LLP22 - Sid Schwarz Interview_FINAL

Eliana Light48min

Eliana Light

00:10

Shalom everyone and welcome back to the Light Lab Podcast. My name is Eliana, so good to be with you. It's been really great to hear people's feedback. We - Josh Ellen and I - are back on the road at least in some capacity. And it's been so cool to go to different cities and hear how people are listening to and learning from our scrappy little show. It really means the world to us. Today, I'm really excited to share this interview with Rabbi Sid Schwarz. But before I tell you about Rabbi Sid, just a reminder that you can check out our show notes at Ellianalight.com/podcast. Or it's linked wherever you're listening to this right now. Everything we talk about is linked in the notes. And we think it's a really great tool for learning. You can also support the show by going to ko-fi.com/thelightlab that's ko-fi.com/thelightlab and supporting us in any way you can. Especially sharing and letting other people know about the podcast. Okay. Today, you get to hear my amazing conversation with Rabbi Sid Schwarz. I met Rabbi Sid in person the way I'd heard of his work for many years, at the Kenissa Gathering. Kenissa is the communities of meaning network. And Rabbi Sid has been identifying, convening and building the capacity of emerging spiritual communities across the country for years and it was really incredible to meet other folks engaged in this deep work, I found it really important, you can check that out. Again, the link will be in our show notes Kenissa. But that's not the only amazing thing represent has done. He founded and led PANIM, the Institute for Jewish leadership and values for 21 years. He is the founding rabbi of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist congregation in Bethesda, Maryland, where he continues to lead and teach. He holds a PhD in Jewish history. He's the author of incredible books such as finding A Spiritual Home: how a new generation of Jews can transform the American synagogue and Judaism and Justice, the Jewish passion to repair the world and most recently, Jewish Megatrends charting the course of the American Jewish future. He has received the covenant award for his pioneering work in the field of Jewish education, and has been named by Newsweek as one of the 50 most influential rabbis in North America. He is a social entrepreneur, author, and teacher. And he cares a whole lot about not just the future, but the present of Judaism, and what we can do to make it engaging, meaningful and relevant, which we talk a lot about in our interview. So here, I present to you my interview with Rabbi Sid Schwarz.

Eliana Light

03:27

Well, shalom, Rabbi Sid! Thank you so much for joining us on the light lab podcast today.

Sid Schwarz

03:32

My pleasure. I'm excited to be here.

Eliana Light

03:35

I knew that I wanted to talk to you. You are someone who thinks very deeply about innovation and the changes that have taken place in Jewish life over the past many decades. But I want to start with your past. What was your relationship to T'fillah when you were a child when you were growing up?

Sid Schwarz

03:55

I went, I grew up on Long Island, my parents are both survivors of the Shoah. And we were a traditional Conservative family. Meaning we didn't drive in Shabbat, we walked to shore. And I was a shul kid. So from the time I could, even before I could walk, I would go every Shabbat with my dad, I actually have a sweet memory that my dad would carry me most of the distance on your shoulders, which was a huge kick for me, but growing up in the synagogue, and I was also sent to an orthodox yeshiva, as a kid today, probably because of Orthodox day school, but where we were and community read called a yeshiva. So the fact of the matter is, I knew the service backwards and forwards pretty well. By the time I was by mitzvah for sure. And my first paid job in the Jewish community was when our Rabbi asked me whether I would lead the junior congregation. I was just sitting at my Bar mitzvah, and I was getting the the princely sum of $25 for Shabbat, which was like amazing because I was gonna be there anyway. And although many, many could critique me the education and pedagogy of Orthodox day schools, I will say that I am tremendously in the debt of that training both from yeshiva and from going to shul weekly, so that when I became a rabbi, knowing that service was not something I had to work at, it was simply kind of came my blood. It wasn't learned, it was kind of like, he was like, kind of mother's milk. So I knew the service credit quite well. But that early experience was, you know, it was straight, you know, straight liturgy he wasn't. And I've oftentimes reflected on the fact that later on, as I got older, I became keenly aware of the imbalance in most services of any kind of variety between keva and kavanah, meaning that I was raised where the kava was all that mattered. In other words, the what prayer goes first, second, third, fourth, and heaven forbid, you skipped something. And frankly, whatever domination you go to, there's a lot of that routinization of prayer, which we'll talk more about, but doesn't lead to the deepest kind of experiences that that I think prayer can and should offer.

Eliana Light

06:27

What are some of those deep experiences that you had? I'm thinking in your young adulthood or a little later, that kind of took you from Keva that fixed liturgy into a different understanding about what was possible in prayer or spirituality.

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