Israel: A Season of Reckoning

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The season of reckoning is upon us. For Jews, the sentiment will likely evoke thoughts of the upcoming Days of Awe. Both the Hebrew month of Elul and then the ten days of repentance that starts with Rosh HaShana and ends with Yom Kippur is the time when Jews are called upon to go into introspection mode. Where we identify particular sins of commission or omission the Jewish tradition calls upon us to repent and to make amends.

These are also days of reckoning for Israel which has the excruciatingly difficult task of trying to live up to the aspirational language of its Declaration of Independence to be “a society of freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel” while living under unrelenting threats to the safety and security of its citizens. This is something worth remembering as over the next few months Israel will be under scrutiny by several different human rights bodies.

Note: This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on October 1, 2014.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) just issued a report on Israel’s treatment of Sudanese and Eritrean nationals who made their way into Israel. The report is titled “Make Their Lives Miserable”, a quote from former Israeli Minister of Interior, Eli Yishai. Indeed, that phrase has characterized Israeli policy towards the 50,000 plus Africans who have come to Israel in the last few years. HRW found that Israel has “coerced” some 7000 Sudanese and Eritreans to return to their countries even as that repatriation exposes the refugees to torture, imprisonment and charges of treason for setting foot in Israel. Israel’s asylum procedure—for those Eritreans and Sudanese who even manage to gain access to it—has resulted in a 100 percent denial rate for Sudanese, despite any Sudanese being liable for up to 10 year’s imprisonment for having set foot in Israel, and a 99.8 percent denial rate for Eritreans, despite their global refugee approval rate of 83 percent. The vast majority of the Eritreans and Sudanese still in Israel are living in detention centers where prospects of finding work and getting residence papers are next to impossible. Israeli officials deny that they are engaged in forced repatriation, although they do say they encourage repatriation to a third country.

The vast majority of the Eritreans and Sudanese still in Israel are living in detention centers, where prospects of finding work and getting residence papers are next to impossible. Last week, Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the Holot detention facility in the Negev to be closed in 90 days, and it struck down a section of the Anti-Infiltration Law that allowed illegal migrants to be held in closed detention for a year.

As tragic and ironic as the African refugee situation is in Israel, it pales in comparison to the attention that will attend several inquiries that will take place investigating this summer’s war in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) itself has started an internal investigation of 99 separate incidents that took place during the Gaza war. They include Israeli military actions that resulted in the killing of civilians, the bombing of UNWRA facilities that were serving as safe havens for women and children and the use of Palestinians as human shields during ground operations. While several human rights organizations, both in Israel and abroad, have claimed that such internal investigations are not sufficiently rigorous or objective, this internal review process has resulted in some indictments in the past.

Even more attention will focus on the panel appointed to develop a report on this summer’s Gaza war by the UN Human Rights Council to be headed by Canadian jurist William Schabas. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he will refuse to cooperate with this commission though a final decision has yet to be made. Informing the threatened boycott are statements that Schabas has made in the past critical of Israel and specifically, of PM Netanyahu. If Netanyahu follows through on his threat to boycott, the action will parallel Israel’s boycott of the UN panel of inquiry led by Richard Goldstone investigating the 2012 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

No comment has yet been made by the Israeli government about another inquiry that UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has proposed to specifically look into Israel’s shelling of UNWRA facilities during the Gaza war this summer. This body will be in addition to the Schabas panel and the report will likely be juxtaposed to the IDF inquiry of the same incidents. One can easily predict that the contrast in the findings will make headlines.

All together this season of reckoning promises to be difficult not just for Israel, but for Jews who are torn between their liberal, humanitarian values and their identification with and affection for the state of Israel. The double standard by which Israel is judged by human rights organizations, by the UN and by the media is well documented. Two hundred thousand civilian deaths in Syria, the imprisonment of thousands of political dissidents in Egypt and the summary executions of suspected collaborators without due process in Gaza by Hamas will get a fraction of the attention that will attend Israeli human rights abuses. It is even harder to accept the irony that sitting in judgment of Israel on the UN Human Rights Council is China, which harvests the organs of imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners, Saudi Arabia where homosexuality is a capital offense and Pakistan which executes people for religious blasphemy.

Notwithstanding all this, I believe that Israel would be making a serious strategic mistake if it again chooses to boycott or disregard the international human rights community. Judge Richard Goldstone, in an op-ed in which he reflected on the report he issued on Gaza (which the Jewish community characterized as his “apology”), made clear that the report would have been far more balanced had Israel cooperated with the investigation. He was left with no choice but to talk to the sources available to him—primarily Hamas.

In addition, in the court of world opinion Israel hurts its own cause by thumbing its nose at the only instruments that we have to insure some kind of sane world order. The instruments are flawed, to be sure. But do we believe that the world would be better off without them? Even the U.S. has learned that it has no choice but to work with these trans-national institutions and state actors. The Jewish community is complicit in this counter-productive strategy when it takes out full page ads to discredit respected international jurists like William Schabas even before he begins his work.

Israel’s human rights record is far better than most of the world believes it is but it is far worse than the organized Jewish community would have us believe. In the rabbinic tradition, one of the names for God is emet, the Hebrew word for truth. At this season of reckoning, neither individuals nor nations can afford avoiding hard truths.

Can Zionism be the Answer?

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Students of American Jewry often point to 1967 as a watershed in the evolution of the American Jewish community. The anxiety that American Jews felt in the weeks leading up to the Six Day War was palpable. There was no evidence that Israel could defend itself against any concerted Arab military assault, no less a multi-front war.

Because people most treasure that which they are on the verge of losing, identification with and sympathy for Israel skyrocketed. With Israel’s surprising and convincing military victory, Jews had much to celebrate. Sympathy turned quickly to pride and in the years that followed and American Jewry enjoyed a surge of ethnic, religious and Zionist identity.

Note: This article originally appeared in the New York Jewish Week on June 3, 2014.

By the middle of the 1980’s there was a growing chorus of voices that warned that Jewish identity could not be built exclusively around the commemoration of the Holocaust and pride in the state of Israel. It is worth noting that the Jewish community did a brilliant job of using those two events as drivers of Jewish identity. But questions were raised about whether identity built around a trip to Auschwitz or a mission to Israel would last. How healthy is a Jewish identity that is built on a story of Jewish victimization? What are the implications of having one’s religious identity tied to a nation-state whose decisions are driven by domestic politics and changing geo-strategic considerations?

These questions linger. But however valid the questions are, the alternative to building Jewish identity around the tragedy and triumph of 20th century Jewish history is to create a community deeply devoted to Torah (Jewish learning), Avodah (prayer, God and matters of the spirit) and Gemilut Chasadim (acts of lovingkindness towards one another and a commitment to heal a broken world).  Non-Orthodox American Judaism has yet to build that type of community (and the Orthodox fare only slightly better). So it is that our community builds Holocaust museums and memorials in city after city and invests hundreds of millions of dollars in Birthright Israel. As expensive as these projects may be, they are infinitely easier to make happen then getting Jews serious about actually living a Jewish life.

Now I happened to grow up as an observant Jew and was the beneficiary of a day school education. Yet what made me most passionate about Jewish life and what eventually led me to want to become a rabbi was my activism in the Soviet Jewry movement and my love for the state of Israel. These “tribal” elements of my Jewish identity are becoming increasingly anachronistic.  More and more Next Gen Jews see such loyalties as offensive. In the Pew study, only 43% of those surveyed felt that caring about Israel was essential to being a Jew. Among those who were under the age of 30, that number drops to 32%. In a more recent study conducted by Steven M. Cohen, close to 20% of non-Orthodox Jews aged 18-29 were “Israel-alienated”.

Perhaps Birthright will make a difference. Evaluation data from past participants show a marked difference in the likelihood that Birthright alumni will marry other Jews and find ways to connect with the Jewish community. Still we know that without high quality follow up much of the initial impact of a first trip to Israel will weaken. Birthright Next has not yet found a way to capture high percentages of Birthright alumni with Jewish content programming. The Jewish Agency’s Masa program has provided financial incentives for longer term Israel program for young adults, from five months to a year. In the wings is a new project coming out of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office. Dubbed the “Prime Minister’s Initiative” it promises to dwarf Birthright in size and scope and the goal is to engage Next Gen Jews in some serious Jewish identity programming with Israel as a centerpiece of a range of experiences.

One has to admire both the ingenuity of Jewish organizations for creating such innovative responses to the challenge of insuring Jewish identity on the part of Next Gen Jews as well as the generosity of Jewish philanthropists who help foot the bill for these programs. Yet I am concerned that one piece of the puzzle is missing. Since the vast majority of the American participants in these programs will live their lives in America, these programs must make a connection between an Israel experience and the heritage called Judaism. When I was a young adult the link between the two was called Zionism.

Zionism is the meeting point between Jewish history, Jewish heritage and the aspirations of the Jewish people to establish a sovereign nation-state in the community of nations. Because I deeply resonate to that synthesis I am both willing and proud to call myself a Zionist even when I find myself in deep disagreement with the policies of one Israeli government or another. At its best Zionism is nuanced and allows for a variety of interpretations of the kind of society that is created in Israel and the relationship between that State and Jews who live throughout the world.

Our dilemma today is that at the very time that we desperately need an ideological linkage between powerful Israel experiences and the creation of robust Jewish communities for Next Gen Jews in America, “Zionism” is absent from the mix. The term has been hijacked by the left and by the right. Among Next Gen Jews I hear arguments that echo the claim of the political left that Zionism is form of racism. I also hear other arguments that echo the party line of much of the Israel advocacy establishment that to be a Zionist means that Jews need to provide unqualified support for Israel because the world is so hostile to the national aspirations of the Jewish people. Even if I accept the second part of that statement, there are very few Next Gen Jews who are prepared to simply be Israel flag wavers.

I believe that the state of Israel is the single most important project of the Jewish people of the 20th and 21st centuries. There is much to be proud of after 66 years but much work left to be done—finding a suitable political agreement with the Palestinian people; strengthening Israel’s democratic principles; achieving true religious pluralism; eliminating institutional discrimination that negatively impacts Israel’s Arab citizens; supporting the renaissance of Jewish culture and learning; incubating new forms of communal life that reflect Judaism’s highest values. This effort should excite, inspire and engage the best minds and hearts in the Jewish world. That would be a Zionism worthy of the term.

Loyalty, Truth and Freedom of Expression

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Given the controversy surrounding Theater J’s production of Motti Lerner’s play, The Admission, at the DCJCC, I expected a full scale indictment of Israel’s conduct during the 1948 War of Independence. Instead I encountered a play that probed the complexity of war, politics, memory, ethnic identity, love and survival with astounding sensitivity and nuance.

Ever since the play was scheduled last summer a small group of Washington area Jews organized themselves into a group called Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art (COPMA). COPMA exerted enormous pressure on the local Jewish Federation to cut funding to the DCJCC because its Theater J had sponsored plays that ask uncomfortable questions about the state of Israel. The effort is similar to actions taken in New York and San Francisco to shut down Jewish Film Festivals because some of the films are critical of Israel. In a display of Jewish communal courage all too rare these days, the executive director and president of the Washington Jewish Federation issued public letters declaring that the community would not cave to the pressure exerted by COPMA even though that action will likely cost the Federation tens of thousands of dollars in contributions.

This article originally appeared in The Washington Post on March 30, 2014.

In fact, the DCJCC did make a concession to the protesters. They downgraded The Admission from a full production to a “workshop” and then inserted into the spring schedule an additional production of Golda’s Balcony, a play about former Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir.

The incident is but one of dozens of examples of how the Jewish community currently labors under a not so hidden loyalty test as it relates to what one can and cannot say about the state of Israel. National Hillel is under increasing criticism for its attempt to enforce standards that would keep certain kinds of anti-Israel speakers from being sponsored by their campus chapters around the country. Jews who associate with J Street have been accused of disloyalty to the Jewish community despite the fact that J Street’s policy explicitly endorses a safe and secure Israel as well as advocates for a two state solution to the Middle East dispute. A recent study found that one-third of American rabbis are not comfortable speaking the truth as they see it as it relates to Israel out of fear for their jobs. Recently, the rabbis of B’nai Jeshurun, the famously liberal synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, were called to task for signing an ad that was seen as critical of Aipac.

I understand what is behind this atmosphere of fear and retribution. Israel is increasingly treated as a pariah nation in the international community despite being the only democracy in the Middle East and having a far better human rights record than any of its neighboring countries. While powerless to change the antipathy of so much of the world to Israel, some Jews try to demand of their co-religionists a loyalty to the country that allowed the Jewish people to reconstitute itself after the Holocaust. Yet with the passage of time fewer and fewer Jews carry these memories and their ties to Jewish communal solidarity weaken. Attempts to enforce communal discipline and require a non-critical assessment of the state of Israel not only cannot succeed in America, it is likely to alienate the very Jews the community hopes to engage.

Ironically a play like The Admission may do more to engage Jews with the issues at the heart of the Middle East conflict than foolhardy attempts to enforce loyalty. The play portrays an overly self-righteous son trying to come to grips with the fact that his father may have been complicit in the killing of Arab civilians during the 1948 War of Independence. The father, perhaps altruistically and perhaps out of a sense of guilt, has devoted his life to improve the quality of life of Arab Israelis. The Arab/Palestinian Israelis in the play are torn between their desire to stay out of trouble, get an education and improve the quality of life for themselves and their children and their desire to unearth evidence of an injustice done to their parents and grandparents a generation earlier.

Hovering over the play is the recognition that war has no victors. All in its wake are victims, even, to quote the Bible, “unto the tenth generation”. Those in the Jewish community who seek to stifle freedom of expression are no less living out the trauma of the Holocaust than those in the Palestinian community who say that there can be no peace in the region until they can return to the villages of their grandparents which are now inside the borders of the state of Israel.

One of the great gifts that Nelson Mandela gave the world was the understanding that no healthy nation can be built on back of an historical injustice without a process of truth and reconciliation in which all parties come to grips with the transgressions of the past. There is plenty of blame to go around, on all sides. Until the parties to the Middle East conflict are ready for such a process, perhaps art will have to suffice.

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Rabbi Sid Schwarz is a senior fellow at Clal. He is the author of Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Community (Jewish Lights). He also serves as the director of the Rene Cassin Fellowship Program, a fellowship on Judaism and human rights with hubs in New York, London and Jerusalem for Next Gen Jews.

A Jewish Approach to the “Differently-Abled”

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I did not know a thing about Jewish Disability Awareness Month (JDAM) until a member of my synagogue called and told me that she was going to make it happen at our congregation. As the founding rabbi of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, MD, I still periodically lead services. It was determined by the powers that be that my shabbat was the best suited to mark JDAM.

It is easy to mock the way that every issue under the sun gets a day or a week or a month in somebody’s calendar but there is no question that it succeeds in raising consciousness. In the weeks leading up to the shabbat, many members of the congregation came forward because their families were in some way affected by disability. This was a good thing; why should people who have so much to deal with feel that they need to hide their personal struggle with their disability or that of someone in their family? Some years ago I delivered a Yom Kippur sermon called ”Healthy, Wealthy and Wise” in which I challenged synagogues to pay more attention to the people in our midst who were ”none of the above.”

This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post on Feb. 27, 2014. JTA syndicated an edited version of the column on Feb. 28, 2014.

It is precisely because our institutions tend to privilege the ”abled” that we essentially make the disabled invisible. Even if the disabled do not experience outright exclusion because our synagogues are not handicap accessible or wired for those with hearing impairments, many feel shunned when they do show up. Staying invisible is just easier for those who are disabled but it doesn’t lessen the sense that the Jewish community is a private club catering to those who are indeed, ”healthy, wealthy and wise.”

The most radical teaching in the entire Torah emerges from Genesis 1:27, the idea that every human being is made in the image of God. The problem is that the phrase is more likely to be reduced to a phrase put on a poster than it is to be employed as it was intended by our sages — to serve as a guide for our behavior with other human beings. The default behavior of human beings is to judge others based on how similar or different they are from us. The more different they are, the less likely we are able to really see them as ”images of the Divine.”

We turn many categories of people from ”images of the Divine who we treat with respect” to those who we make into ”the other.” We do this based on age, gender, sexual preference, race, religion, ethnic/national loyalties and political ideology. And while many of us would most likely respond to an encounter with a disabled person with appropriate expressions of compassion, treating such a person as an equal or insuring that the institutions of which we are part make every possible accommodation so as to allow for the full inclusion of the disabled is well beyond our standard modus operandi.

As with so many categories of Jewish wisdom, the ”Jewish approach” to disability is a mixed bag. Several categories of the disabled, like the cheraysh (deaf-mute) and the shoteh (mentally deficient and/or insane) are neither obligated by the body of mitzvot (Jewish commandments) nor qualified to serve as witnesses in legal proceedings, essentially being in the same category as minors. The blind are obligated by the mitzvot but are not allowed to bring testimony in a trial.

In other places in our tradition, a disability or a disease is seen as a punishment from God for bad behavior. Leprosy is the punishment for talebearing. In the Talmud (Taanit 21a) a story is told of one, Nahum Ish Gam Zu, who had no hands, no feet and was blind in both eyes. These disabilities were not birth defects but brought about as a result of Nahum not being quick enough to feed a beggar before he died.

A third way that the Jewish tradition discusses disability is essentially used as a theological trump card. It is a way of saying that God’s agency in the world is far more significant that human agency. Thus despite the fact the Moses is said to be ”slow of speech”, possibly a person with a speech impediment, he nonetheless offers the most important words in the Biblical story. The rabbinic commentators use this to make the point that Moses is simply an agent for God, serving as God’s spokesperson in the earthly realm.

None of the above three Judaic treatments of disability are particularly sensitive by 21st century standards. I also fear what a disabled person, one who takes Judaism very seriously, concludes from such treatment in our sacred texts. From a theological perspective I am far more comfortable with the theology implicit in Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People, than I am with theological assumptions of the Biblical and Rabbinic texts. For Kushner, God does not cause disability, orchestrate natural disasters nor punish human transgression with disease. Rather God is the source of comfort to which we turn when trying to cope with such setbacks. God is a source of healing, not of affliction.

Many parts of classical Judaism are products of the thinking of earlier generations that may not fully reflect the most enlightened understanding of our time. Yet there is one insight on the issue of disability where Judaism was not only centuries ahead of its time, but where the insight is still well beyond the way most of us behave in the realm of disabilities.

The Jewish tradition prescribes a blessing upon meeting different kinds of people: a king; a wise person; a Torah scholar. The prayer prescribed upon meeting a person who is disabled or who suffers from a deformity is: ”Praised are You, Creator of the Universe, who makes people different, one from the other.” Amazing!

The insight inherent in this bracha is that no two people are alike, that each of us is ”differently-abled.” One person can play piano; another might be skilled at computers; another can fix a toilet. A young man who was a member of my first congregation had Down Syndrome. Every week when he greeted me at synagogue he offered me the most wonderful smile and the biggest hug that any person has ever given me. I came to look forward to Ben’s expression of unqualified love that was not the least bit calculated or contrived. It was his gift.

I suspect that our discomfort with people with disabilities may have something to do with our fear of being in that situation ourselves one day. One might imagine that it would make us more compassionate. But denial may be an even more powerful emotion that we trigger when confronted with a circumstance that we are not prepared to confront. If we take to heart the Jewish teaching about every person made in the image of God and recall that one person is no better nor worse than the other, simply ”differently-abled” we might be better able to open up our hearts, and our institutions to a wider swath of humanity.

We’d all be better for it.

Postscript: In a notable departure from the minhag (custom) of our congregation, I introduced my dvar torah on the differently-abled with a video which I described as a midrash on Genesis 1:27. I suggested that given the theme of the morning we needed to go beyond the typical left brain, intellectual analysis of an issue based on the teachings of the Torah. Some things are learned through the head; others are learned through the heart. Jewish Disability Awareness Month seemed a ripe time to validate alternate ways of learning and knowing, which is one of the ways that the disabled are distinguished from those of us who are ”temporarily-abled”. I highly recommend that you view the linked video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8umFV69fNg

Limiting Debate on Israel Will Only Hurt Us

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The current controversy brewing in the Hillel universe is only the latest example of a Jewish community polarized over how we can or can’t talk about Israel. The guidelines, developed by national Hillel in 2010, were designed to provide a basis upon which a local Hillel could prevent overtly anti-Israel groups from speaking under the Hillel banner.

Of course it is not surprising that Jewish students at Swarthmore and Harvard rebel at the attempt to limit who can be invited to speak about Israel. However well-intentioned the policy might have been, it runs counter to the ethos of free inquiry that is the essence of university culture. Not only will Hillel not succeed in stemming the growth of a movement afoot for campuses to declare themselves “Open Hillels” in defiance of the Hillel speech guidelines on Israel but the net result of the controversy will be that thousands of students will be convinced that the Jewish community has a “party line” on Israel that cannot be crossed. There is no surer recipe to drive Next Gen Jews away from identification with the Jewish community.

Note: This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on February 2, 2014.

Sadly, this is not a phenomenon that is restricted to the college campus. The controversy at Hillel is simply a symptom of a Jewish community that has allowed a McCarthy-like atmosphere to overtake our communal life under the banner of defending the state of Israel. The examples are legion of thoughtful, committed Jews and lovers of Israel who have been declared “traife” because they spoke, wrote or acted in ways that challenged policies of the state of Israel. Richard Goldstone, an internationally renowned South African Jewish jurist, got the treatment for the U.N. report he authored on the Israeli incursion into Gaza in which he said that both Hamas and the state of Israel may have been guilty of war crimes. Peter Beinart, who asked hard questions in his book, The Crisis of Zionism, has been disinvited from Jewish communal forums due to pressure from influential and wealthy Jewish donors. Jeremy Ben-Ami and J-Street experienced a full-on communal assault on their legitimacy even though their position on a two state solution to the Middle East conflict is endorsed by a large majority of American Jews.

In Washington D.C. a group of communal activists formed a group called Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art (COPMA) which has exerted enormous pressure on the Jewish Federation to cut funding to the DCJCC because its Theatre J has sponsored plays that ask uncomfortable questions about the state of Israel. The effort is similar to actions taken in New York and San Francisco to shut down Jewish Film Festivals because some of the films are critical of Israel. In a display of Jewish communal courage all too rare these days, the executive director and president of the Washington Jewish Federation issued public letters declaring that the community would not cave to the pressure exerted by COPMA even though that action will likely cost the Federation tens of thousands of dollars in contributions.

In a survey of over 500 American rabbis conducted by the Jewish Council of Public Affairs conducted in October 2013, over a third indicated that they were fearful of expressing their real views about Israel in public. While the majority of those rabbis indicated that they feared consequences for expressing views more dovish than the mainstream, a significant number of rabbis engaged in self-censorship because their views were more hawkish than the mainstream.

Just as a healthy democracy relies on a free press to insure rigorous pursuit of truth, so too a healthy faith community needs spiritual leaders who can speak the truth as they see it. The principle is called “freedom of the pulpit”. It is sad to observe the extent to which this principle has been so seriously compromised.

The irony, of course, is that debate about Israel policy is far more open and robust in Israel than it is in North America. Evidence the film The Gatekeepers in which former heads of Israel’s Shin Bet speak in great detail about how Israel’s political leadership bears a lot of responsibility for the failure to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Or for that matter Ari Shavit’s new book, My Promised Land, which validates the claims of Palestinians that in the creation of the Jewish State, tens of thousands of Arabs were forcibly displaced and their property confiscated as a result of explicit policies of Ben-Gurion’s government. The implications of Shavit’s book have far more serious implications for the state of Israel than anything Peter Beinart has ever written.

Of course, that is the hallmark of a democracy. That is why, despite its faults and shortcomings, there is so much reason to celebrate the miracle of Israel and what it represents in the history of the Jewish people.

I wish I could be equally proud of the American Jewish community. We have become a community that is scared of the truth and we have allowed intimidation and censorship to take the place of civility and respect for divergent views. We have no chance at success with outreach to Next Gen Jews if we tolerate an atmosphere that is antithetical to the very values that Jews hold dear.

One of the hallmarks of the American principle of free speech is insuring the right of citizens to speak their mind even if the views expressed are repugnant. Now is the time for Jewish leaders of courage to take a similar, principled stand.
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Rabbi Sid Schwarz is a senior fellow at Clal. He is the author of Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Community (Jewish Lights). He also serves as the director of the Rene Cassin Fellowship Program, a fellowship on Judaism and human rights with hubs in New York, London and Jerusalem for Next Gen Jews. Additional articles and information about bringing Rabbi Sid to your community can be found at www.rabbisid.org

Does Jewish Renewal Have a Future?

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I recently had the opportunity to spend some time at the annual gathering of Ohala, the rabbinical association of the Jewish Renewal movement, and at a shabbaton led by students studying at Aleph, the rabbinical training program of the movement.

Although I knew quite a few people at the conference, I came as an outsider. I was invited to deliver the keynote to the Ohala national convention based on the work that I do with rabbis and congregations around re-imagining these institutions. A fairly comprehensive summary of my keynote appeared in a blogpost by the Velveteen Rabbi. Here I want to share a few impressions that I took away from my visit.

Note: This article appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on February 2, 2014 and was subsequently syndicated by JTA.

Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi continues to be a powerful presence in the Jewish Renewal movement. The conference takes place near his home in Boulder, CO so as to make it easier for him to be present. People approach Reb Zalman with great respect and reverence. When he speaks, he fully commands the attention of the room. He has earned this status. Reb Zalman is one of the most important voices of Judaism in our time. Though he has had conventional jobs as a Hillel rabbi, University professor, author and lecturer, he is anything but conventional. In fact he is the ultimate boundary crosser. After escaping Nazi Europe in 1941, he was a Lubavitcher working on college campuses. But he soon made his reputation as a spiritual teacher who made company with the likes of Shlomo Carlebach, Ram Dass and the Dali Lama. I know of no other teacher who can move so seamlessly between Chasidic texts, Eastern religious traditions, Native American heritage and secular American culture. His groundbreaking work in what he terms, ”davvenology” permeates all the work done in the movement.

For anyone who finds worship in American synagogues boring, a small dose of Jewish Renewal prayer is worth a try. It isn’t for everyone but the use of chanting, meditation, movement, unconventional readings and personal sharing does provide much of what so many Jews are chasing in non-Jewish spiritual settings. Not surprisingly the rabbis who have been ordained by Reb Zalman and now the more formal rabbinical training program they have called Aleph, are classic spiritual seekers themselves. As the program for ordination and other spiritual leadership programs have become more rigorous it is clear that those training with Aleph are selecting this path with great intentionality.

It is ironic that much of what Reb Zalman and Jewish Renewal were developing 30 years ago and more is now making its way into mainstream American synagogues. Congregations of all denominations can now be found experimenting with meditation, yoga, drumming, chanting and movement, if not in their main services than in alternate venues that are sanctioned by the rabbi. This “borrowing” has led to some degree of resentment among the longtime leaders of the movement although I did not hear any such complaint from Reb Zalman himself.

The sentiment expressed is that mainstream Jewish denominations take advantage of the R and D work of Jewish Renewal without any attribution while, at the same time, Jewish Renewal struggles to gain acceptance and financial support. Frankly, Mordecai Kaplan and the Reconstructionist Movement can tell exactly the same story as fifty years ago non-Orthodox movements cherry picked Kaplan’s most attractive ideas and made them their own even as the movement that Kaplan helped to launch struggled for recognition and support.

One hears within the confines of the Jewish Renewal movement some anxiety about their future. While there were some young faces at the national gathering, most of the audience was made up of people in their 50’s, 60, and 70’s. While second career rabbis are becoming more common across the denominational spectrum, the Renewal rabbinate clearly skews older than most. The number of congregations in the Renewal network is growing but very few seem to be able to support full time rabbis no less a full complement of other professionals.  Renewal rabbis are also competing in a shrinking synagogue market place. Yet if there is growth in that sector it is likely going to come from independent, non-denominational groups of Jews who are drawn to the leadership and style of a given rabbi. This is a trend that Renewal rabbis may be able to capitalize on.

In Renewal circles there is a lot of excitement about the explosive growth of Romemu, a new congregation founded by Rabbi David Ingber on the Upper West Side of Manhattan which has grown to 500 households in less than two years. The charismatic Ingber was ordained by Reb Zalman and he is candid about the debt he owes to Jewish Renewal in shaping his approach to Jewish life. Yet he himself is unsure whether the Jewish Renewal label will be an asset or a liability in growing his congregation.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Jewish Renewal in the coming years is the extent to which they try to build the infrastructure of a denomination. For decades they reveled in their outsider status, suggesting that their post-denominational approach to Jewish life was more consistent with the ethos of a post-modern Jewish community. Yet today there are several post-denominational seminaries including Hebrew College in Boston and the Academy of Jewish Religion in New York and Los Angeles(independent of each other though bearing the same name). In addition, both United Synagogue (Conservative) and the URJ (Reform) broke all the old rules of denominational Judaism at their recent, respective national conventions as they invited in a broad array of rabbis and teachers who were not card carrying members of their movements. When even the biggest denominations of American Judaism go post-denominational, it makes it harder for Jewish Renewal to make a case to foundations and potential funders.

All this is not to say that Jewish Renewal has no future. At a recent retreat that I led for rabbinical students from eleven seminaries across the denominational spectrum (I do this regularly under the auspices of the Rabbis Without Borders program of Clal), a student from the Orthodox seminary, Chovevei Torah, commented that the teffilah he experienced at the retreat opened him up to levels of kavannah (deep, intentional spirituality) that he rarely experiences in Orthodox settings. Clearly this was the influence of the Aleph students who pushed the boundaries of what can happen in prayer space. I will also say that the four days I spent in the Jewish Renewal community were filled with a level of heartfulness, compassion and spiritual depth that is hard to come by in most Jewish settings today.

I’ve spent the past two years traveling the country first writing and then discussing Jewish Megatrends and the future direction of the American Jewish community. From what I can see, the Jewish community can use a healthy dose of what Jewish Renewal has to offer. I never bet against heart.

———

Rabbi Sid Schwarz is the director Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI), a program of Clal that helps to train rabbis to be visionary spiritual leaders. He is also the author of Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Community (Jewish Lights). Additional articles and information about bringing Rabbi Sid to your community can be found at www.rabbisid.org 

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.

* * *
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

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