Deborah Waxman: There's a lot to move forward in the face of a lot of uncertainty. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah. If only we had a millennia old tradition of wisdom that we could draw from resources to get us through this time of the unknown. (laughter) Deborah Waxman: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. I'm so happy to welcome today as my guest, Yoshi Silverstein. Yoshi is the founder and the visionary behind the Mitsui Collective, a new startup that aspires to build resilient communities through multiracial justice and embodied practice and he also has a lot of experience in the field of JOFEE, Jewish Outdoor, Food/Farming and Environmental Education. Before founding the Mitsui Collective he was the director of the JOFEE Fellowship at Hazon, the Jewish lab for sustainability and we have, whenever we are together we have much to talk about so Yoshi, I'm so happy to be in conversation with you today. Yoshi Silverstein: Thank you, Rabbi Deborah. It's really wonderful to be on. I'm really excited and when I think back fondly to when we originally met in person it was, one it's funny because that was one of the last gatherings in person that I think a lot of us had. It was, I think, two weeks or something before things started to really shut down. Deborah Waxman: Late February, right. Yoshi Silverstein: Exactly, exactly and no, I think getting to meet you and then in particular hearing in general about your work but then about this podcast on Jewish resiliency felt like a match made in Heaven, so to speak or maybe on Earth, what have you. I am very excited to be on. Deborah Waxman: We just have so much to talk about, so I'm really excited that you asked me to join the advisory board at Mitsui and I'd love for you to share with our listeners a little bit more about this project that you're really immersed in. We're going to talk, I think over the course of today both about your work in general and we're going to tie it in to Shavuot, to the holiday that's fast approaching, but let's kind of set the landscape before we dive into the more particular conversation. Yoshi Silverstein: Great -- so Mitsui Collective, as you said, is a new startup organization. We sort of went into soft launch, I jumped in full time following my time at Hazon so that was in early February, just in time for a global pandemic to hit. Deborah Waxman: Oh boy, oh boy. Yoshi Silverstein: That's been interesting, so that's been what the newest iteration has looked like, and we'll talk about that. In some ways, though, the sort of vision of Mitsui Collective really goes back a few years. My background, like you said, is in JOFEE, Jewish Outdoor, Food/Farming and Environmental Education. Then of course as lots of folks I've had other different side hobbies and passions and things that I have done but I like to say that I have never, I'm not very good at keeping hobbies, hobbies, because the way my brain works is that as I get into something I see how it's connected to the other things that I'm interested in and then I want to figure out a way to, you know, once I get really passionate about something I want to bring it into just doing it more often and figuring out how it goes into the work that I'm already doing. So that thing that was a hobby ultimately makes its way into my work and so like I said, I have a hard time keeping hobbies, hobbies. Yoshi Silverstein: I started doing CrossFit, this has been about 10 years ago now, initially it was just something that I was enjoying that was keeping me, just as way to stay fit and move and move my body but also to experience community as the thing I didn't actually [inaudible] Deborah Waxman: Uh huh. Uh huh. Yoshi Silverstein: Being with folks three, four, five, sometimes six days a week, especially in the morning classes, honestly I was seeing those people more often than almost anybody else in my life so after several years of doing that decided to start becoming a coach and then of course once I went down that pathway my brain started just going, "Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing." I started to think initially like, "What would a Jewish CrossFit look like?" Just as a thought exercise. It was actually, I remember I was driving down to Pennsylvania to do my level one certification and it was just a quiet stretch of the road so I started thinking about that and then thought about, "Oh, well, so we could have Jewishly inspired workouts but then it could be this and it could be that," and everything started to build in my head into the vision that's sort of grounded in the idea of, "What does a Jewish movement practice look like?" but then has expanded to think about these other ways in which, we really think about what are the needs that we have as individuals and as communities not just on an annual or a monthly or a weekly basis but actually on a daily basis? And what are the ways in which a lot of us are struggling to meet those needs? And how can we build communities and take Jewish values and ideas and inspiration to both infuse and augment that practice and to inform what that actually looks like? Really that's the heart of the work that Mitsui Collective does, and the mission, which is evolving, but the mission is to build resilient community through embodied Jewish practice and multiracial justice. I think it's really thinking like, what does both contemporary Jewish practice and modern Jewish community, what can and could and should it look like and how do we go about building that? Deborah Waxman: It's so interesting and it's so complicated. I have a pretty serious yoga practice and at this point its been about 10 years and my teachers are, they are pretty deeply immersed in Hindu texts as well as just in the physical asanas, the physical forms and I have really felt like ... I'm worried about if the Jewish inspired yoga, is it adequate? Is there too much syncretism? Is it too watered down? I really appreciate the rigor and the learning of my teachers. I really appreciate that I'm not a Jewish expert in their classes, I'm just a student. There's that ... But yet, I'm always trying to take the lessons that I'm learning in yoga and apply them in my rabbinate, in my life, and my Jewish values. Where they are distinct and where they are integrated and I absolutely understand the impulse to synthesize and in some of the body work I really, I want to bring it together and in some times I want to keep them separate but have them influence each other... Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah, I mean, there's so much to unpack there. I think on one level something that really pushed me to start thinking about what this work looks like not just as a side thing but to really move into it, was just seeing whether you're at Jewish retreats and conferences or you've got your coworkers or you're just like, in all of these different Jewish spaces both seeing the practices that people were doing and I think there's all sorts of ways you could unpack it certainly in the space that I've mostly been in, of the sort of Jewish nature connection and whatnot, I think there's a lot of natural overlap within interests. Deborah Waxman: Totally. Yoshi Silverstein: In movement practice in general. Certainly in yoga, right, and just different sort of relationship to the body. I was seeing a lot of interest in that on just the individual level and then seeing also the ways in which some of those things were being offered at a Shabbaton weekend retreat or at a conference or whatnot. First of all, first of all, if it was even offered because there's been plenty of things where it's not offered at all but then if it is offered- Deborah Waxman: [inaudible] Yoshi Silverstein: It was really interesting, I mean, I could not even try to count how many times I've been in some sort of Jewish immersive communal experience and the Saturday morning options are your morning service and maybe there's a couple different options. There's your sort of traditional or Orthodox and then your egalitarian or you know, with instruments or whatever those options are. Then the other alternative option is like, yoga. Deborah Waxman: Yeah, right. Right. Right. Yoshi Silverstein: I think it's so interesting -- On the one hand I really appreciate that the organizers, I think what they're responding to is knowing that doing whatever form of traditional prayer service in the morning, which there's a whole spectrum of what traditional means in that context, right? But sort of something that if you were to walk in looks more or less like what you'd expect a Jewish prayer service to look like. That that doesn't fit for everybody and that it's nice to have alternative offerings for folks. I think they're responding to that and seeing that these things are popular. To me it also just felt like this missed opportunity to sort of bridge that gap between what are these wellness practices? What are the wellness practices and how do we actually engage with those in a Jewish way? I think there's, first of all, I fully support folks, like you said, sometimes you just want to do yoga or do CrossFit or dance or whatever and you just happen to be a Jewish person doing that thing. Deborah Waxman: Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Yoshi Silverstein: Great. I hope it goes without saying there's nothing wrong with that and there's an opportunity, though, to dig into that and to sort of push the practice. That's one thing that really came to me. I was just seeing that gap in both that, the lack of things being offered explored and also then just seeing the way in which those things are siloed. Like, "Here's the one hour out of-" Deborah Waxman: Yeah. Yoshi Silverstein: "40 hours of programming, or whatever, that are dedicated to an embodied wellness offering." Deborah Waxman: But before you dive into it, in an overview, what would you think about for the complement for the morning options and how would you interweave embodiment through a conference? I know we had a big Reconstructionist convention back in November of 2018 and the thing that we were, I think we did a lot of different modalities but the thing that we were most attentive to was that you could find music at almost any hour of the day. We presumed that people were going to want to stop talking and that they were going to either want to raise up their voices in song or take that in. How would you embody? When we talk about "queer-ing" Judaism, how would you JOFEE-ize the... Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah, yeah, so in some ways I think this is almost easiest to do on Shabbat or at least, I mean, we literally have the container that's already been set and so it's sort of like, we already know that Shabbat is the seventh day of the week, it's meant to be this special holy container that we carve out in time that's distinct from the rest of the week, right? We know that at the core of what makes Shabbat special and holy is the way that we make it distinct and different. I think on one level it's thinking, "Well what do we do? How do we spend the other six days of the week?" On one level you could just be like, "Shabbat should just look nothing like that," right? It's like, one way you could come into sort of a design thinking about Shabbat is how do we make Shabbat look as different from the rest of the week as possible? If I am spending, let's call it 40 hours of the work week, a lot of us it's actually more, sometimes less or we add onto it but if I'm sitting basically either at a desk or on the couch or whatever, I'm spending a lot of my time sitting at 90 degree angles, right? Yoshi Silverstein: One way to think about it is like, Shabbat, maybe we should do anything but sit at 90 degree angles all of Shabbat, right? Maybe if you are gathering for your prayer service, maybe you're actually putting a bunch of cushions on the ground. Maybe you have walking services or like, there's a lot of ways that you can play and be creative with it but that would be one thing is just how do we not just replicate what we do the rest of the week on Shabbat? Deborah Waxman: I feel really keenly aware of that at this moment in time because we are still in a shelter-in-place environment and one thing that's been a really interesting thing for me -- this gives me a lot to think about for my Shabbat practice. On the one hand, I'm so excited by how certain geographic constraints are lifted up in the current environment so that I'm actually going to be Zooming into services in Cleveland and services in Montreal. The Reconstructionist movement is putting on a big Tikkun Leil Shavuot, a big 16 hours of learning for Shavuot and we can do it, we can draw on and tap teachers from all over the place but I spend the work week, I spend the week online, definitely sitting. Definitely at 90 degrees. Or actually something less acute than 90 degrees because I'm hunched over and on screen the whole time. By the time Shabbat comes around, if I'm not actually speaking at another congregation I want nothing more than to not be online. Deborah Waxman: I've always tried to step away from devices on Shabbat but all the more so, even as I'm hungry for people and for community, not to say I ... I also have a bazillion appointments so Shabbat is also about not having any appointments. A lot of that is definitely about my nefesh, neshamah, my soul, but it's also about my body and giving my body and my eyes a break. I haven't necessarily thought about centering Shabbat as an embodied ... Definitely the embodied experience of taste and touch and smell but like really, what it would be like to center my body experience over Shabbat over other expressions of Shabbat. Let's talk actually, let's talk about an example of an embodied Jewish practice and then let's actually move into a conversation about Shavuot. Yoshi Silverstein: Great. Deborah Waxman: I had jumped in and if you want to pick up with an example of an embodied practice that you might go forward. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah so we had been talking about Jewish movement practice. I think because we define Judaism as a religion then the pieces of it that we then- Deborah Waxman: Wait, wait, wait, I got to jump in. That's not how Reconstructionists define Judaism. We define Judaism as the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people so rather .... Yoshi Silverstein: Great so this fits in. This fits in perfectly. Okay so some people, right, define and again I'm making some very, very sweeping generalizations but I think if, let me put it this way, if we define Judaism only as a religion- Deborah Waxman: Great. Yoshi Silverstein: Then the spaces that we create for Judaism to happen are only, "religious spaces," so we built these institutions that were modeled in part after other religious buildings, institutions, right? Sort of have the 20th century synagogue, blah, blah, blah. Part of what I think about whether we're talking about yoga or a lot of martial arts practices, dance practices, that these movement practices didn't come out of a vacuum. They came out of particular cultures with a particular relationship to the community, to the ecology, the place, right? There's a relationship to place. You think about like Capoeira, which is this amazing hybrid of martial art and dance. You can't understand Capoeira without understanding the history in which it came about which was really African slaves in Brazil who turned it into something that looked like dance because they weren't allowed to practice martial arts because they were slaves and the slave masters didn't let them. Yoshi Silverstein: That's how they hid their practice. If you were to try to do Capoeira without that understanding you're really, really missing the deeper point of the practice. I think- Deborah Waxman: You are a Reconstruction- Yoshi Silverstein: ... the movement practice we can think about the similarly of like, how do we have a legitimate, cultural exchange, that's the one thing. Then we do, I don't know, we do what we've always done which is to go a little bit deeper beneath the surface and pull out the underlying tools and technologies and then fuse them with Jewish narrative and metaphor and symbolism and values and something new comes out of that. I think with the Jewish movement and sort of embodied practice, to me it feels like we're right on the verge of something really, really interesting, of really exploring what does that look like? Especially in the world of movement because I think we've only scratched the surface and I think there's so much there and I think right now in pockets we're like, "Oh we can do a CrossFit workout that's inspired by the eight days of Hanukka," which is fun -- well maybe depending on your definition of fun and if you like hard workouts, right? -- Yoshi Silverstein: That could be fun but that's just scratching the surface. That's not enough practice, that's not a movement practice. We need to go deeper. I feel like that's where we're sort of just starting to get into with Mitsui Collective is being part of that conversation of what does this look like? We've developed some ideas along the way but I also definitely don't want to pretend like I have all of the answers because one, I never will and two, this feels like just the start of what I hope will be a really long journey of learning and evolution, yeah. Deborah Waxman: You are a Reconstructionist without fully knowing it just because a Reconstructionist approach, when we talk about civilization we talk about there's a commitment to diversity, this recognition that there are a lot of different elements that make up the Jewish civilization and a lot of different ways of being Jewish and that that civilization is both influenced by external civilizations and also can influence them, as well. So that interchange back and forth. There's a particular, it's not quite a methodology but an approach where we can do it in a self-conscious fashion that you just articulated so beautifully of taking hold and taking seriously both what we come from and what we're encountering and doing it in a curious and a non-anxious way with a recognition that it's not about building walls. That the Jewish civilization and even more to the point the Jewish people will be vitalized by that encounter, will be changed by it probably for the better. Probably for the better. Deborah Waxman: Lets, because we're starting to wind down, when you and I started planning this conversation I said to you if you had your druthers and could create an embodied practice for Shavuot, what do you think ... This experience of revelation, of journeying through the desert -- newly liberated the Jewish people journey through the desert to Sinai, and encountere the divine, record that encounter. From a Reconstructionist perspective we would say we deeply believe our ancestors had that experience with the divine and we believe that their record of that experience was filtered through their own human limitations and the cultural context of the time. What we have in the Torah is both holy and a record of that encounter and also really limited. I can't decide whether to ask you to think about it within the constraints of pandemic and sheltering at home or to ask you just to let your brain go and talk about what, in an ideal world, what it is that you would create. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah, fair. [Laughter] Deborah Waxman: Your call. Yoshi Silverstein: When I think about what an embodied Shavuot experience could look like, one of the most traditional ways of doing Shavuot is this Tikkun Leil Shavuot, this full night practice of study and learning and being in community and it's a really fun, a really interesting practice. I've been able to do it kind of a handful of times depending on where I was and what was happening. The times that I stayed up through the night, both what I benefit from and what kept me in it was that at some point maybe some of the learning sessions started off sort of more focused on intellectual discussion based, sort of what I think of as learning in the head but at some point that almost has to move into the body. It has to move into the heart because for most of us if it stays in the head, at some point our heads will get tired and we will say, "I got to go to bed," right? If we move into a space where it is heart- focused, maybe we're singing, maybe there's some sort of really deep spiritual element, we're feeling really connected to the community that we're with, that's the kind of thing that keeps you up and sustains you through the night and so it makes you say, "This is worth dealing with the impacts tomorrow and for the next week or whatever it is of being tired. I'm going to stay through this." Yoshi Silverstein: Then sunrise hits and maybe if you've had your fire going through the night it sort of picks up the rays of sunshine and now just getting into some ad hoc poetry. I think about what does that look like in this embodied practice? Really but then building off of that. So sure, maybe I'm not opposed in any way to text study. I love a good text learning session so maybe it starts off with some of that but at some point it really moves into just like a fully embodied practice and maybe that's singing and dancing, maybe there's movement but all these things. I have this dream of maybe we're doing it where we start at the base of a mountain and at midnight we start hiking up the mountain so that at sunrise we're at the top of the mountain and we celebrate the revelation not in the way that is worshiping the sun but in a way where we're understanding that the environment in which we are impacts the experience, right? It's just like- Yeah. Deborah Waxman: I just have to jump in and tell you that one of the things I had the opportunity to climb Mount Sinai when I was 30. It was a good long while ago. We climbed it. Probably because it was very hot, we climbed at night and we were there for sunrise and the most transformative -- talk about the place and transforming -- The most transforming part of that was the sky. The sky. I remember we would stop on the way up and I would sit and going up the mountain you can only see the sky because you see the mountain in front of you but we would turn around and sit on our tushes and I would take a drink of water and I kept choking on the water because I had never seen so many stars in my life. Just never. As you're narrating it I can just remember that experience of just awe again and again of being in nature and ascending a mountain. Just the physicality of it and the grandeur and my very smallness. Very small. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah so for sure. At some point, obviously not this year but at some point we'll do some sort of Shavuot hike up the mountain. On some level we need to be, if we want to know what it was like to be in the wilderness we need to go to the wilderness, right? Okay so- Deborah Waxman: Yeah it's so interesting because there is something about the portability of Judaism but that doesn't mean that just because we can make Shabbat anywhere that we shouldn't pay attention to where we are. Yoshi Silverstein: It tees us up to tap into our holiness as people which then tees us up to recognize the holiness of Shabbat in time but it starts with the space. The space really helps to guide that experience. Deborah Waxman: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yoshi Silverstein: Thinking about Shavuot this year where we're not -- I'm not going to say we're not likely, we're not going to be able to gather. Deborah Waxman: Right. Yoshi Silverstein: We're close enough we just know it's not going to happen. Deborah Waxman: Right. Yoshi Silverstein: We're not going to be able to gather in person, in community, so what do we do with that? One of the other really core, I'd say sort of values and traditions and practices that has made its way into Mitsui Collective's pedagogy is this idea of hevruta and in the different ways that I've been able to study movement practice and learn from a lot of teachers, a lot of that work in this comes from folks like Ido Portal who's a Israeli movement researcher and practitioner and some of his students -- also Katy Bowman who I don't think is Jewish -- but a lot of that work happens in relationship. A lot of the drills and exercises are literally done in partners with one person and another. If we talk about the movement ecology, the hevruta partner often becomes nature, becomes the environment in which we're moving. So thinking about what does that then mean for Shavuot this year? I mean, I think we have to figure out some way to get into hevruta and maybe it won't be with another person or maybe it'll be with a very limited number of people depending on who's in a circle of people that you're in- Deborah Waxman: Podding with, yeah. Yoshi Silverstein: I think we can think about first of all, what does it mean to be in hevruta with ourselves, right? It's sort of like, whoever else you might be in hevruta or go out of hevruta with in your life, you will always be in hevruta with yourself and so what does it mean to be in partnership with yourself? To be a good hevruta partner to yourself and then to sort of use that to, I think in the case of Shavuot, to really explore what is the revelation of Torah that I can tap into this year in this moment given the unique circumstances we're in? Given the ways in which we are very much, I mean, you couldn't ask for a greater feeling of being in the unknown. Deborah Waxman: Yeah, yeah. Yoshi Silverstein: That part of the readiness for Shavuot I think is -- we're all right there. Deborah Waxman: Right, right. Yoshi Silverstein: As I think about what an embodied Jewish practice for Shavuot looks like this year, those are the questions I'm asking and honestly I don't have anything sort of like, fully defined yet but those are the questions I'm asking, is sort of, what are the practices that would help us to get there? Are there ways that those can happen virtually and use the virtual tools? Is it live and synchronous or is it asynchronous where we use the internet to share tools but then people just take that and do what they do and then maybe we go back and gather and talk about it later? Right? I don't know but those are the questions I'm asking. Deborah Waxman: Well I think that that's great. We have to wind down now but I think one of the things that I take away from it is that I know the Reconstructionist Movement is doing a 16 hour Shavuot, Tikkun Leil Shavuot, we'll be doing that and people can join through Facebook Live and I think in addition to doing, that one of the takeaways I have from this conversation is I'm also going to make certain I go outside, because Shavuot -- another, the agricultural gloss of Shavuot is that it's the barley harvest and it's about communing with nature and to remember that it is not only about whatever the study might be, whatever the prayer might be, whatever, all those modalities but there's also a way... I love that image of taking on nature as my hevruta, to really connect ... This is the place I am this year. I am at my home, I have been here for eight weeks, I am here for the foreseeable future and to use that as an opportunity to really kind of deepen that connection and to explore the revelation that can come from that. That's a gift to me as I start to orient myself towards Shavuot. Deborah Waxman: I want to thank you so much for this conversation, Yoshi, and I want to invite in anyone who's interested in being a thought partner with Yoshi on embodied Jewish practice to be in touch with him. You can find out more about Mitsui Collective on the website, Mitsuicollective.org. That's M-I-T-S-U-I-Collective.org and a link is found on the show notes at the bottom, the website that supports the show. Yoshi's also very involved in Edot, which is the Midwestern Jewish Diversity Collaborative. Thank you so much for this conversation. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah, thank you so much. I mean, there's more to talk about but this was really, really fun. Thank you so much for having me. Deborah Waxman: We're so glad that you joined us. Thank you so much. For more information on this topic as I said you can look on Hashivenu's website which is Hashivenu.fireside.fm and you can also look at Mitsuicollective.org. You can find more resources on Reconstructingjudaism.org and on Ritualwell.org. As always I'm going to ask if you could subscribe and rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or wherever it is you get your podcasts. I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu: Jewish Teachings on Resilience.