I: Rabbi Deborah Waxman R: Rabbi Sid Schwarz R: We're looking at evolution and not revolution here. All I'm asking you to do is understand that this is not about throwing out one form of Judaism and bringing another. It's a matter of how we need it to evolve to make sure that Judaism is relevant not only to us but to our children and your children's children. I: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu -- a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. I'm very happy to welcome today Rabbi Sid Schwarz as my guest. Sid is the founding rabbi of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland, and also was the founder of PANIM, the Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, which he led for more than 20 years. He currently is involved in two very exciting initiatives. One is that he sponsors a two-year fellowship, the Clergy Leadership Incubator, and he is facilitating and organizing a national network for Jewish innovators called Kenissa. Today, we're going to talk about building community, which is something that he has really organized his life around and thought a lot about over these last many years. Thank you so much for being with us, Sid. Welcome. R: My pleasure, Deborah. I: I so want to hear your learning and your reflections on what it takes to build and sustain vital and engaging community. It's one of the things that I think Judaism offers to the world as a grounding, organizing principle and something that I think is, on the one hand, very reflected in American culture and in our history with a sense of community tasks that undergirds it but also is really a counter to commitment to individualism with an American culture. And I'm really excited to hear both about from the various enterprises that you've invested yourself into and your own gleanings and reflections on them in our conversation today. Do you want to start at the beginning and talk about the first major community that you aspired to build? R: Well, I think I probably should start even, and this is a pre-story to that in a sense that I probably should mention, that is when I came to RRC to train to be a rabbi, I was fairly committed never to serve a congregation. I: I love it. R: It is fairly ironic. And it's just by happenstance that in my second year, I was given the opportunity to serve the pulpit of Beth Israel of Media, which is the closest Reconstructionist congregation to the college. I: Before you tell us that story, what did you think you were going to do? R: I was pretty committed to doing anything but -- I was very involved in Jewish summer camping. I did a lot of work with Jewish youth movements. I was very involved with political activism, Soviet Jewry movements -- all those areas seemed to be areas where I could use a rabbinical degree. But to me, congregations seem to be the armpit of Jewish life. I just wasn't interested in going there. I: And this was in the '70s? R: Yes, mid '70s. I graduated in 1980 exactly. So it's a little bit ironic, but I always recall that I had a great gift. When I was hired by Beth Israel, I was maybe the third or fourth in a series of anchor rabbis they would hire from college. All of whom came, worked there for a couple of years as students then moved on. And so the president who hired me said, "Look Sid, like your predecessors, you're talented. You're not going to stay around here long. But as long as you're here, make it fun and make it interesting." For me, the charge of "make it interesting and make it fun" -- what I heard was "make it like camp", which is all about building community. So the first time I started practicing my congregational rabbinical tasks, it was all about creating something that was as engaging, as compelling and as fun as Jewish summer camp. I: Wow. That's amazing. And you planted the seeds for a real renewal and I've had the blessing to teach at that congregation. It's a vital and an active congregation to this day. That's tremendous. So that was a big course correction for you to have discovered. It sounds like it spoke to you as well as resonated with the members of the congregation. R: It did speak to me. When I moved down to Washington, I started attending a progressive Conservative synagogue, where I'de been a youth director as an undergraduate. And my wife could show you the black and blue marks on her shins where I would kick her on Shabbat morning just saying like I know this is the best place around but it's just not cutting for me. And that really was part of the origin story of Adat Shalom. For many years, people at the College said, "If only we had people who would seed Reconstructionist congregations, we know it's an idea that would catch on, because all the survey data tells us that the ideological profile with Reconstructionism would be attractive to American Jews if only we had a way to bring it out there. And so we did just that. We seeded a new congregation, that being Adat Shalom. And that gave me an opportunity to revisit a lot of the ideas that I played with early on in my career. And also the course I taught at the college before I left Philadelphia, I taught a course called Creating Alternative Communities, which is based on all the experiments that I was playing with in my first pulpit of Beth Israel. But by this time, I was a tad older, a bit more experienced, and Adat Shalom became the new laboratory to build what I like to call covenantal community. I: I'm a huge fan of that concept and that phrase, that language. I started in rabbinical school in 1993 and I remember learning very early on that Adat Shalom had a mission statement or a covenantal statement and if you were going to be a member of that community, you had to sign on and sign up, that it was not about a drop in community or a community where you just drive by and drop off your kids. You had to commit to showing up and helping to build the community. Is that -- R: Yes, that's true. But let me take one step back. I myself have actually used some different terms over the years so I think it's worth defining covenantal community. And the way I define that, by the way, is where people come into, in a voluntary way, a part of an intentional spiritual community, committed to a common mission and committed to the viability not only of the organization of the community but the people who make it up. And that's an important part of it. And so I can't tell you what it feels like to go to a shiva house and people are showing up that the mourner doesn't even know if you'll say that's part of what we do as being part of this community. I use the term to contrast the kind of communities that we need to build, compared to what most synagogues look like and feel like. And that is that most American synagogues are transactional institutions where people pay what they consider to be a fair market price for an array of goods and services that they feel they need at a given point in their lives. And most often that is a Jewish education for their children, usually the affiliation pattern in American synagogues is that when families have kids age 5, 6, 7 they shop for synagogues and when their youngest child finishes their Bar/Bat Mitzvah, within a year or two, a lot of them exit a synagogue. Now, depending on how many children you have, that means your membership is somewhere between 5 to 15 or 20 years, but what we know is that during that period of time, while they've accessed the goods and services that they paid for, very little changes in the minds, hearts or families that are "members" -- we call them members of synagogues. And that is actually what typifies transactional American synagogues of all denominational stripes. No one movement owns that label, so to speak. It's all over the place. But what we know is that for the most part, in American synagogues, the commitment is low and the engagement is low and the transformation is nil to none. So covenantal community is a term that I like to use to say, "We're going for something very different here." And while we too as a covenental community might provide some goods and services, you as people who become part of the community, let's call them members, although I don't love the term, you need to be fully invested in co-creating that community. And what we're going for here is not simply a passive drop your check off a week before Rosh Hashanah so you'll be allowed in the door but in what way are you going to be full owners of the enterprise? I: Adat Shalom is an absolutely amazing community to visit, but one of my favorite things about it, and I guess I should say one of my favorite things about it, is that I believe every Shabbat there's a big potluck lunch, is that right? R: That's one of the obligations of membership. I: Every Shabbat. This one of my favorite stories. Early in my presidency, it was March of 2014, so it was still the Obama White House, and there are a great many folks who work for the government who belong to Adat Shalom and also political folks who belong to Adat Shalom, and I was speaking and someone said, and I'm going to name-drop here, "Have you met Matt Nosanchuk, President Obama's liaison to the Jewish community?" And I said, "Oh no, I haven't met Matt yet." And they walked me over, and it was Matt's day to be on the cleaning squad. And so I met him and he was wearing an apron and big yellow gloves washing the dishes, and this man who regularly met with the president of the United States was in the kitchen at Adat Shalom doing his part, and it made me love the place even more. R: I know. It's a great story. And actually, one of the many obligations of membership is that you have to host a lunch twice a year. So on any given Shabbat, there's about 12 or 14 households that are catering a lunch and nobody is exempt. In fact, a few people early on said we love Adat Shalom but we don't do kitchen duty. And they asked could they buy their way out of it literally. They'll pay a caterer to come in. And the answer was no, you can't. So we really want that coop experience. I: One of the things that speaks to me so powerfully, Sid, is I think that the work that we liberal Jews, have to do is to come up with a compelling reason for people to willingly submerge some of their own individual desires for the good of the community. In a pre-modern time, folks might have either felt obligated to because of a fear of supernatural afterlife consequences or they felt obligated to just because the community was the only home for them and to be placed outside of the bounds of the community would have meant an untenable existence, so, how to create that sense for people to willingly take up obligation. R: There's no doubt about it. And today, Deborah, the fact of the matter is our society is becoming more and more individualistic than it was even a generation ago. And so part of what the challenge is we have to think differently about Judaism for too long. We thought about well, there are more observant Jews and less observant Jews. And so in that hierarchy, Orthodox are the most serious Jews and Reform Jews or Renewal Jews are the least serious Jews. It makes no sense anymore, because I think that it's not a matter of how many mitzvah boxes that you can check; it's a matter of whether you're engaged in building what I like to call covenantal community. One of my favorite stories I'd like to tell, it was a couple who joined the synagogue and they were in their first year of membership. The husband was academic. He had a new position at Georgetown University. And she's a therapist so she was able to move more readily, and within the first six months of their membership, she was in an at-risk pregnancy. And word went out that she would be bedridden until, God willing, she would give birth. And during those six months, the word went out that she needed meals delivered, her other child carpooled to activities, whatever else, her husband was unavailable for that, and the community just stepped up in ways that did not surprise me but shocked this couple and when the baby was born, healthy and healthy mom, and they were on the bimah to name their baby, the mom said "I will never ever in my life forget the kindness and generosity of spirit that was exhibited over here by people we did not even know. By virtue of the fact that we're part of this community, they showed up for us, and I'll ever be in your debt. I: It's such a beautiful story. And I have stories like that from my own personal experience. And I think I want to make the pivot because I want to make certain that our listeners know that we're not only talking about synagogues but that it is a conversation about community and that it is about an investment, I think. The fact of the matter is if they hadn't been part of Adat Shalom, then that network of support, it would have been much harder to activate on their behalf. And I often will say to people, you want to find some kind of home, some kind of group of people that you've thrown your lot in before there's a moment of extremis -- not that you should only do it because you need it then, but boy, it's going to be such a different experience if you have that when there's the death or the illness or when there's trauma. When there's crisis, instant community gets created and that's very powerful, but it's not necessarily abiding. And there are abiding situations where we're going to want to mourn together and also then to celebrate together, that it's the whole spectrum of emotion and experience. So more recently, even as you remain involved at Adat Shalom, you also really have been working with spiritual entrepreneurs, some of whom are working in synagogue settings and some of whom are working to build communities in radically -- well, I won't even say radically new ways, but in ways other than synagogues, which was a primary model of American Jewish organizational life for much of the 20th century. So can you talk a bit about your energies and your efforts right now? R: Sure. I'm happy to. So let me just say that I spend my time in two projects. My Clergy of Leadership Incubator is my two-year fellowship for rabbis. I'm training rabbis to move their synagogues into the covenental community model. That's been a very gratifying thing, and I want to say that unlike many people who have critiqued the current state of the American Jewish community, I've not given up on synagogues. I don't think we should because I think there's so much potential there. So I want to say that at the outset. However, and this is a big however, when the history of 20th century of American Jewry is written, it will make the case that synagogues were the primary retail outlet where American Jews experienced Judaism. But when the history of the 21st century American Jewry is written, it will be clear that synagogues are one of many platforms or retail outlets where Jews experienced Judaism and despite the wishes of people who run denominations, present company included, the fact of the matter is synagogues do not corner the market any longer, nor do I see any eventuality where they will. I: I just want it on the record that we also significantly invest in our innovation and impact department to be imagining models -- even as we are deeply committed to amazing congregations like Adat Shalom and Beth Israel, which is in Media, Pennsylvania. We are also really with you very, very interested in emerging models of Jewish engagement and Jewish community building. So we're trying a "yes, and" strategy, very similar to the one that you are. R: Good. So that introduces my new project. I published a book in 2016 entitled Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future. And in it, I argued that even as many legacy organizations like synagogues and federations and JCCs were on a decline, there was an emerging explosion of innovation with mostly young people creating new platforms for Jewish life and community that needed to be paid attention to. And I got some funding from several foundations to run a project, which we call Kenissa -- Communities of Meaning Network. Now, Kenissa is a Hebrew word for entranceway because I've argued that these new platforms for Jewish life and community are the doorways, the portals through which Jews who might not otherwise access conventional Jewish institutions will access Jewish life. And we've identified essentially five different themes that typify these new platforms. One we call kedushah or sacred purpose. The second we call kehillah, community or covenantal community; hokhmah, wisdom; tzedek is justice; and yetzirah is creativity. And we've been for the past five years now, been on lookout for innovators who are creating new platforms in one of those five sectors. We've been gradually identifying them, committing and building capacity in that network -- which I'm now pleased to announce, which I couldn't do four years ago, our database now numbers over 350 such organizations. And the significance of that as we gather them is that the mainstream community has started to pay attention now to the phenomena in ways that they hadn't to for a long, long time, because they realized this is not just a fringe phenomenon. There is actually a reinvention of Jewish life and community happening under our noses, but frankly, it's off the radar screen of many, many major Jewish communities and institutions. I: I think you said it so well that they were in this interesting post congregational moment where that means that congregations were the obvious and major address in the 20th century. There are other options now, but that doesn't mean the congregations go away. And, as we were discussing earlier, really gorgeous transformational growth can happen and especially I am moved by in congregational life and when people say to me, "Oh, you should dedicate all of your resources only to the new," I will say, "Show me where in American life you can ask people to come together across interests and across age groups to be in community together." And so there's something just very precious about the diversity that can get gathered up inside a congregation. And that said, I really want to both celebrate and support emerging expressions that need not have any connection at all to congregations. Of the five nodes that you're talking about, since we're discussing Kehilah today, can you unpack that Kehilah, the covenantal community, a little bit more? Can you share either an example or characteristics that you're seeing from among those organizations? R: So let me give you two or three examples. I love to point to the phenomenon of Kayam Farm which is based at the Pearlstone Retreat Center outside of Baltimore, Maryland. Kayam Farm was started in 2007 and for many years, it was a place where synagogues would bring their Hebrew school kids to learn about Jewish environmental stuff, where they had a whole farm going on there. But now their plan is to build an intentional residential community with 50 families moving in who actually live onsite and live and breathe a whole Jewish cycle like a moshav in Israel. And by the way, it's not the only such community being created around the country. There's a network of them that we're in touch with and in conversation with. That's one great example. A second example in the area of tzedek or justice is actually based at one of our own congregations in Detroit, Michigan, that being Congregation T'chiyah. So Alana Alpert is the rabbi and T'chiyah has been there for a while. You might know better than I when it started but Alana arrived thereā€¦ I: '70s, I think. R: It's okay. Alana arrived there in 2014. And it was an aging membership. And not unlike many of our congregations, Alana is a passionate social justice advocate. So she started what we called Detroit Jews for Justice. Their first activity was actually to work on the Flint water crisis and they took up a campaign about urban transportation, which was not serving well the low-income communities of Detroit. And then they started a living wage campaign. And within a matter of a year or a year-and-a-half, she's attracting dozens, if not hundreds, of Jews in their 20s and 30s who want to be part of that action. It's a really compelling example about how, if you speak to people's passion, people will show up and because Alana is a rabbi she's built in a lot of Jewish components into her work. It's not just lobbying and activism; it's also tying them into Jewish holidays and Shabbat and [inaudible]. I: I love that story. I just want to give a little bit more background which is that T'chiyah, it ties the first part of our conversation into the second part very beautifully. T'chiyah hired Alana to encourage her to do precisely this. They were founded as a havurah on their own, affiliated with the Reconstructionist Movement, very, very proudly lay led, and they had a sense that they were aging, and they were baby boomers who were aging, and they looked around and they said, "You know, look. We can continue this as an organization that meets our needs, or we can try to imagine what the next generation might want with the recognition that it might not look like what we want." And so Alana was hired, which is an extraordinary vision, but she was hired because the congregation was prepared to subsidize that kind of community engagement without it necessarily flowing back into a precise membership into the congregation. And it happens that there are people who have joined the congregation because they never knew that this kind of Judaism existed and that there are folks who haven't, and that that kind of equanimity and vision, I think, is really incredibly important foundational approach for this moment because, as you said, Sid, it's full of potential but it's also full of disruption, which can make people very, very anxious and very contracted sometimes. R: Well, it's true. And our next phase of Kenissa is actually to explore ways to build partnerships between some of these very young startup Jewish organizations and more legacy organizations including synagogues and JCCs and see whether one could partner with the other because frankly, some of the people who are the kind of constituency in the younger profile people who are attracted to these startups may never be attracted to older [inaudible] synagogues or JCCs or federations. So there's a way to embed them. It may be a way to get a new lease on life and a new way to express Jewish life that will be mutually beneficial both to the startup and to the legacy institution. I: That's a great place for us to begin to wind down but I think you've been a really important teacher of nonanxiety and of curiosity about this rather than just about let's be nostalgic, let's just try to get it to go back to the way it always was. I think that's really good. R: So let me tell you a quick story. Maybe this will be my last sharing. I was doing a presentation about Kenissa. I was invited to come into a fairly major community. They had read some of my stuff, they brought me in, and I was talking about some of these new groups. And when I finished, a gentleman who's probably in his early 80s stands up and says, "The community that you have just described, I don't recognize at all. It's not the community that I've invested my time and money in. And so I'm not sure why you're even here." It was not the friendliest question I've ever gotten. And because I had gotten that kind of question before, I wasn't surprised. And I looked at him with -- not practiced but with true, deep empathy, and I said, "Let's just make up a name because I don't want to name him, "You know, Mr. Goldberg, you and your friends in this room have built this community with love and with generosity and with great spirit. And I know you want to continue. We are standing on your shoulders now. All I'm asking you to do is understand that this is not about throwing out one form of Judaism and bringing in another. It's a matter of how we needed to evolve to make sure that Judaism is relevant not only to us but to our children and our children's children. And as I spoke, I saw a smile crack on his face and soon after the program, the director of the endowment fund who invited me came over with his [indiscernible] because I thought when Mr. Goldberg, I said, "He's an opinion shaper in this group. He's been a leader, past president, the whole bit, but the way you addressed his concern, it addressed a concern that held by a generation of people who have been the loyalists who built our community." We're looking at evolution and not revolution here. I think that's probably in the best spirit of what Mordecai Kaplan, the Reconstructionist, has taught for decades. I: I think that's right. I think the listenership is not exclusively Reconstructionist here, but this is where I think you and I as Reconstructionist rabbis, I personally take a lot of comfort and get a lot of strength from the notion that every generation is invited to, even obligated to reconstruct Judaism and the way I see it, it means that we have this obligation to build the Jewish community that we want to live in and that we want our children to live in, and that's necessarily a hands wide open rather than a gripping stance because I don't presume that the next gerneration is going to -- I didn't want what my parents wanted and I don't presume that the next generation is going to want precisely what I want, but the vitality and the building, and again, as we were talking about at the beginning, I think toward community or toward individual in relation to community, I think, that's the holy work. Thank you so much, Sid, for this very rich conversation and for all that you're doing to bolster the community that is and the community that will be. It's just been such a pleasure to talk with you. R: My pleasure. Thank you, Deborah, for the opportunity. I: It's wonderful, as I said, that you will be able to find resources for all of Sid's initiatives and for some of the other things that we've talked about over the course of this podcast on hashivenu.fireside.fm. And you'll also be able to find more resources on this topic on reconstructingjudaism.org and on ritualwell.org. I am so happy to be with Rabbi Sid Schwarz today. I am Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu --Jewish teachings on resilience.