Lex Rofeberg: The ability for somebody in any minute of their day at any hour of their day to decide I'm going to do Jewish with other people right now no matter what their location is nutso to me. That's unreal. We all have JCCs in our pockets. Bryan S.: Welcome to #TrendingJewish, the Jewish podcast about everything. Today Bryan Schwartzman is here solo. Rachael Burgess my fabulous co-host is out spanning the country promoting on behalf of our organization Reconstructing Judaism, making connections, raising money. So I am here solo and I feel a little bit like the first Wayne's World movie, when Wayne gets up and walks out, and Garth who is so comfortable being on camera with his cohost, all of a sudden is alone and kind of looks at the camera with a deer in headlights, like okay man. It will be good so. Bryan S.: Hi, listeners, we want to hear from you. We want to hear your comments, we want to hear your ideas for guests and topics. Write to us, send us a message to our website trendingjewish.fireside.fm. It's a great way to be in touch with us. If you haven't already subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play, Overcast, Castro and most other places that you can find podcasts -- I actually use PodCast Addict on my Android -- and rate us and tell people about this show. That would be great, a way to keep us going. Bryan S.: So today I'm really excited. We're moving into a topic that I think is going to be a focus of ours in this next batch of episodes, looking at the intersection of Judaism and technology and the ways that the Internet is impacting, changing, posing questions to Judaism and the contemporary Jewish community. I've got a great duo of guests to discuss this. We recorded a great interview, really excited, eager to share it with you. Bryan S.: I have got the co-creators and co-founders of Judaism Unbound which is a podcast. We're doing another podcast about a podcast. These guys are really asking profound questions about the current and future state of Judaism, the Jewish community, Jewish civilization. We've got Daniel Libenson and Lex Rofeberg. Brian S.: Daniel Libenson is the founder and president of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future which hosts and produces Judaism Unbound. He spent six years as executive director of the University of Chicago Hillel and three years as director of New Initiatives at Harvard Hillel. Dan is a 2009 AVI CHAI fellow and has also received the Richard M. Joel Exemplar of Excellence Award. Before devoting his life to working for the Jewish community Dan spent five years as a law professor after clerking for Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the first circuit. He lives in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago with his wife and two children. Brian S.: Lex Rofeberg is a Jewish educator and rabbinical student who serves as strategic initiatives coordinator of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future. He is currently pursuing his rabbinical ordination at the ALEPH Rabbinic Program affiliated with the Jewish renewal movement. He comes to Judaism Unbound after a two year education fellowship at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life based in Jackson Mississippi. He has had articles published by JTA, myjewishlearning.com, Sh'ma Journal, JewSchool: Progressive Jews & Views and others. He grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lex has delivered an ELI Talk, sort of the Jewish version of TED Talks on this very topic. Judaism and the Internet, and you can find [it] now on our episode resources which will be on our home page. Brian S.: So, without further ado here are Dan and Lex. Lex Rofeberg: Thanks for having us. Daniel Libenson: Yeah, thanks for having us. Lex Rofeberg: Glad to hear as we record this it's March Madness so advancing the ball is particularly good this next couple weeks. Brian S.: Isn't that a football metaphor? Can you say it with ... Lex Rofeberg: You know, it's more helpful in football to advance the ball than basketball. You can advance the ball all you want in basketball, you still might not score. It's still part of the process I feel like. Daniel Libenson: I didn't even know when March Madness was other than it was in March so you see the differences between Lex and me which is part of the magic. Lex Rofeberg: Yeah, basketball unbound. Brian S.: I went to UMass which was big rivals with URI back in the 90's. Probably not so much now. The topic I chose and that I hope my co-host who is out raising money for our organization today hope to really tackle is something you both have spoken about at great length, regarding the impact of technology, the Internet on Judaism, Jewish life, Jewish community. I don't think I'm nearly as forward thinking as the two of you. I still have a little bit of a reactionary strain [in] that I'm bemoaning the amount of time people are looking at their phones, not just alone with their thoughts or looking at screens instead of books. I'm thinking about what's lost. Brian S.: Both of you really seem to be looking at what can be gained, what has been gained, what could be gained. So, I guess I just wanted to start the conversation broadly and ask, how do you both approach this big question of what does this technological revolution and access to information mean for our evolving Jewish community? You guys can flip a coin if you want. Lex Rofeberg: It's funny. On our own podcast we're usually like, we're asking the questions so it's easy. Brian S.: By the way, I know as a reporter, I was a print reporter for about a dozen years and I know it was the hardest thing in the world the few times I was interviewed. It's like a doctor being a patient. So I greatly appreciate you subjecting yourself to this because I'm sure I won't do it as well as skillfully as you guys do. Lex Rofeberg: No, I'm sure you will. So yeah. Digital Judaism, what's the deal? Where is it going, yeah, big question but you're right, we do think about it a lot. It's a particular passion of mine and I think it stems from a couple of places for me. One is that I may be a rarity in the world of Jewish professionals in that I've only ever lived in what I would consider small and mid sized Jewish communities. The biggest Jewish community I've ever lived in is Milwaukee where I grew up, which is from my perspective pretty big, but when you're comparing it to New York or San Francisco or even Philly or Chicago where the two of you are, it's small. Lex Rofeberg: So as a result of that, really every element of what I do Jewishly and how I think about the Jewish world is refracted through the lens of somebody who doesn't presume there's that much Jewish around. Who doesn't presume that there's a synagogue in every neighborhood and lots and lots of Jews even in the public schools, etc, etc. Lex Rofeberg: So for me that lens I think is at the core of why digital Judaism is so important to me because there are so, so many people out there for whom digital Judaism is actually their first stop. It's not their third or fourth or sixth stop after the things they've got locally but it's their first. For some of those because they're even, they're in much smaller communities even than -- I'm in Providence, Rhode Island now and Milwaukee is too -- there's enough going on that you can find things to do. But there are some people that are much more isolated and when I lived in Jackson, Mississippi I got a little bit of a lens into what it's like to live in a community with only Jews in the three digits as opposed to four or five digits in a community. Lex Rofeberg: That's hard. It's especially hard if what you want Jewishly is anything other than the most normative, most sort of, for lack of a better term, mainstream kinds of offerings. What digital Judaism provides is a location of Judaism that is universal in the most direct sense of what universal means. We're not yet at a place where the Internet is absolutely everywhere in the world but it's most places that people inhabit. And so, by building up Judaism there, we are in effect building up Judaism everywhere that there are Jews. And so for me to be a Jewish professional and see that primarily as a threat to what exists and not as the greatest possible opportunity we have is a really huge mistake. That's sort of where I'm coming at it from. Lex Rofeberg: I didn't fully answer like what I see as the biggest strengths and scary things about it, but I'm sure we'll get there, but that's sort of where I'm coming at with it. Daniel Libenson: I would add just two things. One, we had an incredible guest on our podcast maybe about a year ago named Rabbi Juan Mejia who is a guy who comes from Colombia and he is doing all this Torah study and things like in Spanish for people in Central and South America who are Spanish speaking Jews or Spanish speaking people who believe they have Jewish origins, and they've taken an interest in being Jewish again and they're coming to know Judaism through the internet. It's the only possible way for them to come to know Judaism because there's basically no Jews where they are. Daniel Libenson: It was just this incredible story of how that kind of expands and how it introduces Judaism to people who may not have had Jewish ancestry, etc, etc. So, it's just this incredible story to reinforce what Lex is saying about the potential power of digital Judaism or the Internet in places where, like Lex is talking about, Judaism isn't as ubiquitous as it is in certain large cities. Daniel Libenson: The other thing for me is to think about the potential of digital Judaism, and that's where I think a lot of us often make mistakes in how we think about something that's actually relatively new. So I often use the example of digital photography, and that when the digital photography chip first came out 10 or 15 years ago, especially being in a cell phone, the pictures that it took were really bad. If we were having this conversation about "digital photography will replace film photography," we would be saying "oh, what a tragedy. These are terrible pictures and it's going to be worse." But we know from the history that digital photography very, very quickly caught up and now in many ways provides a much better photography experience to people than film photography ever did, and for all sorts of reasons it's now able to be used by so many more people that never engaged in film photography at all. Daniel Libenson: That's what I have to say about digital Judaism: that we're only at the beginning and we have to look around. Lex is more positive than I am about what's going on today already and that may be generational, that may be that Lex is more in touch with what's happening in a way that I'm not. Even if we take my sort of Luddite approach and say, well, it's still not that great, we know that the world of digital technology in general is accelerating in ways that we can't even imagine or can barely imagine today. Some of it could go in a dystopian direction but some of it could be incredible. Daniel Libenson: For me, at least, the thing that I can sort of wrap my simple minded thinking around is virtual reality. I can easily imagine that very soon, much faster than we imagine, we're going to have access to virtual reality in such a way that we put on a pair of goggles and some other gear and it really feels like we're in a different place. Once that technology is solidified and ubiquitous, I think that the difference between a digital Jewish experience and an in-person Jewish experience will be so much smaller than we imagine it today, that we can actually imagine it being extremely fulfilling even if your gauge for fulfilling is what's available in person. Daniel Libenson: So, I think it's really important to therefore, A, be excited about the potential, B, get into that landscape early so that we can start to work there, so that when the technology catches up, it's not that then Judaism is trying to jump in there when the landscape is already taken up by all these other things that are going -- and just to really judge it by its potential rather than by its current reality. Brian S.: I think one way to get into this, and Dan I think you touched on it a little bit, I call it my flying car question. Dan, certainly when we were kids you probably remember we imagined we would have flying cars in the future. It was the high point of Back to the Future 2. We didn't get that, but we got things we never imagined. We got computers in our pockets, on our phones. So I feel like there's a little bit of that with Judaism and digital technology. I feel like there was there was definitely this talk and writing in Jewish circles about prayer and communities moving online and there was going to be digital congregations and nobody could wrap their heads around that and nobody really understood it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but we haven't really gotten that, but we've gotten a lot of other things that nobody expected. Lex Rofeberg: So I wouldn't say I would correct you. So basically what I think you illuminated, and what Dan illuminated a little with his photography example, is when we think that the new development is going to lead -- so internet in this case, or any new development. -- we think that the onset of a new technology means that things that we have had for a long time are going to replicate themselves in that new technology. So in this example, that congregations are going to go online and so now the thing is going to be, instead of in-person congregations, it's going to be online congregations. When we think it's that straightforward of a transition, that's the mistake. Lex Rofeberg: I will say there are places -- and I call them"places" by the way even though they're websites. To me they are as much of a place in many senses -- There are places that are seeking and are online congregations. They're not big, and I agree with you that they haven't become a norm that thousands and thousands of people are doing. That said, there are Jewish places where people are congregating online. So whether those are congregations or not, they are now a norm. I'm thinking mostly here of what people affectionately call JewBook. But just the every day increasing map of Jewish Facebook groups that have become part of just the minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, rhythm of people's lives. Lex Rofeberg: I really want to underscore that this is not a small marginal thingk. I'm on obviously on the high end of participants in this world, but I'm in, I don't know probably, seven, 10 of these groups. There's at least a half dozen of them that have thousands of people. Like a thousand, two thousand, six thousand people. That's huge. The ability for somebody in any minute of their day, at any hour of their day, to decide "I'm going to do Jewish with other people right now" and be able to do that no matter what their location is, is nutso to me. That's unreal. We all have JCCs in our pockets. Now, are those JCCs as good as the JCC in our actual community? Probably not, almost definitely not. But there's also things happening there that I can't find locally. Lex Rofeberg: So I can be in a Jewish Facebook group already for very specifically the set of people who are in interfaith relationships, feeling upset at the way that other people in social justice activism are talking about folks in Jewish interfaith relationships and want to have a space to share around that particular thing. I'm in a group loosely about that. That's a few hundred people. Lex Rofeberg: The idea that I could walk into any community in Providence -- and it's not a knock on them, it's not that Providence communities are doing something wrong. -- the idea that I could find something in-person specifically catered to that need of a person in an interfaith relationship who's involved in Jewish community, who's upset at how a particular corner of that Jewish community relates to interfaith conversation, that's not going to happen most likely. If it is going to happen, there's going to be three or four other people in my local community that share that unique positionality. Lex Rofeberg: When you've got the entire locus of the Jewish world all visiting a particular place, Facebook, you can specialize and make distinctive all of these particular kinds of groups, and it's creating a depth and a specificity of Jewish community that I think we've never seen. I don't think we've ever been able to have -- this is no longer me -- but a space for specifically transmasculine Jews of color, these kinds of groups now exist because we have a sample size of millions of people to work from as opposed to a sample size even in New York of like one million and really spread out over a bunch of boroughs less than one million. Brian S.: So what do you each think are some of the most exciting innovative things happening now in the Jewish digital sphere? Daniel Libenson: I think that you have to start with Sefaria. We had an extraordinary interview with Brett Lockspeiser who's one of the co-creators of Sefaria a few weeks ago, a few months ago. What I think it's so important about Sefaria, which for people who don't know is basically a web based hub where you can access essentially any Jewish text, or that's their aspiration. Daniel Libenson: What I think is so important to point out about Sefaria is that I don't think it could have been created by a Jewish professional, because a Jewish professional looks at the wealth of Jewish texts and says, oh wow, this is overwhelming, this is so much. The Jewish canon, the Jewish text library is just so overfilled that it's just overwhelming to imagine that somehow we create some kind of online way that people would be able to access any Jewish text in seconds. Whereas for Brett, someone who worked at Google for a while, his experience of this was that it's a small problem. Google has just put the entire world's information in an index. And so the idea that there's basically a thousand important books and we can find a way to digitize those and translate them and make them available to everybody -- that's a small problem. Daniel Libenson: That's why I think something like Sefaria is really incredibly exciting, because it allows what I often talk about, that we often talk about, this kind of deficit in Jewish education of Jews today, some kind of crisis of education. I have two things to say about that. Number one, the education in Judaism in the past was only for the most elite in society and the vast majority of people had very, very little Jewish education and the only Jewish knowledge they had was what they picked up from their practices at home, which was significant but not vast by any stretch of the imagination. Daniel Libenson: So today we have the potential for literally every Jew to be Jewishly educated more than I think most Jews were in most of the past. Something like Sefaria gives the opportunity, I think, for Jews to have access to Jewish knowledge faster and more immediately and more deeply than 99% of rabbis throughout Jewish history, because rabbis were restricted to what they had learned in yeshiva and what books they happened to be able to afford on their bookshelves. Daniel Libenson: Now because of digital technology, any Jew, any non-Jew, can access any Jewish text and ultimately an incredible translation. The fact that Sefaria was able to put the resources together to buy the perpetual license to Steinsaltz's English translation of the Talmu,d which is an incredibly accessible translation of the Talmud, is just stunning. Daniel Libenson: I think that Sefaria is important in its own right but it's also an incredible example of the potential for digital technology to make Judaism I think more accessible and more powerful for more people than it's ever been before in its entire history, which turns the crisis narrative on its head. So the question becomes what other dimensions of Jewish life can be "Sefaria-ized." Lex Rofeberg: Yeah, I agree with that. I can start by saying with the risk of hyperbole everything that's Jewish on the Internet excites me. Even the things that appall me that are.... To me, to use a Reconstructionist term, it's about building a civilization. It's about creating a map of as much of the Jewish as we can and making it available because here is what goes unsaid all the time in Jewish life. There are tons and tons of people. We all know multiple[s] of them who are walking around feeling insecure about their, for lack of a better term like Jewish knowledge. People will tell you, I don't have that much Jewish knowledge. Lex Rofeberg: If you in 1973 felt like, (just arbitrarily), felt like "I don't have that much Jewish knowledge," you would have to do one of the following things. You'd need to walk into some sort of public space where somebody may see you and purchase a book, a Jewish book, or you would need to go to your Rabbi ask some question. You would have to make yourself vulnerable in a certain set of ways. I'm making it sound lie really scary to do that, it's not the most scary thing in the world to go and talk to a rabbi but it's a hurdle you have to surmount. You would need to walk out of your house, ask somebody that is not yourself for help to achieve this goal of deepening your connection, whether it's what you would term your heritage or your religion or your people or your civilization. Lex Rofeberg: Today, you have that same insecurity. You go to Google while you're procrastinating at work for 12 minutes and you look up whatever it is. It's March so Passover is coming up. I remember there's some parts to the Seder, one of the parts of the Seder. A lot of people aren't going to want to ask what are the parts of the Seder because they're going to think that makes them look dumb. They're going to think that they should have just known that already. How dare they be a Jewish adult and not have just memorized those. It's every year you talk about [them]. Lex Rofeberg: What the Internet does, is it creates sort of an implicit permission to not know, and to take that not knowing and change it into knowing, which is such a, I mean, it's a gift, it's a huge gift because we have so many layers of Jewish insecurity around knowing. The best part of our culture is that it's about knowing and studying and learning and all of that stuff, it's great. But it means that people who aren't at the very maximum level of that feel somehow deficient. We're talking in an RRC context, show of hands, anybody know any rabbis themselves who feel like they're not where they want to be in certain realms of Jewish knowledge? Of course we do. This is such a common thing. We all want to know more. Lex Rofeberg: Every ELI Talk, for lack of a better term, these are Jewish TED Talks, every one of those that is available is a gift. Every myjewishlearning.com entry. Forget the Jewish stuff, every Wikipedia page that is on a Torah portion. There's one guy, there's an article about him somewhere, who went through and did all of the Wikipedia pages for every Torah portion. To me, I don't think he's a rabbi, that's one of the most supreme Jewish services of our time. If we were going to list the people who have had the most impact on the most human beings on the planet through Judaism, he's one of those people in my lifetime because who of us hasn't gone to a Wikipedia page, whether we're a Jewish professional or somebody giving a d'var Torah and we want a quick review or something, whether we're not and we are looking for our first way in and we don't have a translation of the Torah in our house. Whatever it is, that's such a gift. Lex Rofeberg: We already are at a place where we're taking that stuff for granted which is good. I want us to be able to, but when we take a step back the "Jewish Internet" isn't just the stuff that may conceivably steer people away from in-person communities, which I don't think that's really going to happen. It's all of these gifts that we add on top of Jewish life as it is. It's hard for me to look at that and not get all mushy and gooey inside to be totally honest. Brian S.: So I have two I think are very interlocking questions but it is kind of the dreaded double parked question. Lex Rofeberg: We do that all the time. It's a trick of the trade. Brian S.: So, how do you think about, demonstrate, measure impact of a digital source and how do you convince philanthropist, funders that these endeavors are worth investing in? Daniel Libenson: I was going to ask you. Brian S.: Let's figure it out right here. Daniel Libenson: Yeah, let's figure it out if any philanthropists are listening. I wasn't to start by one comment [that] in a little way kind of evades the question, that goes to something that Lex was talking abou,t which was when he said "I'm excited about everything" because everything has potential. For everything is good and important in its own right to someone, and we don't know what has the potential to really take off. Daniel Libenson: Lex in his ELI Talk talked about this as a migration. To analogize it, the Jews are moving to a new place. We know the story of the Jews moving to America and now the Jews are moving online. Think about the beginning of Jewish life in America. We don't really know a lot of what was going on. You can read Jonathan Sarna's book and you can get some flavor of it but basically this mass of Jews arrives in America. One of the amazing things is, I think for the first 150 years of Jewish life in America there was literally not a rabbi on the North American continent. And so you had these 150 years of Jews kind of bumping around and figuring stuff out and moving west and there was all kinds of stuff going on. Daniel Libenson: Some of it I'm sure was great for a few people and sort of went away. Now was that unimportant because it went away? No, it actually sustained those Jews through their migration. So, I think often we imagine that the only thing that has worth is something that's going to ultimately itself become the seed or the nucleus around which the future Judaism will grow. As opposed to seeing [that] if a few people are engaged in something it has inherent value because it's keeping those people in the game. Daniel Libenson: So, that's I think a little bit unclear for a philanthropist how to think about, because the question ultimately for philanthropy is yes, but when should I supplement with my money that activity as opposed to, if it works for the person they should pay for it. And to what extent should we be infusing more money into the system and where in order to have the highest impact. Daniel Libenson: So we do in some way want to measure impact, but the first thing that I put out there is that we should also be careful thinking about that, if we understand what's going on to be a migration and to be this very early stage. And then along comes someone like Isaac Mayer Wise who comes in and looks around and sees what's going on and starts to see connections between them and starts to also see the importance of the migration in a way that people hadn't before. People saw the migration to America also sort of negatively, that it was a golden land but it was also a place where you can't really be Jewish. I mean that's what they were saying in Europe and why many people didn't come. Daniel Libenson: But then Isaac Mayer Wise comes around and says, hey we can actually recognize this as Minhag America, as the American Judaism, which is a new Judaism in its own right, and we can start to give that definition. So I imagine at some point somebody will come along and look around at what's going on in digital Judaism and start to tie things together and try to make proposals as to how things might fit together. And then we might be able to start to say okay, so now that somebody is here trying to help us systematize this, we should evaluate it as a system and then we can use sort of classical measures of impact and whatever. Daniel Libenson: I think about it a lot, maybe like pharmaceutical R&D or something like, that where you just run a lot of experiments, and you know by the nature of the thing that 99% of them are going to "fail" and some of them are going to fail in what you thought that they were trying to do but succeed in some other way. Like I think Viagra was originally supposed to be some kind of blood pressure medication and it didn't work so well for that but it became I think the best selling drug in history for a different reason. I was thinking like what would be the Jewish Viagra, which is sort of an interesting ... Brian S.: Oh gosh. Daniel Libenson: That allowed Judaism to flourish. The question is kind of, at this stage I would propose that we are at the stage of the R&D and of the kind of pharmaceutical. We just have to invest in the process rather than in any particular attempt. But then to go back to your question, I think ultimately the question is okay, if we reframed it there, how do we see what should be assessed. Here's what I would submit as an alternative to the traditional point of view that says what impact looks like is large and growing numbers of people that are being affected by something. Daniel Libenson: I would say that in this world in which it's experimental and it's new, much more important than numbers is the passion of the people who are involved. If we believe that the people who are involved in this new thing are similar to the people who are uninvolved, as opposed to when we're thinking about, let's say, somebody who's really looking for more stringent Jewish law or something like that. There are people that are really passionate about that. We call them ultra Orthodox. The thing is is that we know that they are so profoundly different from people who are uninvolved in Jewish life that even though they have a lot of passion for this, it's probably not going to translate over to those other folks. Daniel Libenson: But if you look at something like Moishe House, or some kind of initiative that's not a digital one, but talk about Lex and the Facebook group for people who are married to somebody who's not Jewish, or whatever, that the people in that group are intensely passionate about it, and you say wow, that's actually the trend that's coming. I mean, that's going to be the vast, it already is the majority of the Jewish population. It's only going to get more so. So if we've actually found something that's generating enormous passion around this group that looks like the people that are not involved, then I would say let's invest in that. Daniel Libenson: First of all, let's help that deepen and let's help that work really, really even better for the small group who is already really passionate about it and then let's help them kind of, whatever you want to call it, do the marketing or figure out how to get the other people to find out about it. Lex Rofeberg: When I reflect on this question -- what I'd say is Dan is the person who's most directly answering it for us in terms of grants et cetera -- when I think about howto paint what we're doing now to appeal to funders, so there's two sort of routes to go. There's funders that we think of as sort of "the funders" that are funding Jewish life in all sorts of different ways. These are foundations, these are federations. Their purpose is to look specifically and they've been doing this. And there's people that aren't funding Jewish life. They have money and they're funding other things. Lex Rofeberg: Do I think that what's being created on the Jewish internet, for lack of a better term, could appeal to members of each of those groups? I do, for very different reasons. The other piece I'd say is that there is a challenge, because this relates once again to what we said before about the transition from one era and to the next, and how those switchovers or handoffs happen -- which is if our metrics for measuring the success of something are about how many people gather in a shared space to do something, then the Internet's failing. In most senses. We're not yet in a virtual reality place where literally the four of us on this call right now are in the same place. Lex Rofeberg: And so, by many metrics of how we think of a gathering, this isn't one. We're in different places. So, if a funder's idea is to support efforts that bring Jews together around Judaism or bring people, I mean, some of them are not just focused on bringing Jews and others together to channel elements of Judaism into the world. The Internet isn't really doing that. But if the measure is we want to fund things that are having a deep impact on massive numbers of people, just as many people as we can and whether they're localized in particular gathered spaces is not necessarily the primary thought, then the Internet is destroying everybody else. I don't say destroying like the others, I'm saying it's winning. Just, we can release a podcast, I mean, we're not the only ones. We release a podcast every week and because we're available everywhere, we get thousands and thousands of downloads a month. We get in the five digits of downloads per month. Lex Rofeberg: I don't know many local Jewish... and I'm not saying that to say we're amazing. There's other podcasts that are also doing this and it requires a heck of a lot less work to create a podcast that reaches 10 or 20 or 30 thousand people a month, than it does to create a Jewish organization in any locality that does. I don't think that the most successful synagogues in the world have 40000 people walking in per month. It's just something that's incredibly challenging to do. Lex Rofeberg: So when your metric is how you touch people, now the obvious response is, well, the 40000 people that are downloading our podcast a month, they're not doing something as deep. They're entering into a 45 minute experience, and hopefully it affects them. Some of them are downloading multiple episodes, whatever it is. It's different. We have to be able to shift what success means, in order to recognize the successes that are happening, because if the way we value success is based on what congregations or other in-person Jewish organizations have done to succeed, then the stuff that isn't thatis going to "succeed" less, if that makes any sense. Brian S.: Yeah, I'll have to admit we don't quite get as many downloads as you -- we're working on it. Lex Rofeberg: But you probably get a bunch for the amount of person-hours that are going in. Like imagine a person, out there putting in however much time you do. Would you reach even 100 people if you were just doing that part time as a part of your job? I don't think most people would so I wouldn't dismiss that. Daniel Libenson: I would add one piece to that which is just, to take that further, first of all, I would say that 45 minutes engaged in a serious Jewish conversation is actually more impact than most Jews are getting even when they walk into a Jewish space of some kind. Even even if they're sitting there for three hours, I think that most of them aren't actually engaging so deeply. So again, that's not something against the organizations and what they're doing. It's just that what they're doing is actually not necessarily what these folks are looking for. What's astonishing to me and again, we just sort of bumbled into this, but what's astonishing to me is two guys literally in a basement can create something that tens of thousands of people are engaging in every month. What does that mean for the future? What does that look like once other people catch on and again, people lament the closing of various synagogues for example. Daniel Libenson: I would say two things. One is that there was sort of a bubble in the 50's, 60's, 70's that basically too many synagogues were built, which wasn't a centrally planned thing and so there wasn't a big strategic plan about it. It felt like the right thing to do at the time because there were a lot of Jews moving to new places. I mean, talk about migration, there were a lot of Jews moving to the suburbs and they had the wealth to build these synagogues and for various reasons they had the interest in doing so. Daniel Libenson: The problem is is that there was a huge financial and capital investment made in those organizations, so it feels very terrible now when they have to close. That's still a different issue than imagining that somehow in a world in which synagogues are closing that means that fewer Jews are going to have meaningful Jewish experiences. I think that it sort of looks that way because the meaningful Jewish experiences in a new way haven't all been invented yet. But we start to see, again, I say, we start to see synagogues for example, or some of these newer type synagogue-adjacent organizations like Lab/Shul in New York that are live streaming their services and it's great to watch a service on a screen potentiall,y but sometime soon you're going to be able to put on a pair of goggles and you're going to feel like you're in that service. Daniel Libenson: At that point, I'm not sure that it's a negative thing. At that point you're saying that literally tens, hundreds of thousands of people might be able to experience this incredible service, or our guest Dan Ain recently talked about how he's really interested in the American, what he calls the great American art form of the religious revival. This kind of one time deep moving experience that you have with kind of a traveling preacher. But the way that digital technology turns it on its head, it says the preacher doesn't have to travel, we can travel. Daniel Libenson: So we can go around to, you could imagine that there are 10 amazing religious-type experiences that are available locally in different places in the country, but because they're all live streamed through virtual reality, in two months can visit eight of them, and every Shabbat I can have this incredible, new, fresh experience with some of the most talented practitioners that ever were. To me that's just an incredible future to imagine. Brian S.: I think each of you set me up beautifully for my final question. I'm standing out at the hoop alone and you pass me the ball. You've used digital technology to advance Jewish conversations and get your listeners and guests involved in deep thinking. I'm just wondering how this whole process, this whole venture has impacted, changed the two of you, changed your perspective on the Jewish future or just your perspective on the medium of podcasting. Daniel Libenson: I often talk about my personal story that I grew up as the son of a Conservative rabbi and I moved to Israel when I was 14, and I, in Israel, was put into the Orthodox school system and kind of lived in an Orthodox world for the four years of high school. I always tell that story, that I hated every minute of all three of those experiences. I was this kind of person. I remember having a conversation with the rabbi of the school that I attended in Israel, and he sat me down at the end of 12th grade and he knew I was going to college in America and he said, "I hope that when you go to college you're going to find a person to study with who wants to study Torah just as much as you do." I said to him, "Well, that's not going to be a problem," because I wanted to study Torah not at all. Daniel Libenson: I think that I had this sense of myself in many ways as, that my Jewish future was going to be sort of on the periphery of the Jewish community if at all, because what it was or what I had experienced wasn't for me. There are ways in which over the course of my adult life I did come in and had various jobs in the Jewish community and I came in and out of it. So it's not quite as simple as that. But in some deep identity way I always felt like an outsider and I felt like that was going to be my lot in life. Daniel Libenson: Because of digital technology, I feel like I'm in the center of something. It's not because of having built that something. It's literally because technology allowed me and Lex to have a conversation that we wanted to have for ourselves. The truth is that Judaism Unbound wasn't meant to start as a podcast. It was started as a book that we were trying to write and we felt stuck on the book and we said we had to do more research so let's do it in the form of a podcast because that will be fun and people will be more willing to talk to us etc, etc. Daniel Libenson: So literally, all Judaism Unbound is Lex and me having the conversation that we really wanted to have and inviting people to have that conversation with us, I mean, our guests. And then it turns out by total fluke that tens of thousands of people are interested in having that conversation. I don't think it's just that they're interested in hearing us have the conversation. I think in some deep way they're experiencing it that they're part of the conversation. And actually where we want to take it going forward is to figure out how to make that real, and how to really allow the people to be talking to one another and talking to our guests and finding each other and finding new people in their communities that are creating these kinds of experiences, or maybe they're going to start being the creators of those experiences. Daniel Libenson: It all started because the technology allowed us to just do what we wanted to do, and then it turned out that there was this kind of silent majority or silent huge amount of people that also wanted it, but kind of like me felt like they were the only one or they were the only one that they knew, and so somehow what's so exciting to me is that the technology has actually enabled me to imagine -- I don't have it yet, but to imagine that there may be the Jewish community in the future that is the Jewish community that I really do want to be a part of. That would have been inconceivable I think. I don't think that there would have been any way that I would have been able to figure out how to do that if the technology hadn't facilitated it. Lex Rofeberg: For me, the question of how the Internet or how digital things have influenced my Judaism or influenced me, it's hard for me to answer, not because it's a bad question, it's a great question but because it's like asking how air affects my life. My profession is for digital Jewish organization, my rabbinical school that I'm in for six years of my life is through digital mechanisms mostly. We also gather in person. My Jewish social justice activism through IfNotNow which is probably my third biggest Jewish commitment -- I'm in Providence where there's not a, we don't have an in-person group so much. I'm mostly doing digital things. Lex Rofeberg: It's not so much that the digital has influenced or affected my Jewish life as much as it is that the digital is my Jewish life. I don't say that because I don't also have in-person spaces. I do. I'm the rare Jew that is a member of a congregation in today's world. I'm a member of a wonderful Reconstructionist congregation in Attleboro, Massachusetts, hey anybody listening. And we go there and we enjoy it. But it's not my first... My synagogue context, and even other contexts in Providence's community that I love participating in and gain a lot from, they're actually at this point in my life, sort of the stuff I do to add the wonderful dressing on top of my life. Lex Rofeberg: The digital has... And it's not that I envision a world where everybody does that, and we flip the script and so that in-person is constantly for everyone. For me that's how it's worked out and I see it as a value neutral piece. And so, what I would ask people to explore is just what are you, what do you desire Jewishly. What's the thing that you're not doing right now that you'd like to be doing Jewishly, and if it's in person, amazing. Go to it, find it. In my experience when people allow themselves to be specific enough about, I am really curious to engage in some delicious Talmud learning with some queer folk. We've had people like Sefaria before, but if you, like if you get specific enough, usually that specific thing you want is not available directly in your local community but it is available online. Lex Rofeberg: My question is: allow yourself to ask that question. Don't presume that because you're in a small town or even a big town with lots of Jewish institutions, that the fact that you have these three or these 11 or these 34 Jewish buildings means that those are the things that you can do with your life Jewishly. Allow yourself to ask, can I plug in a .com or a .org that also does that, that can supplement or be the primary source of what Jewish life looks like. Lex Rofeberg: I think people are going to answer that in all sorts of different ways, but I think the end result will be a more thriving Jewish world both online and in-person because it turns out that one mitzvah leads to another. One Jewish place leads to another and the online leads to the in-person. We exist online and we end up being invited to places physically and gathering groups. It's all one cyclical piece together in building this thing we call Judaism. Brian S.: This has been great guys. A really insightful conversation. I really appreciate your time and thoughts and keep it up. Looking forward to future episodes and hope we cross in the podcast world again. Daniel Libenson: Thanks you so much. Lex Rofeberg: Thanks for having us. Brian S.: Thanks so much to Dan and Lex. That was a great conversation. I am both pumped and kind of in deep thought mode. I didn't know both could happen at the same time. If you haven't checked it out yet I highly recommend checking out Judaism Unbound. There are so many episodes of theirs. I really liked a recent interview they did with Rabbi Dan Ain, founder of Because Jewish. They got into some really profound stuff and kind of talked about rock music and the religious revival tradition in America in the same breath. So, I highly recommend that as a jumping off point to check them out. Brian S.: Again, tell your friends about us. We want to hear from you. Send us a message through trendingjewish.fireside.fm. Find us on iTunes, Google Play, Overcast, Castro, Podcast Addict. Rate us, it really helps people find the show and if you really like what you've heard and want to promote our work and promote the conversations about the Jewish future, go to reconstructingjudaism.org and click donate. It will help. So, thank you, shalom, le-hitra-ot. Until next time. I am Bryan Schwartzman and this is Trending Jewish, the Jewish podcast about everything.