What is on the minds of Jewish thought leaders?

On February 25th, Rabbi Lizzi spoke on a panel entitled "What is on the minds of Jewish thought leaders?". Co-hosted by Congregation Rodfei Zedek and Mercaz, The Center for Purposeful Living, this panel discussion was a provoking conversation about the evolving landscape of Jewish life, and what the future of the Jewish community might look like. R'Lizzi shared the stage with Jacob Cytryn, the Executive Director of Camp Ramah Wisconsin, and Rabbi Benay Lappe, the founder of SVARA, with discussion moderation by Rabbi David Minkus of Congregation Rodfei Zedek.

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to contact chi. On Sunday, Rabbi Lizzi spoke on a panel entitled What is on the minds of Jewish thought leaders. This was a provoking conversation about the evolving landscape of Jewish life, and what the future of the Jewish community might look like. You will hear all about the incredible organizations involved and the influential people sharing the stage. So without any further ado, take it away.

Welcome, everybody. I spent a lot of time thinking about my opening remarks, many, many drafts, but I hadn't anticipated how difficult it is to pull people away from really good food. So I appreciate that, that you came in. And I assure you that the food will be there, once we end. So thank you for being here for the inaugural miracles event. We are really excited by this. It this has been something that Hannah Kaiser and i Where's Hannah? She's somewhere. It's something that we've been working on for the last two years and his has been in my head for a lot longer than that. I've long wanted to have a forum for playing with the ideas that inspire me and the ideas that I know will inspire others. But there's not a real home for them in typical synagogue programming, even the the unique programming that we've been able to do here, I knew that these ideas in this kind of programming deserve to have a home. And so thank you for being here for it. And that's really actually where Mayor cars began by by us sitting around talking about what interested us what was meaningful to us. This essay that we read that experience this interaction, this thing that we saw, and miracles had to be created here. Because this community road fed Setec has been sharing their truth in our programming, we've harnessed the power of storytelling as a gateway to understanding Judaism, but equally important, or maybe more important to to understand ourselves. And we wanted to expand the community with whom we searched for that meaning. The road fit said a community has been uniquely transformed by its search for meaning and its willingness to broadcast that search and broadcast that search in here in this spot. And that search has revealed that our stories, our voice has occupied the blank space between the inherited words of our tradition. And in order, something that I learned in this time is that in order for us to embrace Torah, Torah had to embrace us. And that begins by sharing who we are your causes where we sent our community around ideas, people around ideas, for the sake of personal but also communal discovery. And that discovery will lead not only to us being better Jews, better members of the Jewish community, but simply better humans, our schools, our synagogues, our camps, our Beit Midrash, is our places of study are not meant to be islands, to be refugees from the world, but should be arming us with the tools for making the world a better place beyond our own communities, and giving us what we need to make the world beyond our Jewish community better. And, and those are the goals that Merkaz is setting out to achieve. And we knew that we needed to begin with voices that are familiar to us. Because if we're going to be making the world a better place, we need to know who are the voices that we should be listening to to make that world better. And we have them here today. So thank you, thank you for being here. And thank you for being those voices. This is our first in a series of looking to Jewish leaders who are shaping the Jewish landscape today and reshaping the landscape for the future. I wanted to facilitate a conversation so that we get to hear what it takes to lead what it takes to have vision and how to create and sustain a community of vision, a community of meaning in a cluttered Jewish landscape of many institutions that are not as successful. Camp Kampar ma Psara Mishcon simply, simply put, are doing it right. There are places of integrity, of depth and of true community and not not the way that we so often use that word community so that it has been watered down beyond currency. There are places of real community. I wanted to be in conversation with Jacob Vinay and Lizzy. They're not panelists, but we're going to be in a conversation together. So we can better understand how they became the Jewish leader that they are, how the institutions that they're leading came to be. So that we can be better members of our own community, and how we can make our communities better suited to the search for meaning. And since I'm holding the mic, one of the things that I did not want to do is give long BIOS believe that each one of them is really distinguished. But if you need to know their bio, it's there's a QR code on the pamphlet, if you didn't get one there outside, but I'll just give a very brief intro to each person. Caleb Citron is the executive director of Camp Rima, and my old camp counselor. We're very close. We're very close in age. I, I feel lucky that Jacob is the director of Camp permite. I told Jacob before that there were five of us and I just saw six that that went to rabbinical school, I think with the real aim of sitting in his chair but can't compromise luckily, that they have Jacob as the director, and I feel really blessed to have you as a friend. Vinay Lappi is the founder and Roshi Shiva of spara. There are a lot of wonderful teachers in this room. But Binay is the teacher of all teachers. She possesses the Torah that we all need to hear. And if you have not been been a student, that needs to be one of your takeaways from today, how you can find your way to Bernays Beit Midrash might want to ask other people because I'm a bit biased, Vinay is also my aunt. But I assure you, you're gonna find out that I'm right. Lizzi Edelman is the founder and head rabbi of Mishcon. Lizzi is really redefining what it means to be a rabbi and the communities that we look to for for guidance and leadership. And was, you're just an inspiration to me. So it's really special to have you here. And Lizzie grew up in Hyde Park and I believe our parents are in the front row and, and, and her in laws are beloved members of of this community. So thank you all very much for being here. And really excited to be able to kick off this, this dream of mine with with with all of you. So I'll begin with the startups on that end. Interested in? So with you Lizzi in if there was a Jewish idea or a piece of wisdom that really inspired you to to be a rabbi, and then once you were there? Was this what you saw in the Jewish world that led you to to create Mishcon? What was not being met? Oh, thank you.

Hello. Okay. Thanks, David. This is so fun. I also just, there's, there's something I appreciate about the casualness of this. Like, very often when there are panels or formal things, it's like, this is Rabbi Bonilla Abby and Rabbi Lizzi Heitmann and, and it's fine, because that is our title, but I just, I like being able to call you David and it's fun to be able to be Lizzi up here. And it uh, it helps me kind of get into the headspace of like, who was that, you know, 18 year old who decided like, maybe I don't want to go straight to college, maybe I am on a spiritual quest. Maybe there's something for me beyond, you know, the, the path that you know, just like I went to the lab school, by the way, here and here in the neighborhood, you know, the professional path that leads away from spirituality and make spirituality kind of something you do on the side, but instead to make spirituality and spiritual leadership, the center of my life. And when people ask, Why did I become a rabbi? The answer is like, I don't know, I because I was called, you know, which is not a word that I feel like liberal Jews use very often because it feels so kind of God as anthropomorphic character, who who designates you and says you go on a mission like to Abraham, you know, go forth from your home go on this mission. But like I knew very, I knew very early on in college that this is what I needed to do with my life. But the principles the Jewish ideas that animate Mishcon and that have animated my rabbinic from before I was a rabbi. The email signature I had since I had an email address has been from Psalm 100 Eve duets I don't know Mm hmm. serve God with joy. And I sometimes translate God differently. The one the beloved, the mystery of the universe, Gaia, you know, but rabbi, Rabbi, Dr. Ron Wolfson, who taught at the American Jewish University, he did a bunch of studies with mega churches, and asked participants in mega churches like to describe in a few words, your church experience. And he said, the first word was always joy. And then he did the same study with synagogues. You're laughing? Why are you laughing? And he did not discover the same results. And I grew up in the Reform Movement. I grew up at K m here, and I had an extraordinary song leader, just kind of by chance, I also happen to overlap. His name is Andrew Ray Feld. And now he's the head of HUC in New York. But Rabbi Arnold, Jacob Wolf, may his memory be a blessing. And Max Janoski was the cantor for a couple of years like, I grew up in a synagogue with a lot of joy, actually. And I realized that that was actually that that was the exception to the rule. That was not the rule. And the more people I talked to, as I went through college, and then rabbinical school, and then began to talk to friends about maybe moving home, and thinking about what kind of community I might like to join, not, not start, but join. And I would say like, I would ask my friends who grew up with me who lived who lived in Chicago, where do you go, and they for show for synagogue? Nowhere? Why? You know, because like I at this point, was very deeply invested in the Jewish community, I was working at a car in Los Angeles, a community very much founded at the intersection of joy, spirituality and social justice. And I would say, well, there's got to be a place like that in Chicago, right. And, you know, just crickets. And so I realized that that was the place that had the space for the kind of Jew that I was the kind of Rabbi that I was. So that principle is very important, even to attach embassy. Mm hmm. And I really try and create every experience, including Yom Kippur war, including, you know, like, certain Jewish holidays don't lend themselves to joy, you know, I wouldn't try to impose joy on tissue above. But I feel like there's an emotional essence of every holiday of every Jewish experience that's trying maybe you'll hear Rabbi Vinay, you know, say something to this effect, like, every, every Jewish thing is trying to get you to feel a particular way, or be a certain kind of person, you know, and different holidays, or different kinds of booster shots, for for different kinds of experiences. And so that's, that's what I want to do is get to the essential core. And I think that's an adventure. And that's fun. And that is joyful, deeply joyful. And I guess the last thing is Door Door Door shove, like, every generation does its own thing, and kind of needs its own thing. And the hover rom movement, back in the 60s and 70s, was started by people who were bored of and unsatisfied with the synagogues, you know, the the big suburban synagogues that they had grown up in, but deeply yearn for spirituality and creative, you know, a whole movement of unaffiliated hover era style, synagogues all over the country, that as they age, became kind of more mainstream. And then the next generation needed to create their own things that were different from the way that they grew up, but not as some kind of stinging indictment necessarily, on the way that they grew up, sometimes, yes, but to change and tweak certain things that, you know, left them wanting. And so I feel like Michigan, Michigan is part of that movement. We're part of a seven community network called the Jewish emergent network, with E car in Los Angeles and the kitchen in San Francisco, a bunch of other shows around the country. But we are by no means the only ones doing this. There are many emergent communities all around the country, animated I think by this kind of ethos, which is like, not not a critique, not not a broad swath critique of, you know, the entire Jewish world, but just saying, I think we want to do it differently in our little space here, in our little Mishkan. You know, the Mishcon was its own little traveling, prayer, spirituality space in the desert for the Israelites back in the day. And it gave them a space to create holiness, community spirituality, against a backdrop of a very harsh world that didn't look and feel like the Mishcon looked and felt. And so that's what I'm trying to do.

Great. I'd love to email that email address. So Rene, what, what was the Jewish idea that inspired you to go into professional work and what were you seeing that made you realize that you needed to create spiral

What led me to rabbinical school? It was it was never my intention to be a rabbi. I'm still not sure. I want to be a rabbi. But I wanted to know what rabbis know. So I thought, okay, that must be rabbinical school because that's where rabbis learn what they learn. And I read a book Shoshanna by your dad, about artware scout and in that book, he said, every one of us who ever has or ever will identify as a Jew, I stood at Mount Sinai. We were all there and I thought, oh my god, if I was at Mount Sinai, this whole thing is mine. And the rabbinical schools who don't take queer folk and I was I had been an out gay activists for a decade. They're keeping the tower that's mine from me. So it both motivated me to learn and to actually go into the closet for six years to get that tower that had been mine when I stood up on tiny Okay, so that got me to rabbinical school. Then once I was there, and learning Talmud through a queer lens. What jumped out at me, were the stories of how the rabbi's were overturning Torah, when they felt that their lived life experience their stories, told them that the Torah didn't quite get it, right. And the concept of Svara just blew me away. So this is smart is the word that I named my yeshiva after. It's a 2000 year old Aramaic term that lives in the legal tradition, but it is what animates the entire Jewish ethos. It is the creative, the idea of creative moral intuition, informed by our stories by our lives, that the tradition interests, every one of us to believe in, and which can overturn Torah, when the two conflict. And when I learned that idea, I thought, What a mistake What a travesty that nobody knows this term, who knows this term, I wasn't even taught it in rabbinical school. Imagine in this country, raising children, educating them sending them to university and never teach you them the word democracy. But why would you do that, or just this or equality, you would never try to raise up Americans without teaching them these fundamental concepts. Yet, this is what we had done. And it turned out that just 1% of Jews for the last 2000 years have learned that term. Those who went to Shiva those who had been entrusted with the spiritual practice of Tomic study. And I realized that the most fundamental problem in our Jewish world that I wanted to fix was that Jews didn't feel trusted. They didn't feel that the tradition, their tradition trusted them to know what was right. And until a lot of us have done the work we did, I think Judaism was a take it or leave it proposition. We thought it was fixed, unchanging, this is what it was, you either were willing to go along with it or you opted out. And that seemed like a very bad thing for the world, bad for Judaism bad for all of us. And I wanted to help raise up a new generation of Jews who would realize that the tradition believed in them. And the Shiva that I started was intended to take those who are most than the merchants first, those who had lived life experiences that the tradition most needed to hear from and say, hey, the tradition trust to time to bring what you know to it to make it better.

Thank you. Kate, I have a slightly different question. The first half is is the same, you know, what inspired your decision to to be a Jewish leader and to go into Jewish professional work. But why were you the right person for compromising? Farah and Michigan our service came from I had existed for 60 something years before you took over. Why were? Why did you want that job? And why were you the right person for it?

If Lizzi was Abraham who heard the call, I was Jonah. Who in certain ways was like, nope, not hearing it.

I I, I always felt like I had access to Judaism, just to own sis heterosexual white male that likely had, you know, part of it. I grew up in a conservative synagogue in New Orleans, where I was inspired by a group of people who founded the shawl as part of really a hovel, rat inspired movement. And then, as I moved into high school, for me, the real message of camp, I started a camp around Wisconsin as a 10 year old and never left was that we could act like grownups, and we could do our own stuff. And we could, we could make our own path. I felt that innately as a kid at camp. And then I began to live it out through leadership and us why as a teenager, and then back at camp on staff, and about 20 years ago, a group of us were sitting around thinking about the nature of community at camp and Torah, and we came up with a pretty radical read of one of the most famous, often boring, sukin verses and all of the Torah, thou have to learn how come I love your neighbor as yourself. And so with respect to Hillel, and Shama, and Jesus, we went in a different direction. And for us, we said, maybe they'll have to learn how to come Oka, is not about human beings treating each other, but about building community. And we suggest that and what still, for me very much resonates 20 years later, is this idea that in order to live in community, I need to be selfish, and I need to let you be selfish. I need to say I have my needs, whatever they are, and I really need to articulate and delineate them. And that I need to recognize that things that are not my needs are negotiable. And hopefully, a bunch of those are your needs. And building community together. And what we did at camp as a crochet Daza division head, which was the greatest job I will ever have was about making space for these kids to name what do you need? And what can you negotiate on. And in that negotiation, we found powerful community. Camp around Wisconsin was it's a little murky, it's been a long time. The first summer camp was 1947. We say that's when we were founded. I can't imagine it didn't happen in 46, or 45, or likely even earlier. And what happened is a group of conservative Jews, including Rabbi Ralph Simon, here at this synagogue, Rabbi Simon son was, According to lore, the first camper enrolled at Camp Vermont, Wisconsin, in 1947. A group of committed Jews from the Midwest saw what was happening in Europe and said, this pipeline of Jewish leadership is gone. Jewish leadership in America in the first half of the 20th century, is the story of immigration from Europe. That's the story. We didn't do homegrown leaders. And the founders of cameraman, Wisconsin in the mid 40s said, we need to create a place to create homegrown leaders. And that in effect is still what we're doing at camp. Rabbi Minkus, some other people in the room as well. Rabbi Minkus is a product of that vision of Ralph Simons, and friends, lay leaders, donors, parents, rabbis educators, right 75 years ago. And I will say as right I, I run a legacy institution 75 plus years in and we have to figure out in every generation, how to reinvent ourselves in ways that I kind of think those couple raw minions wish they could have reinvented themselves to. And it's worth noting that as a legacy institution, it's easier to reinvent yourself when you're basically run by 18 to 23 year olds. But our job is to my job and what I think makes me the right person for camp at least the board thought so six years ago is that I love Ramana and I grew up in Vermont, I never left Vermont. And it was about 10 years in the middle there, where I wasn't sure that remote was the right place. And I was very much inspired by radical newer organizations, the Wexner fellowship and counter American Jewish World Service, the Hillel at my college, a variety of other ways of thinking and ways of being in the Jewish world that really informed that, first of all, it made me feel like an outsider in my home at camp, and then informed my thinking about what it means to change and rejuvenate and energize that place. And that's what, that's what we do. And it means that, you know, every few years, we have to figure out again, what is this generation of parents, and this generation of college kids and this generation of teenagers, what do they need? And how do we keep fueling the future, like the ongoing Jewish renaissance in American Jewish life? In a place that's been around for a long time?

Can I just jump and jump in whenever?

I'm so inspired by what you're saying, Jacob? Okay. Two things. One is what you're saying about the community you create. That's also what we noticed, okay. The late Bell Hooks said, education, when it's done, right, doesn't teach you how to create liberation in the world. It is a liberatory experience. Right? So Judaism isn't gonna work. When people figure out how to use it to create a certain experience, it works when the experience in our spaces are it. So it sounds like that's what you're doing. And the other thing I wanted to jump in on was raising up these leaders. What do they need to know? That's one of my big questions, what do they need to know? And where are we going to send them? You know, I used to put a notch on my belt, every time as far Nick would go off to rabbinical school. I go, Yeah, we did it. That they're, they're gonna do the thing. And lots of star next one after a medical school. And nowadays, the star annex who go off to rabbinical school sometimes leave, because those rabbinical schools aren't the place anymore. And they're not learning what they need to learn for a Judaism that's going to look very different. They're not being taught by people who are living in the same universe. And they're not being set up to serve the communities that they want to serve. for which there's no financial model. So anyway, we have the same questions. Yeah.

Look, I was, this is a question later on David's list that we won't get to because of time, so I'll just put it out there. The rabbinic leadership crisis is the single most important crisis American Jews face today. Full stop. I'm actually not interested in embracing any other questions on that front. Global warming is the greatest crisis we face as human beings, rabbis for Jews, and we are failing right now miserably. It's rabbis. leadership's a bigger piece of this. But it's rabbis. And I say that as something my father was a pulpit rabbi for 40 plus years and conservative Schultz had an amazing career. And I decided not to go to rabbinical school part because my mother would have killed me because she didn't want me to live my father's life. My wife probably wouldn't have married me. There was real stuff there. And I've gone a different a different path. And B'nai My sense is we might disagree on some of the things about the rabbinical schools and whether they're salvageable. But one of the things that we're missing, to go back to evangelical Christianity is like a sense of pastoral responsibility. There's a great group of young emerging rabbis, including Rabbi NICUs, who I helped raise in certain ways. And let me just be clear, the remodel was always part a node in a complicated network of a variety of different institutions that would raise our kids to be leaders. And I hear scary things about the politics in America, and about the world we live in and about what I sometimes think is an insistence on too many needs. And not a braveness of saying, Nope, that's actually a want. I know great rabbis who have said to me, I won't name their names, but I will quote them. We're not looking in red states. I'm not willing to look at a synagogue in a red state. These are young people starting families, they're dealing with consequences there that are behind me and my family. I don't know what it means to make those decisions. But Jews in Alabama need rabbis. And Jews in rural Wisconsin need rabbis, and Jews all over the place need rabbis, and we're not doing a good enough job right now. And the institutions that run these rabbinical schools own a good part, at least of the of the responsibility here, we are not doing a good enough job creating those people to serve the Jews. And I like to think that our community model is what people like David and others have taken from camp as they then move on, because like, yeah, we teach text, we teach our read camp, you don't learn Svara at camp, you don't learn. You learn joyful Judaism and an artifice at camp. You don't learn how to live it every week, right going from funerals to baby namings to SmartCode rally is the way that Mishcon, you know, runs their shawl and many of our other synagogues. So, you know, that, that, for me, is the question that all of us needs to be dealing with, and that donors and lay leaders need to get fully invested in. But yeah, I share them.

I don't know. I mean, we thank you for bringing that up. I mean, there if there wasn't a rabbi shortage, and there are many liberal congregations across the country who had been looking for a rabbi for years, and it revealed, not only are people not going into the pulpit, but people are no longer going to rabbinical school. And a member here recently sent me an article by Shara Tillis skin in the Atlantic, which really put this question back on the list. There's no miracles without this question. Just full disclosure. So I'm interested in your perspective on the rabbi shortage, is it a problem? Where does the problem lie? Just your general thought to Lizzi.

And there are a lot of people with a lot of theories on this question. I recently heard Yehuda Kurtzer, who's one of the presidents of the North American side of the Shalem Hartman Institute say that he thinks kind of the polarity between excellence on the one side and complete sort of inclusion and equality and uplifting every voice on the other side, that inside of that tension lies the rabbi shortage because it used to be that rabbis were the 1% that you know, you only did this job if you're excellent at text, and they really deemed you. But now, like any old person who wants to be a rabbi, like we want everybody in the door, let them all in, you know, gosh, like, you know, we need more rabbis. So and he said, if that's gonna be the standard, then who wants to do that? Like people actually want to do a job that requires excellence? I don't know if I by that, when I heard him say that, I thought, I think people don't want to be rabbis, because they're afraid of not being able to be themselves. Once they get ordained, and they'll go to synagogues, and the synagogue will tell them you can say this, but you can't say this. You can, you know, the joke was always like, you know, Rabbi, we want you to come and revolutionize the synagogue come in, you know, change the service, but not a donor alum. Yeah, but also not the way we do the army that we need that to, you know, and just one by one by one chip away at anything the rabbi might do to actually meaningfully changed the experience of being at shul and a blank what kind of fun is that? That's not creative. That's. And David said, when he wrote when he wrote to all of us with the questions. Look, we plan this panel long before October 7. I'm not going to ask you any questions about Israel. But I think we can't not say that there is an increasing chasm between the generations when it comes to Israel, young rabbis, or young rabbinical students prospective rabbinical students are further to the left. We know this from statistics, we you know, this is it's not controversial to say this, we know this. And when you get out into the world, you are told what is within bounds to say and to not say, and I think for many young prospective rabbis, they're like, if I can't authentically speak, if I can't be myself, why would I go into this job? Isn't? Isn't authenticity actually a really important part of being a good rabbi? I can't count the number of times somebody has said to me, you know, one of the things I like about Mishcon Rabbi Lizzi, is that I feel like you're the same person on the Bema as you are when I have a conversation with you, like, I don't feel like you're pretending up there to be a different kind of person, or, like more moral or more spiritual are saying, like, I kind of feel like you're just you. And that's true. I actually made a point of creating a community in which I didn't have to pretend that's a better fit of creating your own community. Build it around, you know, your own strengths. Like I wanted to play guitar and chill, I wanted to do that. So I get to do that, you know, in any other number of things, but even I in the show that I created and feeling the strains of this right now. So I think that that's a big part of it. I'm sure there are other dynamics too. But I think I think that's a really important piece of it. I

agree 100%, and your authenticity, who you are, as a rabbi, when you're Rabbi Yang is, was was such a, an inspiration to me and I, in my career have gone to school, I knew seriously, you've given me permission to be me, as a rabbi and taught me how to do that, and what that sounds like and what it looks like. So there is no prospective Rabbi shortage. There is a job there is a salary shortage in the work that these prospective rabbis want to do. If Svara said, we are ready to ordain, we would have hundreds of people lining up to be rabbis ordained by Svara. But we would have to tell them, You're not going to make a living. Not for the next generation, or maybe two, or maybe three, that you are going to be rabbis, like, the wood choppers in the water carriers and the shoe makers of the early rabbinic period, when you're gonna have to figure out how to make a living, and you're going to Rabbi on the side, and you're going to raise up communities and figure out what Judaism is going to look like the way they did. And that's a tough, that's a very tough sell. But I think that's the future we're looking at. I think we're looking at a non professional, unpaid, robotic era.

Wow. Sorry, I'm very happily employed here, guys.

And I think that should bring us to the funding questions. Well, okay, or wherever you want to go, David, it's fine.

I only add to live so well. Okay. But I think that's at some point, let's

get at how we're going to fund this unrecognizable Jewish feature.

I want to talk about vision, and I don't think you can get to funding without vision. So I hope there's a through line here. And I'll start with with you, Lizzi. And same question for you, Binay. I'll start with Jacob at some point. You had a vision for for Michigan before they were a Michigan knights, you know, on day one or day zero. So I'm curious how you got to that vision. But I'm more interested in how you remain loyal to that vision. And here's the money. Because we all rely on members and donors who may or may not understand that vision. And the question isn't so much about educating your community and how you adapt that vision hand in hand with the community. But how do you remain loyal? Because we all need to avoid being everything to everyone?

That's such a good question. So when I when I was at E car in Los Angeles, that was my first rabbinic job. And they gave me the role of doing community organizing with the local community organizing, you know, faith based community organizing network, which was mostly organizing churches, but like we were a synagogue organizing with them. So I went to the PICO training, the coordinator of the organization was Pico. So I went and learn, you know, basic principles of community organizing, you know, you talk to individuals, you get a sense of what is their pain point, what bothers them? Why, like, what is the what is the pain of their life, you talk to enough individuals, and then you get a sense of a story of a neighborhood community, whatever it is, and then you help people understand that together, they actually have a more likely chance of solving the problem. If they put pressure if they strategize together, then it's a bunch of atomized individuals who maybe didn't even realize that other people share the same problem. And so I learned that model there as it applied to community organizing. But as I realized that inside of myself, I was feeling less and less interested in continuing to live in LA, and more and more interested in returning to Chicago. I think there's like some kind of home device that's implanted in the, you know, brains of kids who grow up here because I know I'm not the only person who, you know, we went, we laughed, we lived in some amazing places, I lived in Northern California, Southern California, Israel. And like, I wanted to come back to Chicago. Like, I wanted the winters I wanted the boots, I wanted the hat. I wanted to be in Iraq, near my parents. And then as I described to you, I started calling friends. And I did those conversations, where do you go like what's, you know? And then, and then when they would say nowhere, then I would say, Well, what do you do about your spiritual life? And their answer would be like, what spiritual life? You know, because I feel like that's actually not a conversation that many liberal Jews have, like, What's your relationship with God? Like? How do you pray? You know, do you ever learn Jewish things? Do you ever do Shabbat? And you know, where do you celebrate holidays, a lot of them would go home and do high holidays with their families. But like, they didn't actually practice Judaism. They intended fully when they had kids one day to practice Judaism again, but in the meantime, like vast desert of 20s, and 30s, you know, and then we're like, what, what's there for me? So that, for me was the founding, you know, oh, there is a there's a community here of people who don't think Judaism has anything for them, is not spiritual, and are young adults. These were people my age. And I read a lot of studies that there was a the JF did a study in 2010, about sort of Jews in Chicago and where people lived, and, you know, affiliation and all of this stuff, the conservative movement had just released some studies, it turns out, like fewer than 10% of people under 40. At that time, at least, were affiliated with any synagogue. So like synagogues are supposed to be the places where you do Jewish spirituality. And you have all of these young adults who are like, no, no, thanks. Not there for me. So that, for me was kind of the calling was like, okay, there is a large community of primarily young adults who don't feel a sense of, you know, Judaism being spiritual, I will create that I will be the rabbi for those people. And so what that means is the dynamics, the social dynamics, demographics, social trends of that community have to matter to me, and I have to go in not thinking how can I change them? How can I make them less likely to intermarry? You know, how can I make them more pro Israel? You know, like these, these are some of the agendas of the, you know, the institutional Jewish world was very troubled by rates of intermarriage. At that time, the conservative movement in which I was ordained was not permitting rabbis, they still don't to perform intermarriages. You know, I think there there is definitely this sense of impending doom and crisis about the widening gap between young adults, you know, attachment to Israel, and the older generation. And you get a sense of, like, we have to teach them, we have to, you know, make, we have to bring them in, and then we have to give them the information. And I was sort of like, where we could just create community and do Judaism and not, like, not impose, you know, some of those like the most, some of the the most identify, like the most identity based things that actually like animate people, not tell them that they're wrong and bad and bad Jews. So that was the beginning. And I sort of pride myself and talk about how we like, in the early days, we had somebody who was like, the Midwest Regional Director of AIPAC, you know, helped start Mishcon, you know, had our, our second service in his living room. And we had like a whole gaggle of young adults involved in JVP Jewish voices for peace. And, you know, and the whole spectrum in between of people who had never share space together in any other Jewish context, but the context in which we were coming together was joy was like Judaism practiced as joy. And that remains my vision I am. I'm like that That's it. You know, I don't want the community to be split down lines of whether you are Zionist enough or not, whether you are anti Zionist enough or not, I mean, there are new litmus tests for what kind of Jew belongs and should be outside the pale. And I'm just I'm so uninterested in that conversation in that litmus testing, I am more interested in practicing Judaism in a way that enables people to meet each other encounter each other discover that, Oh, you think about that in that way? That's interesting. I think about it quite differently. But now that I'm here in a conversation with you, I can treat you like a person and not like a caricature of your, you know, of your viewpoint. And I've seen it happen, but it requires real commitment on the part of the people who opt in. And so what I have found is, it's hard. It's really hard, and it is made much harder in the backdrop of moments of crisis, you know, and what some people feel right now is like, existential crisis for the State of Israel, which then translates into a feeling of existential crisis for Jewish people who, you know, are watching and connected to the State of Israel and it you know, there's a lot more to say there, but tensions run so high and there is such a deep sense of, I think fear that we may lose everything, you know, like some fears that feel rational and some fears that I'm like, oh my god, Where's this coming from? But you know where it's coming from? It's coming from generations and generations and generations of trauma and loss and persecution, and, you know, all over the world. And, and so I get it, how do we maintain a diverse community against that backdrop? Some people are not interested in that, as I have discovered in the last couple of months, they just, that's actually not where they want to be. And for some people, it's incredibly comforting. So, you know, on the funding question, I think we will lose, I think we will lose some funding, I think I know that we already have over this vision. And what can I say? This is this is my animating vision. So you know, if anybody wants to donate our Mishcon chicago.org backslash donate anyway.

Same question. Oh, my

gosh, okay. So I agree with you. 100%. Oh, my God. Yes. Joining you and losing funding also svara.org/donate. Yeah, I think the, the communities that we've created that are successful are the ones where the founder, and the leaders are sticking to their vision and trusting their vision, trusting that what they needed, lots of people need. And at the end of the day, we're going to lose funders, but we will ultimately succeed when we serve the needs of the people we're trying to serve. I'll give you a little story of a funding story innovation, a vision versus funding story. Okay. I searched through my email this morning to remind myself When did this happen? It was 2016 SFAR started in 2003. You remember this story? I'm sure. It was hoping you would tell us. Yeah. And one of the blessings. One of the blessings of being committed to calling ourselves a queer you should have at using the word queer, in 2003, was that nobody would fund us. And the blessing of not getting funding is that you don't have tension over pleasing your funders and giving them what they want and hitting numbers. And you can spend time crafting and burnishing and honing your vision in your in your product without that tension. So it was 13 years, until we got our first grant. And you'll remember this as well. First big grant, and I'm not going to name the funder, but you all know the funder was a $300,000 grant. Now you I want to set the scene. I'm a single mom, I'm working three jobs. I'm a funding spara. And I'm my credit cards are maxed out. I don't know where my next mortgage payment is gonna come from. And we get a $300,000 grant and the funder, we meet with them, we're working up them, what was it for it was to revolutionize supplementary Hebrew schools. How by taking college graduate, young svar. Next, who knew how to learn in the spiral method and create Svara method by T Midrash. For Hebrew school kids in these 20 Somethings would be teaching them in Hebrew schools around the country. It was a slam dunk for us, it would have been phenomenally successful if I do say so myself. And we got the grant. And we met with the funder and they said, Okay, let's, you know, decide on the marketing language to recruit the fellows who would be doing this. And they said, Well, you know that you can't accept anyone into this fellowship, who has any social media presence, supporting JVP? In other words, there is real politics, you're going to have to investigate. And if they have politics beyond these lines, they can't be part of this program. Launched story short, we finally get to the the head guy of the this funding organization who says Oh, no, no, it's not just JVP you You can't have anyone in this fellowship, who supports the accuracy who objects to the occupation. I said I couldn't even run this project. And so we gave them their check back. If we had not given them their check back Svara would have died. It would have stopped being what it was and what it is now. Okay, shameless brag. Okay, maybe in 2016, we had 1000 students, maybe 500. Because we stuck to our vision, and remained a place where, regardless of your politics on Israel, and regardless of your politics, and anything else, you were wanted in loved as far as I had 54,000 students last year. So fortunately, I think that the message is stick to your vision, even though you're not sure where your next you know, mortgage payment is going to come from, and you will be successful. We probably have one funder of all the funders that we now have, you probably have one funder who gets us and who funds us because of what we're about. The other funders fund us because we give them what they want, which is engagement. We're happy to give them the right. But the Jewish future needs the metal cheese, who funded the revenue, the Renaissance, that the individuals who are not going to fund you for three years and then say, you replace our funding who are going to fund for three generations. If you look at how we funded the Jewish revolution, that is America now, the Jewish schools, hospitals, to give the doc the Jewish doctors who had no place to practice medicine, and so on. They weren't funding for three years, they weren't writing a check for three years and then said, okay, then you're you're on your own. They were funding for generations. That's the kind of funding that we need for the future.

Thank you. checkup I'm interested in how you created your vision since you were already at Kemper ma before, and there was already a vision in place that was really successful. So how did you create your vision? At what point did you realize that people are coming along with your vision?

I'm part of my Jonas story is that my predecessor, Rabbi David Soloff, visionary leader, very successful, great guy. Ravenstahl, tried to talk me out of this job. For years. Mostly the line was Jacob, you're an educator, you like ideas? This job isn't what you think it is. And Rabbi Soloff also, I will say I believe history repeats itself. And I believe that every generation has its own founding narratives, and crucial aspects of shaping outlook. And part of me. I mean, just to give you a sense here, my father worked for myself as a division at and its first few summers as director, and then I was a camper and staff member, and division had, at the end of his tenure, that's how long he was around for, may he live in be well, and he kept his politics very close to his chest. I have a sense of his domestic and Israel politics, but I have actually never heard them. Having worked very closely with them, and seeing myself as one of his students, and that's one of the things you learn as his student, that you're not gonna get access to this stuff. And I knew from day one that was never going to work for me. And so part of my own story here is that I was asked to like, clip my wings and shut up and sit in the corner and don't be so loud by a generation of lay leaders and by the professional head of the organization, and that was challenging and difficult and part of what I very much bristled against for for years. And I think part of what I really learned from Rabbi Soloff is that the vision is the community. And I, one of my, we can get into this or not, but like one of my questions for these would be rabbis is Is your pulpit about your ideas? Or is your pulpit about the people? So like, what I'm hearing quite beautifully from Lizzi is kind of like what I would take, which is the people who show up are the community. Right? I'm like, Yes, I have a legacy organization, we have major fundraising needs, thank God, we're generally able to meet them. I give a lot of people what they want. And I feel like, like, I have integrity, with my ideas, and my beliefs about what what happens. And I know that the organization through the 40s on today, Israel's been an almost constant generational challenge. In the early years, the older generation were the anti Zionists, and didn't want you to move to Israel. And the young kids wanted Zionism, and we're gonna move to Israel that's shifted and changed in different ways. Over time, gender, sexuality, civil rights, race, US nationalism, Israel net, like these are through lines that all feel very live right now. But that have been dealt with by predecessors of my board and predecessors of myself. And so I mean, I'll share this story at a very painful encounter. I think it was 2018 or 2019, it was just as the Supreme Court was beginning to dial back row. And a young Jewish leader, a woman relevant for the story, at some point, like sat me down, been a member of our senior team at camp for four or five years already sat me down and said, Jacob, I've had it, I cannot be in a place where my right to my own body is in question. And I don't know exactly what was going on. She heard maybe young staff talking about some I don't know what it was. And I sat her down. And I think in a way that Lizzie might, though, maybe not, I said, I was like, Look, I'm with you. And abortion is a live conversation in America. And in Jewish law, it's not so simple. And so if you if you need to be in a place where it's not a live question, this camp is not the right place for you. And there if there are people who disagree with you, politically, for whom this is, this is their camp to, and we have to figure out what that looks like, with Mitch located and with other things. And I don't have a uterus I named that and in the space, you know, like these, these are these are these are important factors as well. And what does it mean for an older white sis hetero guy to like have this conversation with with a woman in their in their mid to late 20s. I think for me that that vision is about having my own opinions, some very strong opinions. But really recognizing a humility, visa vie the broader community and wanting to hold opinions that I sometimes find anathema. And I often disagree with you and other people that are part of that community. And one of the pieces for me, and one of the things I'm thinking about a lot today, as we get ready for a summer where Israelis and Americans are going to be together at a time when I think it's going to be more difficult for Israelis and Americans to be together because we're in very different places, in terms of dealing with the very different traumas we've experienced in the last few months. And also thinking about or I would suggest, I don't think most Israelis are ready to think about problem solving. And next steps. I think American Jews and Israeli Jews have very different needs and priorities right now. And I think that's about our lived world is I'm thinking about empathy. And I love many of the veteran Israelis. We haven't camp and either commitment to appreciate empathically the Israelis who are in camp this summer, and I'm really worried that because of that empathy, we can't talk about anything. All the things that we need desperately to talk about. And so I'm, I'm really struggling with that. And I'm concerned about that as we as we head into this upcoming summer. But there's, there's there's a piece here. That that is that's that's real, and it's about the real people. And that's why like if we're looking for an unfunded non professional rabbinate, that's great. I just hope they got to the Jews in Birmingham.

It's not that I'm looking for that. I just think that's what we're in for.

Yeah, no, that's that's a

funded Funded revenue. But

I look, I guess for me there's a good portion of my board right now that's really anxious about the conservative movement, for good reason, rational anxiety. And one of the things that I keep telling them is that the fears about the movement are real, and they're long and coming. And they're, I wish we could change them all sorts of things. But the conservative movement, in this way, in a great way, has very little to do with conservative synagogues. That's part of the Achilles heel of the movement. But our conservative synagogues are not going anywhere. The vast majority of the conservative synagogues in the Midwest are not going anywhere. And what I'm concerned about with this rabbinic pipeline thing is those shows will not have rabbis. And that, like that is a great fear for me. And I'll say, but I don't know if you shouldn't be getting ready to say something which you will. But and I don't know if I'm going to anticipate what your question or not part of what makes part of what solves the rabbinic pipeline is a dramatic shift in how the lay leaders of sit of liberal synagogues view their staff. And I say this on behalf of my good friend, David, and on behalf of lots of other rabbis, but part of the problem. And like, I mean, boards need to operate from a position of scarcity. And a concern that if this Rabbi doesn't work out, you don't know if you're getting another one. And that has to change work life balance, it has to change how we think about salary and benefit compensation. It has to think how we deal with your legitimate feelings about the sermon on Shabbat morning, or the eulogy, at your loved one's funeral, or whatever else is going on all of those things. Because that that shift, I don't think it's the biggest part, but it's part of, of the challenge that we're facing.

I was just gonna say, it's not that I'm unconcerned about that conservative congregations who may not have rabbis, I'm much more concerned about the far more numerous Jews who are not going to a synagogue, who will not have rabbis, or will not have leaders to bring them into the messing with of our tradition in the using of our tradition to make their lives better.

But there is some there's some grassroots, you know, shifting happening here. So I, I'm no longer part of the rabbinical assembly of the conservative movement. I was ordained in 2010. And I stayed for three years. And I just got so tired of saying no, to people who were asking me a rabbi to do their weddings and to, you know, join their lives so that they could be part of the Jewish community. And so eventually, I, you know, turned in my membership card, and I happily, joyfully I love doing intermarriages. Because I feel like we are building the Jewish community full of people who are asking to be part of it. I will tell you, like over half of the people for whom I do weddings, end up converting, you know, because they just decided that it's so nice to be in a community that actually welcomes and affirms them, and doesn't require them to be somebody other than they already are. Then once the door is open, it's like, oh, but it's actually nice in here. I like it. You guys are fun. So so I've been move mentally homeless for like a decade, and move mentally homeless. Yeah. And the Jewish emergent network is one example of a network of people who've just gravitated toward one another, because it's like, we're all kinds of, you know, outcasts from our various movements. And we're all doing things a little bit differently. We're not doing it the same kind of differently, but we all kind of have a we share an ethos. Let's, you know, make a network run retreats for ourselves and each other, teach each other Torah, have a sense of fellowship, camaraderie, call each other when we're going through things. I recently went to the conference for renewal rabbis to see if this this may be was my, you know, maybe my move mental home? Maybe it is, maybe it's not, I don't know, I think they're fun. But they do have a rabbinical school that's growing. Maybe maybe the only one in the country that's growing to two.

I'm just going to repeat what you said. So that I'm pretty

sure about an Aries roll of all growth. So I just want to be wary of Yes,

yes. Against the backdrop of a shrinking liberal community and a growing orthodoxy and we're not talking about Orthodox Judaism. We're here talking about non Orthodox Judaism. So all the rabbinical schools are contracting and there is a serious question about how they're going to the whole thing. And the renewal reconstructionists in Hebrew college are growing and relevantly, Hebrew colleges. nondenominational renewal doesn't really consider itself a movement, though at like, at some point, you need a structure that, you know, actually supports rabbis connecting with each other, and maybe, you know, a 401 K plan or something that, you know, all all of the all of the markers of an institution. And if and if they don't wildly succeed, it will be because it'll be because they don't embrace the need for sort of the infrastructure of institution building, which is, I think, where a lot of the charismatic, smart, motivated young rabbis who want to be leaders might, you know, hit a wall, which is at that point of creating the infrastructure to actually house the innovation and the creativity, that, you know, it would be amazing to spread. But you know, like you for a long time, we're just doing this kind of by your lonesome, not everybody would stick it out for as long as you did. With the kind of selfless giving of your yourself your time, your money to put your dream into the world. Most people can't, they can't afford that. And it just you can't tread water forever. And so I do think like, that's, you know, part of the conversation is that the movements themselves are constraining and not speaking to people anymore. But there are people who want the thing that the movements used to provide, and we need new structures for holding.

One of my skills is knowing when the bagels start smelling better, so I'm real quickly, we'll end kind of a lightning round. What are the things that are exciting you that are coming out of your institutions

kids and young adults and families, I mean, our Stevie Astros here about 12 years ago, we engage Steve for help with our market research sales. Our camp was under enrolled for about 10 years after the great recession. And since COVID, our enrollment has been well up. We struggled for years with staff hiring staff hiring appears to be getting easier as the labor market shifts happen. And I think October 7, unfortunately, is helping us hold onto American staff for at least another summer or two, we'll see how those trends go. Our day camp staffing has been very solid, whatever, it doesn't matter. We're we're impacting kids. And look, Jewish summer camps work. All Jewish summer camps work, because they recreate ethnic neighborhoods of the post world war two era. a camp like camp around Wisconsin is different than most camps. Because we don't just try, we don't end at recreating the ethnic, we add Torah and vibrant Jewish living like some other camps do. But the truth is most Jewish camps, that's what they do. And that's why they work at intermarriage and all these other things. Jews become friends with each other. And we create some of that population density that some of you grew up in, that our kids don't really have today. And we're seeing the results of that. And it's a failure when kids live 10 months a year for their Jewish life of a month or two over the summer. And so part of this is recognizing strong synagogues, innovative, a new generation of innovative young rabbis, not so young David. And he called me his old camp director, as camp counselor, and all of that stuff, and we're seeing that we're seeing that happen. And that gives me great hope for the future.

I think what I'm most excited about is the increasing edge of the marginalized, formerly marginalized, Jews and Jewish adjacent folk who are seeing places where they can enter the tradition and be a part of it. That disability justice community I think what we're gonna see in the future is neurodivergent Tara 62% of the 54,000 people who came to spar last year, identify as having a disability or as neurodivergent and what they're seeing in this room issue, the donkey stories that are jumping out at them. I'm referencing the idea that if you're a donkey and you're learning Torah, the donkey stories are going to, you know, jump out, you're going to notice where the donkeys are, oh, that's me. Because you see yourself, the rest of us don't even notice the donkeys. These people are seeing in our tradition and in Torah, just phenomenal stuff. And just like the demographic explosion of queer trans folk, right, 64% If you have a kid, under 20 years old, you know, you know that half of their classmates identify as queer. The neurodiverse community is exploding and their tolerance is totally dope.

I'm excited about a lot of things, I guess, you know, the thing that excites me is one thing that excites me, you know, because I look at what Jacob is doing. And like, literally, you brought me to tears talking about the original founding purpose of Camp Irma. You know, and I think there's a sense that like, the most important, the most important time to cultivate young Jewish minds and identities is early is like, you know, young adulthood or care, excuse me, like childhood camp, great, you know, but then it's like, okay, but not only that, because we, you know, what, if they get woken up in their teens, and so we've teen trips, and, you know, youth groups and that kind of thing, but then it's like, okay, well, you go to college, and maybe you'll get turned on in Hillel, you know, and there's like a ton of institutional investment, you know, from big foundations legacy, you know, for long stretches of time not asking these places to like, turn it off after three years and find your own funding, but like, the just appreciate the importance of Jewish education and identity formation at all of these young stages along the way, and then you get to synagogues. And it's a little bit like, Alright, great, you should be membership funded. Now. You know, like, the, the, the funding world is a little bit like, Okay, now you're all grown up, so figure it out. But what I have seen is that as adults, people can also discover Judaism, as if for the first time and rediscover Judaism, because, you know, the, you know, camp experience wasn't what they were looking for, or they didn't have a camp experience, or they didn't grow up Jewish. If there are any number of reasons why a person as an adult, might have a resistance to walking into a shoal to look for their, their answers or their spiritual practice, but then they do and can actually find it and find it deeply meaningful, and it can be transformational. And so like, that's, that's kind of the business I'm in Mishcon does have a mensch Academy, a place where we're cultivating young minds. And, you know, it's basically a religious school. But seriously, the work that really gets me excited is doing this with adults, because that's actually the majority of your life. And, and I just, I think that there's so much room for, you know, chuva, maybe isn't the right word, exactly. Turning, changing, evolving, growing. But like, we don't have to be the same people at age 30, that we were at age 25, we don't have to be the same people at age 50, that we were at age 35. And our Judaism can evolve with that. And that's fun and interesting. And I think that actually has real implications for what Jewish community looks like, because it won't look the same, and it shouldn't look the same as it did 15 years ago, or 50 years ago. And, and actually, there are some people who enjoy that and want that, and like there should be community for people who want that. And for those of us that are kind of adapting, growing, you know, sort of like rolling with the punches of the evolving world. It's hard, because actually, like, change is hard sometimes, too, you know, and certainly institutions resist change, the more institutionalized you get, it's, it's hard, you know, because people actually get used to a certain thing, and then don't want it to change. But it's still exciting to me that adults, you know, basically, once you're done with your Hillel experience, or never had one, that there's this whole wide open space where we get to play, and I think that's fine.

Thank you. So I want to thank Jacob, Ben and Lizzi, you can thank them too.

It feels silly to write closing remarks ahead of time. But I'll just say, I'm so humbled to have been up here and to hear your Torah, your wisdom and what is shaping your communities to be so impactful and powerful, and I'll say, super nervous here, but I know that there's also a vulnerability in standing up or sitting up here and talking about your injury. Attention, not solely from your perspective but impacted by the people. You're sharing the stage. So I appreciate that vulnerability and that willingness to bring your full selves. Thank you. Without you there is no Merkaz said it's a it's a place where we want to center ideas around people. It's fine to have ideas but with no people there is no mere cosmic cause main center. So thank you for for being here. And just to plug Stay tuned for the content that we're going to be putting out. We have podcasts coming out and our next live in person event will be April 14 with Rabbi Josh Fogelson, Dan Lubin and Judy Finkelstein Taff, so I hope you'll come to that and enjoy the rest of the day thank you

Shabbat replay is a production of Mishcon Chicago, our theme music was composed and performed by Calvin Strauss, you can always see where and when our next service will be on our calendar. There's a link in the show notes. And if you appreciated the program, please rate and review us on Apple podcasts. I know you've heard it before, but it really does help. On behalf of T Mishcon. Thank you for listening