Sara Luria:	I was sure "we're going to nurture the spiritual life of parents. We're going to have a Tuesday night session with parents, and we're going to love each other. We're going to create a small group and we're going to build community that way." Parents can't leave their house on a Tuesday night to go to something that I thought was a good idea.

Deborah Waxman:	I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu -- a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. Today, I'm so happy to welcome Rabbi Sara Luria. Sara is a rabbi who was ordained in the Reform movement and she's had an amazing biography. She was the founder of ImmerseNYC -- a community mikveh project -- a community ritual bath project --  and she, with her husband, Isaac, is the co-founder of Beloved Brooklyn -- a spiritual community. And right now, she is investing a lot of energy in establishing the Beloved Network -- a network of spiritual communities across North America.
	Sara, welcome.

Sara Luria:	Thank you for having me.

Deborah Waxman:	I'm so happy to have you and to have this conversation. I think where I want to begin with is to ask you to talk about what Beloved Brooklyn is. It is, as the introduction suggests, a spiritual community. It is distinct, I think, from a synagogue and other institutions. So if you could talk a little bit about what it is and its aspirations and how it functions, I think that would be a great place to start.

Sara Luria:	Great. I was running the community mikveh project, and we had on the books, just by chance, a gathering of our volunteer leaders, and it was the Wednesday after the 2016 election. Just by chance. We gathered in a synagogue boardroom the evening of Wednesday, November whatever it was, 2016, and we needed a space to cry and we needed a space to be in shock, and we co-created a ritual together in the moment because that's what we do as ritual leaders, and we held each other. That's what we did.
	And as I was sitting there in that experience, I thought about, "Wow. I wish we weren't in such a sterile ugly room. Wow. I wish there was a place where people knew they could go for this kind of experience that you didn't have to be specifically invited in a specific cohort of volunteers for this specific organization, but that there was just a place that you could go to be nourished and to be scared and to be loved."

Deborah Waxman:	So Beloved is a home-based project.

Sara Luria:	Yes. So Beloved is a home -- our home. We moved into this house in August, and we took a month to set up and then basically opened our doors and started inviting our people. And I always say when people call me and say, "How do I start something?" which obviously happens now from time to time, I just say start with yourself. Start with your people. What do you need and what do your people need? And then if it starts with this core of truth for you, it will blossom into something as long as you keep checking in with yourself and keep checking in with your people.
	And so we started this thing, and part of this was I have three small children and they don't want to go to synagogue. (laughs) And I think there is a big open space in the Jewish world for supporting the spiritual needs of parents. And so even if we were just doing that at Beloved, even if we were just saying we're nurturing families, especially the spiritual life of parents, I think that would have been enough at Beloved in some ways.
	But we started with that kernel. We started with the kernel of people are scared, and this is going to be a harder period after 2016 than we could have imagined. And we started with this understanding that synagogue wasn't working for our family, and we know it doesn't always work especially in the time of having young children. So how can we create a space that is safe and warm and loving and serves the spiritual life of parents and it really grew from there based on who came through the doors.

Deborah Waxman:	So you started with your people, but I'm assuming now it's people you don't know walking through the doors as well. So who's coming? Is it young families?

Sara Luria:	Yes. I thought we would build a community for young children and their parents. One of the stories I like to tell is that I was sure we're going to nurture the spiritual life of parents. We're going to have a Tuesday night session with parents and we're going to love each other. We're going to create a small group and just in the vein of small groups at churches and small groups like Parker Palmer talks about and we're going to build community that way.
	The first couple of months we called meetings for Tuesday night. Parents can't leave their house on a Tuesday night to go to something that I thought was a good idea! And so we learned very quickly that that's not how we're going to serve the spiritual life of parents. At this point, we have a lot of different micro-constituencies, I guess I would say. We serve families at a family gathering we call Beloved Garden and then we serve-- . The way I put it is people who can stay out late on one Friday night a month, that means whoever doesn't feel they have to be home late in the evening can come, and that has grown and I really didn't think I would want -- I am always so tired on Fridays, but it turns out that young adults want a Jewish life on Friday night.
	It's really grown and we have lay people leading with me, and we have musicians that come, and it's become this really beautiful what I call "prayer play" experiment and if we didn't have to do any particular part of a Friday night prayer experience, what would we want? We do Kabbalat Shabbat. We do learning and then we do Kaddish and a closing prayer.
	And Rabbi Larry Hoffman is my teacher. And he always says don't do the parts of prayer where the air gets sucked out of the room. And he always says if people don't want the Aleinu, you can feel it in the room, don't do the Aleinu, and my feeling about Friday night was we really need some joy and some holding space, and I don't feel that we have to do any particular thing on any particular Friday night. It's really about feeling into where we are in the world, where we are in our calendar, where we are as leaders, and then offering that to the community.

Deborah Waxman:	So you're not going to get someone who really is halachically legally oriented and who feels like they need the prescribed service in the prayer book. They might come as an anthropological experience but that's not necessarily going to meet their spiritual needs. You're trying to find that best possible intersection between the leader's assessment and the people in the room, what their needs are.

Sara Luria:	Yes, and I also know that Brooklyn offers a lot of different kinds of Jewish experiences, and we have the luxury of doing prayer in this way. It won't work in every community, but it works in Brooklyn.
	And then another community that I am surprised about was we now offer Sunday night meditation every week. And that came from a community member who said, "I'd like to lead a weekly meditation based on the Omer", and I have to say it was my first time really tracking the Omer, the weeks between Passover and Shavuot, and then after the Omer was over, everyone just looked at each other and said, "Let's keep doing this." And it has become one of the most profound experiences of my life to be in weekly community with people who are searching for depth in their Jewish experience.

Deborah Waxman:	That's so great. So I have to ask you about the name. I love the name. And so tell me where it comes from and what it means to you and how people respond to it.

Sara Luria:	One of the things that is important to me about the name is that if you've never walked through our doors, you know what we're trying to tell you, which is that you are loved and we know that in our struggles of our time, everything is commodified, including humans, based on how much you can produce or how young you are or how thin you are or how beautiful you are or how smart you are or how much you've worked this week.
	And what if there was a space that told you, "Guess what. No matter what, no matter, as my mentor says, how good you are at tuba, you are loved. And nothing you're going to do is going to change my perspective that you deserve to be loved and listened to."
	And so we want to communicate that to people. Even if they never come through the doors. When they hear that we are the Beloved community, they know a little bit or they might get a taste of what we stand for.
	The other reason we named the house Beloved is because we were thinking about this project over Passover three years ago. And some people know this and some people don't, and I was one that didn't, that Passover and the Song of Songs, which is the book of love poetry in the Tanakh, in the Hebrew Bible, they're connected -- Passover and the Song of Songs.
	And so three years ago, on Passover, I learned this and I read the Song of Songs, and I know that some people say that the Song of Songs is a book of love poetry between God and Israel as a metaphor. And some people say it's a book of love poetry between one person and another person -- a little bit less as a metaphor -- a little bit more as love letters to each other. I read it and I thought this is a book of love poetry from God to me. God loves me. God is so passionately crazy about me. And what if we really felt the implications of that?

Deborah Waxman:	I think that that is such an important thing for Jews to ask at this moment in time. For me, it's so interesting that the source is from the Song of Songs because so much of that is written in the singular -- in the first person or the second person singular. And our liturgy is written in the collective, and central to Jewish liturgy in both the morning and the evening service is an assertion of God's love for us, but it  -- in the morning services it is "ahavah rabbah ahavtanu" "with an abounding love, with a great love, you love us", and it's an us. It's a we.
	And I realized, I think, in my 20s, when I was really struggling, that I felt that was true for the people Israel and I was a part of the people Israel, but it didn't feel true for me. And I spent a lot of time talking about it. And this was from a conversation with Christian friends -- with folks in seminary. They felt personally and individually loved by God. And some of this has to do with my theology. I don't believe in a personal God, but even setting that aside, I've asked myself the question many times over the years: What would it mean if I believed that I was really loved, if I personally felt washed over with this great love? And so I love that you're asking that and that you're centering that so powerfully.

Sara Luria:	I think love cannot be general, for us to feel it in our bodies. We can be expanded out, but I think the idea of love is that it requires a lot of work in a specific relationship. It's a specific thing. Yes, "I love America" --  and I do. But what does that mean? How do I live that? It has to be specific. I can't just say I love America and then do nothing to support a healthy, robust democracy that we all pray for.

Deborah Waxman:	My sister-in-law, Jenny, who is very wise says love is a verb. You can't just say "I love you" and then that's it. You have to step forward and act it out.

Sara Luria:	Erich Fromm writes about love. I'm reading right now his book "The Art of Loving", and then bell hooks picks up his thinking and she defines love as when you are in love with someone you are invested in their spiritual growth. And she said we get confused because in our families, there is care. There can be care without love, but love means I am invested in your spiritual growth. And so I think we have to be specific in love. And I think -- I hear a lot, "Oh, Beloved. That's nice. Isn't that nice? You're so loving. You're so lovey-dovey." A little bit patronizing that love is just such a sweet thing that we're aspiring to.
	But I think anyone who's been in any loving relationship knows that it's the hardest thing a person can do with their life and the most worthwhile. And so I want to figure out not how do we expand this to generally, "Oh, Judaism is about love." I don't know what that could possibly mean. It has to be more specific. I want to say I want our people who come to Beloved to experience what it is to be in a loving relationship with each other, with me, and maybe at moments with God, so that they can use that base of love and experiences of love to have other experiences of love in their life and to build a life of love. But it has to come from the specific to the general.

Deborah Waxman:	It's so gorgeous, Sara. It's so gorgeous. I was thinking through this season [of the Hashivenu podcast], which is all about community and talking with colleagues and pushing me what do you mean by community? And I was quite certain that it was about beyond synagogues. But at the end, what I was saying is what I mean by community is relationship. What I mean by community is that countercultural assertion against individualism.
	And the founders in America, the early leaders in America, they had a very strong sense of communitas that they put alongside their commitment to individualism. They were just the way we, liberal Jews, are. They were trying to find what the best negotiation between the individual and the collective was. And that's, I feel like, in so many ways, has gone off the rails in American society, and it's all about radical individualism and the whole digital and consumer culture has just accelerated that. And so this idea of -- this relationship and how we are transformed once we enter into relationship, that just feels essential.

Sara Luria:	The way I'm thinking about it right now, I'm experimenting with this language of accompaniment. So at the mikveh, our volunteer ritual facilitators, they're not solving anyone's problems at the mikveh. They are sitting next to someone who is in a transition and saying, "I hear you. I care about you. I'm invested in your spiritual growth. I love you. You're a stranger to me. I may never see you again, but in this moment, I am accompanying you as you do the hard work of this transition."
	And I think about the Shekhinah -- the indwelling presence of God -- when we were exiled out of the Temple, the Shekhinah who lived at the Temple, she came with us into exile. And look, she couldn't solve our problems. She couldn't make it better. She couldn't rebuild the Temple. But what she could say is, "I know you're having a really hard time. And I'm going to come with you. And I'm going to be there with you in your struggles. And hopefully just my witness of you and my sitting next to you will ease the hardship that you're experiencing." And I feel that's what community can be at its best.

Deborah Waxman:	Oh, it's beautiful.

Sara Luria:	If we sit next to each other, we accompany each other. Especially in our meditation group, we really see that. People come in with all kinds of experiences on Sunday night, and the best we can do is sit and hold the space and light a candle and be quiet and listen to one another.

Deborah Waxman:	So beautiful. So we're not finishing up immediately but starting to turn toward the end of our conversation and I just want to ask you. You are creating something that is distinct from existing institutions, shall we say. So I just want to ask you to reflect on --  do you see it as alongside and as a compliment? Do you see Beloved as a critique? Do you see it as responsive to the moment? How are you thinking about it in the landscape and the ecosystem of Jewish communal institutions at this point?

Sara Luria:	I think that we are -- and I'm not the first person to say this -- living through a grand transition in Jewish life or in life in this world. We see everything is in flux. Almost everything is in flux. So it is both extremely scary and also, I think, a time of grief and mourning what was, and also extremely exciting because we are the rabbis at Yavneh. We are the ones who are trying to figure out what are the categories we are going to use to write the Mishnah or - we didn't even know it was called the Mishnah!

Deborah Waxman:	So Sara is referring to when the Temple was destroyed, what happens next? Israelite religion could've disappeared but this small cadre of leaders step forward to create the foundations of what became Rabbinic Judaism. So full of opportunity. I think I agree completely.

Sara Luria:	So I feel there are two experiences happening side by side. One is fear and grief and mourning and rigidity, which is natural when things are changing, and the other is excitement and hope and a lot of different flowers beginning to bud. And so I do not think of this as a critique at all. I think of it as how do we serve the needs of the people around us?
	The network I'm working on building is a network of communities that have a similar value system as Beloved Brooklyn, but they all have different models. So a few of the communities that we're in this network with are attached to synagogues and are startup communities, but the rabbis that are starting up the communities are also rabbis at the local synagogue. It's not that everything has to be done completely separately. I think that what we're doing now is we are composting what isn't flourishing anymore and planting the seeds of what's going to be.
	And so I don't see it as an either/or in any way. I see it as a, "Let's try this. Let's try this. How about this?" And the people who are excited about building are, I think, people who are looking clearly at what isn't working and recognizing yes, I'm sad about it. Yes, I wish it was different, but seeing clearly some parts of the Jewish landscape aren't working. How do we scaffold new possibilities?
	So some of that is adjacent to synagogues. Some of that is within synagogues. Some of that is separate from synagogues. I think about the fact that in Eastern Europe, there were shtetls and shtiebels and they were a flatter Jewish organizations.

Deborah Waxman:	Shtiebels were little storefronts. There were big synagogues, there were little storefronts, there were interest groups that sponsored their own -- such rich and diverse life there.

Sara Luria:	I want to think about what are the ways we can foster all different kinds of expressions of Judaism without saying one is better than the other. I think also about the Beloved Network as, we're doing the R&D, the research and development or the research and design for how Jews gather in the 21st century. You said this, and I agree, that by nature Jews gather. That's how we do our Jewish rituals, our Jewish practices, our Jewish lives, our meals --  so much of what we do is in community. We have to be. It's by design.
	So Jews are going to gather. Let's not worry about Jews not gathering. To me, that's impossible. But Jews may gather differently. And so now is the time to do a lot of research and development around what are ways Jews want to gather in the 21st century.

Deborah Waxman:	So great. So what's it like for this to be your home? This is clearly your heart and how amazing that you get to do this work that you're so passionate about. How do you draw the boundaries? Is that the wrong question? Are you not seeking to draw the boundaries? It's very different from a middle class, liberal understanding of the rabbinate as a profession, and I think most rabbis are in it for much more than just the professional piece but I'm wondering in all the love that you're pouring out, where do you retreat to get renewal or do you not need to or --

Sara Luria:	I would say that "living in the store" is how we put it. We don't live above the store. We live in the store. It's beautiful and complicated and hard. And it's the point. The point is that I am a rabbi and in a way this is a version of a shtetl, a version of an Eastern European village, but not to be too Ashkenormative and only think about Eastern Europe, but I think about the fact that in a shtetl, there was the rabbi and then there was the tailor and the shoemaker, and we all had roles to play and in our house, the experience of my leadership is that I am alongside people, I hope. I think about the fact that the first woman rabbi was ordained 40 years ago.

Deborah Waxman:	In America.

Sara Luria:	I think that for the last chunk of time, maybe not 40 years but for the beginning of that, for at least part of that, women had to prove that they were rabbis in the vein of rabbis for the last thousands of years, which is male. They had to prove that they could do the role of male rabbi, because that was what rabbi meant. So they had to be, as everyone says about women taking any roles that men did, they had to do it better or just as well and better.
	But now, I think, we're at this place where we can say, "Okay. Women are rabbis and what if the rabbinate wasn't a male field but was a field for humans?" What does a feminist rabbinate look like? Not only women being rabbis but what does a feminist rabbinate look like? And I only get to ask that question because of the 40 years of women who have been rabbis on whose shoulders I stand. If I were them, I would have had to do the other role, but because I stand on their shoulders, and we are here and we are women and we are rabbis and I get to say what does a feminist rabbinate look like, not only for women, not only for trans people, not only for men, just for all rabbis?
	And to me the feminist rabbinate is a rabbinate where you get to bring your whole self to the position -- to the calling. For me, that means that I bring my mother self, I bring my sister self, I bring my wife self, I bring my tired and you're in my house self, I bring all myself. And I always say "My children are crying in the background during services by design." (laughter) I want you to know that I'm a real human and I think that's part of building a feminist rabbinate. It's not seeing me as in a robe on the bimah.
	And, again, I'm not disparaging that. I'm just saying for me, that's not what I'm called to be doing. What I'm called to be doing is being this vulnerable person who allows you into my house. And that's how I feel I can help shape a holistic rabbinate for the 21st century. And I think we're only at the beginning of that.

Deborah Waxman:	I think so. I think it's so amazing. I love that image. I always think about feminism, that when people think it's only about women that they missed the point entirely, that it's about helping all of us come to full and complete realization of self. And so to end on that note is a special gift. I loved talking to you. This has just been such a rich conversation. Thank you so much.
	I want to thank Rabbi Sara Luria for this amazing conversation on Beloved Brooklyn and on the Beloved Network.
	For more information, I urge you to look on Hashivenu's website which you can find at hashivenu.fireside.fm. We will post links to Beloved Brooklyn and to some of the books that we talked about. And you can also find some more resources on reconstructingjudaism.org and on ritualwell.org.
	Thank you again, Sara. I am Rabbi Deborah Waxman and you've been listening to Hashivenu -- Jewish teachings on resilience.