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.
Well, shalom, Rabbi Sid! Thank you so much for joining us on the light lab podcast today.
My pleasure. I'm excited to be here.
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?
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.
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.
Right. So there are many stages to that. Let me let me take you through a couple of early stages. I worked my way through college, running Jewish youth groups, USY primarily, and running Jewish summer camps, I was the head counselor at several different Jewish summer camps. And those experiences, whether they were conventions for USY for Shabbat at camp, were totally joyous expressions of Shabbat, with lots of music, with guitar, being by a lakeside, natural setting, whatever else. And it's well known how many people have that experience, and then go back to their home synagogues and say, Boy, this is not as much fun as camp, or this is not as much fun as USY or NIFTY or BBYO convention. And that's true. A lot of places that are known for being prayer places in Jewish community, which is synagogues, you know, are solemn, and boring. And Jews vote with their feet saying, like, I don't need solemn and boring, especially if they knew something else, and they might be able to find it elsewhere. So that's, that's a big problem. But I certainly knew how joyous T'fillah could be. Because I spent years and years in those settings where we made it fun and the energy was through the roof.
I think that joy is definitely a crucial piece of it. And I'm also wondering about how you said the liturgy was in you, I was thinking of the word osmosis that you kind of write osmost. That's how you say it. The liturgy. Besides being able to traditionally daven in a prayer space, did you or do you today find that having the liturgy kind of running in the background, impacts your life in any way, not just your life in the synagogue? But do you think that it has an impact on your life outside of the synagogue? And what might that look like?
Yeah, for sure. And I'll tell you a little story about that. I'm going to first use as kind of as my metaphor, a metaphor that I learned from Reb Zalman. Reb Zalman Schachter Shalomi is kind of was the father of the Jewish renewal movement. And I had the opportunity the the privilege of studying with him when I was at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, he was a professor at Temple University. He was an adjunct professor at the RRC. So I had a chance to learn with him there. I have to say that I was not either smart enough, deep enough or mature enough to appreciate all he had to teach, whereas rabbinical school, and I was at that point already in my 20s. Right. took me some time to acquire a appreciation for what reexamined did with what he called davenology. And I may come back to that later on. But one of the things that Reb Zalman taught which I've repeated many, many times, the shaman wrote in his name was they talked about prayer as freeze dried experience. And the metaphor here is that if you go I don't know what are you a camper Eliana to go camping at all?
Yeah, I enjoy camping.
Okay, so I did a lot of camping when I was younger. And when you go camping for many nights, you buy freeze dried food. Now the fact they were, because they showed up and it looked like they would just choose right. And you had to be cautious about what you said and did because you could either get yourself in trouble, but more likely get in trouble the Jews he speak to. Well, there's a line in the Amidah that says, velamalshalim al tihi tikvah, which means that to the slanderous let them have no success. Now, I must have said that that prayer 1000 times, if not more, before my first trip to the Sovuiet Union, this suddenly when I heard that when I was in that space, and I was aware that somewhere around the Beit Knesset, there could be people who were KGB agents, who were informing on Jews telling me that prayer came to life in a powerful way. And I never have been able to say that prayer again, without reliving that powerful experience of visitng the Soviet Union, as one example of many. So using Reb Zalman's metaphors, to what extent can we use T'fillah and recognize that a powerful experience that we might have, might have been had by other people centuries ago, and they put words to it. And then you could restate those words, which actually puts a dagesh, puts an accent mark and underscore a bold more on your experience, because you're not the first person to have that experience, nor will he be the last. I think, when prayer becomes that alive, that it actually contains the sea of powerful life experiences, both joys and sorrows and everything in between. And you see how powerful prayer and liturgy can be.
I love the metaphor of freeze dried experience. He really did have an amazing way with words Reb Zalman, I've never heard that one before. And your story about visiting the Soviet Union I think is particularly prescient in these days. And the idea that the liturgy can inform our prayer and enhance our lives and connect us to the people who actually wrote them. I'm wondering what brought you to RRC for rabbinical training? What inspired you to go the rabbi route? Was it a voice you couldn't ignore? Was it a call from beyond what was it and what else did you learn about t'fillah in your experience there?
I will say that I went to RRC as a reluctant rabbi, meaning it was not my first career choice. Until the senior year of college, I was pre law, plan to go to law school and was interested in a life in politics actually old triggered by my secretary activism. I mean, starting with my first trip, when I was a teenager, I went on the second year, that the conservative movement USY, was running what they call the Eastern European pilgrimage that was 1970. And I spent the next 20 or so years as an activist, as I told you, culminating I'll just mention this because it was an important part of my life. My first job in Washington when I moved here in 1984, was the director of the JCRC Jewish Community Relations Council. And one of the roles that I played there was in December of 1987. When Mikhail Gorbachev was coming to have a summit meeting in Washington with then President Ronald Reagan, the Jewish community planned a rally, a summit for Soviet Jewry, which took place on December 6 1987. And at the Summit for Soviet Jewry, and I was one of the organizers of that route. And it's a historic turning point, because on a day where the windchill factor was 10 degrees below zero, and we expected maybe we're hoping to get 30 to 40,000 people, a quarter million people showed up to that rally. And it was such an event that the next day when Ronald Reagan sat down with Michel Gorbechav, he said, there will be no peace, there'll be no trade, there'll be no two times until you let your Jews go. And that was the beginning of a major exodus of over a million Jews from the Soviet Union. Now I tell that story, because my experience as an activist culminating in that rally, made me want to enter into law and politics, and to be an activist for three human rights. That was kind of my career plan. However, I had worked my way through college, running youth groups, and summer camps. And I felt I was pretty good at it. And I just decided, hey, you know, good lord, or dime a dozen, and the chances of success and politics, you know, are not very great. Why don't I try the Rabbinate, it seems to be a calling card that would allow me to do many different things. And I've never looked back, it was a good choice for me, and I really appreciate that opportunity. But with that said, I did not expect that I would ever find myself as a congregation rabbi. To me of the half dozen careers that you could pursue as a rabbi, maybe more. It seems to me that the bottom of that list for me personally, was to serve as a congregation rabbi had worked. By that time in a good number of synagogues seen what it was like to be a congregation rabbi and said, That doesn't seem like any fun at all. If anything, I thought I'd become a summer camp director. That seemed like a lot of fun. But by the time I finish with rabbinical school, I was somewhat overqualified to run summer camps, in my view anyway. And I literally stumbled into my first job, because the best job as a student was a student pulpit. So my first congregation when I started, my second year rabbinical school, was a small congregation in Media, Pennsylvania, Congregation Beth Israel. So that's the answer to the question about why went through medical school. Your second question was?
I think my second question was why RRC?
Thank you. The reason RRC, even though I was raised in a much more traditional household, I had an uncle who was a conservative Rabbi, who, when I was probably 14, or 15, gave me a copy of Mordechai Kaplan's Classical Judaism as a Civilization. Now, a lot of a lot of young men who have uncles when they get a book that is considered a little bit illicit, you know, it's usually, you know, maybe a Playboy magazine or something. But he gave me this book, he didn't think my parents would approve, he was probably right about that. But I read the book, which is not an easy read. And Kaplan articulated, all of my doubts about about G?d and religion, and how Jews would fit into my love for America and for democracy just seem to articulate all those things. And from that point on, I felt that if I was going to find a place in the Jewish world, it would be in the orbit of reconstructions. So they want to decide to become a rabbi, that was my main choice, even though I was much more much closer to a lot of the faculty members and staff, people who were associated with JTS growing up in New York and actually went to JTS Prozdor program, which is their high school program and the like. But by the time I decided to go to rabbinical school, RRC was the place I want to go.
That makes sense. And it's really beautiful that you were able to find, find a home in those ideas. And I'm wondering now, how and if Kaplan's ideas about Judaism, and G?d changed or evolved in whatever way your understanding of T'fillah the point of T'fillah and what T'fillah can achieve.
Yeah, so that's a great question. Look, in many ways when I entered RRC, I was a classical reconstructionist, by which I mean, you know, Kaplan wrote, in the early 20th century, for the children of immigrants whose parents came out of Europe, and mostly were exposed to only traditional Judaism. That's all he knew. And the children that they had here in America were the first generation to go to college, they would be exposed to a whole array of scientific, rational discourse, which actually pulled the wool out, pulled the rug out from under a belief in a supernatural G?d. And many of the assumptions that are the foundation for rabbinic Jews. Kaplan wrote for that audience saying, like, you can question the idea of the supernatural guidance still being affirming Jew. And that's what was so important for me to read, because by the time I was a teenager, I had those same doubts I didn't have to have made before I went to Jews. So a lot of the literal meaning of biblical stories, and even the liturgy, were challenging my sense of what was true. So that's what I entered in. Now, it took me some time to evolve, and to start seeing more nuanced levels of how to reengage prayer, if you didn't believe in a supernatural G?d, to whom you were praying. Okay. And that was, of course, the challenge of Kaplan's own liturgical revolution because Kaplan rewrote, all the siddurim, and challenge some of the core assumptions of Rabbinic Judaism, and yet and people have a hard time understanding this, although he changed some of the words, for example, maybe have chosen people Kaplan challenged, he took that out of the liturgy, you don't have a asher bacharbanu, he took out the idea of the Messianic age. So you have geulah instead of goel, redemption as opposed to a redeemer, so to speak. And yet he kept the formula baruch atah adonai, which conjures up in many ways, a supernatural G?d. What that presses you to do is to realize that prayer is meant to be poetry and not prose. And the problem that most choose half of literature, and this is not just Reconstructionist Jews, this includes Conservative Jews and Orthodox Jews as well, I've met hundreds of them, who have these deep doubts about what they're reading, literally. And if you read the prayer book, as if it is, you know, a book of history or some truth claims, you realize that unless you allow the words to hit you poetically, and metaphorically, you really lose some of the richness of the t'fillah. So it seemed to me going forward, that what I needed to do was to help Jews read between the lines of liturgy to get his true power. And we'll tell you the story now, which was actually one of my biggest aha moments, which has was so pregnant. I've actually played off that for the next 20 years. So in my first congregation, it was a converted Quaker meetinghouse, the grounds over the offices and a social hall. And the second story was a sanctuary. And because it was the second story, you couldn't expand it, there - we had 110 seats exactly. Which is fine for us during the year, but a high holidays, it was not adequate. And during my tenure, I was there eight years, four years as a student, and four years after I graduated, during my tenure, our membership grew modestly. So that we had to find a way to have either move out of the building for the High Holidays, or to find a second space. So I made the decision that we would create an alternative service that would happen in the social hall downstairs, concurrent with the service upstairs, which we call the traditional service. Now I'm putting in quotes and essentially air quotes, because it was still reconstructionist synagogue. But that was a service that was going on year after year. And when I did over the course of the first the summer before we did at first alternative experience was I worked with a small team of lay leaders, we created a two hour service for the first day Rosh Hashanah and the morning of Yom Kippur,which included about four prayers. Each prayer took about a half hour to do, and each prayer was essentially processed in multiple ways before we finally recited and the experience was super powerful. Because we've we spent the entire summer saying, you know, what are four quarters where we want to spend time on and how do we explore it on every possible level, not just intellectually, but also emotionally and spiritually. Now, to the extent that there are many people, you know, the especially being bean counters, you know, you know, like they talked about like accountants, accountants or bean counters, you know, they they count the beans. So I called a lot of Jews are prayer counters, how many times names and how many prayers will be said, in the of course of the service. Now, if you wanted to play that game, the people in the upstairs traditional service out prayed us 21:1 in terms of the number of times they said, it's the law, and the word a meaningless. But I know for a fact that the people who were downstairs had a deep experience of kavannah of intentionality, and started to open up for me new possibilities about how we could explore prayer. And I realized that the kind of service I grew up in, in a traditional conservative synagogue might not be the best way to allow Jews to fully appreciate the power of prayer.
The alternative service, I'm assuming it happened year after year, and was quite popular. I'm assuming.
Maybe you're assuming correctly, and you know, it, we had a lot of great experiences, we use different tefillot each year, different people stepped up. But it was very interactive. It was bottom up, not top down, meaning people were offering their own creativity and bring in poems and short stories and personal experiences to kind of provide the kavanah to the prayer. And I walked away, saying that the goal of T'fillah in Jewish settings again, regardless of denomination, is to move to a more even balance between Keva the fixed liturgy and kavanah, the intentionality of the heart and the spirit that you bring to it. And it's rare for me to find a service in a conventional synagogue that approaches that 50/50 balance. But I will tell you, I, you know, we talk more about it is a now for the past decade plus, when I just gone residence weekends, I offer an experience called davening out of the box, which is all a a take off on that first experience that I developed over 20 years ago, my first synagogue where we do fewer prayers, but do a deep dive into the ones that we do do for people to really understand what the power of prayer might be.
It sounds like such a unique and exciting opportunity. I'm wondering if you could give us some examples of what davening out of the box looks like?
Sure. So the first thing to say is that I need to set it up well with the host rabbi, which is itself a no small task, because what I like to do is I like to have a flow. And one of the things that actually interrupts the flow of the law is the Torah service - is very rich and very intellectual. But it breaks up a flow. So usually what will happen is, I'll have the rabbi work in the congregation to do some kind of T'fillah that's traditional and short reading before I start, and then I do a 90 to 100 minute experience without the Torah service, trying to create a kind of a sequence and a trajectory of prayer that's deeply involving people's imaginations. I also in the advertising the program in advance, I say this specifically for people who are skeptical about prayer, don't like services, would probably can think of 100 things they would prefer to do than sit in a worship service. And I don't call it a service. I call it a prayer experience. And it's actually a two level experience, where first we do the experience. And then afterwards, we do a talkback, which I combined was in text study, to get people to rethink what prayer needs to be. So let me now take a step back and give you a couple examples. So for example, when we do the Amidah, as opposed to simply the the standard prayer, the Silent Amidah. The very first paragraph of the Amidah is called the Avot, essentially our ancestor, and we don't just read it, we I actually have people paired with someone else in the sanctuary, which we reset, by the way so that it's always either in a circle, or at least a semi circle. If the sanctuary only has fixed pews, we always do it in social hall because fixed pews don't provide for quick interaction. I want people to be able to move their chairs and reconfigure. And I asked them to find someone where they share with one another, someone who has gifted to them some kind of spiritual legacy that has been meaningful to them in their lives. So they're now accessing, not the Avot of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel Leah. But with the concept of Avot. The whole notion avot is the very notion of the whoever wrote the narrative ancestors. The rabbi's teach that we invoke the ancestors because we're actually are living off of their holiness capital, let's call them okay. That their righteousness, their holiness is something that has is created the battery pack that generates and propels Judaism forward and every individual Jew who came thereafter, even though we're hundreds of generations later, okay, but why stop at the patriarchs and matriarchs? So I have people care often say, identify someone in your life, to whom you owe a debt of gratitude for some spiritual legacy, and have that exchange back and forth. And that becomes the precursor or the kavanah, the intentionality with which we then enter into the paragraph about the ancestors, the patriarchs and the matriarchs. It just gives it a whole nother cast. And, of course, later on to share, it's that's, you know, one example. A second example I'll give you is, I do in different ways, when I'm in a congregation that's a bit more lenient about writing is actually enhanced. So I'll give you in that version. Early in Shacharit, there's a section of liturgy where the metaphor of light - or - is used again, and again, and again, it gets introduced to the bracah right after barchu with praising G?d, Yotzeir Or U'voreih Choshech, G?d who creates light and creates the world, right? And in the next pages of the morning service, you have the constant metaphor of light. So I invite people to, to kind of think about what is the light that you bring into the world, what's light you bring it to the world, encouraged that allowed me to do some writing, we hand out small little index cards, and golf pencils. And if people actually write down some gifts that they have to bring, they can bring to the world. And we set up right in front of the Aron Kodesh, a little table with a usually some kind of a vessel, an urn. You know, that's attractive, people come up to bima quietly, there's no speakings happening. And they put their card in the urn in front of the Aron Kodesh. And we invite them to offer a prayer in front of the Aron Kodesh. And then when they come back, we do two things, we actually sing haer ineinu which is one of those light metaphor prayers, you know, made the light of G?d inspire us, and can we live off that light. And then because I think that people need to hear the same themes in different cultural contexts in several places, during this prayer experience, we do a secular song with the same theme. So we've seen this song, This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, which you might know is a negro spiritual, right? Really powerful people, people are like, naming something that makes them feel that they sort of have something to give to the world. So this is the way we kind of processing the prayer service. And I will say, having visited dozens and dozens synagogues over the past 30 years or so, it is not usually you people tearing up and welling up in the middle of a service and consistently happens when we do this experience. Now that's part A, okay. Now, part B is, as you might expect, people who are regulars will say, that was interesting, but that wasn't a worship service. That was something other. So we have some talk back around that and actually share some rabbinic texts that give pause to consider. How is it that a worship service has evolved the way it it has, maybe we're on the wrong track? Maybe we weren't. Maybe we got diverted, you know, some time ago, and we've got to reconsider what prayer is all about. And we look at a whole series of prayers that essentially with a rabbis themselves talked about the danger of prayer becoming too fixed, and the loss of kavanah. I'll give you one example that is a teaching from Ta'anit, which goes like this. The prayer of a human being is not heard, presumably by G?d, unless the person puts his or her soul, heart essence being into their hand. Now, we take some time to dig it to decode it was at me, okay. Essentially, when we look at that kind of teaching, the entire experience that they had in the morning, was doing that take something that's deep on the inside, taking it out and putting it the hand if the neshama is so is that innermost part of us, the hand the kapo is the most extra part of ourselves because we can even extend it out beyond our body, right? So how do we take that which is deep within us, identify, put it in our hand and put it out into the world, right? Well, the rabbis has had this insight centuries ago. So maybe this is a prayer is precisely to do that. So now, it's clear to me and I think it becomes clear to anyone who comes to this kind of experience, that if your intent is to try and get 100 prayers in, in the space of two to three hours, okay? There's no time to kind of explore your inner self, and to bring it out and to share and to kind of articulate in some way, you need some time for that, which means the put things down. So that whole experience between like expressing it, and then seeing that the rub is themselves, we're struggling with the nature prayer becoming too fixed, is we're gonna say like, maybe we need to rethink the whole exercise or what we call worship in contemporary American society.
I love this, for so many reasons, it's very much with the light lab ethos of slowing down of paying more attention. It's giving people a new sense of what prayer could be. And that's one of the fun parts of being an anything in residence is that you come in and you share, you get to do something different than a lot of people might be used to. I also love the idea of prayer being taking your innermost self and holding it out, and how difficult that is, how vulnerable that really is, and what it actually takes to pray in any sort of place. You know, in the times in our lives, when we pray spontaneously, there are natural responses to living and feeling. And then in a service structure, what you're allowing the liturgy to do is speak to us and inform our own reactions to life, but giving ourselves time to feel and process and be present. I'm wondering how this quote unquote alternative experience has informed your prayer leadership in the main sanctuary, one might say, in your time as a congregational rabbi.
So I've sort of two different congregations each for eight years. The first one I mentioned was when I started as a student, the second one was a synagogue that I have to found Adat Shalom, reconstruction congregation in Bethesda, Maryland, where I serve eight years, and I continue to serve as county rabbi, where I still have a chance for these services and do some teaching. Even though I've been long succeeded by by Rabbi Fred Dobb, was the rabbi at Adat Shalom now. The fact of the matter is, the various experiments that I use in my job getting out of the box program are all things that I've tried at Adat Shalom And when I need to explain oftentimes the people that I usually do one piece like that in the middle of the service, as opposed to the entire experience that way, because it works for scholar in residents weekend, it doesn't work on a weekly routine, the people who come actually do like the structure of the service. But I always feel that if you don't do something that's a little bit surprising in a service, people simply are lulled into a catatonic state. And prayers should be anything but that - prayer should keep you alive. So I always want to, you know, surprise people with something, you know, a different melody is an easy way to do that. But taking a prayer or doing a deep dive into it, is one way to kind of explore that.
Something I also appreciate about this is, it sounds like the conversations I have with educators of children around T'fillah. We're always thinking about how to help the child make meaning out of the liturgy. And we forget that the adults need to do the same thing. Using some of the same modalities, prayer itself, in my mind being a playful, imaginative place, and you're giving the adults permission to do that deep dive. It's really powerful. So we're coming towards the end of our time together. And I want to make sure I bring up how we met each other, which is through Knissa. Through this gathering, and your your gathering the in gathering of all those creating Jewish community, all around the country, all around North America. And you've written about and have been kind of at the forefront of noticing the changes that have taken place in contemporary Jewish life. And I'm wondering what you've noticed about the changes in Jewish life specifically in regards to T'fillah. If you if you had to tell the future? What do you think the future holds for T'fillah in our institutions and in our lives?
Part of what we've done at Knissa, which we subtitle communities of meaning network, is to better raise up the multitude of experiments that are being engaged in, not exclusively, not exclusively by young people but heavily by young people who love Judaism, but are not prepared to simply adopt the forms and the vehicles that were created by a previous generation. And I think the level of creativity that's been expressed over the past two decades by young people reinventing Jewish life and community has got to be raised up. And I'm trying to create more shelf space for those kinds of experiments. Because I think, the way I like to say it is this. If I were to write a history of the American Jewish community, the 20th century, I would argue that the synagogue was a primary retail outlet where American Jews experienced Judaism. If I wanted to try play a little fortune telling here, if the year were, if we were the 22nd century, okay, and we have to write a history of the 21st century American Jewish community, I will say that the synagogue no longer served as the sole retail outlet, where people experienced Judaism that the 21st century gave birth to multiple expressions of Judaism and Jewish creativity, which actually enrich Jewish life enormously. And I think we're at the very beginning of that right now. I'm working really hard. The reason why I have built the network and we're still involved with that, is that I think Jewish life needs a heavy dose of rebooting, okay, I've saying like, institutions that took us to the 21st century to the, to the eve of the 21st century will not carry us for another century. People are abandoning synagogues, I think synagogues themselves, will get a new lease on life only if they stopped being seen themselves exclusively, as Batei T'fillah, which is the Hebrew term for the synagogue is a house of prayer, which not to say that prayer is not important. But I think that we know for a fact that Jews are not going to attend a place that they see as a prayer factory, you know, a place that actually generates prayer slash worship experiences. And if we want to have synagogues be vibrant and relevant again, more than they are today. Even those worship experiences need to be far more eclectic than they currently are. I'll give you an example. I literally got back from Israel yesterday. This past Shabbat, I was in Yerushalayim, in Jerusalem. And on Friday night, I went to a minion that was led by a friend of my daughter, my daughter lives in Israel. And this young man does a very creative T'fillah and it does it throughout Israel, but also in the US. So we went to a Kabbalat Shabbat in the nature museum garden, which is in the Talpiyot neighborhood of Jerusalem. Kabbalat Shabbat took about two hours. We didn't even say for ma'ariv because we were gonna expected at a dinner. So we started five and we left a little bit before seven to go to the dinner invitation we had we hadn't gotten to Monrovia now why? Okay, the issue was not the length. The point was that each song from Kabbalat Shabbat, was sung for between 15 to 25 minutes, repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, with people getting up spontaneously and dancing and moving into the, to the spirit of the T'fillah. Okay, it was amazing. Just an amazing experience. Now on the next I love it, I just totally loved primarily because you had young people who probably would not attend a more conventional prayer experience. And they were totally was the T'fillah. Now the next morning, just so you know, I'm a little bit schizophrenic. I went to the Great Synagogue on King George Street, which is the seat of the Chief Rabbinate, which is also known as having probably the finest Cantor's and choir in the world. Okay, you could not have two more different experiences. And I love that too. Now, I tell you that story, because there's a range there. And I think that we need to way more experimentation in our prayer spaces for people to kind of come alive, if the experience of prayer is not going to allow us to kind of make us feel more fully human, feel more connected to who we are, who we want to be what the we want the world to be. What's the purpose of it? Okay. So I think that a lot of the organizations and new manifestations of Jewish life that we have, at least our network is actually creating that kind of eclecticism, which I think is going to be the key for the future for us to kind of see that there are many, many ways for us to experience the richness of Jewish life and what we've inherited.
Amen. That's a vision I can get behind more eclecticism. More hyperlocal experiences that are shared more strong values and ways to gather around those shared values. And helping people be able to open up and and sing and feel more human. I'm wondering if we could end with a bracha, with a blessing for you, if you could share just whatever's on your heart right now, or based on our conversation today, a blessing with me and our listeners.
I think a blessing I would would offer is the teaching of Rab Ami, from Talmud Ta'anit, which I mentioned before, and I'll say it a bit slower, so people understand okay. And I'll just read the text and translate it in a loose way. Okay, so my prayer for your listeners is to recall the teaching of Rav Ami, Once prayer is not effective is not heard is not internalized. Unless, unless you take the time to really think about what's important in your life, and the world, with the people who care about the people you love. The people who don't know and you don't understand. And you kind of get in touch with those things, and find a way to articulate it and bring it out to the world, that kapot in your hands, extending that new insight, learning and enlightenment in a way that can nourish you as a human being and bring healing and tikun to the world.
Amen, amen thank you so much for joining me today.
My pleasure. Thank you all the honor for your work.
Amazed amazing. Oh, what a beautiful conversation! Thank you so so much. I loved all of your stories. I certainly learned a lot and I'm excited to share.
Thanks Eliana. Appreicate it.
And thank you so much for listening. Christi dodge edits our podcast. Thank you Christi. Yaffa Englander does our show notes - Thank you Yaffa. You can find us and join in the conversation on Instagram or Facebook at the light dot lab and we hope to see you very very soon. Take care y'all! Bye!
