 1980’s Israeli’s engineered a remarkable rescue of Jews from Ethiopia. And, in the 1990’s Israel took in almost a million Jews from the FSU. Wherever Jews have faced oppression, Israel has been a place of refuge.

But the true test of Biblical hospitality is opening our gates to those refugees who are not part of the majority culture. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that starting next week, Africans who came into the country illegally will be deported to Rwanda or Uganda. Tens of thousands of Israelis have protested the decision, arguing that such an action violates a core principle upon which Israel was founded.

In that same spirit, over 900 rabbis have signed a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, co-sponsored by HIAS, the New Israel Fund, Truah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and Right Now: Advocates for African Asylum Seekers in Israel. I am proud to be among the signers.

It reads, in part: “We write as Jewish clergy from around the world to urge you to stop the deportations of asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea who have sought refuge in Israel. As a country founded by refugees and whose early leaders helped to craft the 1951 International Convention on the Status of Refugees, Israel must not deport those seeking asylum within its borders. We Jews know far too well what happens when the world closes its doors to those forced to flee their homes….”

“…Our own experience of slavery and liberation and our own experience as refugees compel us to act with mercy and justice toward those seeking refuge among us. Please affirm these Jewish values as well as Israel’s international commitments by stopping the deportations.”

In the Biblical story of the Exodus, we are told that Pharaoh “hardened his heart” against his Hebrew slaves. We know what hard hearts look like. In the United States it is promoted as America First and it threatens 3.6 million undocumented immigrants and 800,000 “dreamers” who came to this country as children. Hard hearts are contagious. We now read of Hungary First, Austria First, Italy First, Myanmar First. Each of these countries has its unique victims. And now, Israel First. For every country that closes its heart and closes its borders, the most destitute people on our planet suffer.

We are here today, on the eve of Passover, the holiday of freedom, liberation and justice, to call for a new spirit. Rather than country first, how about compassion first? Instead of ethnicity first, how about hospitality first? Instead of me first, how about justice first? Let Israel be a light unto the nations in the way it treats its refuges.

Kol dichfin yatai veyachol –“let all who are hungry, all who are needy, come into our homes and eat.” Let the Passover season inspire us to open our hearts, open our homes and open our countries to the strangers in our midst. That would be a Passover worth celebrating.

These remarks were published in the New York Jewish Week on the same day as they were delivered.

Should a Rabbi Take Communion?

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When I was growing up, the onset of holiday season brought endless conversations and opinions about the significance of Jews having Christmas Trees. Frankly, the topic never much interested me. I am a firm believer that if we make Judaism alive, joyous and relevant, we will get more than our share of Jews—as well as a good many non-Jewish fellow travelers—who will find ways to be part of the Jewish community. What does interest me is the extent to which we are entering into an era in which people who are searching for meaning are willing to explore beliefs, practices and rituals of traditions that are not their own as a way to deepen their particular religious journey. Recently, I even found myself challenged about whether or not it was OK for me to take communion as I participated in a Christian worship service. Some background.

This was first published in the Israel Times in December, 2017. A previous version of this article appeared in the New York Jewish Week.

Much has been written about the “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon that has resulted in the decline of membership in conventional religious institutions even as there is an upsurge of interest in living more mindful, intentional lives of purpose. While a handful of forward-looking clergy have successfully incorporated this new consciousness into the faith communities that they lead, most congregations continue to do business as they did 50 years ago. It doesn’t take a genius to guess which of the two types of faith communities are thriving and attracting younger people and which are aging and dying. 

For the past three years I have been leading a national effort to identify emerging Jewish spiritual communities around the country called Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network. What we have been learning is that many of the most innovative efforts to redefine Jewish life and identity are not happening in synagogues. What has made this work all the more fascinating is a close collaboration with the How We Gather Project based at Harvard Divinity School led by Angie Thurston and Casper terKuile. Casper and Angie are uncovering emerging spiritual communities in the larger American public square that parallel (and sometimes overlap) with those that the Kenissa Network is finding in the American Jewish space.

This fall the third national gathering of the How We Gather Project took place at Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut. The 120 participants ranged from those who had no background in conventional religious institutions to clergy who are clear outliers (rogues?) in their respective denominational homes. Most however had some exposure to an historic religious tradition even though the attitudes towards that exposure is deeply ambivalent. There are many reasons for this ambivalence but among the most paramount is the belief that no one religion has cornered the market on Truth. The currency of most religious traditions is to promote the view that they do, in fact, represent “the way”. For most millennials, this is a non-starter. They are simply not going to walk in the door, and if they do, they are not staying for long.

To a person, the young people who are driving emerging spiritual communities are deeply caring and thoughtful seekers. Putting them together in the same space for several days is an emotional, spiritual and intellectual feast. There is a hunger to experiment and explore different historic faith traditions and to create spiritual practices from scratch. On any given morning, a participant could attend a session on Mormon mysticism; an Islamic Dhikr practice of remembrance; art as a form or resilience; a meditative Jewish shacharit service; or Afro Flow Yoga. Most people gravitated to the practice that was least familiar to them, not the most comfortable.

I led a session called Sabbath Praxis. To an audience that was mostly non-Jewish, we considered how “sabbath consciousness” might be the necessary antidote to a world that has made wealth, power, materialism and technology the idolatry of our times. We broke into pairs (chavruta) to do some study of excerpts of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath, a book written in 1951 but which is as relevant today as ever. The group then broke into stations, each taking one of ten principles that were created by a project called The Sabbath Manifesto that included things like: avoid technology; spend time with loved ones; go outside. Each group created a ritual to represent their principle. Many will now explore how they might integrate that ritual into their lives.

The consciousness of the space we created was exhilarating. Participants were eager to experiment with practices that have been around for centuries. Wisdom was freely quoted and cited from a wide range of religious traditions. New practices were invented and new wisdom emerged from the experience we were sharing together. Forty non-Jews participated in a mikvah ritual led by Rabbi Sarah Luria, the founder/director of Immerse NYC, and they could not stop talking about it for the rest of the weekend. If religion has a future in America, it will look like this. And clergy had better find a way to get on the bus.  

Oh yes, and I had to decide if I was going to take communion. It was certainly not my intention. I was, however, eager to attend a service called Liberation Communion. It was being led by an ordained Methodist minister named John Helmiere who leads Valley and Mountain Fellowship, an alternative, progressive church in Seattle. The liturgy included many references to Jesus as a role model of a political revolutionary who saw the ills of society and who chose to speak truth to power. When John invited participants to participate in communion—walking forward to ingest bread and wine, I asked him what those symbols meant in the context of the service he was leading. Of course, I knew that traditionally, the bread and wine were symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ and I knew that it was a religious rite meant exclusively for believing Christians. In the same way that certain rituals in a synagogue are reserved exclusively for Jews, I wanted to respect the boundaries of the faith community that I was visiting.

But John “reconstructed” the meaning of communion so that the bread represented the abundance of the earth we inhabit and wine represented our need to embrace life with joy. The ritual aligned with the message of the creative liturgy John developed and I decided to accept the invitation to communion. As with so much of the experience over the weekend, we both learned about particular practices of faiths not our own, and discovered how the particular practices pointed to a larger, universal, shared aspiration for ourselves and for the world.

It certainly helped that the bread provided by the Jewish retreat center was challah and the wine was kosher Kedem grape juice, both Jewish comfort foods. Taking communion in that context made me no less Jewish just as the mikvahexperience did not make any of the participants less Christian or Muslim. All of us though, were inspired to see how faith and practice can help make manifest the kinds of lives we want to lead.

Now I just have to figure out how I will explain this to my mother.

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Rabbi Sid Schwarz is the author of Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future. He directs both the Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network and the Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI), a two-year fellowship for rabbis on visionary leadership. Both programs are housed at Hazon.

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