American Judaism #2: R'Deborah Waxman — Boldness & Holy Chutzpah in Reconstructing Judaism

Join Rabbi Lizzi and Rabbi Deborah Waxman, President and CEO of Reconstructing Judaism, for a conversation about the state of American Judaism and the boldness and "Holy Chutzpah" in Reconstructing Judaism

View From The Top: A Discussion Series w/ Rabbi Lizzi
Rabbis are on the front lines of leading communities, speaking out for moral clarity and Jewish values, and representing Jews in multi-faith spaces. But there is a rabbinic pipieline problem in the world outside of Orthodoxy, and this moment in American Jewish history has been called “the end of the Golden Age of Judaism in America.” Are we headed for a renaissance of American Judaism or a decline? Join Rabbi Lizzi for a series with the heads of different rabbinical seminaries training the next generation of Jewish leaders, on what they’re seeing from where they sit — what challenges and opportunities, and where they see American Judaism headed.

Two essays on chosenness: https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/c__c/Waxman%20Fuchs-Kreimer%20Chosen%20People.pdf

A talk on divine justice that R' Waxman gave at the Chautauqua Institute in 2019: https://www.reconstructingjudaism.org/article/divine-justice-jewish-perspective/

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

Transcript

Transcript

Deb Hello, welcome, welcome Rabbi Deborah Waxman, to our morning minion and to the place where I have discovered is the most interesting and interested bunch of people in our community to participate in and witness and be part of this, you know, conversation, and this kind of ongoing conversation about where the Jewish community is right now and where we are going, as indicated by what my friends and colleagues are seeing in the rabbinical seminaries, with the idea being that rabbis are kind of The like rabbi, are at the forefront of the various trends that are happening. And even if we're not at the forefront, we're certainly behind the people who are pushing the trends and and you know, there's interesting stuff happening, and one might see it through a lens of decline, but one might also see it through a lens of opportunity, and my suspicion is that from the different seminaries, you know, Orthodox, different shades of Orthodoxy, conservative, Reconstructionist reform, non denominational people are seeing different things. And so I am so happy to have you here with us. This morning, I'll read just a little bit of your bio, so people who are less familiar with you may know just a little bit about your background. Rabbi Deborah Waxman is the first woman rabbi to head a Jewish congregational union and a Jewish seminary. So Rabbi Deborah Waxman, PhD, became the president and CEO of reconstructing Judaism in 2014 she's drawn on her training as a rabbi and a historian to become the Reconstructionist movements, leading voice in the public square. She's taught at RRC, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College since 2002 where she is the Aaron and Marjorie Siegelman, Presidential Professor. Her writing has appeared in the forward the Times of Israel, The Philadelphia Inquirer JTA and other news outlets and several academic papers She's published. Waxman is a cum laude graduate of Columbia College, Columbia University, and graduated from RRC herself. She earned a PhD in American Jewish history from Temple University. And I'm so happy to welcome you this morning.

I'm so happy to be with you and with all of you.

All right, so I got to connect with Deborah a little bit last night, and one of the things that I was remembering back on was having my own visit to RRC as a prospective student, and being told something that felt true to me, which is, no matter what anybody may call themselves, Orthodox conservative reform, if they're alive in America today, practicing Judaism, they're Reconstructionist and so. And I thought, You know what, you're right. But I wonder, Deborah, if that sounds right to you, and if it is, why, like, can you explain what Reconstructionist Judaism is and why? No matter how a person defines themselves, they might just be a reconstructing Jew Sure,

there are a couple different there are a lot of different ways. When I used to teach reconstructionism, one which was before I was President, I would invite the students in the class to do reconstructionism on two feet. We call it the elevator. Excuse me, two minutes, and we called the elevator speech for a very, very, very tall building. And what's fascinating to me how everybody has a different way of unpacking it. So I'm going to do it a couple of different ways, really briefly. One is just like the definite reconstructionism was founded by Mordecai Kaplan, it emerged here in America. It was geared significantly toward the children of the the waves and waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe. So like, first first born American, first born American, first generation American Jews trying to, like, hold on to the richness of Jewish life, and also to embrace the fullness and the potential of democracy, of American civilization, of rationalism. So it was an effort to really, you know, there's, there's these, these mythological stories we think of immigrants sailing into New York Harbor and throwing their tefillin into the into New York, into the water. And this was an effort to say, No, you can hold on to your tefillin. You might, might want to make changes. And you can, and you can fully integrate into American society. Was a bit of a pushback against the melting pot ideology of like, strip away all of the things that made you unique in order to become American. And what Kaplan was insisting on was that you could be fully American. You could be fully Jewish. And this was a, this was a methodology to try to make that possible, and the methodology was essentially like a definition. He put forward the idea that Judaism is not only a religion, religion is really incredibly important, but that Judaism is the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people and. The things I want to call out there is, like, the nouns in that definition are civilization and people. And embedded within both of those is this understanding of diversity. When we talk about civilization, like religious is like, the is the is the main adjective. It's really, really important. But Judaism is about more than just religion. It's about culture. It's about ethics, and it's about food ways. It's about all these different ways of entering in the evolving is really important that over time and in different places, the most energizing, the most vital, the most important expressions of Judaism were going to be different and that they would get transmitted across that civilization and also get also changed, like Kaplan was writing at a time when

there was, can you give us, like a year? You know, we're a generation. He

his, he put, he put forward this definition in 1922 in the late teens, early 20s, he established his it's a synagogue, but the name was society for the advancement of Judaism, and he really understood it as like a lab where he would introduce all kinds of experiments, experiments, and tried to work through all the ways that he was willing to push and willing to explore. Because he, you know, our ancestors, they introduced these changes, but they did it in unselfconscious ways. When the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the rabbi's started to develop Rabbinic Judaism, they didn't think that they were like breaking with history. They thought that they were finding some ways of continuing history in the face of these challenges. And what Kaplan was able to was, was able and willing to say was yes, that we that's what they thought they were doing. And we see that they were doing that, but they were also actively introducing changes. And we are moderns. We bring a modern historical consciousness. So we can not only analyze that in the history, but we can also introduce some of those changes ourselves. So he was, it was a real activist approach. Kaplan was located most spent most of his life professionally, but also personally, within the conservative movement, and he was a real outlier at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where they would do the study of history, but they wouldn't introduce that. There was a lot of struggle and ambivalence about actively introducing the changes separate from the halachic process. And so there were among his followers, people who said, We really need to establish separate institutions that will take this on wholeheartedly. And so that's how the first that's how after World War, two congregations who were, they had this big pamphlet in campaign pamphlet, pamphlet hearing campaign during World War Two. So there were a lot of lay people, a lot of men and some women who served. More than half a million Jews served in the US armed forces. So they were exposed to these pamphlets. So mostly they were lay people who came back and wanted to establish synagogues, and they wanted to establish them expressly on Reconstructionist grounds, or they wanted to like they were conservative synagogues that were led by disciples who had studied with Mordecai Kaplan, who wanted to kind of jointly affiliate. So congregation started first and then as Kaplan aged, he lived 103 but as he was born in 1881 as his star started to kind of fade at JTS for age and for changing circumstances, then there were some of those leaders. My zoom, sorry, hopefully this is not going to be a problem. Somebody signed trying to sign on. You seem fine to us. Yeah, I'm getting all kinds of I made it go away, and hopefully it won't be a problem. So then there were, then there were some of these congregations. They wanted rabbis who were trained by the according to this approach. So that's that led to the establishment the reconstructions Rabbinical College in 1968 and then, as we started of graduates. It led to the establishment of the rabbinical Association, and lo and behold, we had a denomination. Those are the structures, the basic structures of the denomination, even though there was always this idea of an approach, and we kind of started to dismantle that denominational thing with a merger. We merged together the congregational union and the Rabbinical College about 13 years ago, and that's when the name reconstructing Judaism comes out. So this idea of being able to being actors in our own Judaism, and being able to draw on the breadth of diversity, I think that's and especially with an approach that's really infused by American commitments of democracy and an openness to kind of trying to find the harmony, harmonization between religion and rationalism. Really, I do think speaks to a lot of American Jews. And so whether or not sometime about big R reconstructionism, like I'm the head of the big most of many of the big R Reconstructionist organist institutions, and then small. Our reconstructionism, which is what, like most a lot of people, even if they've never heard of us, it just makes a lot of really intrinsic sense. I mean, what they'd say? Innings Kaplan really was a small d Democrat, that he really believed that what the people were doing was really, really important, and that put him in opposition. Rabbinic Judaism is a fairly top down, elite approach. And he was trying to find a marriage between,

between sort of grassroots and top down, I mean, in a very practical way, with what I'm thinking about is, you know, the family who keeps kosher at home, but eats out, you know, eats out whatever, and not not just eats out whatever, but eats shrimp, eats pork, eats whatever. But at home, they have separate dishes, and it's like that. There's something really important about the maintaining of the structures of tradition, but it's not because you think God is going to smite you for eating the wrong food. It's because you have, like, an emotional attachment to the structures of tradition. And at the end of the day, you're choosing where, where and when to apply them, right? And you want

to transmit it to your children, and you

want to transmit it to your children, and also you you're, you know, part of what you're saying to them in your practice of like going and having shrimp cocktail out while at the same time having separate dishes at home is something like tradition really matters to this family. And also we're not dogmatic about it. You know? What they said at the line that I learned when I did the visit was, Halakhah gets a vote, but not a veto, you know? And so it's like Halakhah gets a veto at home, but just a vote when we're out. And the truth is it loses. Truth is, it loses when we're at a restaurant. And that's right, most American Jews who are not orthodox practice Judaism in some kind of a way like that, where, you know, and we might say we're picking and choosing which, oh, that's Reform Judaism. But you know. So what, like, philosophically, what's maybe the difference between how you think of reconstructing Judaism and, like, how the Reform Movement constructs, you know, its relationship with Jewish tradition?

Yeah, so you just described my childhood completely like my we kept kosher at home. And my father actually is that first, like my my grandmother, my grandparents on my father said were immigrants like my father really was that generation. And I grew up in a left wing conservative synagogue that was infused with reconstructionism, even though I never heard the name or the word the approach until I became a religion major at Columbia and like, read about it in a in a class and so. And my, what my parents said was, we want you to have the best of both worlds, or another way, the way you were just saying it is like, yes, we are, you know, we're intensely connected to our Judaism, and we are, at the same time, citizens of the world and trying to find that possible balance. My mom was very active in women's league for conservative Judaism, and when I told her that I I wanted to go to rabbinic no one was surprised, but I wanted to go to rabbinical school. People were surprised that I wanted to go to RC. And there's long not the time to talk about that choice, but, but she was initially, like very bewildered and confused. And then basically, when I said living into when I gave her an intro book that talked about living in two civilizations, it mapped so completely on to to those choices that they had made his there's a there's there's a lot of There's historical reason about why reconstructionism is distinct from the Reform Movement. And think about, I just talked gave the years like Kevin was writing. Most of this theoretical work was done in the 20s and the 30s, and some some really important stuff in the 40s about setting aside the idea of Jews as the chosen people. That was that was a product of like post World War Two, living through two world wars and seeing the dangers of chauvinism led to that conclusion. But in the in the 20s and 30s, the primary expression of Reform Judaism was very classical. It was only a religion. Was only Judaism was only a religion. The Orthodox, on the reform of that era shared something in common that they understood Judaism to be exclusively about religion, to be exclusively religious. The Orthodox said it should determine every part of your life, and the reform said it should determine what happens at home, and then you are indeed a citizen of the world. So one,

an ethical monotheism, right? Like, basically, like, we don't need it to cush root Shabbat, although all the things that make Judaism kind of, like weird and make us stand out, like, we jettison those things in the Reform Movement. And, right? I mean, and it's what's, of course, interesting is like 100 years later now, like the reform movements coming back to so much of that

they have moved so much closer to us, and frankly, so the reconstruction so before I was founded on the idea of individual autonomy, like this great thing that emerged with modernity and reconstructionism is a bit of a critique. Happen you? Of course, we want. Want the I. We need to make space for the I, but the commitment to the we is also very strong cap and was really influenced by Emile Durkheim and the whole idea of collective consciousness. So there's a communitarian orientation, like decisions and Reconstructionist congregations are made, often communally, through values based decision making through people have to opt in. You can't just show up and vote. You opt in. You do a course of study. The rabbi is the primary teacher and interpreter and broker of text and tradition. You just decide what are the values you want to bring into play. Many of them emerge out of Jewish tradition. Many of them emerged out of American or broader discourse, and you decide together. So that there's, again, the both movements have really moved a lot more toward each other. And some of it is esthetic, like you go like, and it's almost how we train Rabbi's too, like we are not training rabbis. We are training Rabbi's toward a partnership with strong partnership with lay people. And in a in a and how to be leaders in a really democratic context. And that's it's not that that doesn't happen at the reform seminary, but the orientation and the pretty single minded focus on that is pretty it does mark it as different. There are a lot of reconstruction Rabbi so would be very comfortable in most reform settings. Reform settings. There are a lot of reform rabbi who would be very comfortable in many reconstruction settings. And there are some. They're pretty they're pretty elite, they're theological and esthetic, but there are some really significant differences.

Yeah, yeah. Well, so the the idea for this series of conversations kind of came out of the notion that, like, there there are some significant shifts and transformations, kind of like tectonic not the, you know, they're not, they're not earthquakes happening in a moment. They're like slow but observable changes happening, you know, decade to decade to decade. And one of those changes is there are fewer rabbinical students enrolling, across the board, in liberal in the liberal movements. And I think this is also true even in Liberal orthodoxy might not be true in the Haredi world. That I don't know, doesn't seem that way, but certainly in what we'd call like the liberal Jewish world, there are a lot of great seminaries and fewer students in each one of them. You know of the pictures on the walls of days of your you know there are 12 students, 15 students, 30 students in classes from the 1980s and 1990s and then, like this year, the school I graduated from with 13 students and got ordained that year. In 2010 there were six students that God ordained Ziegler this year, which I think they were, like, thrilled about it, but it was six, and that was up from, you know, two years ago. So, so this is a phenomenon, and that kind of contraction, that shrinkage is it's not just rabbinical students, you know, congregations are closing and merging, and so it just, it seems that there is a kind of tectonic shift happening. And I wondered, you know, from the vantage point where you sit both as the head of the rabbinical seminary, so observing students coming in, what they're bringing, what they're looking for, and then also understanding what's happening in synagogues across the country. You know the trends in synagogues across the country? Can you describe kind of, what you see happening and why, if you have any ideas,

I mean lots of ideas like so they're somewhat speculative, and I mean, as an historian, I have bring a lot of humility, like to it's, it's we understand in bits and pieces, and understanding emerges, you know, more powerfully later on, I will say that I stepped into this role. It was announced. I started on January, 1, 2014, and my appointment was announced in like, the first week of October of 2013 which was about six days after the 2013 Pew study came out. And that was the first real study of American Jews and what they think. And it really started to it was a deeply flawed study in a lot of different ways, but it definitely brought to the fore that American Jews were really understanding starting to understand ourselves very differently, and that the institutions and the organizations and the approaches that we built up after World War Two, when America before Israel was established, when the idea that Israel might be established was still an open Question, and when America, very suddenly, was thrust into the position of being the largest and wealthiest and most influential Jewish community, not just being the place where a lot of European immigrants, the bodies came. And then, even after immigration was shut down, the ideas continued to flow up until the start of World War Two, and suddenly we. Thrust into these this place of leadership. And what that Pew study started to show is that those structures which served us well for several decades were starting to really break down. And that, I would say that in the years following World War Two, a significant understanding of American Judaism was, like, kind of as as as, like construction, ethnic constructions of identity, that the religious piece was kind of acceptable, a kind of interesting kind of, we all kind of identified, I think about it in in the Cold War, first of all, a lot of other expressions of Jewishness, like Jewish socialism really got shut Jewish communism really got shut down. Not Jewish, but Jews who identified that way, that really got shrunk in the Cold War. And Eisenhower said, I don't care in the fight against the Soviet Union, I don't care what religion you are, as long as you're some religion. So being identifying as you do became really important. But we all know the stories of the synagogues that were mostly empty, except for the High Holidays, where they were filled with people and people mostly identified with this ethnic expression and reconstructionism had a lot to do with that. The concept of ethnicity didn't emerge. It was created by Jewish sociologists, by many but including Jewish sociologists who were struggling to talk about the extra religious expressions of Judaism that the wider world, especially like a Protestant America, that really saw religion only as a system of belief they were trying to grasp. And you think I mean this, this feels pertinent to mention up until, like the early 20th century, when Jews were trying to talk about that part of ourselves, we, in America, we use the language of race. And you that's why you saw like the young men's Hebrew Association or the Reform Movement used to be the union of American Hebrew congregations. And after Plessy versus Ferguson, Ferguson and the hardening of the color line, the race language became really dangerous for Jews. And so there were, there's grasping for language and for conceptualization and for ways to live that captured the more than religious identity that but that stayed away from the dangerous racial conversations. So that's how we lived for many, many decades. That's the Judaism I was born into. I grew up in, in West Hartford, Connecticut, and it's a little bit like the Skokie of Chicago, where you didn't have to be Jewish. It was in the air a lot like the Upper West Side of New York. I mean, not not with the cultural stuff, but the density kosher supermarket schools closed on high holidays. That's broken down and but we still have a tremendous amount of investment in the structures and in the infrastructure, in the conceptualizations, and so we one of the reasons why I see a decline across the of attendance, across the Jewish community, is that our structures don't meet the needs of this of a post ethnic Judaism, which looks and feels different. We're still, we're still learning the ways that they very much shaped by the by the digital like, look, we're all convening from different places on the web, like all these different options that didn't previously exist, and with unbelievably rapid change happening along the way. Like, I thought that my presidency would be mostly about helping American Jews make that shift from ethnic Judaism into post ethnic Judaism. And for sure, we've been doing a lot of that work, and we've been dealing with, you know, two Trump administrations and COVID and George Floyd and October 7 like so the pace of change isn't necessarily keeping up, I would say precisely. So I think that speaks to a lot of why synagogues, not not only there are other factors as well, but some of why synagogues are really, you know, we see incredible evidence of vitality, like Mishkan, and we also see these big edifices that are, you know, where the investment was, in the buildings and in the appearances. I mean, I don't mean to that's dismissive, like, but, but,

I mean, it's okay, like this past, this past Sunday, we took a couple kids from our B mitzvah class to the community mikvah. And the community mikvah is housed at what used to be Beth Hillel B'nai emuna, this enormous synagogue that you can see from the highway, and has this enormous sanctuary tower that from, from what I can tell, like, esthetically, it's interesting. But like, how do you say a bit like, for hearing inside the place? Like, sound, acoustics, thank you. Like, the acoustics are wild in there, and, you know, and at the end of the day, like, it had its moment for sure, this place was built to house a congregation that at one point in this space was thriving, but somehow the weather, like the focus on the building, the maintenance of the building, the needs of the building, and the amounts of hundreds of 1000s of dollars that go toward maintaining structures are not going into the whether you'd call. Like R and D, or just the human infrastructure required to actually serve humans, right, to serve the needs of people. And so Mishkan has now we're, like, 640 builder member households, and we do not have, you know, we have a space where we have, like, religious school and learning in an office, but we rent space for, you know, those big conventions of people, high holidays, Shabbat, you know, big, big moments of coming together, because it doesn't make financial sense, like all the money that that one might spend on that building one can spend on human beings that are responding to the needs of people in real time, which just feels like it's it, we're suffering. I mean, it's not it's, it's, like a it's, it's just a challenge, like it's, those buildings were built for a purpose, and they served an important purpose, and those buildings are also a metaphor, or rather like they're symbolic of the larger structures and institutions created to serve a particular moment in time, maybe post World War Two. It sounds like that's what you're saying, and now we're stuck with them, right, right, right?

And how do we recreate them? And so like, what were we communicating out to the wider world, and what were we communicating to ourselves? And that's, it's, it's, it's very much in flux. It's very, very much in flux. But I'll say also, just about rabbinical schools. In addition to all of that going on, there are a couple of things, and I know that you've had other speakers who probably address some of this a couple. I want to raise up two points that I think are really, really relevant to the reconstruction of Rabbinical College. Like, on the one hand, like, so I would love to talk about the curriculum and all the ways that I think that we are really, you know, we with this understanding of evolution and with this understanding of like, we want to train people for an activist approach to be leaders. You know, co leaders, co creators, and an activist approach to Judaism. On the one hand, we're pretty well in we keep remaking the curriculum, and remaking the curriculum, not in a frenetic way, but in a way that I think is really responsive to the and to help train leaders for the for the for the current and even more, for the future. I would say one of the things we're really leaning into right now is helping people to understand that, how to, how to, how to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable, and that that that is not that that is not a that's not a mandate of Judaism, that's and that's not a, it's not a helpful that approach in the crazy, disrupted world we're living in right now leads to a retreat and leads to a kind of small c conservatism that we, I don't think serves us well, but, but I would say there are two factors that I want to make certain get, like, added into this deliberation of why fewer rabbinical students. I mean, maybe three. Probably a lot of people have said, like, as congregations start to struggle, like, if the congregation, the congregation was the has been the major way for Rabbi's to earn, to make a living, to support themselves. That's not true. The Reconstructionist movement, since RSC was founded, was founded with this understanding of trying to meet the Jews where they are, and only about a third of our graduate serves in serving congregations. We have a huge percentage on campus and as as chaplains, either, you know, in hospitals or in geriatric settings, we have and then we've always had, like, a real entrepreneurial bent and but I, I it like Kaplan. One of the things he put forward in the 30s was this idea of organic community, and the idea that the synagogue was incredibly important, but it shouldn't be the center of Jewish life, because what about all those Jews who were not so interested in religion? It should be a communal organization where everybody pays their proverbial half shekel, probably prorated, so that there was more equity. And then if you were a member of the Jewish community, you could have access to a community rabbi. And it's a model that if we had adopted, it would be serving us incredibly well right now, and we're and we're still struggling. So one thing is that to go to rabbinical school, it's a it's a graduate program. It's it's five to five years or longer, for four years or longer, depending on where you go, and for many it's not, it's not, it's not the most expensive graduate program, but it's not the least. And the idea of possibly taking on debt and then having really uncertain job prospects that absolutely and the evidence of a Jewish community that is not really willing to grapple with the problem like an established Jewish community, that's very demoralizing, I will say, the student debt crisis. I don't think that most folks 50 and up, understand the magnitude of how much the higher education debt crisis that emerged after the Great Recession of 2008 has completely remade higher education, and how much that that would suppress enrollment, especially when along the way, the Jewish community created, like, funded internships to get like there are other pathways into Jewish communal leadership, like MBAs. This just. Foundation for a long time, paid for MBAs, if you as long as you committed to a couple of years of service in the Jewish community. So there

was also, there is also a pipeline crisis for other like senior level C suite type senior roles in Jewish communal life, right? So I think there's a general sense that what is impending, what is happening is we do not have the leadership in training or in place to take over for the people who are sort of at the top of these roles. And maybe that one of the reasons why we are struggling, you know, downstream, is because the folks at the top have not really, like, haven't turned over, or aren't quite ready or willing to deal with the actual issues coming up from sort of a grassroots level. But anyway, that there are other places and ways that Jews are being invited into leadership that are not as Rabbi,

that's exactly right, which, but then that's good and necessary, but you also have to pay attention to what it's going to do. It used to be that the main way you would emerge into Jewish communal leadership was through rabbinical school. And I do feel like, for a long time, you know, like, like, there's the Organize, there's there's a there's a push pull, there's an ambivalence about Rabbi sometimes. So there the Jewish, the broader, most of the seminaries are supported by their own people. There's not like a broad in the 60s, the last time there was a crisis in rabbinical enrollment, the J The Federation structure made massive investments in rabbinical seminaries. But that hasn't happened in 50 years. And there's I've been like, because I sit at a lot of different tables, both as a seminary head and as a movement head, I've been trying to wave the flag about saying like we are, there is a challenge and there is a crisis, and I have to say, I'm I'm underwhelmed, like the I feel like, and this happens too often. They have a theory of why and and they are going to lean into that theory, and I'm theory of why that the seminaries are moribund and not sufficiently creative, and the denominations are dead, and so therefore we should not invest in them. And

what's, what's their alternative? What's, I mean, like, invest in so

their alternative is like, I don't know. I mean, like, so, so, like, there's a So, one of them. So another theory is that the rabbi people don't respect, and therefore, because the seminaries are inferior, or the denominations are lacking in ideas, the rabbi, and it has been lowered. The esteem of the rabbi has been lowered. So therefore people don't want to go to rabbinical school. And so therefore, like, for example, the Jim Joseph Foundation has invested in a big, big initiative run through the shalom Hartman Institute to get Jewish educators, people with already have the Jewish education to give them the mikha, to give them the ordination in order to rehabilitate the Rabbinate. The same time, they commissioned a study that asked young folks, people of 18 to 40 years old, what do you think of Rabbi's? The level of respect was incredibly high. The desire to have a relationship with Rabbi's was incredibly high. Have they changed their strategy in light of the findings of that research project. No, right? So, it's so the so there's the other thing is that at RC, you know, look, we take the commitment I said that the other noun is, is people, and the centrality of people, and really trying to pay attention to the diversity of people who are attracted, who are Jewish, and also to, therefore, who are attracted to potential leadership, and we really want a rabbinate that looks like the people that we are serving. And so we, and we really, we have always, like reconstructionism, has always paid attention to the margins and tried to bring the aspirations and the experience of people on the margins to the center. So as soon as Kaplan founded the Society for the advancement of Judas in the 1922 the first thing he had four daughters. His oldest was 12, and he brought her forward Judith Kaplan for to become later Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, to become the first Bat Mitzvah in America. And that was the beginning of an and it was two years after the American influence was incredibly high, two years after the 19th Amendment granting women suffrage. And so that precipitated a real move toward women's religious equality, also social equality, not at the same exact moment, from the 50s on, the Reconstructionist movement recognized that Jews who were choosing to marry non Jews were not making a decision to exit the Jewish community. So Reconstructionist congregations passed a resolution in 1968 acknowledging patrilineal descent and. And and RC has admitted students who are one so ambulance one Jewish parent and raised in a Jewish household. So that's been early on that also led early on in my presidency that we started to admit rabbi who were partnered with non Jews who wanted to serve the Jewish people who live deeply immersive Jewish lives, and recognizing that we wanted the rabbi's to not be symbolic exemplars only, only the only holders of some kind of authentic Judaism over here, while their congregants are doing something completely different, we wanted a much greater continuity. And our current commitments are also about we also, we were the first seminary to admit openly, initially gay and lesbian and then bisexual people. And we've been graduating, you know, admitting and graduating trans students for about 15 years now. And and also really trying to live into our racial equity commitments and really invest in Jews of color who want and who often face many more barriers, and we have not gotten a lot of support for a lot of this stuff. And I would say the current thing that we're really struggling with is that that's struggling with we're really, really, really committed to it, and we're paying a price for it, is that we you do not need to be an ideological Reconstructionist to enroll at the reconstructions Rabbinical College. I talked about reconstructionism as a methodology, and that's what Reconstructionist Judaism like advances in the widest possible way. And then there are congregations that are organized around that. And this curriculum is deeply shaped by core commitments of reconstructionism. The first couple years of the program, are we study about the evolving religious civilization. So students start with the biblical period and then layer in what happened with the rabbinic period, medieval, modern, contemporary. And that's the first couple so that's very, very Reconstructionist. The whole that we train them on values based decision making and on Democratic leadership, we also want we understand that book learning only goes so far when it's this kind of leadership, and so we've always had this very robust, what we call practical rabbinic program, trying to make certain That Rabbi's know how to to really walk the walk and do this stuff. And we've leaned into the last two years of our rabbinical program are immersive internships, where students can go anywhere and with really strong local supervision and also distance supervision from us. And they the last couple of years of schooling is about this, like really learning how to be a rabbi in the field while continuing to learn. And we come together twice a year for school wide retreats. So we, we say, you don't, you don't have to be an ideologic you. So many, many, many people resonate both with that idea educational approach and the community that it creates, the it's a very Hamish, it's a very intentional and intense community and and you don't need to. I was not a card carrying Reconstructionist when I started. I was by the time I graduated, but we don't. We're not trying to indoctrinate. We're just trying to offer this. We really believe in the approach. So reconstructionism. Kaplan was a huge Zionist, very, very involved. But he was, and he was a cultural Zionist. He had a lot of apprehensions about state power married to religious authority. I talked about the setting aside of choseness. He was as concerned about empires and the chauvinism there. He's also concerned about, like he saw the Catholic Church and the power that it wielded. He was very worried. So he, when he he absolutely saw that Israel should be like this vibrant cultural center, like his Zionist mentor, and he was really worried about about Orthodox Judaism, married to state everything that is playing out in Israel right now. Kaplan, named expressed his concerns about as early as the 19 early 1940s was talking a lot about it. In the 1950s after these very supportive of the establishment of the state. When it happened, he preferred a Commonwealth with international involvement, in part for minor protections of my religious and cultural national minorities. But he was supportive, but had these concerns and these critiques. So there is this really strong Zionist history, but there's also this understanding of evolution and that I wouldn't, I don't presume that what Kaplan saw and believe, and he spent much of the 1970s living in Israel. I came back because he was aging, and his daughters wanted him nearby, and spent the last couple of years in New York City. But we, we have a required study in Israel. We absolutely believe in worldwide. Jewish peoplehood, and we also don't have a litmus test on Israel. We the litmus test we have is how we treat each other, how we stay in connection and stay in community and and that has meant that we talk to rabbinical students, perspective rabbinical students, about their relationship to Israel. We let them know that we have this requirement. It's been a requirement that's been hard to enforce in COVID and post October 7, but we do admit non Zionists, and we do admit anti Zionists, and that has been we the expectation is that they'll be within the framework that we lay out. And we do, that's been like intolerable for elements of the Jewish community, that the idea that, I think that there's like this, this deep discomfort of the idea that there's someone who could declare themselves to be anti Zionist and still want to be a rabbi like I think that that's like a mind boggling and it's and there's very little curiosity about it or and there's very little What is anti Zionism, and what it the obligation it places on us is like, we really have to learn how to do conflict and well. And we were like, not so up to the challenge. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, like we, along with everyone in the Jewish world, was shocked and traumatized, and we saw really quickly, oh, we need to deepen these skills. And it was last year was a terrible and difficult year, and we learned so much from it. And this year has been really gorgeous, and everyone has really doubled down on the language I use is building covenantal community across difference. So

Deborah, I want to ask you another question, and then it looks like Morris actually has a hand raised. So, Morris, I see you there, and just hold it for a minute, and then, and then you'll get the next word. So there's a lot in what you said that I want to like, sort of comment, comment on, and then, and then ask about. One of the things that you mentioned is just like, you know, from Mordecai Kaplan's daughters Bat Mitzvah forward, he and you know what became the Reconstructionist movement really was at the foreground of kind of every boundary issue in the Jewish community as it played out. And so inclusion of women, leadership of women, inclusion of LGBTQ people, leadership of LGBTQ people, inclusion of patrilineal Jews. You know people who have one Jewish parent, whether it's a mother or father, and say, You know what? You identify as a Jew. Like, welcome to the family. You can be a leader here, which you know, and all of these. It's like, you know when? When a community or a yeah, when I feel like when, when a group steps out, you know, half a step, or a step in front of the mainstream consensus, that's usually not one of the large, you know, hulking institutions in the community. It is usually a small fringe, fringe, like nimble, a community that is able, right, that is able to kind of do, do a process of discernment, you know, within the values of that group that's not, that's not big enough, and, you know, sort of stayed in its ways, enough to be tied to, you know, whatever used to be, and enable, really, to be nimble and respond to the moment and and usually does, because you're on the front lines, pay for that choice with people, you know, from the mainstream and from the outside, like the majority. So, and I'm putting that in, like, air quotes, you know, saying, Oh, you've, you've, uh, relinquished, you know, you've relinquished your card, and, you know, whatever, like, you've, this is not Judaism. Like, what you're doing is not Judaism. And then it's, yeah, and then it takes, you know, a decade of proving No, in fact, it's Judaism. Like these are people, just like you're a person. And you know, women can lead LGBTQ people can lead. Men and women can be married, but men and men can be married, and women and women can be married. And turns out, people who don't necessarily believe in a ethno national, religious nation state can also be great pastoral presences and rabbis and their commitments around Israel are not necessarily traitorous. They might actually be the same very values that motivate you expressed differently and like and we think that's okay, you know, we're going to say that's okay, and you'll pay for it, and you're because you're on the front lines of that. But I think what that ends up doing is creating the you know. It creates the plausibility for people to think outside of the boxes you know, and outside of the you know, sort of the constraints that people have been thinking within up until this point you but you pay for it, because people like, you know, have an initial resistance to i. Ideas that feel progressive, even people who think of themselves as progressive, you know, and you age, you get older, you have become stayed in your commitments. I mean, I've talked to so many people who say, I, you know, I'm progressive, but this, this is a bridge too far, and it's sort of like, I, I totally, I get the emotion around that. And also, you know, the the horses out of the barn, like the train has left the station. So the question is, like, how are we going to, in a nimble way, respond to the evolving needs of the Jewish people as we are seeing them unfold, rather than saying, like, Oh, if we could just stuff the toothpaste back into the tube, you know, we then we could recover American Judaism? No, like, that's actually like that. That's not the emergent way to respond to the real needs, aspirations, hopes, expressions of Jewish people in this country who want desperately to be involved, and also it's really, really hard. So my question here is specifically with Israel and Palestine. You know, you talked about how last year was really hard. This year you've had, like, you use the word gorgeous. I love hearing that. That's so nice. I'm wondering, like, what did you learn, you know, if you are kind of like the R and D wing in some ways, of like the Jewish community, kind of at the front lines, responding in real time to the needs as they're unfolding, what did you learn that actually should be, you know, that should be practiced more widely, because it will help people and help people feel more included and supported and not rejected by or, you know, all the other things that happened over the last year that drove people away. What did you learn that can help people and after you respond here, then Morris, you can ask your question. And

after, after I respond, and before Morris, I'm just, I'm not at home, and I thought I had a lot more juice, so I'm going to take one second to just run across the hall and get my power cord so I don't disappear on you. So I'll answer great, grab the cord and then come back for Morris's question. I i It's everything you said. Lizzi, I agree completely. It's so much more helpful when you say it, because when I say it, we are the speedboat that's kind of out ahead of the Jewish community and the Reform Movement, which often adopts our changes, like our innovations, about 15 years later, is the ship of state that's a lot slower to move if I say it, people say, Oh, you're being self serving. But I think that, and I think that you're absolutely right. What did we learn? What did we learn? We learned that? Well, we learned that we have to develop skills to actually listen to each other, not listen to like, okay, when are you going to stop talking? So I can make my point, either to dismantle yours or to reinforce what I'm saying, but actually to listen. We have to and then there's your skills. And it's a very for those of us who are Ashkenazi descendants of like the Ashkenazi immigration. Like these are not skills that are culturally prevalent, like we jump in, we interrupt each other.

I say that, like interrupting is a Jewish love language, yeah, but, but yeah, it's also something we need to know when to like, how we can control it, yeah, okay,

um, yeah, it's

gonna go, go, go, get your power.

I always say, I mean, more than that, I so appreciate the question. I

I'm friends. I think we'll be here until 930 and then we'll and then we'll call it. When

I sat down, it said I had two and a half hours, and now it's telling me it's about to shut down. So I apologize. It gets the video. So we learned that we have to develop, we have to invest in Tada Great, great. We have to invest in learning new ways of listening and learning new ways of talking. And this is certainly true for Israel. It's also that really helps with some of the racial equity we're racial equity work that we're going to do. Like this maps on to some of the things that, like anti white fragility folks have said, of like, what, you know, white supremacist culture and like making space. So that's one thing we learned, is like, invest in this learning new skills, especially around challenging topics. We learned that so much of the conflict around Israel and Palestine is a generational conflict, and there are probably six generations involved in this conversation, from survivors or people who lived in the same time period as the Shoah, all the way down to our youngest, like the, you know, the kids who want to be involved in the Jewish community, and they are frequently talking at cross purposes. They are absolutely not listening with empathy or curiosity. Um. And I've been incredibly pained by those folks from older generations who've said there is no place for you in the Jewish community if you hold those views. Oh, yeah. We've learned that that the that the terms Zionist and anti Zionist are almost completely devoid of meaning Yes, and people project onto them whatever they think and whatever they fear, and then, then they, furthermore, they use them as cudgels to beat each other up. And we've also learned that when we try to navigate away from that language, that there's just incredible anxiety, especially there are people who just, if you do not say Zionist like they won't even participate in the conversation, so that it's a very narrow space. We learned that it is absolutely possible to build what I call covenantal community and stay together across difference. If you, if you, if you make that the non negotiable, then it can work, and it means living with discomfort and leading with leading from a place of discomfort to and helping people develop capacities. That doesn't mean it's constant discomfort, but it means that it you know that just because one is uncomfortable doesn't means is not an invitation or a pretext to exit, I feel like there's one more thing that we learned. What did we learn? That's probably, I mean, I think we those are good, yeah,

no. But I mean, even just to think about how at the heart of Jewish spiritual practice is saying the word Shema, which means listen. And you know, or pay attention, as I learned from Rabbi Darby Lee, an RRC grad, you know, who is non, non hearing, who's deaf, who says, pay attention. Pay attention. That means, like, your whole focus. Like it and like, we need to say that, right? It's not, not this, it's this, right, not, not putting your hands behind your ears. It's, it's, it's showing that you are fully present. It's he name me. And that's the difference between, like, really listening and kind of like listening in the way that you were describing. Most people are often listening in hard conversations, which is like, when's the opening when I can rebut the thing that you said because I disagree, and you need to be put in your place and and instead being in a place of real receptivity, which is a spiritual practice, it's not something that you know, yes, if you have functioning ears, it happens by default, but it doesn't really happen. Your heart isn't hearing. And so the you know, the practice and not just hearing heart, is a practice. It's a practice, and it's

not only about listening just to be empathetic or to show up for it's not, it's not, it's also with the willingness to possibly be transformed. Yeah, that's true, like in the individual, and it's also true, like, that's a that's a Reconstructionist approach to community building, that when we bring people from the margins into the center. It's not just a welcome. Come on in. You are welcome. You should assimilate to what I think, what we think, are the most important things. It is, come on in. Let us learn from you, and we will be changed. We is as members, and we as a community will be changed by this encounter. And that's scary, but it's also scary. It's, you know, yeah,

all right, Morris and yeah, I just

want to make a comment. I grew up in the mother church of reconstructions, mish Bucha, you know, the Father, the Son in law and the Holy Ghost Writer, right? Kaplan. I rise in Eugene. Cohen, my first girl. My first girlfriend was ironstein's niece, Hester. Now she, of course, became a radical, but the point is, but I'm trying to say, look, captain was born in 1885 whatever. And was 84 I forget exactly, but he was anyone. But the point is, he wrote Judaism and civilization 1934 by then, he was already close to 50, or maybe older 50, right? And his thinking was very influenced by a lot of including the liberal Protestant theologians at the Union Theological Seminary across the street from the Jewish Theological Seminary. I'm going to make a statement, not so much raise a question, but to just raise some, maybe thinking, some issues. The problem with it is the world that Kaplan was dealing with, and you hit it right on the button, it was a second generation Eastern European Jewish phenomenon. People like to be Jewish. They just didn't believe in the traditional that generation is gone, and the whole world that he grew up with is gone, including a big thing was Hitler the book was almost stated by the time he wrote it. And the question then arose in a very real sense, among other things, is, how do you do. Deal with evil, all right, Captain is not very good at and you're absolutely correct. After the Second World War, whatever passed for thinking in the conservative and reform with reconstruction, that was because of the homogenization on other things of the Jewish community. That breakdown between the Eastern European the German Jews broke down. And the real point, I'm trying, I think everything you say, but the world is changed again. Just the other day, there's a prayer out here called prayer for the French Republic. I don't know if you're familiar with that play, but any case, it's about people in France who've been there for a long time and then decide to go to Israel because they're concerned about their safety. In other words, not only has the world changed, but America's changed. Needless to say, a lot of the ideas that Kaplan had was the idea of people trying to integrate themselves, as you said, into American society, that society is no longer the same. And so what I'm really saying is, I agree with much of that you say, but I think that a lot of the ideas, including as the liberal not only Jewish liberal churches the but liberal religious organizations in general, Having trouble that may be reversing now, but for example, you mentioned the chosen people concept. Kaplan said, Look, that's that's not being very American. On the other hand, I myself feel that it's probably a mistake, right? Most people feel now, you may disagree with me, and I'm not trying to, but the point is, most people feel they're sort of chosen people, but what Judaism did was then try to put that into religious conflict, or at least he'd make that argument religious conflict. What I'm trying to say is that you can talk about Kaplan, you can talk about reconstructionism, but the problem is that the whole world, the whole framework that created his thinking is, you know, basically gone all right, including the whole including the entire demographic basis. So that's really what I'm saying. It needs to be total rethinking so much for that. I

think that's, I mean, as you're saying that, Morris, I'm like, my god, could that actually be said about basically every social critic you know over the years, you know, like Durkheim, Freud Marx, you know that like they were responding to the world in which and so they were saying some truths that are timeless truths, and some of those truths will apply very differently, and maybe stop applying when the world changes, and that that's just always something to be aware of when we think back on the influence of great thinkers. But actually So Deborah as we're rabbi, Rabbi Waxman as we are, as we are approaching the end of this hour, I actually think like that, what what you observed Morris, is a great segue to help, to help, to help, kind of like tie a bow in the conversation, you know, like using where the movement has come from, but looking at where the world is now, where America is now, kind of, what are the opportunities for this movement, or For, you know, what are the opportunities facing us as liberal American Jews that you see, you know, drawing from the past, and also, you know, jettisoning some of things that you know might have been orthodoxy before, or, you know, core principles of reconstructionism before that actually may apply less now, given that the world actually

is different. So I want to, I want to say I put a dropped, a couple links in, one about about the Odyssey, about the problem of evil, and my efforts to and my efforts to present a Reconstructionist approach at the Chautauqua Institute. And then also two essays on chosen us that kind of address some of the things that Morris was talking about really, really astute this look, I talked about Judaism as the evolving religious civilization Kaplan's court insight, and that evolution is applies to reconstructionism as well. You are absolutely right that Kaplan was trying to Americanize the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and our work today is about trying to Judaize folks who have grown up in a very American environment. They are not the same challenges. They're also not the same opportunities as you, as you said, Lizzi, I think that there is within reconstructionism, there is a tension. There are some people who absolutely believe that Kaplan is the Alpha and the Omega, and that we should be referring to Judaism as a civilization again and again and again. And I am of the belief that what we want to take from Kaplan is his boldness, his holy chutzpah to take hold of he was a real Magpie and anything. That he thought would breathe life into the Jewish people. He was willing to grab hold of it so Durkheim and other expressions of social science science. He was not a Freudian, but was interested in some expressions of psychology. He was really involved in actively involved in conversations with folks like Robert Park and Horace Callan, who were building out the whole idea of Colin was working on pluralism like he was going to use any kind of tool. And we need to have that kind of confidence. The tagline of reconstructing Judaism is deeply rooted and boldly relevant. We need to have that kind of confidence in and orientation toward our the rich storehouse of Jewish wisdom and Jewish practice, and we need to also have that the same kind of bold openness to the tools and the possibilities of the wider world. So that's definitely my approach, that I do understand myself to be pretty kaplanian, but it's in the spirit of Kaplan it's not in the our world is so different. He never could have imagined when he talked about living two civilizations the way that Jews have been embraced, and he would be devastated by the rise of anti semitism that we're seeing around the world and in America and in the dismantling of democratic systems here and in Israel. I I think that the the the the the moment I do really feel like reconstructionism focus on community is incredibly important. Right now it's not. This is a this is a take on a deeply central Jewish tenant. This is not anything that reconstructionism is exclusively owned, but in that way and the fact that we understand it to be oriented toward the synagogue, but not exclusively within the synagogue. And that's led to some of our some of the experimentation and some of the investments we've made in R and D, not as much as we would like, because we don't have as much money to invest in as we would like, but some definitely our openness and to ritual, our website ritual Well, which provides support for and tries to give voice to aspirations around ritual. I feel like our ancestors knew how to be resilient in the face of challenge, and I am. I we are living in more challenge than I ever could have imagined when I was a child, when I started rabbinical school, when I graduated, 26 years ago. So I do think that about and especially like, we've got the headlines, the devastating headlines, and then we've got also got this, like the studies that show, like unprecedented levels of loneliness. Like our ancestors got things right that we are clearly struggling with or getting wrong. And like, so to try to recommit to community and to an understanding of mutual obligation, willingly assumed, rather than imposed. That feels incredibly important the covenantal community work that I'm talking about. I feel like this is going to be another instance that if we make it through the disapprobation that we get for tolerating anti Zionist, even as I've told you, like those, I think those words are meaningless. We will once again, be a model for the rest of the Jewish community. It's enough of a maelstrom that on bad days, I worry, will, you know, will they silence us? Not silence us like Not, not shut us down, but just starve us of resources, or, you know, like the headlines, you know, we could have an article that talks about, I announced that I'll be stepping down, and it was a, it was a very long and wonderful interview. It's, I've got 14 more months to go, but a long and wonderful interview about a lot of different things. And the headline that, the editor, not the reporter, slapped on was Reconstructionist leader to step down amidst anti Zionist controversies. And it's like it was, it was such a neck, and we got them to change it, but it was JTA, so it went out to the wire services and and when the reporter himself, who has a Sunday column, was able to title it himself, he says, this is why this Reconstructionist leader is stepping down after 13 years. And it was, it was just a it was just an invitation. It was a variation of this conversation, but it reads completely differently with those headlines. Yeah.

I mean, I think what I'm seeing is the same dynamics happening in the country at large right now, with the government trying to, basically, you know, use loopholes and legal cudgels to silence universities and free speech around things that don't conform to, you know, their particular agenda or angle. You know that that that is a compelling it's a compelling strategy for, you know, organizations to kind of visit on smaller, less powerful, less powerful bodies that are saying things that feel true and relevant and important, but contrary to the long held orthodoxies of the, you know, of of the of the power structure. And you. You know, and I don't know any other strategy than to keep being true to yourself and your institution and the the mechanisms and you know, strategies that are working for you to create the, you know, beautiful little island of, you know, research design and you know, experimentation that that really do end up leading to the transformation of the American Jewish community, and it really has. And I feel like if we look back, you know, the backward looking 100 Year gaze, you can, you can really see the ways in which, the ways in which RRC and the Recon Movement has done that. So I really want to bless and pray that the movement continues to be able to play that role for the American Jewish community, that you have the resources that you need and the visibility and the recognition for all of the really beautiful work that you've done and the mistakes you've made and the lessons you've learned. So may there be many, many more years to to learn and grow for you and for all of us. Thank you

very much. Thank you very much. That's

a blessing to do it alongside you to off this path. Thank.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai