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

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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.

This article was originally posted Jan. 13, 2014 on Rabbi Rachel Barenblat’s blog, ”Velveteen Rabbi”. The article is a reflection piece by Rabbi Barenblat herself after listening to Rabbi Sid’s keynote address at the Ohala (Jewish Renewal) National Conference in Boulder, CO. Click here to see the original posting.

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 toownership. 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.

Truth or Consequences

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Truth or Consequences was the first game show ever aired on commercial TV in the United States, appearing first as a pilot in 1941. It seems an apt phrase to describe the dilemma facing us today as we try to get a younger generation of Jews to have an affinity with Israel and the Jewish people. Starkly put, many Jewish-sponsored programs believe that we need to protect Jews from encountering any information that might put Israel in a less than morally righteous light. There seems to be no limit to the amount of money that can be raised for pro-Israel/hasbara organizations. While I am sympathetic to the motivations behind those organizations—creating a generation of Jews who appreciate the miracle of the state of Israel and its centrality to the Jewish people—I find the methodology to be problematic both ethically and pedagogically.

This article was published in The Jewish Peoplehood Papers, November 2013.

I have spent much of my career as a rabbi and educator with young people. In short, we are losing the battle for their hearts and minds because they don’t believe that we—the Jewish community—is telling them the truth. The consequences for both Jewish identity in the diaspora and for support for and affinity with the state of Israel, is disastrous.

It need not be this way. For several decades I have created and run educational programs for young Jews designed to increase their social and political activism on a range of issues, including Israel and the Middle East. I have also run numerous trips to Israel to explore, not only the geo-politics of the region, but the Jewish and democratic nature of the state as well. In these efforts, I have consistently looked for people and organizations that can speak to the challenges that Israel faces on a range of issues—the peace process, relationship with the Diaspora, treatment of Palestinians in the territories, Jewish pluralism in Israel, attitudes towards and policies affecting Israeli Arabs, the income gap between various ethnic groups, etc.

With few exceptions the reactions are consistent. There is some initial shock at the extent of Israel’s social and political challenges but then people realize that we are talking about a relative young country, existing in the midst of an undemocratic region of the world facing ongoing security challenges. They are impressed at the robust nature of Israeli civil society, a feature unique to democracies. They realize that Israel is not a Jewish Disneyland where everything is perfect. Most importantly, they appreciate that they have been treated like adults, exposed to hard and often competing truths out of which they need to re-weave a narrative that makes sense to them.

Along these lines, this past year I helped to launch the Rene Cassin Fellowship Program (RCFP), a year long program on Judaism and human rights for young adults, ages 25-35, with hubs in New York, London and Jerusalem. With lead funding from the New York UJA/Federation’s Commission on the Jewish People, the program includes monthly study sessions from a common syllabus, monthly chevruta discussions between and American, European and Israeli Fellows on the monthly sessions, impact projects to be implemented with specific NGO’s and an Israel study tour.

Our study tour in Israel looked at some very challenging issues: the Arab minority; Bedouins; religious pluralism; security; settlements; African refugees; the nature of Zionism. Our presenters included government spokespeople, representatives from a wide array of NGOs and both Jews and Arabs. The interchange between Fellows from the three different regions was fascinating. A very politically progressive Israel found herself becoming an eloquent spokesperson for the merits of Zionism and the state of Israel despite its challenges. In turn, a very politically hawkish American Jew found herself so upset by our visit to Hebron and the treatment of Arabs there by the IDF and by Jewish settlers that politically left Israelis had to help her recover her Zionist balance.

To the extent that one of the goals of the RCFP is to strengthen the ties between young adult Jews in three centers of Jewish life (North America, Europe and Israel), it is clear that our theme of human rights created a common universe of discourse. In fact, many of the Fellows made clear that they would not have chosen to sign up for a more conventional program dealing with Israel sponsored by the Jewish community. They were drawn to the RCFP because they were convinced that the program was committed to a rigorous and critical look at international human rights, including Israel. The Fellows are among our best and brightest but many represent a constituency that most Jewish communities cannot access. The fact that the RCFP program spends considerable time helping Fellows appreciate the alignment between Jewish values and human rights values is one of many ways that gives participants a renewed sense of pride in their Jewish identities.

The responses to a variety of attitudinal questions on a questionnaire we administered on the last day of the program offers some insights into what participants took away from the program. The responses that were statistically significant included the following:

• I have a better appreciation of the challenges that Israel faces in its attempt to balance its commitment to human rights with its commitment to security and the safety of its citizens.
• I feel connected to my Jewish identity as a result of this trip.
• I have a more nuanced understanding of the meaning of the term “Zionism”
• Israel is now more central to my identity as a Jew.
• I believe that Israel’s democracy is seriously at risk.

One of our European participants, who has participated in more Jewish community sponsored programs than any of the other 29 Fellows, wrote the following in his evaluation:

“This seminar reminded me what peoplehood is, or at least should be about. …The program took ‘Israel engagement’ to a whole new level. Just as in relationships we can tell the difference between a flirt and real love – when we fall in love, it happens despite the other person’s problems, mistakes and issues. It’s the same with Israel: If we want young adults to have a strong bond and a real connection with Israel, we have to see the country without any make-up, as it is, with all its difficulties and challenges. That was the main gift given to those of us who were privileged to participate in the RCFP Israel study tour.”

The message that we were able to convey is that Israel is both a sovereign nation but that, on a larger level, it is a joint venture of the Jewish people. That sends an empowering message to young Jews that their engagement can make a difference in Israel. The lesson for those who care about strengthening the Jewish people is that we need to meet today’s young adults where they are at and help them articulate what is at the root of our collective Jewish enterprise. This is the only way to engage Next Gen Jews.

The RCFP program is charting an educational methodology that is desperately needed in the Jewish world because there are thousands of young Jewish adults who can be more deeply engaged in the Jewish peoplehood conversation with a program that resonates with their values about creating a more just and peaceful world. Unless we are prepared to engage in this conversation in a critical and truthful way, the consequences will not be pretty.

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Rabbi Sid Schwarz is the director of the Rene Cassin Fellowship Program. He founded and led PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values for 21 years. He is also the author of the recently published Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Community (Jewish Lights).

A Synagogue Stimulus Plan

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At the recent national convention of United Synagogue, Rabbi Ed Feinstein was reported to have said “the house is burning down” as a way to signal to Conservative congregations that the hour is too late for synagogues to think about modest changes in the way they do their business. Since the 2000 publication of my book Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews can Transform the American Synagogue I have worked with many congregations and rabbis across the denominational spectrum about strategies to move their institutions from the current paradigm—the synagogue-center—to a new paradigm, the synagogue-community, which is far better suited to address the changing reality of American life and the next generation of American Jews.

The good news is that dozens of congregations have been moving in this direction aided by many national and local initiatives among them: STAR (Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal), Synagogue 3000, the Legacy Heritage Innovation Fund and the Synergy project of the New York UJA Federation. The bad news is that not enough synagogues have recognized the need to change. If the Pew study does nothing more than to provide a strong kick in the pants, it comes not a moment too soon. National rabbinical associations and congregational unions are well aware of the precipitous declines in synagogue affiliation and they are acting with a sense of urgency that I have not seen in my lifetime.

There are four core principles that are essential to move a congregation towards the synagogue-community model and they are set forth in great detail in Finding a Spiritual Home. Like with all institutional transformation strategies, those principals require diligent attention over two to three years before they will start to produce results. But I often am asked: “What can we do in the short term to begin to build some energy in our congregation as we start the longer term process of systemic change?” To that end I propose a three part synagogue stimulus plan, shock therapy to move congregations out of the stasis that threatens to make them increasingly irrelevant to American Jewish life.

Rabbinic renewal– A community is only as dynamic as its spiritual leader. Many rabbis are not spending the most of their time on the things that they are passionate about. At the same time, rabbis spend enormous amounts of time planning for and conducting religious services. We did not need the Pew survey to tell us that few non-Orthodox Jews attend religious services in synagogues with any regularity. Even as there are emerging around the country amazing alternatives of joyful and soulful worship, it has yet to manifest itself in most American synagogues. I suggest that synagogues reduce by 25% the amount of time their rabbi needs to lead services. On that one Shabbat a month, the community should tap the talent of its members to create a lay-led service, even if it is dramatically different from what happens the other three weeks of the month. It is one way to generate some of the energy that one witnesses when attending an independent minyan and bring it into the synagogue. In turn, the rabbi should be charged with re-directing that newfound release time to any initiative around which they are passionate that might attract under-engaged Jews into the orbit of congregational life, whether that happens in the building or outside of it.

Diversify the Program– One hundred years ago Mordecai Kaplan argued that Jews are a religious civilization and that worship represented only one manifestation of that civilization. The Pew study validates Kaplan’s prescient analysis. Jews love being Jewish but fewer and fewer of them want to express it in religious ways. Congregations can and should be the main retail outlet where Jews can explore the rich heritage of our people. Once a month, on Shabbat morning, congregations should offer a wide array of activities through which Jews can deepen their engagement with Jewish life and learning. Let there be classes on Bible, rabbinic texts, Musar, contemporary Israel, Jewish fiction and contemporary Jewish music. Run workshops for families on how to celebrate an upcoming holiday, how to develop Shabbat rituals, how to raise well adjusted children or how to create a family that effectively conveys the values of hesed (compassion), kedusha (sanctity), tzedek (social justice for all) and tzedakah (sharing of our resources to support good work in the world).

Once down this path the options that emerge from the community itself are limitless. In my own congregation we double our attendance on those shabbatot when we offer such options and most workshops are led by congregants. Everyone, including those who attended the worship service, then joins together for a pot-luck lunch and the community feels that Shabbat is at the center of our communal experience. The rabbi should be central to these optional activities, both in supporting those who lead them and offering an option herself/himself that they are passionate about.

Jewish Renaissance Innovation Fund– Synagogues have got to serve a constituency broader than their current membership. I suggest that congregations set aside 5% of their budget to create an innovation fund offering mini grants to anyone, member or not, who wants to develop a new Jewish initiative. The initiative should then be made available to both members and non-members in that congregation. The monthly Shabbat program mix is the ideal venue for the congregation to benefit from this investment. Equally important is that young people, who want to re-invent their Judaism, will feel supported by and increasingly appreciative of the sponsoring congregation. Right now, they are nowhere to be found on the synagogue landscape.

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There are dozens of ways that these innovations can roll out. Each is a catalyst to help synagogues re-tool themselves for the new social reality that we live in and for the next generation of American Jews. There is no time to wait. Let the conversation begin.

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Rabbi Sid Schwarz is the director of the Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI), a program sponsored by Clal: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, training visionary spiritual leaders for the American Jewish community. He is also the author of Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Community (Jewish Lights). A version of this column was delivered at the recently held United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism national convention.

Towards Intentional Spiritual Communities

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America has become a society that breeds spiritual malaise. Among the chief causes of this malaise is the erosion of our country’s civic fabric. One need only think back to the weeks following the 9/11 tragedy to recall the overwhelming sense of American common purpose: Residing in the heart of every American, that commonality made us feel as though we were part of a grand social venture that was unique and unparalleled in the history of the world.

But we also live in a moment when technological advances make the American pre-disposition to rugged individualism — noted in 1835 by Alexis DeToqueville — ever more consuming. I fear for this society whose predominant cultural message is: Get what you want, when you want it, no commitments, no obligations.

Given that the operative ethos of Jewish communities for centuries has been a belief in collective responsibility and mutual support, the Jewish community faces ever-greater challenges to counter an American cultural message that is moving in the exact opposite direction. One example of the Jewish community trying to adjust to a new cultural reality in America is the attempt to re-imagine synagogues without dues structures. While I admire the willingness of synagogue leaders to take the risk of such experiments, the jury is out on whether this strategy will prove to be wise or folly. No less a risk is being taken by the Jewish program of the moment, Birthright Israel. Is making the program free a brilliant strategy for attracting Jewish young adults or will it haunt us well into the future by conveying the message to Next Gen Jews that someone else will pick up the tab for their eureka experiences?

Now seems to be the time for Jewish leaders to be bold enough to declare Judaism radically countercultural. For more than 100 years, the prevailing ethos of American Jewish life was the claim that Judaism and Americanism were value-aligned. It was the natural case statement for a minority immigrant community desperate to ”make it” in American society. But today, according to the 2013 Pew Forum U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, Jews are the wealthiest faith community in America. We are not exactly worried about “making it.”

The question today is: Can Judaism be made relevant to Jews who have everything? The only way we can answer that question in the affirmative is to create communities that offer American Jews what America cannot give them.

Twenty-five years ago, I served as the founding rabbi of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland. We hoped to create something other than a limited liability suburban Jewish congregation. While the programs and services of suburban congregations met the needs of many American Jewish families (though that number is now dwindling dramatically), many congregants who were serious about their spiritual journeys did not find their needs met by synagogues. We wanted a community that would make demands on its members and, in turn, would aspire to engage the mind, touch the heart, and expand the spirit of all who came into our orbit. The language for what we sought to do was not part of the lexicon of the American Jewish community but it needs to be. It is about creating “intentional spiritual communities.”

Several principles guided our effort. The most important three continue to resonate in any conversation about building community:
• Creating an organizational culture of participation and empowerment: We were very intentional about tapping the gifts of our members and then creating an environment in which people took leadership in every imaginable area of congregational life, from social action, to leading services, to teaching courses to overseeing lifecycle needs. As people heard about this culture of participation, more people of talent joined our community.
• Mission, Mission, Mission: We spent a lot of time discussing and articulating why we existed. Few of our members ever thought they would join a synagogue. In our first few years we developed a “Statement of Principles” that articulated guidelines about shabbat, tzedakah, voluntarism, social justice and much more. Over 80 percent of the community participated in the process of studying these issues and shaping the documents. Those documents, and what they represented, then became the magnet of what drew others to the community. If a family just wanted to pay dues and have a child become bar or bat mitzvah a few years down the road, then we were not the right synagogue for them and we said so!
• Serious Judaism: We were not going to offer “Jewish lite.” We made demands on people’s time and money. We offered a community of fellow travelers that came together on shabbat and at other times for people who wanted to explore what it meant to create and belong to a true spiritual community; that was precious enough to attract a lot of people.

It seems clear that synagogues will no longer have the exclusive franchise on meeting the spiritual needs of Jews. The growth of intentional communities built around themes such as environmental stewardship; prayer and spirituality; food justice; social responsibility; and simple living underscore that Jews are ready for a fuller engagement with Judaism and with community that is authentic and spiritually serious. It is noteworthy that this fall, Hazon (www.Hazon.org) will sponsor the first national conference on intentional communities at the Pearlstone Retreat Center in Maryland.

The existential question that drives American Jews today is not about social acceptance or material success. It is about whether they can find a sense of purpose in a society that has become so radically individualistic. At a time when old paradigm synagogues are shrinking and closing, it is time to create communities that help Jews become more socially conscious, more spiritually aware, and more fully human. When we do that, we will open the door to a Jewish renaissance in America.

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Rabbi Sid Schwarz is the director of Clal’s Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI) a new, two-year program for early career rabbis designed to create visionary spiritual leaders with the skills to transform American synagogues. CLI is part of the Rabbis Without Borders portfolio of programs. Schwarz is the author of Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Community (Jewish Lights) and Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews can Transform the American Synagogue (Jewish Lights).

This article appears in the November 2013 issue of Sh’ma Magazine

Profiles in Courage-A Kol Nidre Sermon

Sermons and Speeches

Two years after John F. Kennedy was elected Senator from Massachusetts, he wrote a book called Profiles in Courage that would win a Pulitzer Prize and also help propel this handsome young senator into the White House three years later. Kennedy, a history buff, chose to profile eight political figures whose courage while in office was, shall we say, out of the ordinary. Kennedy consciously sought to emulate those figures in his own Presidency; most historians would judge that Kennedy did that admirably, particularly in his ability to walk the world back from the ledge of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I want to speak tonight about what it takes for each of us to live our lives as a “profile in courage.”

A couple of years ago, on the heels of a sermon I delivered called “WWMD: In Search of Character and Ethics”, I taught a course for Adat Shalom on Musar, Jewish ethical teachings. For each midah, the Hebrew term for a positive character trait, we had a worksheet that helped participants make that midah more present in their lives. Character, not unlike proficiency at an instrument or in a sport, requires practice, a lot of practice. One of the entries on that worksheet was a space asking each participant to fill in the name of someone who was a living role model for that midah. Definitions take you only so far. Seeing how a character trait is embodied by a real person, responding to real circumstances makes it much more possible for us to try to emulate that trait.

For this reason, before I offer a Jewish spin on the character trait of courage, let’s first talk role models.

Role Models

There is hardly a better role model in the world today for “courage” than Nelson Mandela. The outline of his story is familiar. A leader in the African National Congress which was dedicated to ending the Apartheid regime in South Africa, he was convicted of sabotage and treason in 1962 and sentenced to life imprisonment. After 27 years in jail he was released in 1990 amid escalating international pressure and civil unrest. He partnered with President F.W. DeClerk to establish free, multi-racial elections in 1994, an election that he won, allowing him to ascend to the Presidency of South Africa, serving five years, from 1994-1999.

What was so notable about Mandela’s leadership was his ability to rise above anger and to withstand the natural tendency to seek revenge and retribution. He did not forget the oppression and suffering that black South Africans experienced at the hands of the white, Apartheid regime. He paid a personal price for fighting that system every day of his imprisonment. Yet he also understood that the future of his country depended on uniting the country, white and black together. His decision to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Panel headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the vehicle for Mandela to create a historical record of the injustice of the Apartheid regime without allowing the past to doom the country to decades of violence and retribution.

Even more surprising, especially to Blacks in South Africa, was his decision to meet with senior figures of the hated Apartheid regime. Emphasizing personal forgiveness and reconciliation, he announced that “courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace.”

When South Africa hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup, Mandela became fan #1 of the South African national team, the Springboks, even though the team and the sport itself was the chosen pastime of the white minority. As portrayed in the movie, Invictus, with Matt Damon, when South Africa defeated New Zealand in the final, Mandela presented the trophy wearing a Springbok shirt. Some say that it was at that moment that Mandela succeeded in uniting a country that, under other circumstances, under a political leader without Mandela’s vision and moral courage, would have been mired in racial conflict for another century.

Other Role Models

Jews too have a Mandela like figure in the person of Natan Sharansky. In the 25 years that I spent as an activist in the Soviet Jewry movement, Sharansky was one of my personal heroes. Thousands of Soviet Jews became refuseniks when they were refused permission to emigrate by Soviet officials and they often lost their jobs as a punishment for their “civic ingratitude”. Hundreds of other Jewish political activists were imprisoned on trumped up charges, sometimes for drug charges after the KGB planted drugs in their apartments. But Sharansky was the best known of all Soviet Jewish refuseniks.

He was the most public of all activists in speaking to the western media on the blatant human rights abuses of the Soviet government. He also refused the requests of Jewish organizations that asked him to avoid getting involved in championing the rights of other Soviet dissidents. They felt that such partnerships would lessen the chances for success on the Soviet Jewry issue. But one of Sharansky’s closest friends and colleagues was Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, a non-Jew who became a political critic of the Soviet government. Sharansky was resolute in his commitment to human rights for all Soviet citizens, not just for Jews.

If you want to understand what courage looks like read Sharansky’s memoir of his nine years in prison, Fear No Evil. The most obvious example of courage is that he refused to betray any of his colleagues to the KGB, paying the price time and again by being put into solitary confinement. But even move importantly was his refusal to capitulate to KGB intimidation that he would be put to death. He continued to live as a free man in his mind, even as his body was imprisoned. Within a year of being released from prison, he stood on the stage of the Summit Rally for Soviet Jewry at the Capitol here in Washington D.C. in December 1987, a symbol that one man of courage could defeat the Soviet state. Within four years of that rally, close to a million Jews had re-enacted the Biblical Exodus and left the Soviet Union for Israel and the West and the Soviet Union was left on the dustbin of history.

Sometimes courage comes in surprising packages. Malala Yousafszi, the Pakistinian school girl was a hero even before she was almost killed by a Taliban assassin last October and even before she addressed the UN this summer. At age 12 Malala started blogging for the BBC under a pseudonym in order to bring the world’s attention to the need to educate young girls in the Moslem world. By the age of 13 she began to speak at public gatherings and to the press. At age 14, she received Pakistan’s National Children’s Peace Prize and the prime minister set up a technology college for women at her request. She began receiving death threats at age 15 but refused to stop her activism for female education. Now 16 years old and recovering from her near assassination, it is clear that her voice will not be silenced.

A final example: This year a documentary came out about one of the thousands of amazing stories of survival during the Holocaust. No Place on Earth tells the story of how Esther Stermer, a mother of six, saved her family and five other families, 38 people in all from the Nazis by taking refuge in a cave and living there for almost a year and half, 511 days. As the Nazis occupied western Ukraine, Esther led her family to one of the largest tunnel systems in the world, called the Priest Grotto. They lived there in complete darkness except when they prepared food. The head of each household sneaked out at night to forage for food. Water was found underground. Her sons, Sam and Saul, now 87 and 90 respectively, tell the story of how two Nazis on patrol found their mother on patrol early in their odyssey. With her life and that of all the others at risk, she refused to play the victim. She spoke boldly to the Nazis: “What the Furher will lose the war because an old Jewish woman is hiding in a cave with her family?” Remarkably, they left her alone and they survived the war underground.

Lessons

What can we gain from pondering the lives of Nelson Mandela, Natan Sharansky, Malala Yousafszi and Esther Stermer?

It is a Jewish value called ometz lev. This value does not have a direct translation in English. Literally it means “heart-strength” and it has nothing to do with eating low cholesterol foods.  A better translation is moral courage, fortitude, resolve. When I was growing up, the epitome of strength were photos of a 20 year old Mr. Universe named Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was my role model! I decided to order the weight training ropes he was endorsing from the back of a comic book. I used the ropes religiously, every day. Months later, when the ropes failed to have their advertised result, I took solace in the teachings of Judaism that made clear that strength was in the heart, not in the biceps. Mi hu gibor, asks the Mishna; “who is brave and courageous?” Hakovesh et yitzro, “the one who is able to control his or her impulses.”  

Personal Application

The first three examples I shared with you all came to public attention because of their well publicized plights that took place in political contexts. But don’t think that just because you are unlikely to be featured on the cover of Time magazine that ometz lev does not apply to you. All of us are capable of strengthening our ometz lev.

The Book of Proverbs teaches: “the refining pot is for silver, the furnace purifies gold but God tests our hearts (17:3).” Life can be hard. We are tested every day. How?

  • Consider the mid-career professional who is let go because of the changing priorities or reduced budget of the agency. That professional now worries about how they will provide for their family, pay for college, or have self-respect within their community of peers.
  • Consider the teen who, because of awkwardness or shyness, being too smart or too dumb, being too tall or too short, or struggling with their gender identity is being bullied at school. He has no friends. She has noone to talk to. This teen considers taking his or her life to end their silent agony.
  • Consider the 60 year old adult who gets a diagnosis of inoperable cancer. Just a week earlier there were things to look forward to. Life was just beginning. A vacation, children getting married, taking on a new hobby. And now the prospect is of hospitalization, dependency and saying goodbye. What of the spouse, who wants to be strong for their beloved but is undergoing their own private hell with the prospect of burying their life partner.

Each of these situations is taking place in our community right now. Each of these situations is in this very room right now. Maybe it is someone sitting right next to you.  Sometimes we know about it and there is the sustenance of sacred community and its ability to reach out and support people in their times of fear, of pain and of loss. But in many cases, we don’t ever know. The fear and the pain is borne in silence. Perhaps that silence is a sign of stoic courage; perhaps it is a sign that our society places too much emphasis on a person’s ability to “tough it out”, to be independent and not to rely on others.

In each one of these cases, we need ometz lev, the courage that comes from deep inside of ourselves. This is a courage that does not win medals for bravery but a courage that gives us the ability to confront life’s toughest challenges and go on living. Perhaps we each need a healthy dose of ometz lev just so that we can tell others that we need help and support. Perhaps the most courageous thing we can do is to say: “I’m scared, I feel all alone, I feel helpless, I need help”. One of the great gifts of a sacred community like Adat Shalom is the deep reservoir of chesed, of lovingkindness that exists here and that is shared with people in their times of deepest need. Chesed is to ometz lev as rain is to a withering plant. It sustains the life giving force within us. In the year ahead, I invite you to be part of that sacred, communal give and take. Try to grow closer to this community that needs you to sustain it and that can, in turn, sustain you in your most trying hour.  

Day to Day Life, and Death

Just to be clear, you need not be facing a life-threatening situation to find the trait of ometz lev to be helpful. In our own community I am constantly inspired by examples of people exhibiting this “courage of the heart”.

  • Parents who are raising children with physical, mental or learning disabilities, who modify their life and/or career to accommodate visits to doctors, hospitals, schools, all manner of therapists and who must support their child through the emotional turmoil of finding their place in the world.
  • People battling their own inner demons, be it a chemical dependency, food addiction, fear of social settings, each of which makes each day a struggle for balance and sanity.
  • Adults caring for aging parents watching the gradual loss of competence and independence of the people who were once your source of support. Are there any easy answers about when to bring help into a parents’ home? When to take them into your home? When to place them in a nursing home? When to move them to hospice? When to make that fateful decision about life support in a hospital?  I think not.

All of these circumstances call for ometz lev.

This past summer my mother’s sister, my Aunt Zahava, was taken to the hospital for a lung infection. The families were relatively close. Aunt Zahava and her family lived in Flushing and I grew up on Long Island so we spent a lot of time in each others’ homes. My Aunt Zahava never forgot a birthday or an anniversary and though the stroke that almost killed her 20 years ago made her physically weak, she led an active life with her second husband, Eli in Baltimore. Now in her early 80’s, the hospitalization took its toll. Soon other parts of her system started to break down. The most serious condition was a leaking heart valve that a cardiologist suggested be repaired a decade ago as a voluntary procedure. My aunt refused at the time and now the medical consensus was that in her weakened state, she would not survive heart surgery.

I visited Zahava a couple of times and she was awake and alert, surrounded by her husband and her children although she could not speak because of a trach in her throat. When Sandy and I visited her together, we stood on either side of the bed and she engaged us in conversation with her eyes. She held each of our hands and did not stop caressing us for the entire visit, a way for her to communicate her love.  A week later, with no prospect for recovery, Zahava, fully conscious, aware and mentally sharp, asked that they turn off all the life support machinery that was keeping her alive. She did not want to live that way with all that would imply for her loved ones. Her husband and children acceded to her wishes. Within a day she died.  The loss is deep and still painful for those of us who loved Zahava. What an example of heart courage! Sometimes ometz lev can not only help us learn how to live, but also how to die with grace.

The Hasidic tradition gives us a metaphor to understand the challenge of having this level of courage. It comes from R. Nahman of Bratzlav; many of you may know it as a song. R. Nahman taught: kol haolam kulo gesher tzar meod; vehaikar lo lefached; “the world is a narrow bridge, and the essential lesson of life is not to be afraid”.

A Gift

Just a few weeks ago I heard an interview on NPR with Sebastian Rossouw, pastor of Regina Mundi church, the largest Roman Catholic in S. Africa, located in the black township of Soweto.  He was being asked about the legacy of Nelson Mandela and he said: “The legacy that Mandela brings is that despite what the past has dealt you, do not allow it to determine your future.”

What a great Jewish lesson. Leonard Fein has written that Jews are “prisoners of hope”. I love the expression and have used it time and again. By “prisoners of hope” he meant that Judaism has taught us that it is within our power to change; not only change the world, but also change ourselves. As part of our soul-searching this season, we should ask ourselves—are we going to accept that who we are and how we behave today is all that we are capable of or do we have the courage to begin again and do better.   

Each of our role models, Nelson Mandela, Natan Sharansky, Malala Yousefzai , Esther Stermer prevailed because they had the ometz lev to look past the hand that life dealt them and create a new reality for themselves and for the world. They were “profiles in courage.”

This is also the gift of the yamim noraim, the High Holydays. To be better people, we need to strengthen our resolve. To face the challenges that will inevitably come our way this coming year, we need courage.  It is good to be reminded that within each of us is a deep well of ometz lev that we can summon up for those moments when we most need it. Then, and only then, will we realize that we don’t need to check Profiles in Courage out of the library. We just need to look in the mirror.

Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI): Shaping Visionary Spiritual Leaders by Rabbi Irwin Kula

Articles, Featured

Organizations throughout the American Jewish community are painfully aware that the strategies and programs that may have been effective for a previous generation will no longer meet the needs of the younger generation of Jews who have been raised in a dramatically different world than that of their parents or grandparents. Indeed, many of those organizations are already experiencing attrition and loss of market share.

We are fortunate that forward looking philanthropists and foundations have stepped up over the past two decades to fund whole fields of endeavor that are having a dramatic impact on the vibrancy of Jewish life. The Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education (PEJE) has strengthened our day school system. Birthright Israel has made it possible for 400,000 young American Jews to have a direct encounter with Israel. The Foundation for Jewish Camp has provided resources to improve the quality and increase the capacity of Jewish summer camps. It is long past time for the Jewish community to begin to invest in its rabbis.

Clal-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership believes that the Jewish community can only be as strong as its spiritual leaders. Even though the Jewish community may rank among the most secular and least devout of any faith group in America when judged by weekly attendance at services or expressed belief in God, Jews represent a community of faith and of fate whose resilience and solidarity is unparalleled in the world. Jews continue to look to their rabbis to give voice to these bonds of communal solidarity that make Jews feel so connected to other Jews all around the globe and to teach and communicate wisdom that helps people improve their lives and become better, more compassionate, loving and happier people.

This is why Clal has invested major time and resources in the training of rabbis through its Rabbis Without Borders program directed by Rabbi Rebecca Sirbu. Since its inception four years ago RWB which received a 2013 Slingshot Award designating it one of the most inspiring and innovative projects in the North American Jewish community, more than 150 rabbis have participated in its programs and become part of the RWB network.

On June 1st Clal is opening the application process for a brand new program under the aegis of Rabbis Without Borders. It is called the Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI.). CLI is designed as a two-year program for early career rabbis to encourage innovative thinking and equip rabbis to serve as transformative change agents in the communities that they serve. We are looking for rabbis who think big, prepared to dramatically re-think how synagogues function or prepared to launch a spiritual alternative to synagogues of their own design. The syllabus will integrate methodologies from the field of leadership education and innovation with the best thinking in the field of synagogue transformation. The acronym – CLI – reminds us that clergy are intended to be human vessels that create sacred communities in which Jews can find meaning and purpose (klei kadosh).

Directing CLI will be Rabbi Sid Schwarz, whose book, Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews can Transform the American Synagogue (2000) helped to define the field of synagogue transformation and which offered a model for a new paradigm for the American synagogue. His most recent book, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Community (2013) has set an agenda for much of the American Jewish community as it seeks to remain relevant and engage Next Gen Jews.

Working with Sid Schwarz will be Marty Linsky, one of the top leadership consultants in the world. Serving on the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School since 1982, Linsky is the co-author (with Ron Heifetz) of Leadership on the Line (2002) and The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (2009). He and Ron Heifetz are also the co-founders of Cambridge Leadership Associates.

The CLI program is informed by more than a decade of work that Clal has done with rabbis and rabbinical students across the denominational spectrum. There is a gap between rabbis’ desire to provide leadership to the Jewish community and their sense that they lack the toolkit to be effective in that role. Recently graduated rabbis regularly talk about the need for a support system to help them navigate the challenges that new professionals invariably face. Because so many rabbis enter the field with a need to support themselves and their families many choose more conventional jobs even when they might have an interest in experimenting with riskier, more innovative models because the former offers a more reliable source of income.

Compared with other professions, the American rabbinate is woefully weak in the area of professional development. The lack of such support has created rabbis who feel isolated and who often face mid-career burnout. At a time when dramatic changes are taking place in American society and among the next generation of American Jews, Jewish institutions will require visionary leadership to adapt to these changes. That leadership will need to come, first and foremost, from rabbis who are still held in high esteem by Jews and who see them as the standard bearers of the Jewish tradition.

Funded by lead gifts from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, and Alisa and Dan Doctoroff, the Clergy Leadership Incubator is designed to create an intensive mentorship program for some of the most creative and innovative rabbis entering the rabbinate from across the denominational spectrum. The challenges facing American Jewry can not be successfully met by any one denomination working in isolation. Furthermore, increasing numbers of rabbis are now being trained for a post-denominational Jewish community. The Clergy Leadership Incubator will make available to its participants the best minds and practices in the nonprofit sector around reflective practice, adaptive skills, innovative thinking and visionary leadership. Finally, it will provide as mentors to the CLI fellows the experience and wisdom of some of the most successful and innovative rabbis in the American Jewish community.

The future vitality of the American Jewish community depends on our ability to train and nurture a cadre of young, visionary spiritual leaders. No seminary can do this alone. CLI will leverage the many assets of the Jewish community and tap into the great wisdom beyond the Jewish community, to create this cadre of new rabbinic leaders for our community.

To apply for participation in the program go to rabbiswithoutborders.org/?q=forrabbis#CLI

Rabbi Irwin Kula is the President of Clal: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. He is also the author of “Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life”. 

Gary Rosenblatt on Jewish Megatrends

Articles, Megatrends Book Tour

 

Jewish Megatrends:  Rabbi offers a new way to think of ourselves: “tribal,” and “covenantal”

Gary Rosenblatt

New York Jewish Week, 5/22/2013

Rabbi Sidney Schwarz recalls the exact words of a comment from a liberal rabbinical student that disturbed him profoundly.

“We were at a retreat, and he said to me, ‘I didn’t go to rabbinical school to carry the tribal water of the Jewish people.’ And I thought, ‘that is the job of a rabbi.’”

Rabbi Schwarz, founder and leader of a Reconstructionist congregation in suburban Maryland, says the encounter was not atypical of a select group of progressive Jews who are deeply committed to Jewish life — but not to the agenda of an organized Jewish community perceived as “obsessed by continuity.”

Calling for a new way to reach these and many other young Jews, most of whom eschew the term “Zionist,” Rabbi Schwarz has come up with an unusual approach in his new book, “Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future” (Jewish Lights Publishing). It opens with his thesis on how to engage the majority of young Jews who show little interest in traditional forms of affiliation — synagogues, organizations, Federation — and then asks 13 leading Jewish innovators to each write a chapter in response to his views, based on their own observations about what works and what doesn’t.

He closes the book with a rebuttal of sorts, “fine tuning” his initial thoughts and charting an upbeat path for an American Jewish community he views as “in transition” rather than “in decline.”

The result is a compelling overview of the stand-out successes and major challenges in confronting a generation many believe is moving away from its parents’ and grandparents’ ways of identifying Jewishly, and in charting a course for engaging it in ways it can relate to, authentically.

Rabbi Schwarz has the credentials for this effort. Besides his rabbinic duties, he is known nationally as a social and political activist, and founder of Panim, a group he led for two decades that trained teens for leadership through Jewish education, values and social responsibility. He is also the author of two previous books, one exploring the key to successful synagogue models (“Finding A Spiritual Home”) and the other (“Judaism and Justice”) on the power of social justice in engaging young people.

Those themes form the core of “Jewish Megatrends,” in which Rabbi Schwarz identifies a growing polarization between what he describes as two types of Jews. One, like himself, he dubs “tribal Jews”; they identify strongly with Israel and worry about external and internal threats to Jewish continuity. The other he terms “covenantal Jews”; they are primarily made up of younger people who are less parochial, less concerned about group solidarity, and more interested in universal themes like justice and human dignity.

Rabbi Schwarz argues that the organized Jewish community, led by tribal Jews, is in effect driving away covenantal Jews by “drawing hard and fast lines on who does and who does not belong to the Jewish community.” He says “rabbis and the organized Jewish community are notoriously bad at understanding and validating” those whose Jewish identity is “soft and highly ambivalent,” but who can be engaged through programs that connect them to universal and liberal values stemming from their Jewish heritage.

The key, he says, is to reach these “covenantal Jews” from the outside-in rather than the inside-out approach. In other words, don’t begin by preaching Jewish texts, which they see as irrelevant. Rather, “start with what matters” to sophisticated, thoughtful Jews, like their commitment to improve the world, and show them how these goals can be advanced through Jewish wisdom and spirituality. That means tracing social justice to ancient Jewish values, and offering a caring community and “sacred purpose” to their lives.

Don’t try to give them Judaism-lite, Rabbi Schwarz insists, but “raise the bar” in terms of content and commitment. If you’re serious with them, they’ll take you more seriously. And don’t be afraid to proclaim Jewish life as countercultural, emphasizing personal relationships in an era so dependent on technology that people prefer texting to meeting face to face.

The main section of the book is made up of chapters on innovations in Jewish culture (by Elise Bernhardt), synagogues (Rabbi Sharon Brous), family foundations (Sandy Cardin), Israel (Barry Chazan and Anne Lanski), denominationalism (Rabbi David Ellenson), “getting” the next generation (Wayne Firestone), Jewish social justice (Rabbi Jill Jacobs), community centers (Rabbi Joy Levitt), the Orthodox difference (Rabbi Asher Lopatin), interreligious collaboration (Rabbi Or N. Rose), tribes, food and community (Nigel Savage), the federation system (Barry Shrage), and Jewish education (Jonathan Woocher).

Most agree, to varying degrees, with Rabbi Schwarz’s basic premise and approach, giving examples of how they try to provide authentic experiences to a younger generation for whom Israel and the Holocaust hold increasingly less appeal. For example, both Wayne Firestone, outgoing president and CEO of Hillel, and Jonathan Woocher, a leader in innovative Jewish education, make the point that Jewish students aren’t trying to “fit in,” as their parents did, but are seeking ways to live more meaningful lives through Judaism. Rabbi Ellenson, the president of HebrewUnionCollege, notes that young Jews are not interested in denominational labels. And Rabbi Brous, who leads a popular synagogue in Los Angeles, emphasizes that the more demands she makes on her congregation members in terms of attendance and commitment, the better they respond.

Only Barry Shrage, the chief executive of the Jewish Federation in Boston, seriously challenges Rabbi Schwarz, arguing that the author’s “tribal” and “covenantal” depiction is an inaccurate stereotype, and that in truth the younger generation is more nuanced in terms of Jewish identity. For example, he says some may care deeply about the Palestinians’ plight but far more worry about Israel’s security.

Most significantly, he believes Birthright Israel has had a profound positive impact on young Jews, and he argues against dismissing tribal Judaism. “Not only is a ‘tribal-free’ Judaism inconceivable,” he writes, “it is also not necessary to attract the next generation of Jews.” That can and must be done, according to Shrage, largely in the ways Schwarz calls for.

The hopeful note throughout is that the contributors to “Jewish Megatrends” are seeking and finding creative ways to make Judaism compelling to people who are not just seeking to balance their American and Jewish identities, as did their parents and grandparents, but are looking to Judaism to provide deeper value in their lives. The question is whether these innovators are reaching enough Jews to make a difference, and if the rest of us are paying attention.

 

Q & A with the Religious News Service

Articles, Megatrends Book Tour

Rabbi’s Message for American Jews: Change or Die

Interview with Lauren Markoe posted on the Religious News Service (RNS)

Rabbi Sidney Schwarz, ordained in the liberal Reconstructionist tradition, sees a divide between generations of American Jews that could spell disaster for the community.

One generation he calls “legacy” or “tribal” Jews — those who built the national organizations and synagogues that have served for decades as the backbone of American Jewry. But reams of statistics show legacy Jews have enjoyed limited success attracting younger Jews.

The other is what he calls “covenantal” or “innovation sector” Jews, a younger generation that has founded a myriad of niche Jewish organizations — environmental, social justice and political — that can, in Schwarz’s vision, build on their parents’ work toward a more brilliant American Jewish future.

In a new book, “Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future,” Schwarz says the upstart generation cares deeply about Judaism — but draws on its spiritual legacy more than a sense of tribal solidarity.

Schwarz, who lives outside Washington, D.C., and has worked in both sectors of American Judaism, talked about the conversation American Jews need to have among themselves to preserve their collective future. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What’s wrong with the way that Jewish America organizes itself?

A: The problem is that the institutions that have guided the community for the better part of 100 years are too much in touch with their base. They’re committed to serving the people they consider loyalists, and they assume the next generation will fall into line. I wrote this book to send up a flare that that’s not going to happen.

Q: What can this new “innovation sector” of American Jewish life offer younger Jews, who are far less likely than their parents to join synagogues, Jewish federations and groups like B’nai B’rith?

A: The Jewish community was becoming less progressive in the 1980s, and Jews whose political affiliations skewed left were feeling disaffected. In response, you had an array of organizations crop up, ranging from Jewish Funds for Justice, to Mazon doing hunger relief, to the American Jewish World Service doing development work, to the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. They’ve proven for more than a decade that they can identify a market that the legacy sector can’t seem to capture.

Q: So should the oldsters just hand the car keys to your young innovators?

A: I believe the future lies in the two sectors collaborating. Each sector is at risk in different ways. The legacy sector’s membership and its budgets are declining. They can’t capture the next generation of Jews. The innovation sector is organizationally immature. Organizations pop up on the innovation screen, and everyone is so excited, journalists write about them — and then five years later they’re gone.

If some of the resources and the know-how of the legacy sector were shared with the innovation sector, you’d have a way to win.

Q: There’s tension between the two groups on Israel. Is that a sticking point in getting them to cooperate? I’m thinking of J Street, an organization that attracts Israel supporters who find the American Israel Public Affairs Committee too hawkish.

A: Israel is definitely a flash point. The Jewish community in America has very low tolerance for dissent around Israel. And if you are an organization that wants to challenge the policy of the State of Israel on any front, you are going to incur the wrath of large powerful forces.

In some cases, these new organizations love that conflict. When J Street came about, there was a strong effort to marginalize them, to portray them as not loyal to Israel. J Street parlayed that into astronomic growth over their first three years.

Q: Where do the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox fit into your landscape of American Judaism? What about Chabad, the Brooklyn-based Hasidic organization, which is running programs that attract Jews of varying levels of observance the world over?

A: Chabad has kind of written the playbook on innovation, and legacy organizations can learn much from Chabad. The two things they do right are one, they don’t judge you, and two, they set a high bar. The ethos of legacy organizations has been that the only way to interest non-Orthodox Jews in being Jewish is to deliver “Jewish lite” or watered-down Judaism. That totally doesn’t work.

What next-generation Jews want is something that’s authentic. The Orthodox, they get serious Judaism. The challenge will be: Can we create a non-Orthodox brand of Judaism that’s equally serious?

Jewish Megatrends-On the Road, Part 2

Megatrends Book Tour

 

In the past two weeks we held a beautiful book launch at my home shul, Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, MD and then I did events in New York and Boston.

The New York event was held at the JCC of Manhattan, directed by my good friend, Rabbi Joy Levitt who is also a contributor to the book. We had an embarrassment of riches with five contributors all coming to the same program. In addition to Joy, we had Nigel Savage of Hazon, Jon Woocher of the Jewish Education Service of North America, Jill Jacobs of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and David Ellenson of Hebrew Union College. The evening was moderated incredibly skillfully by Jane Eisner, the editor of the Forward.

One interesting moment was a comment by Nigel about the need for the Jewish community to engage in evangelism. Nigel believes that Judaism has something precious to offer the world and he believes that we should be more pro-active in telling non-Jews that they would be welcome to join us. I publicly challenged Nigel on this. I state quite clearly in the book that Judaism can provide an antidote to the spiritual malaise of American life.

Yet evangelism strikes me as a bad strategy. I believe that if we create compelling spiritual communities, people will come, both Jews and non-Jews. Heaven knows we don’t have to work hard to bring non-Jews into our spaces. They come quite naturally, hand in hand with our sons and daughters, or as guests of the Bar or Bat Mitzvah or as spiritual seekers who are checking out the Jews. I’ve had numerous encounters with these gentiles after services. Even when I discount the false flattery (and there is plenty of that) there are many who find our music uplifting, our Torah discussion stimulating and the way the community embraces each and every visitor, quite special. I know that it plants seeds in people’s minds about whether they might want to join our community through conversion or help to create something similar in their church.

I am less interested in capturing souls than I am in offering a spiritual alternative to the superficiality of the American public square.

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The morning after the New York event I got an email from a 20-something who was in attendance at the event. He grew up in an interfaith household, attended Unitarian church and experienced both Christian and Jewish holidays in his home. After getting turned on to Jewish life as a result of a Birthright trip to Israel he got involved in several Jewish social justice organizations, became an active participant in a Reform congregation in the DC area and volunteered for HIAS. On all counts, it was quite a Jewish communal success story, though not as common as I would like to see.

But then the letter changed tone. He went on to say that he moved to New York almost two years ago and has yet to find a welcoming environment. It has not been for lack of trying. He also finds a disturbing gap between Jews of his generation and older Jews. Reacting to the comments I made about the need for more dialogue and cross-fertilization between Jewish legacy institutions (e.g. Federations, synagogues, JCC’s, etc.) and the younger, Jewish innovation sector, the letter bemoaned the fact that he saw few people his age at the very forum where I was speaking about Jewish Megatrends. Nor does he find many older people when he spends time at some of the Jewish social justice programs that he attends.

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The letter was an interesting reality check on the state of the American Jewish community, made even more poignant because the next day I was in Boston, participating in two separate forums with Barry Shrage, the long-time director of the Boston Federation and a contributor to Jewish Megatrends.  I invited Barry to contribute to the book because he has built one of the most innovative Federations in America. In his chapter he reflects on the similarity between the four core principals that I suggested are necessary for Jewish institutions to have a shot at engaging Next Gen Jews and the core principals that guide the work of the Boston Federation.

Still, despite that common ground, Barry and I do not see things exactly the same way. He does not agree with my assessment that Next Gen Jews are largely turned off by Jewish legacy organizations. He also does not share my view that Next Gen Jews are seriously distancing themselves from identification with the state of Israel. After our exchange that was done in front of his own staff at the CJP offices in Boston, I asked Barry publicly if he thought there was a serious divide between Jews who were involved with and played leadership roles in the Jewish establishment and the vast majority of Next Gen Jews. He said “No”.

Now despite an impressive list of accomplishments at the Boston Federation, I don’t believe the Jewish community is well served by such a sanguine assessment. At virtually every stop of my still young book tour, I hear stories from young people that suggest that a serious divide between them and the organizations that are the stewards of Jewish communal life. Not only do we need to do more to fund and support the new approaches to Jewish life that are emerging from Next Gen Jews, I think that the legacy organizations need to pro-actively try to bring Jews from the next generation into their planning and leadership circles. Only that way can we hope to build and shape new models of Jewish life that are responsive to the changing nature of the American Jewish community.

The Jewish Social Justice Bus

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Last month I was invited to speak at the Jewish Funders Network’s (JFN) annual conference in Los Angeles. JFN has emerged as an important player in the American Jewish community. As Jewish Federation fundraising has been relatively stagnant for the last two decades, family foundations have emerged as a very important source of philanthropic venture capital, helping to get new ideas and new organizations off the ground. In my new book, Jewish Megatrends (Jewish Lights), I write about the differing fortunes of Jewish legacy organizations (e.g. Federations, synagogues, JCC’s and membership organizations) and the Jewish innovation sector (e.g. new organizations that have been targeting Next Gen Jews). The former are suffering from serious attrition; the latter are booming. In any event, JFN has become the support network for Jewish family foundations.

On the second day of the conference, participants were able to choose from four bus tours of Los Angeles: LA Arts, Creative Community Engagement, Health and Social Services and Social Change. Not surprisingly, I chose Social Change, a central focus of my work and passion. Even before we boarded, not exactly knowing who had signed up, the trip became dubbed “the Jewish Social Justice Bus”.

And what a bus it was! When I wrote my book, Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World, I identified and tracked down for interviews about 50 Jews who were playing an important role in the emerging Jewish social justice sector. I felt a bit like a kid in a candy store to find some of the most important leaders of that field on the same bus—Simon Greer, who led the Jewish Funds for Justice and now is president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation; Alan van Capelle who succeeded Simon at JFSJ, now called Bend the Arc; Ruth Messinger, president of the American Jewish World Service; Dan Sokatch, president of the New Israel Fund; Rachel Levin of Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation; and Rabbi Sharon Brous, the founding rabbi of IKAR. I found myself invoking Tefillat haDerech, the Jewish prayer for safe travel, because if the bus happened upon misfortune, the whole field of Jewish social justice would suffer a cataclysmic setback.

The field trip included a few stops and a chance to meet an array of activists. One was the Breed Street Shul in the BoyleHeights section of East LA. Once a thriving Jewish area, the neighborhood has suffered from some decline in recent years and most of the synagogues closed their doors years ago. In 1988 the Shul was registered as a national historic landmark, insuring that it would not be torn down and eleven years later, a non-profit group incorporated with the express intention to refurbish the synagogue. What is most significant about the project is that the intention was not to create a museum. Rather the goal was to create a new hub of Jewish activity in a section of LA that might attract different Jews than those that join affluent suburban synagogues. Part of how Breed Street is already realizing its dream is through partnerships with immigrant organizations in the neighborhood, mostly Latino.

Many urban areas throughout America are being re-discovered by younger Jews who are drawn not only to more affordable housing, but to mixed neighborhoods filled with the kind of cultural, political and social energy that is rare to find in suburbia. These Jews are also drawn to a different kind of social justice engagement. There was a time when Jews of conscience left their comfortable neighborhoods in the suburbs and spent an afternoon in a social action program in the inner city, only to go back home at the end of a few hours. Today, Jewish social justice activists know that real social change only happens when we create alliances with at-risk communities, live and work side by side with those communities and treat our allies as full partners. Indeed our meetings with Angelica Sales of the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights of L.A. and with Kafi Blumenfeld of the Liberty Hill Foundation spoke of just those kinds of partnerships with the Jewish community.

The Breed Street Shul represents a return to a neighborhood that was once bustling with Jews who might have been the grandparents of the Jews now moving back in. But it is more than that. It also represents an embrace of a serious commitment to tzedek, to the kind of justice work that is central to an authentic expression of Jewish living and Jewish values.

It is exciting to note that similar reverse migrations of Jews are happening in other communities in America. In Detroit, Jews helped to save the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue (IADS) that was located in a former Jewish neighborhood downtown. In WashingtonD.C., the original Adas Israel in Chinatown was about to be sold to become a nightclub when it was bought by a few Jewish philanthropists. Refurbished and re-dedicated in 2004, the Sixth and I Synagogue is one of the brightest success stories in American Jewish life. Seven days a week Sixth and I is bustling with activity, including an eclectic mix of religious services, cultural events and social justice engagement in the neighborhood. It is no accident that both AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps and Moishe House, are renting houses for their 20-something participants in similar urban neighborhoods. There is more than a little poignancy in the fact that these grandchildren and great grandchildren of immigrants are now moving back to the old neighborhoods to help a new generation of immigrants establish lives of dignity.

Those of us who were on the Jewish social justice bus may have helped a bit to create the impetus for this kind of re-engagement with the Jewish past and with Jewish values. But it is the young Jews who are now “walking the talk” of Judaism who are really to be celebrated.

The day after the Jewish social justice bus trip, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Morton and Jane Blaustein Foundation and the Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation joined together to launch “Justice, Justice Shall You Purse”, a $1 million Jewish social justice matching fund under the aegis of the Jewish Funders Network. It is an exciting moment in the expansion of Jewish social justice in America and precisely the kind of development that I wrote about and encouraged in Judaism and Justice.

The Jewish social justice bus is on the move. It is time to get on board.

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