A Time for “Eternal Vigilance”

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Trauma is everywhere.

I know. My experience would not be shared if I lived in Youngstown, OH; Lansing, MI; or Green Bay, WI. But I don’t. I live in suburban Washington DC and I am a rabbi who works with and among Jews.

My synagogue was packed on the shabbat after the election. Many came who were not regulars because they needed one another and our rabbi created the space for people to share their feelings during the Torah service. It reminded me of how people flocked to our small, suburban synagogue on Long Island two days after the assassination of President Kennedy. It was not a shabbat; people were traumatized by the event and needed a community of comfort. A friend of mine who has been a long-term attorney in the Department of Justice indicated that he would need to resign, not because he was a political appointee but as a matter of principle; he could not serve in a Trump Administration. Another friend, a psychiatrist, indicated that new prescriptions for Xanax (anti-anxiety medication) were flying off her pad.

This column appeared in the New York Jewish Week on November 23, 2016.

In the week after the election I followed several rabbinic list serves. There were voices of reason suggesting that we need to work harder to understand the Trump voters so that we don’t exacerbate the divisions in our society. Admirable sentiments but I am not there yet. Our democracy is at grave peril from a President-elect who fans the flames of bigotry, has no regard for truth (e.g. Obama is not an American; climate change is a hoax), and whose primary behavioral filter is how his wealth or ego can be serviced.

A night that might have ended with a woman breaking the proverbial glass ceiling instead ended in a frightening echo of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Donald Trump won the Presidency on Nov. 9, 2016, the anniversary of the night that demonstrated that Hitler intended to act on his promises. It would be a pleasant surprise if a President Trump would walk back the dozens of irresponsible promises he made during the campaign. But for Americans to count on that would not only be utterly irresponsible but would also demonstrate a total disregard for history. Authoritarians are not mollified when they attain power, they become addicted to it and their appetite is rarely satiated.

I am not a person prone to fear or anxiety. I tend to be hopelessly optimistic and I am often teased about how much I trust everyone. But today, I am scared. The Southern Poverty Law Center recorded close to 500 hate incidents across America in the one week since the election. The Jewish tradition teaches us that human beings have both good and evil inclinations. The campaign of Donald Trump fed off of people’s fears. Hate speech, bigotry and even violence were the hallmarks of his rallies. Now, that behavior has been given sanction by his elevation to the highest office in the land. In schools and stadiums and public squares across the country, the bullies now have a champion and the weak will cower in fear. For the first time in my life, I feel deeply ashamed to be an American.

Thomas Jefferson said “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. Indeed. I say that not in any partisan sense. It is not just progressives who will suffer when climate change deniers and the fossil fuel industry start to control environmental policies in this country. It is not just minorities who will suffer when the Department of Justice gives a wink and a nod to more “law and order” instead of serving as a break on the exercise of undue and often lethal force by police. Ironically, it will be Donald Trump’s base of the white working class that will suffer the most when tax rates are cut for the top 1%, the estate tax is eliminated, deficits balloon, and there is no money for jobs program, subsidized college education or health care.

We-as Americans and as Jews-have our work cut out for us. Now is not the time to “normalize” a President-elect who is so ill equipped to govern a nation or to give him six months to see if our worst fears will come to pass. It is a time for eternal vigilance.

It is a time for Americans to get back into the civic arena with time, energy, ideas and money. Join non-profits that champion the causes you care about. Ally with populations that are most at risk. Fight efforts to restrict voting rights that mostly target minorities and the poor. Exercise your rights to assemble in peaceful protests wherever and whenever power is exercised unjustly. Let the world know that the America that was once known as “the land of the free and the home of the brave” has not disappeared. If that spirit will not be made manifest in the corridors of political power, it will be manifested by the American people.

Let us take a lesson from the common ancestor of Jews, Christians and Moslems, from Abraham. In the Hebrew language, he was called an ivri. It is translated as “a Hebrew”. The word’s origin means “from the other side (of the river)”. The rabbis of the Jewish tradition teach us that it is the destiny of those faithful to the lessons of our Patriarch to be willing, when necessary, to stand on the other side. To stand in sacred opposition.

Now is such a time.

Spiritual Heroes: A Kol Nidre Sermon

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For many years, the organization that I led-PANIM- ran 4-day seminars on Jewish values and social activism for teens who came to Washington D.C. from around the country. When I would speak to the students, my lead-off question would be: Who are your spiritual heroes?

It was a question that gave pause. Most American teens would have fairly quick answers if I asked them to name their favorite lead singer in a band. Or their favorite movie star. Or their go-to sports legend. Each of those answers could have come back affixed with the label “hero”. But “spiritual hero” was not a word combination that they expected. I’d wait a minute or two and usually a few hands would go up in the air. Before I called on them I offered a definition so as to make it possible for more students to get a person in their mind’s eye.

My definition: “A spiritual hero is someone, either living or deceased who, by virtue of their words and/or deeds, led a life that inspired others and was worthy of emulation.”

Let me take a moment now and ask you to think of one person who has served for you as a spiritual hero. I hope most of you have thought of someone. If not, don’t worry. This sermon might give you some ideas. Tomorrow, during the afternoon break discussion, we will have a chance to share thoughts with one another.

One of the reasons I decided to speak about spiritual heroes this year is because we live in a time when we desperately need to restore our faith in the nobility of the human spirit. I assume most of you shared my dismay at the unexpected rise of Donald Trump as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. I dare say that we could describe the man’s character by simply picking out 5-10 of the lines from the al chet prayer—a list of behaviors that we need to repent for. Let’s see: triviality of thought; shaming of one’s neighbor; arrogance, excessive pride; abusive speech, to name just a few. OK, maybe it is more than 10. Suffice it to say: Hardly a role model for a national leader.

Some would say that we should not look to the political realm for moral or spiritual leadership. They will say that what it takes to rise to the top requires too many compromises, too many concessions, too much deal making. I vehemently disagree.

Most of us have lived to see a handful of political leaders emerge as spiritual heroes: Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia. Lech Walesa in Poland. Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Aung San Su Ky (Chi) in Burma. Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in Israel.

None of these leaders were saints. None lived unblemished lives. But each one was able to rise above the small-mindedness that is the currency of electoral politics to seize an historic moment for their respective countries. Each was able to act in a way that helped to bend the arc of history toward justice. By doing that, they made the world better; they were role models for their citizens; and they helped us understand what it takes to act with spiritual heroism.

Spiritual heroes represent more than simply “doing the right thing”. For that I could have used the term “moral hero”. Children can be taught to do the right thing. But spiritual heroism implies a much more mature understanding that our behavior has cosmic significance. Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, taught that the universe was structured to support human goodness. It was how he understood the concept of God. Spiritual heroism requires cultivating an inner sense of what is right and just. Morality requires our head to guide our behavior. Spiritual heroism requires head, heart and the totality of our selves—our souls (i.e. the meaning of the first line of the V’ahavta prayer).

Allow me to expand on the concept of spiritual heroism by offering a glimpse of two people who have been spiritual heroes for me. Both passed away this past year so it is fitting to invoke their legacies: Elie Wiesel and Rev. John Steinbruck.

Elie Wiesel died this summer at the age of 87. He first came to public attention as a chronicler of the Holocaust. After his mother and sister were killed at Auschwitz, Wiesel and his father were deported to Buchenwald. His father died within the year but Elie Wiesel survived. His book, Night, is his recounting of his experience in the concentration camp and it is the way that millions of Jews and non-Jews learned about the Holocaust.

But for me, the book that made a far greater impression was his book The Jews of Silence. It was published in 1966, six years after Night. I was 14 years old. The book was my wake up call to social conscience and it started me on a 20-year journey as an activist on behalf of some 3 million Jews in the Soviet Union. I was transformed by the poetic way that Wiesel flipped the meaning of the word “silence” in the book’s title. Much of the book was about the how the Communist State silenced Soviet Jews and restricted their ability to practice Judaism or to emigrate. But the book’s punch came from Wiesel’s accusation that Western Jews were as responsible for that predicament as were Soviet officials. It was our silence, it was our apathy that allowed Soviet Jews to be imprisoned in a totalitarian state. This, he argued, was morally indefensible. As the British philosopher, Edmund Burke said in the 19th century, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men (good people) to do nothing.”

I pledged to myself not to become a “Jew of silence”, someone whose apathy made me complicit in the suffering of other people.

In the ensuing years I made two trips to Russia to meet with Soviet Jews and bring them Jewish “contraband”. I attended dozens of rallies and spoke at dozens of synagogues, showing my slides of my visits with Soviet refuseniks. My first congregation adopted refusenik Lev Elbert, who lived in Kiev. While he was serving a prison sentence for trumped up drug charges in 1983, we helped to facilitate a Bar-Mitzvah for his son, Karmi, via telephone. I later met Lev and his son in Israel. This type of activism was widely practiced by thousands of Jews in the West during those years. These Jews emerged from their “silence” to mobilize on behalf of our oppressed sisters and brothers trapped in the Soviet state.

Ironically, my first face to face meeting with Elie Wiesel took place on December 6, 1987. I was then the executive director of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington D.C. and we helped to organize the Freedom Rally for Soviet Jewry the day before Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met President Ronald Reagan for a summit meeting in the White House.

Wiesel and I met on the podium of the rally. The rally would not have happened but for the efforts of Wiesel and recently released prisoner of conscience, Natan Sharansky. Few gave the rally much chance for success in the middle of the winter. But the rally captured the imagination of Jews across the country and it did not take long for Jewish organizations to sign on and support it. A quarter million Jews attended the rally and it changed the course of history. Within a year, the gates of emigration opened and close to a million Soviet Jews went to Israel and to Western countries. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own tyranny. Textbooks and courses on human rights will now cite the Soviet Jewry movement as the first successful international grassroots effort in history to reverse a national policy of discrimination. The campaign started with Wiesel’s book, The Jews of Silence.

Among the many things that I found so inspiring about Elie Wiesel is that he did not restrict his activism to Jewish causes. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, not because he wrote the book Night, not because he was a voice for the victims of the Shoah and not because of his advocacy for Soviet Jewry. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he stated that, as a Jew, he was part of a traumatized generation that experienced the silence and abandonment of the world while Jews were systematically exterminated. Yet he went on to say that he could not restrict his own activism to Jewish victimization alone. Among the issues he invoked in his Nobel speech were: apartheid; the rights of Palestinians; hunger; racism; and the political persecution of writers, poets and intellectuals throughout the world.

Some 2000 years after Rabbi Hillel stated: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me; but if I am only for myself, what do I amount to?” Wiesel re-stated the same principle in a modern idiom. Indeed, in April of 1993, I was present at the dedication of the US Holocaust Museum. More than a dozen heads of state were present as was President Bill Clinton who offered the keynote remarks. Wiesel, who at the time was chairman the US Holocaust Commission, followed President Clinton. In his trademark soft voice, he turned to the President and said: “Mr. President: If your words here today mean anything, then you cannot stand silent as Bosnians are being starved and slaughtered in the Balkans.” Within the year, the Clinton Administration became actively engaged in protecting Bosnia until the Dayton Accords were signed, bringing an end to that horrific war.

The words and actions of one spiritual hero named Elie Wiesel literally saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Reverend John Steinbruck did not play on as large an international stage as did Elie Wiesel but his spiritual heroism was no less impactful. In fact, because John and I were friends, he may have had more impact on me than did Wiesel.

When I moved to Washington D.C. in 1984 to head up the Jewish Community (Relations) Council, John was already a legend in a city that can get easily jaded to celebrity. John came to Washington in 1970 to be the senior pastor of Luther Place Church. The church was at the corner of 14th and N Streets, off of Logan Circle, an area that a couple of years earlier had burned in the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Luther Place had a beautiful, historic building but its membership had made the exodus from the decaying inner city and its future looked dim.

I first met John standing on 16th Street across from the Soviet Embassy. The Community Council that I headed was the sponsor of this demonstration of solidarity for Soviet Jews. Every day at 12:30pm, a different Jewish organization took responsibility for standing silently across from the Embassy for 15 minutes holding signs that said “Free Soviet Jews”. The vigil took place without interruption for 21 years, from 1970-1991. John was a great champion of human rights and that commitment led him to take a trip to the Soviet Union in 1976 to meet with Jews. He came back deeply committed to the cause and on many Jewish holidays John, along with a handful of his Christian congregants were the ones who stood vigil across from the Embassy while the Jewish community observed its holiday.

But Soviet Jewry was only one of John’s many crusades. Aware that within blocks of his church dozens of people slept on the streets of the Nation’s Capital, John challenged the churches and synagogues of the area to practice “Biblical Hospitality” by taking the homeless into their buildings overnight. The idea made for a great sermon but no clergyperson in town had the courage and the determination to walk the talk. How would a congregation support such an effort? What would it cost? How would security issues be handled? How could budgets accommodate the exorbitant insurance premiums that would result?

John taught by example. Because of the membership decline in his congregation, his Sunday School classrooms were not being used. “Let’s open the doors” he told his Board. “Invite the homeless in from the cold and let us make our church into a sanctuary of hospitality”. His Board raised all of the expected objections at which point John said: “This is a church and we don’t put God to a vote”. The sheer force of his moral argument carried the day and within weeks, homeless people were invited to come in off the street to get a hot meal and bed down in Luther Place’s classrooms.

Very few congregations followed John’s lead in bringing the homeless into their buildings but they were inspired to support his efforts through financial contributions and a legion of volunteers (including from Adat Shalom).

John built a compassion-industrial complex, an array of institutions all growing out of his simple but profound commitment to help the most vulnerable among us. At his urging, Luther Place bought the townhouses across the street from his church which became a continuum of care facility for homeless women. He then raised millions of dollars to build a state of the art residential complex for women called N Street Village. The homeless needed medical care so the Zacchaeus Free Clinic was founded where physicians volunteered their time to provide free care to the city’s homeless. To address the chronic food insecurity of the city’s poor, John inspired the founding of Bread for the City whose van, dubbed “the glean machine”, picked up leftover food from events all over the city and turned that food into meals for the poor.

It is breathtaking to realize the power of one person’s ministry to change the life of so many—from homeless people who got a new lease on life because they were nurtured by the institutions created by John to middle class people of faith who came to realize that religion can and should be about much more than just worship and ritual. It would be hard to find a better example of a spiritual hero than Rev. John Steinbruck.

Let me then come back to the question I posed to you at the opening of this sermon. “Who would you identify as a spiritual hero?” someone, either living or deceased who, by virtue of their words and/or deeds, led a life that inspired others and was worthy of emulation.

At the root of spiritual heroism is the belief that every person, regardless of race, religion, nationality or political ideology, is made in the Divine Image and is deserving of respect. The fact that we live in a world in which 65 million people are now refugees is a reminder of how few spiritual heroes are among us. The fact that we live in the wealthiest country in the world—the US– in which close to a quarter of all children live in poverty is a reminder of how few spiritual heroes are among us. Read the book, The New Jim Crow, as you must, and you get a harsh reminder of how deeply racism is embedded in American society, condemning people of color to be a perpetual underclass in our society. All these are reminders of how few in number are the spiritual heroes among us.

Identifying a spiritual hero for yourself is a valuable exercise. I encourage you to do it. But I am even more interested in each of you seeing yourselves as spiritual heroes. The entire High Holyday liturgy is about making you into a spiritual hero. You have a few flaws? Welcome to the club. You made a few mistakes? You’ve got company there too.

But each of you have engaged in acts of love. Each of you have offered words of kindness. Each of you have stood up for those who are vulnerable. Each of you have given time and/or money to causes that will make the world a better place. These are behaviors that are worthy of emulation. This is the stuff of spiritual heroism.

There is a Chinese proverb that says: “Don’t curse the darkness; light a candle.” It parallels a verse in the book of Job: v’al drachecha naga or, act in such a way that a divine light will shine on you. Or a better translation: act with integrity, act with compassion, act with moral courage and a light will shine from within you. This is the essence of spiritual heroism. You can be source of divine light for others. Many of you are among that army of spiritual heroes who either in your professional roles, in your volunteer roles or in your family systems, are finding ways not just to curse the darkness but to bring forth light.

Perhaps it is time for a modest reconstruction of the theme of the High Holydays. Much of the liturgy we recite cites all of the ways that we may have fallen short or sinned. But how about this amendment to the High Holyday practice? Think of it as High Holydays, 2.0.

Let us identify one quality, one action that we engaged in, even once this year, that gave off light in a dark place. Make that action the topic of conversation with your spouse, your children, your friends and let that action inspire others to do the same. This is not bragging; it is modeling. It is so necessary. And we must do it. The world we live in today is filled with quite enough darkness; it is time to generate a bit more light.

May the New Year help you see the spiritual hero in the mirror. And when you see that reflection, may you know that this is the light that you were destined to bring into the world.

Note: This sermon was delivered at Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation (Bethesda, MD) on Oct. 11, 2016.

Elie Wiesel: The Echo Chamber of Moral Witness

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Although I had the privilege of hearing Elie Wiesel speak at least a dozen times and had the opportunity to once have a private meeting with him in conjunction with a book that I was writing, my thoughts about him actually relate to how much impact he had on those who never met the man.

I read The Jews of Silence soon after it was published in 1966. I was 14. No other book had as much impact on my life. It was my wake up call to social conscience. I was transformed by the poetic way that Wiesel flipped the image of Soviet Jews, whose impulse to connect to Jewish practice and Jewish people was silenced by the Communist State, to the image of Western Jews whose silence was a function of moral indifference.

Note: This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on July 14, 2016.

In the ensuing years I made several trips to Russia to meet and bring Jewish “contraband” to Soviet Jews. I also had a supply of name bracelets with the names of select prisoners of conscience. I attended dozens of rallies and spoke at dozens of synagogues, showing my slides of my visits with Soviet refuseniks. My first congregation adopted refusenik Lev Elbert, who lived in Kiev. While he was serving a prison sentence for trumped up drug charges in 1983, we helped to facilitate a Bar-Mitzvah for his son, Karmi, via telephone. This type of activism was not atypical for thousands of Jews in the West during those years, Jews who emerged from their “silence” to mobilize the single most successful grassroots human rights campaign of the 20th century.

Ironically, my first face to face meeting with Elie Wiesel took place on December 6, 1987. I was then the executive director of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington D.C. and we helped to organize the Freedom Sunday for Soviet Jewry the day before Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met President Ronald Reagan for a summit meeting.

Wiesel and I met on the podium of the rally. The rally would not have happened but for the efforts of Wiesel and recently released prisoner of conscience, Natan Sharansky. The rally was not exactly the “style” of the Jewish establishment, which preferred to do their advocacy behind closed doors. But the rally captured the imagination of Jews across the country and it did not take long for Jewish organizations to sign on and support it. A quarter million Jews and non-Jews attended the rally and it changed the course of history. Within a year, the gates of emigration opened and close to a million Soviet Jews went to Israel and to Western countries. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed under the weigh of its own tyranny.

A month after that historic rally, I left my position to found PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values. It was a national organization designed to use the moral teachings of Judaism to inspire greater social and political activism on the part of young American Jews. For more than 20 years, almost any Jewish institution that worked with teenagers would send them to our 4-day Panim el Panim seminars in Washington D.C. throughout the school year. During the summers we ran longer, more intensive programs.

By rough estimate, during those years, I gave over 200 keynote presentations to over 10,000 Jewish teens participating in PANIM programs. The life and wisdom of Elie Wiesel was a centerpiece of those presentations.

First I would relate my own moral “wake-up call” and tell how I became involved in the struggle to save Soviet Jewry. Second I would ask how many knew of Elie Wiesel and then, ask why he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Since most teens at least knew of, if not read, Night, most were surprised to learn that Wiesel’s Peace Prize came not because he became a voice for the victims of the Holocaust—and that he was for sure—but because he turned from championing the memory of Jewish suffering during the Shoah to a more broadly framed commitment to stand witness to the dangers of intolerance, persecution and genocide wherever in the world it occurred.

Wiesel’s Nobel acceptance speech is a beautiful re-statement of Hillel’s famous maxim: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me; but if I am only for myself, what am I?” Wiesel never turned his back on his Jewish commitments. But he did realize that such solidarity with one’s own is not sufficient in a world so filled with violence, hatred and oppression.

My third point would be considered controversial in many Jewish spaces but, here again, I quoted from a speech that I once heard Wiesel deliver. Wiesel stated two lessons that he learned from the Shoah. One was that we must be forever vigilant against those who might seek to persecute Jews or threaten the State of Israel. Jews have enemies in the world and, after the Shoah, it would be naïve to ignore those ongoing threats. But, he hastened to add, the second lesson he took from the Shoah is that Jews cannot make “defense” the totality of their public agenda. We are a people with a sacred mission to bring healing to a broken world. We must therefore ally with the most vulnerable people in the world, regardless of their race, religion or creed.

I would inevitably build on these lessons from Wiesel to challenge our students and ask rhetorically: What will be you wake-up call? What are you destined to do? How will you use your education, your political access, your privilege to ally with those who don’t have your good fortune, be they Jewish or not?

Hundreds, if not thousands of Jewish young people took that message to heart and are doing the sacred work of tzedek all over the planet. Thousands more were exposed to Wiesel’s teachings in other contexts, reading his books, attending his lectures, being taught by those, who like me, were simply echo chambers of his profound moral witness to the world.

May we be worthy of the example of his life.

The New Paradigm Spiritual Communities Initiative

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During the first week of March some 60 people gathered under the aegis of a new national initiative called the New Paradigm Spiritual Communities Initiative (NPSCI). NPSCI is sponsored by Clal: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership as part of its mission to make Jewish into a public good. Funded by the William Davidson Foundation, NPSCI is co-sponsored by Bend the Arc, Hazon, the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and Mechon Hadar.

The gathering was anything but conventional. In fact, the invited participants were given only the barest of details about what would transpire. We called it a “Consultation” and, once convened, we used the language of a “conversation for possibility.” For over a year we developed a data base of individuals who were leading initiatives that might represent a new model for Jewish spiritual communities in America. In our invitation letter to a sub-set of that database, we indicated that we wanted to explore what might be a significant new phenomenon in American Jewish life. The Consultation was designed to better understand what this phenomenon looked like. Clearly, what attracted the invited participants was the interest in meeting other, like minded innovators, social entrepreneurs and “creatives” working in the Jewish space.

Note: This column appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on March 31, 2016. On the same date, Gary Rosenblatt wrote a cover story in the New York Jewish Week about the Initiative. You can find that story here: http://tinyurl.com/Spiritual-Comm

The significance of this first gathering cannot be underestimated. For generations, Jews have thought of synagogues as the institution that nurtured their religious and spiritual lives. But as growing percentages of people describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”, synagogues that do not nourish souls are suffering from a loss of relevance and declining membership numbers. This is happening at a time when trends in American society (e.g. effects of internet culture, the erosion of social capital, partisanship replacing the “public square”), are making the need for spiritual community greater than ever before.

American Jewish life is in a time of transition that calls for bold, new thinking and the development of new models for identification. Membership and affiliation patterns that have sustained synagogues and other legacy Jewish institutions for more than a century are eroding. At the same time we see a dramatic growth of interest and energy in new expressions of Jewish community. Some are focused on learning. Some are focused on social justice. Some are focused on contemplative practice and spirituality. Some are focused on food and environmental sustainability. Some are focused on prayer. Some look like synagogues; some do not. Each sector has seen one or more organizations emerge that have either seeded the phenomenon or have created a network to sustain and support the phenomenon.

What the sectors have in common is that they utilize a particular idiom unique to contemporary American culture that attracts other Jews with similar interests. The richness of the Jewish heritage is literally being re-invented in our time by the way in which Jewish wisdom is being applied to the challenges that confront our world today. If properly nurtured and encouraged, these “communities of meaning” can form the nucleus of an American Jewish renaissance.

Our working definition for new paradigm spiritual communities are groups that use the wisdom and practice of Judaism (chochma), to help people live lives of sacred purpose (kedusha) and inspire people to contribute to a more just and peaceful world (tzedek). The context for this work are covenantal communities (kehillot) in which a group of people intentionally enter into a mutual obligatory relationship, commit to a common mission and give of their time and psychic energy to support the viability of the group and the material and spiritual needs of the members of the group. What we discovered at our inaugural Consultation was that despite the wide variety of Jewish groups that we convened, the vast majority resonated to the definition of spiritual community that we proposed. Some are already doing awesome work integrating the elements of chochma, kedusha, tzedek and kehilla. Others saw that integration as aspirational. The “conversation for possibility” opened up a door for us to imagine how this emerging phenomenon could be advanced and supported.

The New Paradigm Spiritual Communities Initiative (NPSCI) will be creating forums where the people leading contemporary efforts to re-define Jewish life and community for themselves can come together, learn from each other and be supported in their efforts to create communities of meaning. NPSCI will gather together individuals whose work and/or thinking can advance an understanding of this phenomenon from many different sectors of the Jewish world. Participants will benefit from seeing their particular endeavors in the context of a changing socio-political landscape and a rapidly changing Jewish community. There will also be participation from significant thinkers and practitioners beyond the Jewish world that will enrich and broaden our conversation.

In the course of the next year NPSCI will be engaged in several efforts. First, we have engaged Dr. Tobin Belzer, a leading sociologist based at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, to do a study of the new paradigm spiritual community phenomenon in the Jewish community. Second, we will be sponsoring a weekly blog on new paradigm spiritual communities which will appear every Monday on our website, www.npsci.org. We hope to be a catalyst for a broad range conversation among those interested in the phenomenon to comment on the weekly blog. Anyone can subscribe by going to the website’s Home Page. Third, we intend to convene on a regular basis the individuals driving the phenomenon to network with each other, to identify best practices and to upgrade organizational capacity.

While many of the new paradigm spiritual communities are being created outside of the walls of American synagogues, we believe that synagogues that care about being relevant and compelling to Next Gen Jews will benefit greatly from participating in this effort as well. We welcome all those who want to learn and who have something to teach.

Rabbi Sid’s Remarks at White House Chanukah Party

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Remarks at the White House Chanukah Party by Rabbi Sid Schwarz, Senior Fellow, Clal: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership and Founding Rabbi of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation, Bethesda, MD. December 9, 2015.

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Thank you Mr. President.

I know that I speak on behalf of everyone present tonight in expressing our gratitude for the way that you and the First Lady have, once again, opened up your home to the Jewish community for an annual White House celebration of Chanukah.

Chanukah is a festival of liberty, teaching us that freedom is not free. When there is evil and tyranny in the world, we must summon the courage to fight it. Sadly, we are reminded of this by the daily headlines. Not too long ago, Jews were the ones on boats seeking refuge from the horrors of Nazi Europe. The special affinity and love that Jews have for the State of Israel is because, after 2000 years of wandering, Jews were able to be, in the words of the Hatikvah: “free people in our ancestral homeland” (am chofshi b’artzenu).

But for most of us here tonight, America is our home, the most hospitable country for Jews in the entire history of our people. I know this first hand. Both of my parents were survivors of the Shoah. My father was born in Berlin. He left two weeks before Kristallnacht in 1938 at age 16. He came to America on the last successful voyage of the St. Louis. The next voyage of that ship came to be called the Voyage of the Damned because its 937 Jewish refugees were sent back to Europe, having come within sight of Miami Beach. Five years later my father would proudly put on an American uniform and return to Europe to fight with the U.S. Army to defeat the Nazis.

The word Chanukah means dedication. At a time when we hear the most shameful expressions of bigotry in our public discourse from prominent personalities, we must re-dedicate ourselves to the principles of tolerance and justice for all, something that you, Mr. President, have modeled throughout your presidency.

So it is in that spirit that I invite you to join me in the blessings for lighting the candles with the addition of the shehechiyanu prayer, offering gratitude for this moment celebrating Chanukah in the White House.

Yitzhak Rabin: Reflections on Loss, Despair and Hope

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For people who care deeply about the State of Israel, the future of the Jewish people or about the prospects for peace in the world, the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin provided much to think about.

People of my generation readily remember where they were when they heard the news about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The news of Rabin’s assassination hit me even harder, likely because I was far more invested at that point in my life in all the things that Yitzhak Rabin had come to represent. I recall vividly getting home from shul in the early afternoon of that November day when a neighbor driving by slowed down to ask me if I had heard the news. As the only rabbi on the block, she wanted to know my reaction, but it was the first time I got the news. My knees buckled and I got that feeling in the pit of the stomach that is triggered when the world, as you have come to know and rely on it, is about to fall apart.

As I think back now, it is clear that the assassination actually achieved its nefarious objective. The Oslo peace process was killed along with Rabin. In a new book, Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, author Dan Ephron argues that a better analogy for Rabin’s murder than the assassination of JFK was that of Abraham Lincoln. Both Lincoln and Rabin won elections in young countries that were deeply divided over one critical issue, slavery for America and the possibility of trading land for peace in Israel. The opponents to these political leaders believed that the very future of their nation was being compromised by the elected head of state. The rhetoric that came out of these dissenting sectors provided incentive and justification for two young men in their 20’s, John Wilkes Booth and Yigal Amir, to take history into their own hands. The major difference, however, was that Lincoln had already vanquished the Confederacy by waging the Civil War, thus putting an end to the prospect of a country, “half slave and half free”. The Oslo Process was still in its infancy when Rabin was assassinated. Only a leader with moral courage and vision could lead a wounded and vulnerable nation away from occupation and perpetual conflict towards a more hopeful future. It was not to be.

We have seen this scene all too often in recent history. Leaders of political or social movements that seek to reverse generations worth of hatred, prejudice and oppression often pay the dearest price for their courage—Mahatma Ghandi, Anwar Sadat, Martin Luther King, Jr. What a sad commentary on human nature that terrorist networks can survive the killing of their leaders while movements for peace and justice often falter when their leaders die or are killed.

Yitzhak Rabin was a soldier who believed that peace would require more than a strong military. It would require a courage deeper than that which is called upon in battle. I was privileged to be seated on the White House lawn in September 1993 when, in the presence of President Bill Clinton and, face to face with Yassir Arafat, Rabin uttered words that could have reversed a century-old conflict. After recounting how many lives had been lost and all the reasons that Israel might be justified in continuing the cycle of war, he made a leap of faith by saying: “We say to you (Palestinians): Enough of blood and tears. Enough. We have no desire for revenge. We harbor no hatred towards you. We, like you, are people who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, to live side by side with you in dignity, in empathy, as human beings, as free men….”

Contrast the tone of those words with the extremism, the hatred, the mistrust and the ongoing cycle of violence that characterizes the situation in Israel/Palestine today. Leaders on both sides of the conflict are more inclined to bow to the pressures of their most extreme constituencies than to lead their people in the direction of mutual recognition, trust and peace.

Because even Jewish secularists are People of the Book, it is interesting to note that in the weeks following Rabin’s assassination, many commented that it took place in the week when the Torah portion was Vayera, the portion telling the story of the Binding of Isaac/Yitzhak. The Biblical Yitzhak was spared thanks to an angel; the Yitzhak who was the Prime Minister of the State of Israel had no such angel to spare him.

This year, the twentieth anniversary of the secular date—November 4th—fell a week later in the Torah reading cycle. It too had a message that makes one pause. The portion of Chayei Sarah starts with the death of Abraham’s wife, Sarah. Abraham wants to acquire a proper burial plot for her and he pays a high price to a local Hittite to gain full title to the Cave of Machpela. That Biblical city of Kiryat Arba is today the city of Hebron, probably the ugliest front in an all-too ugly history of conflict between Jewish settlers and a majority Palestinian city in the West Bank. It was the site of the massacre of 29 Palestinian Muslims at prayer in the Ibrahimi Mosque (named after the common ancestor to both Jews and Muslims) by Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein on Purim, 1994.

Abraham’s purchase is the first act that begins to fulfill God’s promise of the Land of Israel to Abraham’s offspring. At the time it was an act of love and loyalty. But acts of love and loyalty, when not tempered by compassion for others, is precisely what allows extremists to employ religion to be a force for hatred and violence instead of as an inspiration to work for reconciliation and peace.

If ever there was a time to raise up the legacy of Yitzhak Rabin, z”l, now is that time.

Note: This article appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on November 17, 2015.

Where Fools Rush In: Spiritual Leadership for a Changing Jewish Community

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Note: In January 2014 I was invited to deliver the keynote address at the Ohala national convention, the association of Jewish Renewal Rabbis that was held in Boulder, CO. It was significant because my charge from the leadership of the organization was to speak about Jewish Renewal in light of the fact that the charismatic founder of Renewal, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, was approaching 90 and the movement clearly had think about leadership succession. It was a tall order, made even more challenging because Reb Zalman was not only in attendance at the conference, but he sat in the first row for my presentation. Reb Zalman was well aware of why I was invited to speak and he not only gave me his blessing to do the talk, but he expressed his deep appreciation for what I said after I concluded my remarks. Sadly, this would be Reb Zalman’s last conference as he passed away six months later on July 3, 2014. Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt, who blogs under the name the Velveteen Rabbi, was in attendance and did a remarkable job of capturing the essence of my talk. This excerpt comes from her website: http://velveteenrabbi.com/. 

 

This morning I attend a keynote address by Rabbi Sid Schwarz, whom I have known since that PANIM interdenominational rabbinic student retreat I was blessed to attend all those years ago. He’s now involved with Clal (the Center for Learning and Leadership, the parent organization of Rabbis Without Borders), and has most recently published Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future, which makes him a perfect fit for an OHALAH conference themed around He’Atid, the future of Jewish Renewal. His talk is entitled “Where Fools Rush In: Spiritual Leadership for a Changing Jewish Community.”

In a recent presentation to CLI, R’ Sid offered a metaphor of broadcast and receiving — that rabbis need to be able to both broadcast and receive. He suggests to us this morning that we might understand Torah as 70 wavelengths on which we might receive truth. Most of us can only broadcast on a few wavelengths and can receive on fewer than that, and that’s something we need to work on.

He reminisces briefly about how he wasn’t able to hear Reb Zalman’s Torah back in his early rabbinic school days, and indeed regarded it as “strange fire” within the Reconstructionist rabbinical college… and because God has a sense of humor, here he is today, in full awareness of the debt he owes to Reb Zalman and to this neo-Hasidic / Jewish Renewal world. He talks about the shift which unfolded in the 20th century — thanks to R’ Mordechai Kaplan, R’ Abraham Joshua Heschel, our own Reb Zalman — between the vertical metaphor of God (God’s up there, we’re down here) and a horizontal metaphor of God (we and God are interrelating in an I/Thou fashion.)

I came to understand that what I’d seen as dichotomies in the Jewish world were in fact overlapping truths. We all need to work on our antennas so we can access one more wavelength than before so that we can acknowledge that truth has many faces, as does Torah, at least 70 faces.

He uses his work as a historian to try to help him understand not only the past but also the future. He acknowledges that we read in Talmud (Bava Batra) that from the time of the destruction of the Temple of old, prophecy exists only in the hands of children and fools. But notwithstanding that sugya, we have to try to take the risk of understanding not only the past but how we’re going to address the future.

In his newest book Jewish Megatrends he talks about the moment we’re at today in American Jewish history: a simultaneous decline of legacy Jewish institutions (synagogues, Federations, JCCs, membership organizations — the “organized Jewish community”) and also a golden age. If you look at the legacy Jewish institutions, the current situation looks like a decline; but if you look at the innovation sector of Jewish life, you see amazing pockets of renaissance.

He files these renaissance happenings under the headings of four pillars. The first is chochmah, wisdom. In 50 years, he suggests, the world will be amazed that religious communities ever though of themselves as independent silos, rather than interconnected. Reb Zalman was way ahead of the curve on this! We all need to understand the overlap between our wisdom traditions and every other. The second pillar is tzedek, justice. And the third and fourth pillars are kehillah (intentional spiritual communities) and kedushah (helping Jews live lives of spiritual purpose.)

He asks: what is the nature of the kehillah we need to create? And what kind of spiritual leadership is required to lead such kehillot?

The American synagogue, he tells us, has gone through three stages, and we now need to figure out how to reach the fourth. First as new immigrants we created little shteiblach, informal home-based communities. As we became better-established in this country, we moved to secondary areas of settlement, creating ethnic synagogues. There might be a modest building, maybe hiring a rabbi with a small salary. In the post-WWII period Jews acquired affluence, moved to suburbia, and in this third era we were living in areas where we were no longer the majority. The synagogues built in that third era were “synagogue centers,” which is still the dominant paradigm in congregational life today. And congregations which operate under that paradigm, he says bluntly, are failing. We need to move toward the next stage of the American synagogue.

The synagogue center is failing because it’s essentially in a consumer relationship with Jews, marketed like a commodity. Jews decide they need a certain set of goods and services (usually education for their children and of course the bar / bat mitzvah) — but that b’nei mitzvah tends to be the terminal degree in Jewish life, both in the sense that we won’t see most of those families again after b’nei mitzvah is celebrated, and because that in turn suggests the end of the Jewish future. People make decisions based on: what synagogue is convenient to me and offers a fair market price? People join synagogues when their kids are five, and when their youngest child is 14 they exit the synagogue. And during those years, nothing has changed in the life or heart of the neshama of the Jews who are members of that synagogue center.

Today, given the changing economy and the rise of the internet, the goods and services which for a long time Jews joined a synagogue to acquire can now be acquired á la carte, more cheaply, and sometimes at higher quality than via joining a shul. So the primary draw for Jews to join synagogue centers has evaporated.

Here’s the good news. Over the past 20 years, some new thinking has emerged about the nature of synagogues. (See Synagogue3K, STAR: Synagogue Transformation And Renewal, etc.) In the early years seminaries were grouchy about this new way of thinking, but today most seminaries are getting clarity around the fact that the kind of rabbis they’re training, and the synagogues for which they’re training them, will not serve the needs of the American Jewish community of the future.

Synagogues which are stuck in the synagogue center model, he says, are doomed. The best development consultants in the country can’t transform those old-model synagogue centers into what’s needed now. Change needs to come from rabbis; from inspired spiritual leaders who have a vision of what inspired spiritual community could look like. Beyond that, we need a toolkit for that transformation, because otherwise all of our energy and passion is going to lead us nowhere and we’re going to crash and burn in frustration.

Organizations naturally resist change. And in synagogues it’s even harder because resistance to change takes on a theological cast. We feel the weight of the challenge of trying to preserve a tradition which we love, as rabbis, but which (practically) nobody else gets. He quotes R’ Harold Schulweis: “Rabbis have answers to questions which Jews no longer ask.” (A rueful and knowing sigh moves around the room.)

You can broadcast [your teachings] all you want, but if you don’t tune in to the wavelength of the Jews you want to touch, your broadcast is useless.

There are, R’ Sid says, three barriers in this work. First: the nomenclature problem. Second: a turf problem. And third: a play-it-safe problem.

When he wrote Finding a Spiritual Home, he was writing about people who had a deep desire for spiritual community and hadn’t found it anywhere in the organized Jewish community. In the late 90s, it was hard to find four synagogues to profile. Today there are several dozen new-paradigm synagogues! But here’s the nomenclature problem: many of them don’t want to call themselves “synagogues,” because the word is so poisoned. Think of Ikkar in LA; The Kitchen in SF; Mishkan Chicago; Romemu in NY. These places are doing amazing work in this new paradigm model, but they often don’t call themselves synagogues.

And, people are using different words to describe the same phenomena: “the synagogue community,” “sacred community,” “the emergent synagogue,” “commanding community,” “visionary synagogues,” “kehillot.” There’s so much overlap in the work of creating these kinds of communities — but if we’re going to have a social movement, we need to agree on nomenclature! It sounds like a minor thing, but having common language can make a real difference in terms of galvanizing the people who understand that we can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing in the ways we’ve been doing it.

The second problem is the turf issue. Three years ago, within a span of 3 months, the Conservative movement came out with their strategic study of their movement and the numbers were dreadful; the Reform movement experienced a revolt in some of the largest synagogues in their movement, and those communities declared intention to bolt; and the Reconstructionist movement sponsored a program on “rethinking the rabbinate.” So R’ Sid wrote an essay called “Are Synagogues Still Relevant?” which argued that there’s idiocy in every movement trying to do the same thing, competing to see who’s going to get to the finish line first.

There’s a growing body of expertise and best practices among everyone who’s trying to solve these problems. If there were ever a time when the denominations should come together and say ‘we should work on this collaboratively,’ this would be the moment!

(That draws spontaneous applause.) But, he argues, it’s not going to happen. The denominations won’t want it to happen — and, he cautions, even we here in this transdenominational gathering are challenged by this work.

Jewish Renewal emerged as a nondenominational phenomenon. But Max Weber and Reinhold Neibuhr draw out the trajectory of all emerging religious movements — from sects to churches. Sects begin with charismatic leadership, which we here in Renewal clearly have. They have “insider language,” which we here in Renewal also have. But ultimately in order to survive, we move from the sect stage to what looks like a much more conventional denomination, and R’ Sid sees that hapening here. “I’m not saying ‘don’t do that,'” he notes. “But before we cast stones at the denominations which have been functioning for a century or more, remember that you too are on a trajectory.”

“To say that there are many ways of being Jewish is a narrow ridge to walk, but we must walk it.”

And the third problem he cites is a taking-risks problem.

We need to encourage our rabbis to be risk-takers — to dramatically rethink what synagogues can be and need to be. And we need to educate our lay leadership to be in partnership with us, the spiritual leaders — we need them to give us space to take risks and to fail! As long as we learn how to “fail forward.” Because nothing ventured, nothing gained. If we want to play it safe, we condemn ourselves to stay on the trajectory of synagogues that will continue to shrink.

With awareness of those three obstacles, he moves on to the four pillars of intentional spiritual communities. An intentional spiritual community needs to be mission-driven. Writing a mission statement and then ignoring it — that’s not enough; that’s not a living document. We need direction. If you have no destination, any path will do; but if you’re clear where you’re going, you can correct when you stray from the path.

An intentional spiritual community needs to create an empowered and self-generating culture.Kedusha (holiness), like love, can only be created with reciprocity. It’s not a one-directional relationship. To get the gift of Torah, we take upon ourselves the ohl mitzvot, a sense of obligation. “Even if you’re agnostic about the idea of Torah from Sinai, you can understand that community itself can be the commanding voice which gives shape to the desire of God.” We are all b’nei brit, children of the covenant. We are born into a sense of obligations and we need to make comnunities understand that we are obligated to a higher sense of purpose and also to each other.

The greatest gift we have in Jewish community, which remains untapped in most synagogues, is the brilliance and gifts of the people in front of us. And so often we reduce people to “dues-paying members.” We have an obsession with size and membership, which has no meaning whatsoever. We need to move to a commitment to ownership. It’s not how many people pay dues — it’s about how many people feel that they are part of a community of Jews who are committed to some sacred purpose.

He moves then to talking about framing serious Judaism. Larry Kushner has a great piece,  The Tent-Peg Business, written back in the 70s and still relevant. The way he judges success in his community is how much Jews engage in primary Jewish acts. And he defines those primary acts the way the tradition does: Torah — avodah / service / some encounter with the divine and with sacred purpose — and gemilut chasadim, acts of personal lovingkindness and acts of global and social repair.

One of the greatest errors made by non-Orthodox Judaism in the 20th and 21st century is the belief that the only way you get Jews in the tent is by offering “Jewish Lite.” The communities which are thriving are those which offer a sense of authentic Jewish encounter with Torah, avodah, and gemilut chasadim.

To be fair, the reason we went down the road of Jewish Lite was that earlier generations wanted to desperately to “be American” that they wanted to fit in, not to stick out like a sore thumb. But that’s no longer an issue with the next generation. Now the next generation is asking, “do I need Judaism?” Many of them look at religion and see narrow-mindedness, chauvinism, and fanaticism. If we want to reach that sector of Jews, we need to think of other ways of talking about what sacred community might look like.

He cites the Pew study: that 94% of Jews say they have a positive feeling about being Jewish. This is an amazing thing! People already have a positive feeling about Judaism — but the way to get them to live out that positive feeling is to give them serious Judaism, Torah and avodah and gemilut chasadim.

The fourth pillar of building intentional spiritual communities is, he says, visionary spiritual leadership. In the mid-20th century as the Jewish community was building synagogues and community centers all over America (proving that we could build shuls as large and beautiful as their churches), rabbis were trained to be CEOs of those synagogues. (And this is something about which Reb Zalman spoke as recently as yesterday at the smicha ceremony — that it’s fine for our boards to want to run synagogues as businesses, as long as they remember that synagogues are in the “business” of doing Jewish, not the business of earning dues.)

The chavurah movement arose in response to this — the yearning to create rabbi as teacher, friend, colleague instead of the “imperial rabbinate” paradigm. That was a good corrective to the CEO model, but that also doesn’t turn out to be all that’s needed. We need to own our power as rabbis with sincerity, clarity, integrity, strength. Rabbis need to listen — but we also need to be able to dip into our well of deep wisdom and to share that wisdom. We need to be able to share what people could aspire to become, and to put that out there, and then listen to their reaction. That, he says, is the recipe for success.

Our tradition, he reminds us, is not value-neutral. Judaism is in favor of certain ways of being in the world. We as teachers and rabbis need to give voice to that as strongly as we can! Jews are hungry for rabbis who can make some sense out of a world that seems to get more materialistic, more superficial, more profane and less compassionate every day. They need our vision of what sacred community can look like. Rabbis can’t be CEOs, but neither can we just be facilitators. As important as learning Tanakh and rabbinics and Hasidic texts, he suggests, is taking time to study the works being written around leadership.

We are on the cusp of enormous potential. But we need to tune up our antennas, to listen to the fact that Torah comes in at least seventy faces, and to understand that the Torah we have to offer is a Torah that Jews are hungry for.

Discovering America

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There is a wonderful phrase in Hebrew that drips with sardonic, Jewish wit. It is when someone says “gileta et America”, meaning “so you discovered America!”. It is said to someone when they say something so obvious that everyone has known it for years, but the person who shared it put the thought out in a way that suggests that they were the first person to uncover this truth.

This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on August 21, 2015.

The phrase occurred to me when I read Daniel Gordis’ August 13th column in the Jerusalem Post titled “What if we Stopped Hasbara”. In the column he condemns the “Israel can do no wrong” mentality among the burgeoning number of Israel advocacy groups. He also urges the groups that truly care about Israel to talk about the country with a bit of nuance. There is no way that such groups have any credibility among thoughtful diaspora Jews when again and again they portray Israel as always in the right and everyone who challenges Israel as always in the wrong.

Gordis’ key passage: “Why, then, do some of us insist that being a real Zionist means insisting that … Israel does not have a racist, xenophobic cancer in its midst that simply needs to be excised? In part, that is too often what we model. When has the leadership of the Zionist world (except for the past two weeks) offered (any) critique of Israel’s actions, whether during peace or in war?”

So Daniel Gordis has “discovered America”.

It is indeed tragic, that it takes the slaying of Shira Banki, a 16 year old participant in Jerusalem’s Gay Pride Parade and the death of a Palestinian toddler (Ali Saad Dawabsha) and his father (Saad Dawabsheh) at the hands of arsonists to awaken the conscience of Israeli leadership to the scourge of extremist Jewish terrorism.

Liberal Zionists have been sounding the alarm bell about the unchecked rise of ultra-nationalist, anti-democratic and racist Jewish groups for decades. It would be too kind, and untrue, to say that the Netanyahu government has just ignored the phenomenon. There is ample evidence that many arms of the Israeli government have been complicit in aiding and abetting the rise of forces that threaten the future of the state of Israel as much if not more than Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran combined. Nor is it even remotely acceptable that the Prime Minister himself, on the eve of the last election, gave voice to the most vile anti-democratic and racist sentiment when he warned his supporters that Arabs (who are Israeli citizens) were going to flood the voting booths and that his supporters needed to turn out to re-elect him.

It is not surprising that a country under siege falls victim to increasingly xenophobic attitudes. In a 2012 poll conducted by an Israeli polling firm, Dialog, 59% of Israeli Jews wanted preference to Jews over Arabs in public employment, 49% wanted the State to treat Jews better than Arabs and 33% objected to Israeli Arabs even having the right to vote. The Israel Democracy Institute has been reporting a consistent rise of racist sentiments among Israeli Jews for more than a decade. It is even more pronounced among younger Israelis. In such an environment, one would hope for political leadership with some moral courage.

To say the least, Prime Minister Netanyahu has not provided that kind of leadership. In addition to his own statements, he has appointed senior cabinet members who have shown shocking insensitivity to the principles of minority rights, due process or the Jewish value of “protecting the stranger”. Minister of Justice, Ayelet Shaked, has suggested that the Israeli Supreme Court needs to be “reined in” because of its rulings that often uphold the rights of Palestinians. Minister of Culture, Miri Regev has stated that public funds should be withheld from artists who might be critical of the government, sending a serious message about freedom of expression in Israel. Deputy Foreign Minister, Tzipi Hotovely, who for all intents and purposes runs the Foreign Ministry in the absence of Avigdor Lieberman, has stated that because God gave the Land of Israel to the Jewish people, there is no problem with settlements on the West Bank.

Thank goodness for Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, who has been a consistent moral voice defending the rights of Israeli Arabs and condemning the hate speech and hate crimes that have become more prevalent and more acceptable in the Israeli public square. For his moral courage, Rivlin has had to shore up his security detail because of the growing number of threats being made of the kind that led up to the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin.

Daniel Gordis is the darling of the Jewish establishment on all things Israel. I say this with both admiration and some irony. I love reading Gordis. He hits many of my emotional Zionist buttons very deeply. Perhaps that is what gives him both some cover and some credibility to say what many of us have been saying for a very long time about the very real dangers facing Israel as both a democratic and a Jewish state.

On the issue of Israel, the Jewish community has become a toxic place. The open exchange of ideas is now far less valued than loyalty to the tribe and to the state of Israel. In such an atmosphere, truth suffers and thoughtful Jews become increasingly alienated from the Jewish community and from Israel.

I’m glad Daniel Gordis “discovered America”. Maybe someone will listen.

Rev. John Steinbruck: Spiritual Role Model

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, a life counts for a million or more. Last week I attended a memorial service for Reverend John Steinbruck who died on March 1st at the age of 85.

When I moved to Washington D.C. in 1984 to take the post as the executive director of the Jewish Community (Relations) Council of Greater Washington, John was already a legend in a city that is somewhat jaded by all of the personages of importance (or perceived self-importance). John came to Washington in 1970 to be the senior pastor of Luther Place Church. His church was at the corner of 14th and N Streets, an area that a couple of years earlier had burned in the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Luther Place had a beautiful, historic building but its membership had made the exodus from the decaying inner city and its future looked dim. John liked to say that his church stood at the crossroads of prostitution, drugs and political power because all three were in the vicinity in great quantity.

This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on March 31, 2015.

I first met John standing on 16th Street across from the Soviet Embassy. The Community Council that I headed was the sponsor of this demonstration of solidarity with our sisters and brothers behind the Iron Curtain. Every day at 12:30pm, a different Jewish organization took responsibility for standing silently across from the Embassy for 15 minutes holding signs that said “Free Soviet Jews”. The vigil took place without interruption for 21 years, from 1970-1991. John was a great champion of human rights and that commitment led him to take a trip to the Soviet Union in 1976 to meet with Jews. He came back deeply committed to the cause and on many Jewish holidays John, along with a handful of his congregants were the ones who stood vigil across from the Embassy.

But Soviet Jewry was only one of John’s many crusades. Aware that within a few blocks of his church a few dozen people slept on the streets of the Nation’s Capital, John challenged the churches and synagogues of the area to practice “Biblical Hospitality” by taking the homeless into their buildings overnight. The idea made for a great sermon but no clergyperson in town had the courage and the determination to walk the talk. How would a congregation support such an effort? What would it cost? How would security issues be handled? How could budgets accommodate the exorbitant insurance premiums that would result? John taught by example. His Sunday School classrooms were not being used. Let’s open the doors he told his Board. His Board raised all of the expected objections at which point John said: “This is a church and we don’t put God to a vote”.  The sheer force of his moral argument carried the day and within weeks homeless people were invited to come in off the street to get a hot meal and bed down in Luther Place’s classrooms.

Very few congregations followed John’s lead in bringing the homeless into their buildings but they were inspired to support his efforts through financial contributions and a legion of volunteers. John built a compassion-industrial complex, an array of institutions all growing out of his simple but profound commitment to help the most vulnerable among us. At his urging, Luther Place bought the townhouses across the street from his church which became a continuum of care facilities for homeless women. He then raised millions of dollars to build a state of the art residential facility for homeless women called N Street Village. The homeless needed medical care so the Zacchaeus Free Clinic was founded where physicians volunteered their time to provide free care to the city’s homeless. To address the chronic food insecurity of the city’s poor, John inspired the founding of Bread for the City whose “glean machine” van picked up leftover food from events all over the city and turned that food into meals for the poor.

Realizing how many young adults were turned off to institutional religion but motivated to follow the model of the life of Jesus in serving the poor and needy he created the Lutheran Volunteer Corps (LVC) modeled on the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. For a year, recent college graduates would live communally in a house in the poorest section of a city and work with a non-profit social justice agency, earning just enough money to pay for their expenses. The Jewish organization, Avodah, which offers the same opportunity for Jewish young adults, owes its founding to John Steinbruck because Rabbi David Rosenn, Avodah’s founder, spent time with John and LVC which inspired him to create Avodah.

It is breathtaking to realize the power of one person’s ministry to change the life of so many—from homeless people who got a new lease on life because they were nurtured by the institutions created by John Steinbruck to middle class people of faith who came to realize that religion can and should be about much more than worship and ritual.

As I sat in the pews at Luther Place Church during the memorial service for Rev. John I could not help but think what our world would look like if clergy across the religious spectrum acted on their faith in the way that John acted on his. Very few are cut out to be a prophetic voice the way John was; it is a hard and lonely road. Yet people are hungry for that kind of inspired spiritual leadership in a world that seems more broken every day.

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 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.

Note: This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on January 20, 2015.

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.

In several of my presentations to Haitians, my translator was a young 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!

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 serves 170 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 fifth year. Over 100 Adat Shalom households now contribute $100/year for five years which allows us to support Pastor Johnny’s NICL School in Leogane. As a result of this generosity we are able to send $8-9,000/year to fund scholarships for student tuition, 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”.

In December 2014 I accompanied an Adat Shalom service mission to Haiti; it was our third mission in four years. It was also our largest delegation ever with eightyoung men, ages 15-25, and thirteen adults. It is hard to capture the power of the experience in words. During the days we worked at two venues. Having helped to build Lambi Village I in our 2011 and 2012 missions, we now broke ground for Lambi Village II. Each of these villages will house approximately 60 families that did not have homes to live in. Many have lived under tarps for years. We were so impressed that Grace International, the ministry that sponsors the Lambi Villages, pays as much attention to building character and promoting healthy family systems as they do to building structures to house Haitians.

At Pastor Johnny’s NICL compound, we broke ground to build a dining hall for the school and we also created a vegetable garden that we dedicated and named Gan HaMazon, the garden of plenty. Many of the 170 students in the school are food insecure so we focused our attention on that aspect of community development. At both sites, 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 put together 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? On our last day, every person had 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 talked about the experience as “transformative” and “life changing”.

I believe that 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 in 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. 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; 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 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.

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