Michael Strassfeld: We were really trying to recapture a Jewish past that we felt had been lost, but we didn't want to just take it lock, stock, and barrel. Deborah Waxman: It wasn't a retreat into Orthodoxy. Michael Strassfeld: No, so it isn't a choice between living in the contemporary moment or doing the Jewish thing. You could do both. Deborah Waxman: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman. I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. I am so happy to welcome today my teacher and my friend Rabbi Michael Strassfeld. Michael is the rabbi emeritus of SAJ, which for much of its life, for nearly a hundred years, was spelled out as the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. It was Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan's synagogue, the founding thinker of Reconstructionism. It recently has gone through a new branding. It now spells out those initials as Judaism That Stands For All. In addition, Michael's a really prolific author. He was the editor of all three volumes of the groundbreaking Jewish Catalogs and of several books.We'll probably talk about them over the course of our conversation. Welcome, Michael. It's so good to be with you. Michael Strassfeld: Thank you. Deborah Waxman: There's so much to talk about. We're focusing this season on constructions of community and Jewish thinking about building up community from a Jewish perspective, what that means in the larger environment, with some thoughts about how that is a source for cultivating resilience. We've talked about maybe kind of investigating some of the experiments and the projects that you've poured yourself into, chronologically. I want to take you back to the establishment of Havurat Shalom, which is still a lovely and thriving community and an affiliated community of the Reconstructionist movement and was, in its establishment, a really groundbreaking experiment in American Jewish life. Can you reflect? Michael Strassfeld: Sure. As you said, Havurat Shalom, which was located in the Boston area, basically in Somerville, Massachusetts was one of the early havurot. Havurot comes from the word havurah, which means "fellowship". It was a group of people that wanted to get together and live a Jewish life together. It was in an intentional community. Deborah Waxman: I think about two things. I mean, just two thoughts. One is we think so much about the American ethos as being a commitment to individualism, and so the countercultural nature of that impulse from the American place. I'm thinking that there were a lot of communitarian experiments in American life at that time and then the deep Jewish roots of that impulse. How evident was that? How much on the surface were those? Michael Strassfeld: Well, I think one of the interesting things about the havurah and other pieces of what might be called the Jewish counterculture is really the context as often as in Jewish life as the larger American culture that's going on. There was very much, as you said, a movement towards community as part of the American counterculture, even going so far as there being communes that would somewhat go back to the land and others that would certainly share resources. They're really communitarian. Michael Strassfeld: It's interesting that in the Jewish counterculture, I don't think it went that far. It's interesting to speculate why. There was a sense of we wanted to live together in community and in some ways perhaps a reaction to a feeling that the communities that existed in the Jewish community with, I guess, really large synagogues were often too large and felt impersonal and only "on-paper communities", that people really didn't know each other and weren't really connected in these large impersonal institutions, at least in our view of them. Deborah Waxman: Do you think it was a reaction to suburbanization and driving to synagogue and a move away from more, like, of a shteibel, more of a neighborhood based religious center or even just dense ethnic neighborhoods? Michael Strassfeld: That's interesting. I think ultimately the Havurah and other similar groups were in urban settings. I mean Somerville is an urban suburb of Cambridge and Boston. I think that was more to do with where people were because the members were people in their 20s, graduate students or beginning to do jobs. I think that's where they were found. Though I do think the sense of American Judaism is being this suburban Jewish experience, which many of the members of the Havurah had grown up in. I grew up actually in urban.. Deborah Waxman: Yeah, yeah. You're a New Yorker, right? Michael Strassfeld: No, Boston. Deborah Waxman: Boston? Michael Strassfeld: Yeah, Boston. I think it was also how the world was perceived. In that sense , you think about Phillip Roth's fiction about that world. It was very Phillip Rothian to say it. That picture felt not much of a community and not very vibrant and a lot of passivity in those synagogues ... Deborah Waxman: And performative, like more about what you wore or not, not necessarily about deeply felt commitments, more about showing up on certain days, wearing certain things. Michael Strassfeld: Yeah. Yeah, so there was, right, there was the how people dress. Also, I think, the subtitle of the Jewish Catalog, which I'm sure we'll talk about, is "A Do-It-Yourself Kit". In that sense in synagogues, the rabbi and the cantor would stand in front. They would lead the service. Most of the time there was deadly silence in the congregation, and so that they were being Jewish for you. The Federation world, which was also reaching its peak around the Six Day War, was like, well, we're helping Jews elsewhere. We're helping Jews in Israel. We're helping save Soviet Jewry. All very important and valid causes, but what were those people doing for their own Judaism? I think that was the fundamental impulse behind trying to recapture a Judaism that was ours as individuals and in the setting of a community. Deborah Waxman: When you came together to live was the Jewishness, was it about religion? Was it about just about ethnicity? Did you guys think about it or was it all negotiated? How much of the religious impulse shaped the initial... Michael Strassfeld: I think, in some ways, it was all those things perhaps. The truth is there were a variety of havurot, havurah, and so people used to say about the three early ones that. The Boston one, Havurat Shalom, was religious in its orientation. The New York one was intellectual. The Washington one was political. As all such things, there's some truth, but the larger truth is there were pieces of all those elements there. The fourth is community. It was actually the most ambitious part of the agenda of those groups. It was -- being the most ambitious, I think, it was -- succeeded and also didn't succeed. Deborah Waxman: The living together piece or the community-building piece beyond sharing space? Michael Strassfeld: Well, it may be useful to explain a little bit how the community-building took place. Again, each group is different. There'll be communal meals weekly. There would be retreats, where the group would go away for a couple of days over a holiday weekend or just over a Shabbat weekend. That was, obviously, an opportunity to have a more intense experience. The truth is that for most of the people in the Havurah this was the center of their life. You spent a lot of time in various activities, whether it's classes during the week, communal things, or just, we actually decided to put a washer and dryer in the basement of Havurat Shalom, which again, unusually had its own building. We did that because we thought, "Oh, this was a way to bring some people together. They'll just hang out while you're doing it, and..." Deborah Waxman: Really strategic. Michael Strassfeld: .t..here'll be, exchanges. I think that was all positive. It was a community around Jewish things like prayer and study, and social justice, but there was also just, in that sense, bringing people together. Intentional communities are challenging. Deborah Waxman: Yeah, they're tough. They're tough. I want to actually loop back to the Jewish Catalogs. The way that the havurah movement really took off and continues to this day is the notion of intimate and ongoing groups, whether they are within larger systems, as within established synagogues, or free standing. There's also the National Havurah Committee that was established to foster and connect and provide ... You and David Teutsch were the founders? You were the ... Michael Strassfeld: Yeah, we were both ... yeah, I was the first chair. Deborah Waxman: The first chair. They continue to thrive with a weekly summer retreat. That is, some folks, that's their main commitment, and they go through. How did the - I presumed, but I've never asked you this, that the Jewish Catalog emerged out of the Havurat Shalom ethos. Is that me projecting that back into history or did that really happen? Michael Strassfeld: No, no, that really. There's a variety of different stories, but the one that focuses on Havurat Shalom is that people were sitting around and it was coming up on the fall holiday of Sukkot, where you build a Sukkah, which is a booth, a temporary structure supposedly to remember the Israelites wandering in the desert, and people saying, "Well, we don't remember how we did it last year." Someone said, "Gee, it'd be great if there was a book that would tell you how to do that." Michael Strassfeld: Another place where came from was the Whole Earth Catalog, which was a huge bestseller and really represented the American counterculture, in a book form. Well first, two people wrote a master's thesis for a program at Brandeis where they had to describe the project. They didn't have to do it. Then Richie Siegel, who was one of those people, decided, well, to do it. Then, my then-wife Sharon Strassfeld and then I joined to be the editors of the catalog. There was really like the Whole Earth Catalog, in some ways, it was really an attempt to express the Jewish lives that we were living and we were trying to live. We asked basically all the people we knew in this Jewish counterculture to write different articles for the book. Deborah Waxman: I mean, it's really hard, I think, for a generation that's rising up now in the age of the Internet where you know, "Okay, how do you build a Sukkah?" Okay, type it in and maybe you get, hopefully you come to Ritualwell and our wonderful website or you go to the Chabad website or you go to the Sukkah Project's amazing ... When did it come out? Michael Strassfeld: '73. Deborah Waxman: '73, like in the 70s when I was coming up, in the '80s, there it was. I can tell you Michael, that I made my ... it was very crazy. I made my first tallit in sixth grade Hebrew school. The girls made them. The boys made them. I think they presumed that the girls would give them to men in their family. When it was time to tie the tzitziyot, we looked at that chapter of the Jewish Catalog. The first time I wanted to make challah on my own, there are many Jews who have family recipes handed down, but we didn't have them, so I looked at that Catalog. Deborah Waxman: Every time I moved into, -- had photocopied the chapter on hanging a mezuzah, because in that period of time, in my late teens and early twenties, when I was moving essentially every year, I could never remember which way to point the mezuzah, what the berachot were, what the blessings were. I had in my files for when I moved, the photocopy from theJewish Catalog on hanging a mezuzah. It really was this guide for if I wanted Jewishness expressed on my terms in my life, here was a map. It was educational rather than prescriptive. It was, "Here's what it is. Here's what the roots are. Here are some choices." It was so liberating. It was really very empowering. Michael Strassfeld: Right, I think that one important piece that it wasn't prescriptive. There were other books that came out around the time which said, "Here's how you be a Jew." Just the fact that it was called the Catalog, which means that it's a catalog. You pick and choose. You read one chapter, you do this rather than "Here's the whole thing. You've got to buy the whole package." I think that was really important. It was really, just like the story about the sukkah, building the booth, was really that sense that all that material wasn't accessible. Deborah Waxman: It really wasn't. Michael Strassfeld: That's one of the reasons we decided not to call it the Jewish Whole Earth Catalog. The Whole Earth Catalog, if you wanted to build a geodesic dome, which was a big Buckminster Fuller thing in those days, they had a book. They referred you to the book. The Whole Earth Catalog showed you a page from the book and a cute drawing of the geodesic dome or whatever. Then you say, "Oh great, I'll go get the real thing." We couldn't do that. We couldn't say, " Look in the Shulhan Aruch, the code of Jewish law", which was in Hebrew, and actually, it doesn't tell you how to build it. It only tells the rules that makes it kosher, ritually fit. Right? We had to do both the practical, here's how to build the thing, but also, take all that what was in lost, inaccessible, a better word, inaccessible within the tradition and make it accessible and to do it in a very contemporary manner. I think another piece of it was the pictures of us in the catalog look like every other American in their 20s, really long hair. You should see the picture of me on the back of the Catalog. Deborah Waxman: I haven't looked in a long time. It's on my shelf at home. I'll go home and look tonight. Michael Strassfeld: Yeah, there's a lot more hair, et cetera, et cetera. It was just, we looked contemporary. That was a way of saying it isn't a choice between living in the contemporary moment or doing the Jewish thing. You could do both. Deborah Waxman: I think also one of the things that's always really appealed to me, and this is a big question I have about community, it was also not nostalgic. It was about mining the past, but that contemporariness to say "this is relevant today." This is not about "let's try to capture something old", but rather "let's try to bring this into the , cherish it and use it now." That really resonated very powerfully with me as I was ... I mean, I came from a rich and warm Jewish home. As I tried to translate that into my young adult life, that ethos, that sensibility was very compelling to me. Michael Strassfeld: I think in some ways that's the way that the Jewish counterculture was a little bit different than the American counterculture, which I think looked at the past and said, "This was bad. We want to create a new future, a better future." It wasn't like, "Let's go back to colonial days," or something like that. We were really trying to recapture a Jewish past that we felt had been lost in moving from Eastern Europe to America. We didn't want to just take it lock, stock and barrel. Deborah Waxman: It wasn't a retreat into Orthodoxy. Michael Strassfeld: No, so even if you take Hasidism, which is a mystical movement that from the 18th century. I mean, there's still Hasidism today, which was a very important source for spirituality, which was also a big piece of Havurat Shalom. We found it was a great source of spirituality, but we rejected the notion of a Rebbe, a spiritual master, of total commitment to Jewish law, of a secondary status for women. I mean, there was much that we rejected, so it wasn't just ... Deborah Waxman: Powerfully modern and forward looking. Michael Strassfeld: That's - it wasn't "give me that old time religion." It was, "There's a lot that's been lost. We want to recapture it, but we want to recapture it for this moment, not to go back to a past, which probably never existed the way we imagined anyways." Deborah Waxman: Right, right. Well, I wanted ... It's a great segue, because I want to ask you about not necessarily the role of Rebbe, but the role of the rabbi. Because when I first met you, and I probably shouldn't even say met you, but when I first encountered you in person was in the early '90s. I had graduated from college and was living on the Upper West Side and was trying to build my independent Jewish life and had found a lot of meaning in the havurah movement. I'd gone to the National Havurah Committee's summer institute. I started to go to services at Ansche Chesed, which was a synagogue, an old synagogue that had been somewhat moribund and then had been significantly revitalized by some of these energies and had a collection of havurot. You were, at the time, the spiritual leader of Ansche Chesed, but you were deliberately at that moment in time, not a rabbi. You were so knowledgeable and so soulful and so honored as a leader, but my understanding in the early '90s was, but not a rabbi. Here you were in ensconced in community. Can you reflect on that? Michael Strassfeld: Sure, I think, it was, in the havurah, the notion that we were all equals and that this was participatory, was very important. I mean, the reality wasn't always, I mean there was some people who knew more. There were some people who just were more leaders and other people who were happy not to lead. The idea was that we were all equal participants in the group. We all were responsible for everything. If somebody says, "I said," it was a reaction to synagogue life where the Rabbi and the Cantor did everything and people..." Deborah Waxman: They were the symbolic Jews. Michael Strassfeld: Right, symbolic exemplars. Deborah Waxman: Yeah, the very famous book among rabbis by Rabbi Jack Bloom, Rabbi Dr. Jack Bloom. Michael Strassfeld: I think it's really interesting that the people that were in Havurat Shalom in its early years, the number of them who became rabbis is relatively small. More people became Jewish Studies professors. Deborah Waxman: Right, doctorates, yeah. Michael Strassfeld: They felt like that was a way to have a career that was Jewish, but that felt more comfortable to them than the rabbi. It was a reaction against that. I think that felt good. Then at some point, I think two things happened. One was I said, "Look," but I actually have a very good Jewish background. Therefore I knew a lot of Jewish texts, et cetera. The reality is we weren't all the same. I think it was for me, it certainly was a sense of, it was my own psychological development. I felt like, "Oh, I have a voice. I want to teach." At the synagogue I was at, Anshe Chesed, I started off running programs, which was enabling other people to teach and to speak. I came to a place where I felt, "I feel like I, I want to do this. I'm ready to do this." Therefore, I graduated rabbinic school at 41, not because I was there for 20 years. The opposite, I was on a fast track. I think that was ... I would just add one other thing. I think the havurah movement, to call it that, suffered somewhat by not having leadership. Deborah Waxman: I don't know if you remember this, but my last year of rabbinical school, the assignment at the time was that, David Teutsch who was directing Contemporary Civilization would have us analyze an institution in preparing us for leadership. I was getting ready to graduate. I was getting ready to start working at what was then Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. I studied the National HavurahCommittee. My big question was, what does leadership look like in a democratic context? I interviewed you. We had this long conversation. I came to New York and sat in your office. I think you were already at the SAJ by that point. We had a long conversation about what does leadership look like? You were really meditating on this, like how to foster that community but have someone who really is first among equals. Michael Strassfeld: Right, it's an ongoing question. There's no simple answer. There's a wide diversity. I mean, there's some pieces of the Jewish counterculture, call it the Jewish Renewal wing if you want to, that really has moved towards the Rebbe/spiritual master model, which has its pluses and minuses. It's very hard to I think all rabbis, of just about every denomination, struggle with how much authority do I have or do I want to use versus how do I empower other people. There's no simple answer. Deborah Waxman: Do you have a vision of leadership, like once you've made the decision to come to RRC and get the rabbinical degree and how you poured yourself into leadership in a different way after the degree? Michael Strassfeld: In some ways, that's just what I said. I think you're always trying to balance it. The truth is, looking back on my life, I feel there's a one of the themes that runs through it is really a desire to make the riches of the Jewish tradition, which I, because of my Jewish education, I had access to, make that accessible to as many people as possible. Deborah Waxman: Yeah, so resource and guide. Michael Strassfeld: Well, just in the sense that the Jewish world would be a better world if more people had that access. Clearly then people would be making their own choices, feeling like, "Well, I know ..." I always feel comfortable with the choices I'm making, the issue of, "Well, is this Jewish enough for authentic enough," is really a question for me, because I feel I'm deeply Jewish. I'm deeply rooted in the tradition. I mean there are things I've done, which I look back on and think are stupid or just didn't work. I don't feel inauthentic. I feel like I'm authentically struggling with the tradition. I may be making the wrong decision. I'm sure that sometimes I do. I think the Jewish world would be a great world, if everybody felt that confidence or that ability, based on some knowledge, to make choices. Deborah Waxman: I think that's a premise of a Reconstructionist approach is a tremendous amount of empowerment, but it presumes education and it presumes knowledge. It's not just about desire or individual autonomy; that you're doing, you're making those decisions in the context of and I learned this from David Teutsch from community, but that's both horizontal, like the community that's actually around us, and the vertical community, the community that proceeded us and with an eye toward the future. Within that, it's a big experiment, because we do live in this fluid and unprecedented moment. Michael Strassfeld: Yes, and that is, I think, the struggle for Reconstructionist congregations in particular. Often, people don't commit to the study part ,or have they studied it enough, right? There's no magic. Well, if you learn this whole book, then you'll know it all. There isn't a.. The study of Torah is a lifelong enterprise, isn't it? No graduation... Deborah Waxman: I graduated. Right, I graduated from rabbinical school knowing how little I knew, but at least I knew how to navigate, navigate that scene. Michael Strassfeld: That's why I, with my unusual background for not unique but unusual for a liberal rabbi. It's like I don't have that when I know most of my colleagues feel, they're always questioning like, "Do I know enough? Am I really legitimate in the decisions I'm making?" Deborah Waxman: A lot of the last several years have been like the in addition to the Catalog work, and I still use, when I'm doing preparation for holidays, I'll pull your Jewish Holidays volume off the shelf. You also have written several books that are more, they have an arc. There's an invitation to begin at the beginning and read through to the end, as opposed to something like the Catalog where you could dip in on your own. It seems like that's part of that impulse to educate and to illuminate and to open up for people. Michael Strassfeld: Yeah, so the Holiday book talks about the holidays. Twenty-five years after the Catalog, there was a question of redoing the Catalog or really what the Jewish Catalog would say today. Out of that came A Book of Life:Embracing Judaism as a Spiritual Practice. The sense that spirituality is now or it could be understood as the overall kavanah, the overall intention for Judaism. Right, in a sense, it was a bigger -- it wasn't chapters. It was a sense of overall unity that the spirituality ran through everything, still divided by all the different pieces of social justice, Torah study, et cetera, et cetera. Deborah Waxman: I'm so interested in your current project, which is really, it's digital. I think of you, I mean I guess, I think back to that first time I went into Ansche Chesed, I know this is part of the newsletter that you're putting out. What I remember is walking in this big, big, it's one of these upper West Side synagogues, the kind that you see in movies, tall ceiling ... Michael Strassfeld: Two stories, yeah. Deborah Waxman: In that space you were, it must've been, I think it was probably the first Yom Kippur that I stayed in New York rather than went home to my parents' synagogue. You were singing a niggun. You were singing this wordless melody for 15 minutes or so and really bringing us all to a place of internal contemplation. For whatever reason, that image of you and that music and it feels exactly opposite to a digital project, even as I know you're trying to capture some of it. As we wind down, what are you thinking about now? What do you hope to accomplish? If you have any thoughts about ... I do feel like I'm part of a larger Reconstructionist community, even as folks are scattered all over the place. I feel like the listenership of Hashivenu, from the people who come and talk to me, that there's a growing sense of connection there, but obviously it's more virtual, rather than the kind of face-to-face connection that I'm more accustomed to. Michael Strassfeld: Needless to say, it's a challenge for a person my age, this whole digital world. Sometimes you feel you're just too old to really capture it. I wonder about these virtual communities. Can they really be communities? There certainly is a value to them for people who they don't have a choice, right? There is no community right around them. I think, there is, I mean all sorts of ways that the digital, again, to use the words I was just using, make things accessible. It can reach lots of people in new ways. This newsletter is a way to try and do that and to take the experiences and the knowledge and experiences I had for the years I was a congregational rabbi and the resources I gathered at that time and share them with other people. Deborah Waxman: If people want to know more about this new project, how would they find out about it? Michael Strassfeld: If people would like to subscribe to my newsletter, it's free. They could just go to my website, which is michaelstrassfeld.com. There's a link there to sign up for the newsletter. The newsletter is weekly. It has a word of Torah about the Torah portion and an intention and a verse to focus on for a week and a link to me singing a Nigun or a song. Again, michaelstrassfeld.com. It's all part of this larger project, which is the book I'm working on. Deborah Waxman: Maybe we'll end with this. Tell us about your new book. Michael Strassfeld: I've just about completed a new book. The working title is Judaism Disrupted. It's an interesting, there's a variety of arcs that you probably could see just from our conversation today. I grew up in an Orthodox home, a Modern Orthodox home. I've gone to the havurah and to the Reconstructionist College, places from there. If anything, I've become somewhat more radical in my thinking over that period of time. The book is really, the starting point is a sense that Judaism hasn't successfully reacted to how to live in the contemporary world and that we, on some level, have been tinkering around the edges and that really to meet the challenges of the 21st century, we really need to radically reconstruct, as Kaplan and others would say, our Judaism for the contemporary moment. That's what the book attempts to do. Again, the thing, another one of the themes in my life, which is to look within the tradition, even as I'm rejecting. I have a chapter called Rejecting Rabbinic Judaism, even, I'm rejecting some of the models and paradigms and practices of the past, but still to look for the tradition, both in Hasidism for spiritual innovation, I would say, and as well as looking in rabbinic texts that I think point to, or it could be sources for different ways to think about our Judaism and how we interact with a world without borders and boundaries. Deborah Waxman: I'll share for our listeners that we had a really wonderfully successful convention in November of 2018. Michael was a panelist on the opening plenary session talking about some of this in passing, and so we'll put a link to it. We recorded the session. We'll put a link in the program notes if you want to watch it. Deborah Waxman: In the service of this radicalism, one of the things that Michael said is you offered a critique of synagogue services and how uncompelling they are to so many people as evidenced by who's coming and who's not. You talked about the possibly jettisoning everything, including possibly the Shema. I saw you. You also did a followup workshop. I saw you later in the convention and said, "I was overwhelmed by people who came to me and said, 'You can't give up on the Shema.'" You said, "Okay, so we'll keep the Shema." They got very fixated on that particular suggestion. You worried a little bit that they missed your larger point about boldly making change. Now I urge you to click on that link and know that if that moment in the recording makes you uncomfortable, that he's backed away from it, if that helps you open up to the larger message. Deborah Waxman: I keep thinking here's where I want to end, which is, I don't know that I shared this with you. I was really privileged in September to travel with our board chair, Seth Rosen, to visit with congregation Dor Hadash, the Reconstructionist community in Pittsburgh that met in the Tree of Life synagogue. That was the community that signed up for HIAS Refugee Shabbat, so obviously they were very deeply affected by the shooting. They lost one member, Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz and another member, Dan Leger, was very seriously injured and several other people who were either there or on the grounds, the whole community. I led a healing service for them. The service was about, the theme of brokenness and wholeness. I brought an absolutely beautiful teaching that you had created and that I found on our website Ritualwell. Deborah Waxman: I just wanted to share with you that, and to just commend the thoughtfulness and the sensitivity of your writing, whether it's in the short excerpts of the newsletter or in the larger expositions of your full length books, and just to say what a pleasure and an honor it is to be in relationship and in community with you. Michael Strassfeld: Thank you very much. Deborah Waxman: I want to thank my guest, Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, for our wonderful conversation about his life in a certain way, and about a lot of different ways to build and think on community and leadership within community. We're going to have a very rich selection of resources on Hashivenu's website, which is hashivenu.fireside.fm. You could also find more resources on reconstructingjudaism.org and on ritualweb.org. I am Rabbi Deborah Waxman. You've been listening to Hashivenu:Jewish Teachings on Resilience.