Episode 32: Sharing Jewish Joy (with Tony J. Westbrook, Jr.)

Eliana Light49min

Eliana Light

00:00

Today's episode is sponsored by my friends at Temple Beth Abraham in Nashua, New Hampshire and online at tbanashua.org. They welcome everyone to participate in their services and programs throughout the year in their neighborhood or online. I did high holiday services with them for a few years. It is such a warm and welcoming community with a really brilliant leader Rabbi John Spria-Savett, whose Tov The Good Place podcast has also been a sponsor of our show. Thank you so much our friends at Temple Beth Abraham!

Eliana Light

00:49

Shalom, everyone! Welcome back to the light lab podcast. My name is Eliana so great to have you here. If you're listening when this comes out, it is Chol Hamoed Sukkot. The day is in between on Sukkot, which means we use the greeting moadim l'simcha. And you might want to respond: chagim uzmanim l'sason. We'll put a link in the show notes for a song that can help you learn this greeting if you'd like to use it today. I hope if you celebrate or even if you don't, that you've been having a wonderful chag-tober as I saw someone post about it online and love that very much. I've been having a really great chag-tober. And right before the holidays, I recorded a bunch of really great interviews that I'm so excited to share with you and today, my friends, we are talking to the one, the only, Tony J. Westbrook, Jr. Tony is an award winning Jewish African American activist, Jewish educator and community leader. He is the director of Jewish service learning at repair the world. Before that, he was the assistant director of Hillel at Washington University in St. Louis, and the director of Jewish life for Capital Camps and retreat center in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. He also serves as a freelance Jewish Life Consultant and Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion educator and has facilitated racial justice and equity training sessions for BBYO, Beit, Hillel, Hillel International and the Wexner Foundation. And I heard about and found Tony's amazing education work through his social media presence. He has 1000s of followers on Instagram and on Tik Tok bringing joy as Judaism to all of them. He earned his BA in communication studies from Fontbonne University in St. Louis, Missouri, and is a graduate of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. And he's also the recipient of the Covenant Foundation's 2021 Pomegranate Prize for emerging leaders in the field of Jewish education. This is someone who has contributed so much to the Jewish education field. And I'm so so grateful that we've had to talk to him. In fact, just last week, Tony was named one of Tel Aviv Institute's Top 100 Most Influential Jewish people. That's like in the world. He is an incredibly sweet soul. And I'm so so glad to bring you this week's interview with Tony J. Westbrook, Jr.

Eliana Light

03:40

Tony, so great to have you here. Welcome to the light lab!

Tony Westbrook, Jr.

03:44

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

Eliana Light

03:46

So, so excited. I want to start by going way, way back and ask what prayer was like for you when you were a kid growing up? What was your relationship to prayer?

Tony Westbrook, Jr.

03:59

So for me, growing up prayer was the way in which to communicate with God communicate with the divine. I didn't grow up Jewish. I grew up in the Pentecostal movement of the black church. And so prayer there looks very different for folks coming from that community. It's ecstatic. It's through dances, through praise, it's through worship, and much later in my life, and I officially became Jewish, prayer changed but whenever I think back as a kid, it's this very like, embodied thing, right? It's through music. It's through, you know, waving your hands in the air. It's it's really this embodied thing, which I think I still hold a lot of that today, which is always interesting sort of when and how it shows up.

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