The Present & Future of American Judaism #1: R'Bradley Shavit Artson

In this inaugural episode of a new interview series titled "The View From The Top," Rabbi Lizzi spoke with Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson about his perspective on the state of the present and future of American Judaism.

R'Artson (www.bradartson.com) holds the Abner and Roslyn Goldstine Dean's Chair of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and is Vice President of American Jewish University in Los Angeles. Rabbi Artson has long been a passionate advocate for social justice, human dignity, diversity and inclusion. He wrote a book on Jewish teachings on war, peace and nuclear annihilation in the late 80s, became a leading voice advocating for GLBT marriage and ordination in the 90s, and has published and spoken widely on environmental ethics, special needs inclusion, racial and economic justice, cultural and religious dialogue and cooperation, and working for a just and secure peace for Israel and the Middle East. A member of the Philosophy Department, he is particularly interested in theology, ethics, and the integration of science and religion. He is also Rabbinic Leader of the Abraham Joshua Heschel Seminary in Potsdam, Germany, ordaining Conservative rabbis for Europe. A frequent contributor for the Times of Israel,  and a Contributing Writer for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, he has a public figure Facebook page with over 93,000 likes. Rabbi Artson is the author of 12 books and over 250 articles. He is currently completing a new book, Wells of Wisdom: Ancient Insight to Thrive.

https://www.aju.edu/ziegler-school-rabbinic-studies

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Transcript

Transcript

Hello, Rabbi Bradley. Shavit artson, welcome to Mishkan. Welcome to contact. Hi. Thank you. Rabbi Lizzi, it is such a pleasure to be with you. Yay. So you are the first in a little series I wanted to do called a view from the top. And I know it's a little pretentious, maybe, to think of the heads of seminaries as like the top, but the idea is, well, is for me, I'm thinking about rabbis. I'm thinking about rabbis and how rabbis are on the front lines of Jewish communities, often speaking out on behalf of the Jewish community, or at least their Jewish community, for moral clarity, for Jewish values, representing Jews in multi faith spaces. And this is, obviously, this is an important job. This has been a job for 1000s of years, guiding, steering, leading. You know, I remember, actually in rabbinical school, we once had a meeting with somebody from uscj, the conservative movement synagogue arm, who came and asked us, like, what metaphor we would use to talk about, you know, what does a rabbi do? And I remember, I think for me, it was like, like, tour guide or something, because it was like, we're we're in the terrain together. But also I'm kind of showing you, you know, what's interesting where? Because maybe I've studied it more, but also, like, maybe you know more than I do about this place, you know, but everybody had different metaphors. In any case, Rabbi's have been doing this for 1000s of years. It's an important job, and

there's a pipeline problem in the liberal world that I think has been acknowledged. Like, I don't think it's a secret all of the seminaries, as far as I know, except for a few, which we can talk about, are contracting, not necessarily, that's a description, not necessarily an indictment, but But I'm wondering, like, what is this? What does this say about where American Judaism is now, where it's going? And you know, a couple months ago, Franklin for wrote this piece that had a provocative title, right? Is the end it? Is it the end of the golden age of American Judaism? And is this pipeline issue an indication of the end of the golden age of American Judaism? So, you know, I don't expect you to have all the answers, but I expect you to have the answers that you have from your unique vantage point as the Abner and Rosalind Goldstein Deen Chair of the Ziegler School of rabbinic studies in Los Angeles, California, and the vice president of the American Jewish University, and also my teacher, and also the dean of the school I chose to go to and a big reason why I chose to attend the Ziegler School of rabbinic studies. And so I'm excited to have you be our first in this series. So welcome. Well, thank you. It is a pleasure to be here. I want to add to the conundrum you've just put out there, and then tell you why I still think I have the most optimistic job in the world.

So on top of the pipeline issue, which is that in all of the seminaries, including the modern Orthodox seminaries, the numbers are both vastly reduced in the last 30 years, the number of people applying to rabbinical school has decreased by about half. That's a 50% drop, and the number of rabbinical schools has more than doubled. People keep opening up rabbinical programs to ordain Rabbi because it's once you've assembled a faculty. It's a low hanging fruit, so to speak. You know it. You can do it, and your graduates will go out there and they'll do amazing things. And so why not? So we have more schools with less students, and it's also a second area I want to raise the cookie cutter students are gone, meaning, when I was in rabbinical school, I was unique in that I hadn't had a childhood of deep Jewish learning, of summer camps, of day school, of spending a year in Israel on a movement program. I didn't do any of those things. I wasn't part of us, why or nifty, or any of the organizations so and all of my classmates were, they were all pedigreed Jews, and those people are gone. I don't know where the graduates of summer camps are going and youth groups are going, but they're maybe it inoculates them against the rabbi net, and so by the time they become adults, they say, well, been there, done that. I'm not sure, but,

but we live in an age in which the people who are coming. Need more training. Need more background. You can't assume Judaic knowledge. Now, I would pick that any day, because what they bring, frankly, what what you brought, was incredible boundary crossing, life, wisdom. Mm.

And the willingness to see things that were invisible if you're part of a dynasty. So you know, being related to people who feel like they're marginal or marginalized by the community, people who don't hear the community saying what's their core convictions,

who are drawn to spirituality and holiness, but there are things that put them off or block them at the door, right? So I love the fact that my students, and many of the rabbinical students today at other schools too, are people who, themselves, took a journey to get there. Yeah. The other thing I want to add is, what's striking about it is normally, you know, this is an age in which market economics seem to dominate. Rabbis make a good living. I'm not just talking about the limitless lock spread that you can pick up from the refrigerator during the week after your congregants have gone home. I'm talking about they get a really good salary and a really good package. And so you would think for that alone, if people were looking for meaningful work and work that is high profile and work that is well rewarded and allows you to retire with a decent pension like this, is great work. I think it's important that you just mentioned that my parents didn't know that. You know, i Nobody knows that. My parents were really afraid when I said I wanted to go to rabbinical school. They were, like, our direct quote, are you sure you don't want to get a master's degree from Harvard in basket weaving? And I said, What are you talking about? And they said, Well, you know, a degree from Harvard, you know, in basket where you could do anything with that. But like, with a rabbi, like, what are you going to do with that? What are they going to pay? How are you going to eat? You know, correct? Look, I had a conversation with someone in the entertainment world who had a sibling who was thinking of going to rabbinical school, and they were saying, this is a dead end profession, and they're going to starve. And I said, I have some bad news for you. Your sibling is going to earn more than you will.

They'll have greater job security and a greater package, not to mention all the goodies people give their rabbis because they want to express love and adoration and gratitude. So, okay, so, but that makes us all the more puzzling, like that should mean more people coming. Okay, but here's, here's the thing, it is a reflection, I think, of something bigger. Some of it, the Jews talk about. Some of it we don't. So let's talk about, honestly, what I think are the factors that go into this. Yeah, one American Judaism is now fourth and fifth generation. Have you looked at the survival rate of Japanese American culture, Scandinavian American culture, French American culture in the fourth or fifth generations? How many great, great grandchild of French immigrants are fluent in French and feel that Paris is their second home, right? None the great American story like it or don't, is that people come here and the Atlantic washes away their previous identity, and maybe it holds on for the immigrant generation and then the children of the immigrants, who still feel guilty, but by the time you get to the grandchildren, they are absolutely American. What's astonishing about the Jewish story is not how many people are drifting away, it's how many people want to hold on. That's what makes us different than any other American immigrant group. So we are so focused on the attrition rates that we don't notice that compared to the competition, we are an anomaly, right? Korean Americans would give their eye teeth to retain their identity this long. That that's really interesting. I mean, it's interesting to think about the Jewish American experience as an as more analogous to say, you know, the Japanese American experience, or any, you know, any cultural group from anywhere in the world that kind of comes here, where they're common language, common practices, you know, shared history, and then blends into the American melting pot. You know, I think in general, people think of Judaism as I'm using, like scare quotes, like a religion, or like Christianity or Islam, and my understanding is in the liberal world, in the Christian world as well. I mean, I, I don't, I don't know about Islam so much, but my my colleagues and pastors in the liberal Christian world are seeing the exact same thing, or seeing direct linkage. Yes. So let's now move to, I just wanted to set it in the sociological Jews never go there. We are actually people, and so we are subject to the same challenges of everybody.

Then on top of that, this is a very difficult age for organized religion. Yeah.

Yeah. And I want to hasten to say a good deal of that is the fault of organized religion. Yeah, right. It takes, as Christopher Hitchens used to say, it takes religion to make mediocre people truly evil, right? You know you because the things that religious people will say and do to gay people, to trans people about issues of race or gender, the sexism and patriarchy. You know, religion has a long history of some very noble and good things and some really saintly individuals, and then a whole lot of awful Yeah, so,

and in America, as in much of the world, religion often makes an alliance with Empire, and that always makes religion ugly.

So, so I don't want religion to act like they're the victims here. I mean, they are, but this is, this was heschel's critique in the 50s, right? Like

people blame the secular world for the fact that nobody wants to be religious. No. Blame the religious communities. They become dull in sipping oppressive right? What I would if I when I have the chance to talk to Heschel, which I hope will happen, not in the immediate future, but at some point down the road, I

want to tell them, It's not a binary, that's right, the secular are to blame too, right? Because frankly, if you look at the history of secular movements, they don't look a whole lot better than religious movements. I will remind you that Nazism and Stalinist communism were both secular movements. Mao Zedong killed a ton of people without a shred of religion. So, you know, it turns out that just humans are primates descended from apes who had anger management issues, and so we manifest all the time. Okay, but, but religion has taken some big blows. One of them is in the medieval period, what I like to think of as the good old days,

the only coherent explanation for life, intelligence, humanity, the world, was God,

and Darwin blew that away. Darwin blew that away. Newton Galileo blew away the idea that the earth is the center of the universe. Freud blew away the idea that we are rational creatures who are dictated by reason, and all we need to do is reason better, to do better like there have been, you know, Marx brought up, leaving aside. Marx as a propagandist, Marx as a political philosopher helped us to notice that our group behavior is sometimes different than our individual behavior, and how we behave as a group has certain attributes that we don't always control. So those guys shredded the necessity of religion as an intellectual explanation. Right? You can have a perfectly coherent explanation for the world that doesn't engage religion. That's right, that's new in the history of the world. That's new in the planet. That's still the minority, right? We are the minority, and that we live in a culture in which you can dispense with it and be fine.

But what hasn't gone away is spirit.

That's right. And so here we have this anomalous thing, the Jewish population. When you poll the Jews, the fastest growing group is none of the above. What's your religion? None. They say. Okay, here's some interesting things. Of those nuns, the percentage who say their Jewish identity is very or somewhat important is 85%

here's the kicker, I don't understand. The percentage of none who say I don't believe in God. When asked, Did God give Israel to the Jewish people, 10% say yes, which for the life would be not understand, yeah, but 90% of them have a Seder for Passover.

About 75% do something for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Again, we are anomalous right now. It's true. Christian seminaries are closing all across the country. And then I want to set that in a bigger thing, the humanities are being assaulted. People don't major in French literature anymore. Sorry to keep picking on the French. They don't major in in English Literature either. Right? So the humanities are shriveling up. People getting PhDs in the humanities can't get work and and that, I think is, for me, personally, it's a tragedy. I think the humanities are essential to helping us tap into the wisdom of the ages,

but, but they're gone in part because of the cost of education, in part because people don't see the value of it.

People.

Want to get a job at the end all that stuff, but religion is humanities right at the end of the day. Lizzi what you and I did together in rabbinical school was study literature. Yeah, right. And we studied literature. And I would add, I don't know if this, I've never thought about this exactly, but it's like also performance art, and the ritual piece of it is like an embodied, you know, it's not just literature, it's not just intellectual, it's an embodied, not like a dance practice, but also kind of, you know, there's something about the physical, tactile ritual elements, especially of a more rigorous practice. You know, one of the things that we discussed talking about is, like, why might a person choose a conservative seminary, and I can say personally, having grown up in the Reform Movement as as you did, like I wanted a more rigorous practice demanded of me, which included how I ate and how I, you know, wore a tall eat and, you know, being expected to put on, to fill in, and daven and, you know, like it was, it was all the different things. So it's, it's not, it's like, yes, it's humanities, but not just humanities, it's also a department, you know, correct? So look, partly, that's a critique of the way the humanities are transmitted. The fact that literature departments see themselves as purely intellectual is a crime.

No one ever I majored in in literature. No one ever said to me, how are you transformed by this poetry. No one ever said, you know. Okay, great, so you've read Moby Dick. How do you walk in the world differently now, because you read this incredible book that would have gotten you laughed out of the department, right? But so in the seminaries, we study literature holistically. Yes, we study it with your heart. And Judaism is a life choreography, right? Okay, so, but that's so the humanities are being assaulted third there's a demographic shift, right? So we had the baby boomers that peaked and tanked, and then their kids had a wave of a population increase, and that tanked. And we're now in the third trough. We haven't yet gotten the kids of the kids, of the kids. That's because I'm the child of baby boomers. My parents are baby boomers. I'm that. I'm in that peak time. Kids are my kids are six and eight right now, correct? So, so there's my prediction is it's coming, right? There will be, because all graduate school programs are shrinking, except for the practical ones, right? Okay, so that's the third and then the fourth that I want to mention that is never said publicly, but your congregation and your your listeners can hear it Israel, yep. And what I mean by that is not the ISRAEL PALESTINE debate. I mean that that doesn't help. But here's the thing.

30 years ago, a 19 year old who wanted to live an intensely Jewish life outside of orthodoxy would go to rabbinical school. Now they make Aliyah and they work in tech in Tel Aviv.

So there's a whole lot of people who get siphoned off the Jewish community, and they do their Jewish by living in Israel and being Israelis. That's a very interesting theory I have never considered or heard of. Do you have do you have numbers to substantiate that? Or is it just a feeling you have? Well, let me just say that, as a rabbi, it's my general practice to say things that I have no empirical support for

and I don't think I'm the only rabbi who does that. Absolutely not. Of course, no, no one has studied this, because, in a sense, it's the Live Wire. What is the cost to diaspora communities of having such an attractive place that suctions off some of your most devoted young people? Right? No one has studied that, because the price of that. I mean, what? So what's your remedy for that make it less attractive? Like, I mean, really, what are you going to do? It's just the reality of Jewish life right now. But I know several people who approached me talk to me about the Rabbinate, and then, as they got older, said, No, I'm moving Israel, which is fine, and that's great, but that's interesting. That's very interesting. I wonder if that's more true for your generation than mine, because my, I feel like my analogy to what you just described, I'm interested, I'm turned on, is moving further to the right. It's going to orthodox yeshiva, you know. And maybe it's modern Orthodox, but also maybe it's like, you know, one, one of the Kiru, of one of the like,

engagement evangelical yeshivas in Jerusalem. And then it's like a rigorous, all inclusive, all encompassing, like, you know, Jewish life, whether in New York or LA or Chicago or Israel, yes, so, so that also, but that's, I think that's a subset of what I just said. Interesting, okay? Because Israel funds a ton of money into orthodoxy, right? If we have those streams of money we could offer. You know, I have people who call me and say, I want to learn in Israel. Are there places to go? I mentioned the conservative yeshiva and Pardes, both of which they have to pay for.

There's.

Ton of welcoming orthodox yeshivot if you're willing to live that life,

that are

because they're funded by the Israeli government at a level. So okay, so all of those are clusters. And then the last thing I want to say, and I want to try to not be ageist about this,

my generation were by and large, joiners,

and we like to be members of things. We like to be part of a group. And we didn't have iPads and iPhones, so we didn't listen to things when people wanted it, whenever we wanted to. We listened when they were programmed. And we had to go somewhere for those programs and and being a rabbi is also really hard work, as you have discovered it, it's not nine to five, it's not, you know, like you're on all the time.

And

there are a lot of people who just say, that's, that's crazy. I'm not. I don't want a job. That's I'm on all the time. I mean, yes, I like this stuff, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to get a job or and the irony is, of course, that it's not only rabbis who are on all the time. Any job which is not just punch in, punch out, is going to make my wife is a federal prosecutor, and she works all the time too, right? So it's that you're not going to solve that problem by not going into the Rabbinate, unless you go into work that is just bounded,

but, but that, I think, okay, so all of that, yeah, I think those are the main sources. Oh, and then, you know, look, I mean,

I had a meeting last week with all of the liberal seminaries. They all complained about the growing gap between Hebrew preparation and what's needed for rabbinical school. Okay, so I think it's fair to say that the conservative rabbinical schools probably require a bit more on the Hebrew side, but the reform the non denominational ones are also reporting they have a very hard time. People come to them eager and excited, but with a blank slate. They don't have enough Hebrew to read the texts. So there has to be. How do you get people from that wanting to do it to the place where they can profitably sit in the class? That also becomes another boundary.

Okay? So

did I cover that subject? I mean, I think those are a bunch of very they ring they ring true, both about, you know, why it might be a smaller number of people, you know, knocking on the door

and and what it looks like for the people who are knocking on the door, they're eager, they're excited. They have not traditional cookie cutter backgrounds, but also a lot less fluency and facility with Hebrew language, right? And that that could be a barrier. I mean, I remember, actually, in my first conversation with Rabbi Peretz at Ziegler when I was in my senior year of college,

and I graduated from Stanford University, and I majored in religion and philosophy, and I, you know, I worked with,

I did study with you later. No, I worked with Dr Arne Eisen, like I, I felt like I came with strong, you know, street cred to get into this school and share. And Rabbi Peretz asked me, Do you daven? You know, tell me about your prayer life, and then tell me about, you know, your Hebrew. And when it was clear that I wasn't in the practice of praying three times a day, or actually at all, you know, I did enjoy it on Shabbat, like, once a week. I was really good. I enjoyed it once a week. But, like, the idea of actually devoting a practice to it was not something that I did. And then also, I wasn't, I wasn't really ready with Hebrew. I had thought that, nonetheless, she would say, but like, Oh, we're so desperate for students that, you know, like, come anyway. And she said to me, why don't you go take a year, you know, and spend some time working on all those things, and then, like, if this is still the right school for you, come back. And I mean, I remember at the time feeling like the sting of rejection, and had I been less committed, or had I been a little more not vengeful, but like, you know what I'll show you, you want to send me away. I'll go to a school where they don't need me to pray three times a day. And you know, I would have done that. But the problem was, I actually really wanted to go to Ziegler. So, you know, it all worked out. But I could, I could imagine, of course, you know, the barrier that that presents for your average person who's super excited about Judaism, but not quite at, you know, at the place that you want students to be when they walk in.

I mean, I do think the Israel pieces, you know, not, not the from the angle that you described. I think from the angle you know, from the political angle, from the

you know, I don't want to have to become a.

Oaks person and a defender of policies that I think are wrong and immoral as a moral leader, and I've just watched as Rabbi as you know, who I've seen go through school have to muzzle themselves in order to get a job. And so I do think that there's truth to that as well. However, I'm curious to ask you, I think another thing that's happening is those students are actually going to school and getting ordained. And so I'm sort of wondering, you know, from your vantage point, what are you seeing happening with, you know, students who, throughout rabbinical school have been very critical of Israel, because they can be or, you know, or supportive, or whatever. But then they get into communities where, of course, most of those communities are, most of those communities are not homogeneous, you know, and don't reflect whatever specific you know, specific angle the students coming from.

What have you seen happen for those students, in terms of, you know, they're feeling like they can be themselves. Them, feeling like rabbinical school prepared them for what they actually have to do as Rabbi's Yeah. So, so can I answer that in the context of a bigger context? Absolutely, yes. Couple years ago, we were watching our numbers shrink, yes, and the school is getting smaller and smaller. And, you know, there's a point at which that becomes irrevocable, where there are so few people that if, if two people in the class don't like each other, the class implodes. And then people also don't want to go to a school where they come to visit and there's nobody there, that's right. So we established a Blue Ribbon Commission. We brought in people from all around North America. We brought in people who were affiliated with the conservative movement and people who were not, people who were reform, Orthodox, non denominational at all. We brought in rabbi and not Rabbi's. We brought in people who were thinkers about the Jewish future. And we did a three day intense conversation, and then out of that, they generated a list of proposals. And what I said to them, there are no sacred cows. Any proposal you want to make, make, and they came up with a list of here's what you need to do to reinvent rabbinic education. And we've now done all of that. We streamlined to the curriculum. We created a residency year in the final year of the program, so we took most of the practical rabbinic courses, and we put that in you can go be at a synagogue or a hospital or a chaplaincy or education or an agency, and you'll do your practical work with a rabbi supervising you on site, which means that can be anywhere in North America.

We streamlined the Israel program from a full year to two and a half month intensive. Most Israel programs, ours, included, were Disneyland Israel. You go to Israel, you study with Americans, you take the same courses you could take in America, and you get to walk the streets of Jerusalem, which is cool. But what we've done is created a program where you really wrestle with Israel's diverse populations, Zionism and its various histories, the history of the state of Israel,

Torah, to Eretz Israel, the texts that pertain to Israel. So it's a very intensive summer, and then we totally redid the curriculum. So it's now a four year program, if you come in with the right level of Hebrew

as a result of all that. Oh, we moved campuses. We're now in the heart of Pico Robertson, which is very Jewish neighborhood in LA and we brought in some new faculty members who are incredible. We did all of that as the Blue Ribbon had suggested, and no surprise. Oh, and we created tuition transparency. It's now $8,000 to come to rabbinical school each year. I'm sorry, Lizzi, that was not in your time, but that's the total tuition for each year. That's incredible. And we did that to lower the barriers. We did without lowering the standards. We wanted to keep high quality. We're still, you know, original texts in the original language. We're still, you know, committed to all of that, but we want to remove the artificial barriers. And as a result, for each of the past three years, we've grown.

And so we are now on the upward climb, age in which the pipeline is still a catastrophe. We are growing. And so I want to tell that to your listeners. Ziegler is growing, and we've been growing for three solid years, which changes the mood of the school and the breadth of the students and and they're amazing, and they're diverse and they're they have wonderful backgrounds, all of which enrich the school. We have several LGBT students, several they them students. We have a significant number of Jews of color, and and, and so the diversities that enrich our place is wonderful and extraordinary. And here's part of what makes it a little bit easier for us on the ISRAEL PALESTINE front.

I am going to say this here because I want to be not misunderstand.

Understood

we are a Zionist rabbinical school, but the Z word makes people crazy, so I generally don't use it because people mean different things by it.

I ask people, do you affirm the right of the Jewish people to national self determination in their homeland?

And the answer to that has to be yes, that has nothing to do with. Are you nauseous because of the current Israeli Government does has nothing to do with. Do you think the Palestinians also have a right to national self determination in their homeland? It has nothing to do with? Do you think that the settlements are an abomination? There are progressive Zionists and there are reactionary Zionists and there are centrist Zionists. The school doesn't take a stand on where you are. You have to be in the family. So our conversations are kind of heated, and we create space for them, but they're in the context of make Israel better, not eliminate Israel or create a Jewish identity, separate from Israel,

and that means we all have skin in the game, much the way most of us are not particularly happy necessarily with this current government in the United States, but that doesn't touch our devotion and love for this country. It means we're committed to making this country reflect its ideals.

So that means we have a slightly different version of the debate than in the schools that don't take a stand on that question. But you're right. There are a lot of people who just assume there's only one way to be a Zionist. And part of my job and part of the job of the Jewish establishment, is to go out and speak to congregations and remind them that if you say there's only one way to be a Zionist, then don't be surprised when your kids tell you, if that's what it means, then I'm not so you need to provide your kids with versions of Zionism that are outside your political comfort zone if you hope to keep them engaged. And I think we as a Jewish community, have done a terrible job of that over the last 25 years. Yeah, it's interesting. So first of all, I'm noticing what Irene put over here in the chat where she described kind of like the holistic approach that, you know, outside of the liberal world, like in the Orthodox community, you you know, reach out to the rabbi before coming in for Shabbat, they'll set you up with a family to, like, have Shabbat dinner or have Shabbat lunch. You know, you bring your kids to shul. They don't have to, like, sit in a stuffy room and wait for three and a half, you know, three hours for the service to be over. They can, like, play out in the courtyard where the older kids are babysitting the Orthodox day school movement. You know, it's like that. There's a whole structure for day school, and then a gap year, and whatever that just, there's a the whole the pipeline starts at birth. It does. It doesn't start at you know that, like teenage youth group, even it's like the pipeline starts at birth, which is just, it's a, it's a different and more holistic approach. I think that's true. Irene,

yeah, look, let's let's honor, there's much that's beautiful within orthodoxy, excuse me, there's much that's beautiful within orthodoxy, and much that is alluring for some of us, it comes at too great a cost, right? So I'm not prepared to leave my trans brothers and sisters outside. I'm not prepared to abandon my gay, lesbian brothers and sisters. I'm not prepared to abandon the worldview. I don't believe in a God who rewards and punishes every single infraction, and

so for me, that's not available, but I look with envy at their communities and what they're able to do, and we do need to do a better job of that. Although what I want to point out, Rabbi Lizzi is that's not a description of your congregation. Is it that stuffy service that the kids have to sit docilely and obediently in through the whole service, nor either? And the fact is, it's not for many, but there are still a lot of Jews who won't make your place a regular practice, or the place I go a regular practice. However alluring and wonderful it is, there's something deeper, which is why I started with structural things. Yeah, and we don't need to fix the problem for everybody. We just need to keep enough of a core that we transmit it to the next generation. That's our task. But what I'm telling you is I think Ziegler has done a job of addressing that, and I know that the other rabbinical schools are hard at work at figuring out, what do we need to revise, modify, so that we keep our core commitments while reaching the next generation.

Can we talk for a second, actually, about what Irene, what you raised, for me, is actually where you started at the beginning, when you're talking about cookie cutter, you know, this sort of like kids who grew up in the movement, kids who grew up singing the songs, going to the camps, you know, going to the youth group stuff, going to the conventions, doing a, you know, year in Israel.

Or, you know, a summer program. And then just knowing that after college they were going to go to rabbinical school, they were going to be Rabbi as they were going to be just like their rabbi, who they looked up to in their community. Maybe the services were boring, but like that guy was in charge, you know, and I want to be, I, that's what I want to do. And there were, there were members of the class I studied with, especially from JTS, I would say, you know, when we did our combined year with the Ziegler, the JTS students in Israel that year, where I met a lot of students who were exactly like they were products of the movement, you know, and the pipeline started in elementary school. Lizzi Yeah, I went to school with the great grandson of Solomon Schechter, wow, grandson of Louis Finkelstein. And these are, like, the great conservative,

my rule at Harvard and my rule at JTS was, if someone has the same last name as a really famous person, you don't ask them, Are you related? You ask them, How are you related?

Yeah. And so, you know, I do notice that, like the shrinkage that we're seeing in rabbinical schools, is happening across all of those parts of the pipeline as well. You know, Henry, my husband, was a leader in us. Why growing up, you know? And there would be like 1000 2000 people at the convention, and now it's a couple 100 people. And I'm wondering, you know is, is what is all that shrinkage in all the different you know, along every node? Is that like a symptom of what you were describing earlier? Yes, so all of those demographics that I talked about pertain there. And then the second thing is to review the to think about the rabbinic pipeline as a rabbi issue is already to remove the solution. Yeah, right. The solution is

we did a great job of adapting organized Judaism to America of the 1940s 50s, 60s, 70s. Brilliant job. They did what they needed to do in that generation to solve the problem for a generation. But every solution is only one generation long. That's right, it's now our time. It we need to figure out. Because, as I mentioned, look, the spirituality is still there. Yep, they're still saying Being Jewish matters. I'll give you another statistic that's shocking. The Federation here did a study of the Jewish population,

which group has greater Jewish clicks, meaning they do Jewish things. Talk to Jewish people, engage in Jewish practice, go to Jewish events, 30 and under, 60 and over. And what they found, counterintuitively, is that the 30 and under by far, register more Jewish clicks every week because they're listening to podcasts, they're listening to music, they're but what they're not doing is joining a synagogue and paying a membership due so so what we haven't done is figured out, how do We create the institutions to service these people, because at some point they're going to need someone to marry them, Bar Mitzvah, their kids do their life cycle, things, God forbid, funerals, visit them in the hospitals, answer their questions, right? They're going to need institutions of some kind, but what they don't need is their grandparents, synagogue, yeah, now I want to be clear, those synagogues aren't going away, nor should they right, but they will never have the centrality and the monopoly that they once had. And denominations will never go away, but they also will never have the centrality that they once had, either. So I think the job of all of us, not just rabbi, is to figure out what is it that will help deepen the Jewish lives of today's and tomorrow's Jews, what do they need? And then how do we get in front of them to offer them what it is they need that they're receptive to? And so here I will tell you, that's where we go back to. My job is the best and most optimistic job in the Jewish world, because I get these incredible people like Lizzi heidiman, and we take the famous walk by the camp, right? And then, for some reason, I'm able to help persuade them that this is their path in life. And they come in, and then they do things that I would never have thought of in a million years. And you are a prime example of that, but not the only example of that. And I can't tell you the number of times I've had the experience. I had the experience in your place, you know. So I go to your wonderful, wonderful community,

and you the whole service is stuff I would never have thought of, and it's amazing, and it's wonderful. And then in introducing me to the group, you say, This is my rabbi. I learned from him. It's like you didn't learn any of this from me. What I did was I gave you the tools and got out of the way. That's what our faculty did.

It, right? You brought this to it. So I don't need to come up with the solutions. I need to train the amazing, wonderful, out of the box people, so that they have the skills to rely on and the knowledge to make it authentic, and then trust that they will go in the world and they will betray me in 100 ways, right? They will do things I never thought of things that I would say, No, you can't You're not allowed to do that. And they'll do it. And I'll say, Oh, my God, that works. So

that's where my job is the best job in the world. I travel all around and I watch our alumni doing extraordinary things that work, and no one solution is going to fit. It's not like everybody do this. It's the each is going to be different for each different community and

and then they point to me and say, I learned that at this guy's school. No, you didn't. We just gave you the tools. Yeah, and so that I again, my generation doesn't need to think of the solutions. The other thing I'd say to donors, and if there are some listening, let me just speak to y'all right, our job is to fund things we don't like and won't attend if, if people walk in and they see a room full of us, and by us, I mean the old timers,

young people will just walk away. So what we have to do is pay for stuff we don't go to right and then and the fact that it's stuff that we say, Oh my God, that sounds awful.

It doesn't matter that we like it. Years ago, my rabbi, Sharon brows, who's the Rabbi of Ikar, also my rabbi, yeah, created a service that she called the Jerusalem service, and it met in the solarium, and they were no chairs in the room. She wanted everyone standing. And I hated that service, because, frankly, I have the soul of a 19 year old, but the knees of 120 year old. And so it was painful the whole time for me, and it smelled like a gym, and we were crowded, and it was hot, right? And

and then she came up to me afterwards and asked me what I thought, and I said to her, the day you start tailoring Ikar to my likes, is the day it starts to close, right? Don't worry about whether I liked it and I hated it. I've been to Jerusalem. They have chairs in Jerusalem,

but what I loved was there were 200 young Jews singing and dancing and doing Jewish and loving it. So really, don't worry about me, because I'm going to walk out of here saying that was the most incredible thing I've been to in so long. It was so inspiring. I hated it, but, but I loved what was going on. And so the donors have to do that too. They have to be willing to make possible programs and experiences that they themselves stay away from.

Great. Thank you.

Interesting. I mean, I do think you're describing

a dynamic that is really visible right now in the Democratic Party. You know, it's like you're describing like the a changing of the guard and a kind of protecting of the tradition, and a, yeah, like a sense of the elder generation having to protect something and, and, and actually doing harm by staying in, you know. I mean, obviously we need elders in positions, you know, like, like to educate, you know, but the people on the front lines, so to speak, you know, like the rabbi's going out into the world, actually need to be responsive to the people coming up and next generation. And we can't be constrained by the kind of directives from the top. I mean, it's what people ask me, like, why? You know, you chose to go to a conservative seminary, but why are you no longer part of the movement? And the fact of the matter is, I'm constrained in the way that I want to serve Jews by the decisions being made by people a generation, two generations, three generations. You know, who are able to vote in a body that yes, I would, you know, I'd love to be part of the chevre of the rabbinical assembly, but at the end of the day, they're tying my hands in ways that make it hard for me to serve Jews, and sorry, like I'm not going to be a member in that organization anymore, but I still proudly went to a conservative seminary, you know, and got that education, and actually, in very in a lot of ways, still adhere to the philosophy of being like Mara deatra of a community based on what I know of Jewish tradition, and what I know about our aspiration to serve Jews and bring them closer to Torah. Is it non Jews and everybody who wants to show up and be part of this thing?

Yeah,

and that's beautiful. Well, it's painful to watch. You know,

the elder generation actually.

Stand in the way of the next generation. Yes, it's, it's King Lear. It's King Lear. It's my job. I you know you live long enough you become an old, Cranky Muppet, you know those two Muppets

like, that's me now,

and my job is to back off, right? Being an elder statesman requires you to do some Simpson, to condense yourself and to trust the people who you've raised right, that it's their time and they will go where you and that's really hard to do. You're unwilling. You'll live long enough to have that struggle too. You'll sit in the background and say, oh my god, I'm already having it. I'm 44 and I'm already having it. I know what we should be doing here. And why are you not listening, right? But the the each generation, its job is to portray its predecessors in the advance of the values. And I agree with you. I think that's both look the Republican Party with which I have a huge problem these days, has completely reinvented itself. It's not the party of Reagan anymore. It's not the party of Nixon anymore. It's not the party of Eisenhower for sure, anymore. It's not even the party of Bucha one or two anymore, right? And they've enjoyed great political success because of that, the Democrats have to learn how to let go, how to be able to say we trust now, the next generation will be very diverse. I don't think it's clear where the next generation isn't all Bernie and AOC. There are plenty of democratic centrists in the next generation too, and they have to duke it out, but it's their fight, and what we can do is, when asked a question, answer the question and then smile and say, you're going to be great. Whatever you do, you're going to be great. I don't need to weigh in on this, right? But that's really, really hard, and I think that's true for the Jewish world in general. All of the legacy institutions need to smile, nurture, exude trust, and when asked answer, yeah, I mean, I think what you described earlier about the disconnect between the folks who are funding all of the institutions and the people attending them and expected to show up,

that there is a big disconnect In terms of the expectations set by folks you know, creating, creating the possibility for these institutions to exist. And then the the younger folks who want to, who want desperately to be part of the Jewish community, but not a Jewish community that's going to constrain them, or, God forbid, like make them feel like their Jewish values that they were taught

aren't going to be reflected or honored.

And so, I mean, I think it's visionary as as usual, because I know you, it's visionary to hear you like thread that needle you know that you actually you want to say to donors, of course, we want you to love what we do. We do a unique thing. We do an important thing, but it's not necessarily going to be for you, for you,

except if you are committed to the Jewish future, right? Like I'm a shepnachus machine at this point, I the Ziegler school. We had ordination. Was that last night, Monday night, and 350

people showed up to honor the six people we've now turned into rabbi. And they were wild, diverse people. I mean, really, they were unbelievable group. It's on it's on YouTube, if anyone wants to watch. It's a beautiful, inspiring ceremony, which we tweak every year because of suggestions from the seniors, like they changed the ceremony. It's not the same ceremony you did. I mean, it is, and it's not, but, but the thing is, like, in the end, that's what the donors, they're gonna and all of them have jobs. All of my seniors went out with jobs, right? Because they have what to offer the Jewish world, and they're going to change those institutions and strengthen them and so, and that's where the nakas will come in. The donors will gain great nakas, and they will have successfully enabled the Jewish people to survive into the next generation. That's enough. That's enough.

I think, as we close, just because we've, you know, maybe we could keep talking for a long time, but

I'm remembering a lunch and learn. I don't know if you still do this, but when I was a student, you would do a monthly Lunch and Learn where it was just like a ask Rabbi artson, whatever question you want to ask. Rabbi artson Stump the deen. And so I asked you, what are the three, and it was an arbitrary number, but I said the three most important Jewish questions facing all of us today. I remember that. Well, do you remember what your answer was? Because

you said, I'll tell you what you said. You said, I don't think.

Think I You said, I think the Jewish community is obsessed with asking Jewish questions about the Jewish community, our demographics, our you know, like the pipeline problem, what like we are obsessed with navel gazing. And if we actually want to contribute something, if you rabbis want to contribute something, don't ask questions about us. Ask the universal questions. What are three questions facing the world that we have uniquely Jewish answers for? Because we that's what Judaism is coming to offer. You know, not our right and and so. And then we, you know, I don't remember what we you know, did we talk about climate change? Did we talk about Israel? Did we talk about America? But, but you mentioned, like, three unique Jewish approaches to thinking about universal issues that are of concern to all of us, that Rabbi should be concerned about too, because we're members of the human family. So I wonder, in that vein, if there's anything you want to sort of like, yeah, so let me look I do remember that precious exchange.

I'm now working on a book that I hope to publish called wells of wisdom. And the argument of the book is that people make a mistake pigeonholing Judaism into the same religious categories as Christianity and Islam. It's not the same. It just looks the same in the West, but really it's a wisdom tradition and it's a technology to help people thrive in their humanity, and it has something therefore, to offer non Jews as well. It's it's a resource as would, as is any world wisdom.

I think part of what I answered you with is, there's a reason why I love the medieval thinkers, right? Because the modern thinkers ask itty bitty little Jewish questions, and then they muster universal tools to answer those questions. But the medievals ask great, big human questions, and then they muster Jewish tools to answer those questions, right? Rambam didn't worry about Jewish continuity. He didn't worry about survival. He didn't worry he worried about, what does it mean to be good? He worried about, what is our role in the world? How should we treat each other? What is a just society like those questions, and then he used Jewish resources to answer it, and that's a Judaism worthy of us, and that will link our generations. So I agree that part of the challenge is, let's ask those great big, universal questions, trusting that our tradition has the tools to answer them.

Well, this is a great place to stop. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and, by extension, with everybody who listens. And we'll put more information about the Ziegler school and the rest of your extensive and impressive bio in the show notes. And Well that may the May the walk to Shavuot, may the you know, now less than two weeks to Shavuot, be meaningful, and amen, may all of us receive the Torah that we need this year and that the world needs from us. Amen. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai