B. Schwartzman:	From the recording studios of Reconstructing Judaism, welcome to Evolve: Ground-breaking Jewish Conversations.

Ariana Katz:  :	The ability to get stuck in, "Here's everything that's wrong with the world. Here's what's happening to my planet." Those are all really heavy, just shoulder-sagging things to talk about. The thing that saves us time and time again is our calendar, is our tradition, and that interplay between seeing the horrors of the world with a bright future that we're dreaming of and working towards together. That's what saves us.

B. Schwartzman:	I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman. We have a great show for you today. Our guest is Rabbi Ariana Katz, and we'll be discussing her essay, "Here We Are: Congregation Planting in Baltimore.

B. Schwartzman:	In case you missed our last show, we had a fascinating conversation with Rabbi Rachel Weiss about her essay, "21st Century Judaism." It was a really great conversation about Jewish communities today. Be sure to give that a listen.

B. Schwartzman:	As a reminder, all of these essays discussed on the show are available to read for free on the Evolve website, http://evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. If you're enjoying the show, please take just a minute to give us a five-star rating or leave a review on whatever podcast app you're using. The ratings really help people find out about the show.


B. Schwartzman:	All right. Without further ado, I'm pleased to welcome my colleague and friend, Rabbi Ariana Katz, who is a 2018 graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and founding rabbi of Hinenu: The Baltimore Justice Shtiebl. We’ll be speaking about her essay, "Hinenu: Congregation Planting in Baltimore." For a little context, Hinenu means "We are here" in Hebrew. It is the plural of Hineini, which is said at  key points throughout the Torah by Abraham, Moses and other biblical figures, usually as a response to God’s call. Shtiebl, on the other hand,  means "little house" in Yiddish. It evokes an old-world, hyper-local and informal approach to Jewish community and the kind of image stands in sharp contrast to the more formalized structures of the suburban synagogue, which proliferated in the United States in the 1950s and 60s and still really shapes the Jewish landscape today. Welcome, Rabbi Katz.

Ariana Katz:  	Hey, Bryan. I'm glad to be here.

B. Schwartzman:	Thanks so much. This is great. It's our second conversation focusing on Jewish community. Last time we spoke with your colleague, Rabbi Rachel Weiss, talking about re-energizing a Reconstructionist affiliate in an established congregation. Now we're going to be talking about building Jewish community from the  ground up, so I'm excited. We're here to talk about Hinenu, the Baltimore Justice Shtiebl. Did I get Shtiebl right?

Ariana Katz:  	Yeah, you rocked it.

B. Schwartzman:	All right. First, I'm wondering --  Just to give the listeners a better sense, can you give us a sketch of the Baltimore Justice Shtiebl? What it is? Who's attending it? Maybe, a little bit how it's like a congregation and how it's different.

Ariana Katz:  	Sure. So I guess last year someone in the congregation said to me, "Oh, well, this isn't your bubbe's synagogue." I stopped him in his tracks and I said, "Okay, that's not true because one, I love bubbes, and we have a lot of bubbes that you may know and bubbes you don't. Two, we're actually doing something that's a very old model." Building a synagogue that's also a community center is pretty much as old-school, classic, as traditional as it comes. We are doing it with a contemporary flavor and analysis and culture, but at the core of it we're making a synagogue. If we try to say differently, we're either burying the lead or fooling ourselves. We are doing a really classic project of making a synagogue.

Ariana Katz:  	So Hinenu convenes this year. Now we come together for three shabbatot a month. We have two Shabbat mornings and one Friday evening service. We have an intro to Judaism class called Diving Into Judaism. We eat vegetarian potluck after every service. We're very much in the vein of the havurot and Reconstructionist congregations in that way, and are continuing to be plugged into organizing and mobilization. I would say about half of our members are involved in two or more civic organizations in Baltimore City. And so, thinking about the justice work of our congregation is a real priority. It's infused both in our activism, and it's infused in our prayer life.

Ariana Katz:  	Our membership ranges from 8 days old to 80 years old. The multi-generational element of our shul, I think, is a piece that sometimes when talking about emergent communities we're supposed to bury. There's this fascination with millennials and Gen-Z and how do we center youth.

Ariana Katz:  	From the very outset, the idea of a singularly generational Jewish community was something that I was not interested in, and our members weren't interested in because to have Jewish community is to have people of every life stage together. Hopefully, from some listings I described, it is a regular shul, and we are very much in our forming years.

B. Schwartzman: Why did you choose Baltimore? Why was this the place for this experiment, this journey, however, we want to describe it?

Ariana Katz:  	Baltimore, because it has a really rich Jewish biome of Jewish communities of every denomination and orientation, and because the need for a Jewish community that was centering more left political Jewish analysis with energetic practice was another addition to the community here. Baltimore, because it's close personally to where all my family lives and where all my family is buried.

Ariana Katz:  	My partner, Ever, is from Howard County, which is right outside of Baltimore and has a really big love for, especially Baltimore sports teams, despite some of their better judgment when it comes to the Orioles, but we're trying. And because it's an East Coast city that has a vibrant Jewish community but needed a hub for especially LGBTQ Jews, especially for multifaith families, for Jews of color, for people with disabilities to convene and be centered.

B. Schwartzman:	On the Evolve platform, there are a bunch of other articles, particularly under the headline of race and the Jewish community that challenge the idea of the Ashkenazic centric view of Judaism and Jewish life. I'm curious. With that in mind, if there was any reticence to use a Yiddish term which obviously is Ashkenazic and kind of really hearkens back to the Eastern European shtetl conception of Judaism.

Ariana Katz:  	Yes, I love this question. 

B. Schwartzman:	All right. That's why I'm here.

Ariana Katz:  	For many people, the use of Yiddish is a part of a continuing or rediscovering of a personal or cultural legacy that has existed for a long period of time. There's like a length and depth of history and culture that has been lost through modernity that has been reduced from an entire civilization into slogans on SNL.

Ariana Katz:  	And so, a piece of that work around Yiddishkeit is actually rediscovering an entire history that was lost because of the  Shoah that was flattened in some ways from the period of '48 on when Jewish attention really recentered and focused around Israel and Israeli culture. 

The concept of Ashkenormativity is one that says that all Jewish experiences hearken back to the Pale of Settlement. That all Jews now have an affinity for gefilte fish. All Jews are white. All Jews have a biological and emotional connection to Eastern Europe. The use of Yiddish, as you pointed out, is a real question because a priority for Hinenu is to be a space where we are a multiethnic community of Jews. It is not just an Ashkenormative space. The use of Yiddish doesn't need to disappear, but in order to build multiethnic Jewish space we have to use all of our tools, to make space for all of our tools to be used authentically.

Ariana Katz:  	You could hear in my voice, like...it’s fraught because for me personally Yiddishkeit has been a liberatory discovery, [but] it has been a thing that has closed the door in the face of the people for whom Yiddishkeit is  like, "Y’all, did you know there’s an entire Jewish civilization outside of potatoes in Eastern Europe?" It's fraught for that way. My hope is that our vibrant klezmer band and our use of Shtiebl is a flag for us to continue bringing in Jewish voices from around the world.






B. Schwartzman:	I wanted to ask, really simply, why take the challenge of, in a sense, creating your own job? Why, your first year out of rabbinical school, not apply to work for somebody else in something that already exists?

Ariana Katz:  	Because I like to make my life and the lives of the people I love difficult. (Laughs) Because the dream for Hinenu existed in my mind and heart before I started rabbinical school and was something that was brewing in Baltimore before I got here. The need and the hunger for Hinenu necessitated starting it. I was really informed by the anarchist collective that I was living in in Boston as well as worker co-ops and Kaplan's concept of a shul with a pool.

Ariana Katz:  	When I came to Philly, bright-eyed and totally innocent and ready to start rabbinical school, I had a dream of a synagogue that was a community center meets organizing hub meets a place for really good davening. When I landed in Philly, I began working as the Torah School Director for Kol Tzedek in West Philadelphia. That continued to shape this vision, so that when it was time to graduate... about a year and a half before that, I looked around and thought about cities that I had connections in or knew people in, to think about where this place could grow. It turns out that people were in Baltimore meeting for radical Tu BiShvat Sederim and showing up at one another's homes with hesed, with loving kindness, and food and care.

Ariana Katz:  	The community was already starting to blossom. And so, Hinenu needed to exist with or without me, with or without Baltimore. It was going to be birthed somewhere, and I'm really glad that it ended up here.

B. Schwartzman:	Before we move forward, I want to move back for one second. I've known you for a while. This is the first time I've heard you mention living in an anarchist collective. Can you say something about that, and how that prepared you for rabbinical school? It doesn't appear on the typical rabbi resume, I think.

Ariana Katz:  	Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, anarchist organizing was my first stop after Jewish day school. So I went to Boston University. Found myself with a bunch of anti-authoritarian and anarchist young people in Boston. It sharpened my political analysis and understanding of how harm is both interpersonal and structural and a concept around personal freedom, though many of the anarchists that I first met wouldn't call it this, [that personal freedom] is divine and not something that any human being has a right to seize from another. We also have accountability for how we treat each other.

Ariana Katz:  	The concept of bein adam la-makom, between a human being and God, and bein adam le-havero, between a human being and their friend feels very much aligned with how I think about liberation, personal freedom, and how our freedom actually can impact one another at certain points.

Ariana Katz:  	Being in an anarchist collective, for me meant going to bed early during the fundraiser raising money for a local bail fund, so that I could wake up at 5:00 in the morning and go teach religious school, like stepping over the Israeli anarchists who are sleeping on the couch, but that space really shaped what I have come to know and continue to learn about interdependence, and community building, and home messy and painful and beautiful it can be.


B. Schwartzman:	Wow. In your Evolve article, which is titled Here We Are: Congregation  Planting in Baltimore. You wrote that "Hinenu has formed out of a desperate need for the shelter that one can offer another", which I found very powerful. I was wondering if you could say just a little bit more about that.

Ariana Katz:  	There is something really profoundly lonely about moving through this world in this lifetime. There is something deeply isolating to wake up, get the kids ready for school, figure out what you're eating for lunch, go to work. Come home, do it all over again, and we don't talk about it enough. We don't talk about loneliness enough.

Ariana Katz:  	The opportunity to speak frankly about our emotional realities, about our political and spiritual realities as a community, I see as one of the opportunities to bust through that loneliness, and to replace it with or add to it interdependence. And so, the shelter that has formed, that is forming at Hinenu, I think, for me I knew it was really starting to take shape when I saw people who had only met through shul who were 40 years apart in age kiss each other on the cheek when someone new came into services.

Ariana Katz:  	That's the best vantage point because I'm up there at the shtender noticing everything. Seeing people greet each other with just a joy that we made it to Shabbos again, thank God, and that I'm so glad you're here, really exemplifies that shelter. 

B. Schwartzman:	Another quote that really struck me was when you wrote, "Most of all, I see Hinenu as a place where we can nourish the neshamot, souls, of organizers so they can go back out into the world and continue doing their work." I guess I'm just going to ask can you give some examples of how you're able to do that.

Ariana Katz:  	Hmm. I can give you examples of how we try to do it...

B. Schwartzman:	Fair enough.

Ariana Katz:  	There's this ritual from Marge Piercy where you name a political loss. Then you as a group go around and people can name what those losses were. Then as the collective, we read some poetry about this loss and how it won't shape us but we must acknowledge it. Then we ask for political wins, and people go around and shout them, and we are able to name that. We can rejoice in them even if they're not for forever.

Ariana Katz:  	When thinking about the organizers who are one of the many different identities in our community really making it explicit, that work is really important. The sense that everyone in our congregation is cherished and needed, and that there's hopefully something that might be meaningful for you personally, and not just about what good you can do for others really matters.

Ariana Katz:  	Over the high holidays, we try to do an aliyah for caregivers, and just blessing the work of caregivers is another way that I think about nourishing the souls of our people. Making spaces that are beautiful and lush is really important. We deserve lush spaces that are decadent in some ways. And so, nourishing the souls of our community means having opportunities to see each other, and having opportunities to make beautiful art together, and having opportunities to just be here.

B. Schwartzman:	We're talking about 70, 80 people at this point, or...

Ariana Katz:  	Our membership, we have about 115 individual members and 85 families.

B. Schwartzman:	Assuming, at least, some of these folks were people who were interested in Jewish community but hadn't found their space yet or were dissatisfied with their space. How did you find them, or how did they find you, or how did everybody find each other?

Ariana Katz:  	Well, we were all at Sinai. Then I just passed around the signup sheets. [laughter] My experience of it was in December, 2016. I sent two text messages to people who lives or had lived in Baltimore. I said, "Do you need a radical synagogue?" They said, "Why don't you come down and meet us for coffee?" At the end of each coffee  date, I would say, "Do you have people I should meet?"

Ariana Katz:  	And so, that built and built into a hundred coffee dates in eight months. Friends then felt empowered to tell their friends and tell their friends. And so, that initial community organizing wherein I would meet people, connect with them, hear their story, share mine, think about shared goals. They would then become a hub to do that work is really the basis  of how Hinenu formed.

Ariana Katz:  	Now we are an institution. Oh my God, we're an institution in the Baltimore world, and that's actually very destabilizing for many people in our community who are used to the Groucho Marx "I don't want to be a part of any organization that would dare have me as a member." We are able to sort of be listed among the other congregations and the other organizations that have institutional names to put on its flyers and co-sponsor. That also brings people in. As I said, there's so many amazing, delicious Jewish communities in Baltimore. And so, we collaborate a lot and hope to do it more in the future. That also brings more folks in in that way.

B. Schwartzman:	I want to ask a question about space. There's been a lot of conversation about space in the Jewish community in recent years.

Ariana Katz:  	Yeah.

B. Schwartzman:	In your piece you refer back to the idea of the synagogue center and shul with a pool that was popularized by Mordecai Kaplan, the architect of Reconstructionism. Clearly, you're not a mega-synagogue with a shul with a pool at this point. You're meeting in which it sounds like it's rented space. I guess I'm kind of wondering what you meant by emulating the synagogue center. Do you actually envision one day having a big building?

Ariana Katz:  	Shtiebl means little room in Yiddish, and I always envisioned Hinenu in a row house. We daven in the living room. We cook gorgeous food in the back room. Our offices are upstairs. The dining room is a beit midrash. We've outgrown that, and I need to let go of that vision. We do a Purim morning megillah reading in my living room, and we cram 30 people in here. It was deeply uncomfortable. We have more people than would fit in a row house, which is an amazing problem to have.

Ariana Katz:  	It is funny that the smallness of Shtiebl is actually no longer a possibility, but the warmth of a room that's multipurpose, it can do a lot of things. You can daven, you can learn in, you're welcome here. That remains. We rent space from the awesome community at Homewood Friends, the Quakers. That is really our hub for our services and our events. It's been really great because the space is so gorgeous and is in that really traditional Quaker way. The walls are bare. There isn’t iconography. We bring in an ark. We bring in our torah table. We bring in the shenders, and we transform it into a synagogue.

Ariana Katz:  All of my colleagues and mentors who have had to also become building and grounds... in addition to being clergy, say, "Don't be a fool." Let this be a record that I heard them and ignored them.

Ariana Katz: The shul at the pool for Hinenu in my imagination is a shul with a multifaith practice center with spaces for community healing, and with places for shelter, for food and housing, for folks who are experiencing housing instability, for people looking for shelter and protection.

Ariana Katz:  	 Religious institutions have the unique ability to be sanctuaries for folks evading and trying to escape ICE. And so, I think that all religious institutions as a building, you can be taking that responsibility seriously. The need for a physical space matters. They feel like there's a space for us to be safe, and stable, and comforted.  And the capacity for growth that a permanent space that is so multiuse in that way might offer a community like Hinenu is just so profound. I'm hopeful that the generosity of our community, the communities we partner with, and some of the very clever listeners who are listening now might be inspired to help us build such a thing.

B. Schwartzman: So, I'm quoting something you wrote again, not to be like Tim Russert or Meet the Press, but searching for precision, you write, "A significant portion of the people who come to Hinenu are deeply distraught about the Jewish community's silence at or complicity with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories." A few sentences later, you conclude, "These people come to Hinenu to create a future in which the price for entry to passionate Jewish life is not blanket support for Israel." I think what I'd like to know is how does this work in practice, and do those who might not fit this description, is there a place for them at Hinenu?

Ariana Katz:  	I answer the second question first. There is a space for everyone who is ready to be aligned with our community's values at Hinenu. Everyone is welcome. I am eager for there to be a continued range of opinions within our congregation because it makes us stronger. It gives us an opportunity to live up to another one of our values, which is makhloket le-shem shamayim, dispute for the sake of heaven. Our value statement which is on our website, hinenubaltimore.org/values is something I'm really proud of. Our community did a lot of really beautiful work there to talk about defining our lines because every congregation has them. It also means that openness to discuss them is important.

Ariana Katz:  	So on lines. The majority of synagogues in the United States will, pretty much without question, identify a relationship with Israel as central to the experience of the congregation and every member of the congregation within it. That is not true, obviously, for those individual members of that synagogue necessarily. People are complex. We contain multitudes. We are nuanced political and spiritual beings that can level our own critiques. 

Ariana Katz:  	And so, that value is not actually reflective of, I think, the growing number of American Jews who have been deeply hurt and concerned about what's happening in Israel/Palestine. A bit of this is generational. Sorry, everyone. I was born in 1990 and was raised in a day school where Israel was not thought about twice beyond support, and relationship, and growth. I didn't live through a time when Israel was being founded during the major war.

Ariana Katz:  	I know, for many of the listeners of this podcast and people in our community, my story and my timeline  has an experience with Israel/Palestine that is different than people who were like, "I was there when it was founded. It meant something different" which is why I say that the growing relationship and perspectives around Israel are shifting to, I believe, to the left. We need to Jewish spaces where it's okay to have those opinions and still be allowed to be Jewish.

Ariana Katz:  	In my activism and my work, I have been called a self-hating Jew. I have been called a kapo. I have been called a Nazi because I dare to ask about the ethical  implications of how Jews in Israel are enacting military policy. That is complicated, and that is really painful, and that is not an uncommon story within our congregation. We have members in our shuls who are J Street members, who are not members of anything, who are member of the Jewish Voice for Peace, who do it,  If Not Now. There is a spread within that, and there are people for whom they don't feel aligned with how Israel-Palestine is talked about Hinenu, but still want to be in the community.

Ariana Katz:  Within our congregation, we have members who have both explicitly and implicitly been asked to leave [another] synagogue because of their political stance and thinking really tangibly about what that means. That means that there are Jews who are being told by other Jews, "We don't want you here to make a minyan because we disagree on a political issue." That causes so much pain and hurt, and there are so many brilliant, beautiful neshamas who need a place to bring their gifts that don't have that place.

Ariana Katz:  	Like I'm saying about a shul at the end of the world, I think that there is a growing tide of Jews who are really being asked on an ethical standpoint to think about the occupation and to think even before that and say what does it mean to be a Jew in this time when what's happening and what has happened in Israel-Palestine has happened.

Ariana Katz:  	I want Hinenu to be a place where we don't have all the answers, but we keep asking those questionsWhen we talk about Israel, in the large Jewish community, everyone's sort of like gets really activated and loses their breath. So we're building a muscle, also, to be able to talk about a painful personal and communal conversation without completely shutting down every time, which is a thing all of our communities, I think, we need to all grow in together.

B. Schwartzman:	I hear that. I guess I'd be concerned with painting our diverse communities across North America with such a broad brush. I'm not sure that's what you'd intended, although I certainly wouldn't discount the experience of what your members have felt. I've seen a big range in just the communities I've encountered from sort of more the traditional unquestioning attitude to one of more open criticism, if not, as far left as perhaps would be represented at Hinenu. Actually, I think maybe even a bare majority now has gotten to the places where they just don't want to talk about it. I'm concerned about painting religious communities with a broad stroke.

Ariana Katz:  	Totally, a hundred percent. Thanks for raising it because I think broadly whenever I talk about Hinenu within the rest of the world, there's a sense that we can say like, "Oh it's so different and unique, and separate, and revolutionary, and there is a universal element in asking questions in a way that our community does." There are people in legacy synagogues that have been around for a hundred years, that are asking the same exact questions, that hold the same exact beliefs and are in a community where what brings them together is not necessarily the things that bring people together at Hinenu.

Ariana Katz:  	That tone of, "Oh, Hinenu is different because blah, blah." There is something unique and powerful about what we're building, and also we are in the similar and same project as Jews across the country. That broad brush, I really appreciate wanting to put a finger on that.

Ariana Katz:  	But I think that there is something unique in synagogues that are actually making space for people to be progressive around Israel-Palestine. That's really sad because, like you said, there are large numbers of people in synagogues that actually do feel aligned. We're talking about the occupation, but it's not happening. I believe that what is happening in Israel-Palestine is an ethical issue, a moral issue of our generations collectively. To not talk about it is also a choice.

Ariana Katz:  	And so, if our synagogues cannot be a place where we talk about the pain, and the hope, and the opportunity, and the real teshuva that needs to happen, where's it going to happen?

B. Schwartzman:	Okay.

Ariana Katz:  	One more thing on that is just that we might want it to be true that people of lefty positions around racial justice, around Israel Palestine, around LGBTQ inclusion are welcome, but making it explicit actually changes things. By not just saying you can be here if you have to, but by saying we want you here. I think all of us can think about times in our lives when we felt tolerated and haven't really felt passionately needed and wanted. That is the tone, the tone shift. For Jewish communities to be saying this, to have rabbis who will say this, to  hire rabbis in other communities that will say this is new. People still lose their jobs talking about the occupation.

B. Schwartzman:	I think we got to a clarifying space in this. Obviously, we could probably stay on this topic until we're both blue in the face. 

Ariana Katz:  	Yeah! I would love to!

B. Schwartzman: I think we have time for one more question. This has been a great discussion. It's hard to put it to a stop, but I wanted to ask. On the Evolve website, Rabbi Seth Goldstein, who's president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, wrote, "When I think of serving the Jewish people, it means that we as Reconstructionist rabbis embrace an unapologetic progressivism, total inclusivity, and radical egalitarianism." How do you relate to that statement, and is that how you see your work playing out at Hinenu?

Ariana Katz:  	It's such a beautiful piece, and I agree with every word that Rabbi Seth said. I think that's totally encompasses what we're creating. Rabbi Deborah Waxman talks quite a bit about the optimism of Reconstructionism. That also feels imbued, just like in the tone of how Rabbi Seth was talking about the inclusivity and egalitarianism and progressivism. Those are exciting future-reaching -- now, but also future-reaching words.

Ariana Katz:  	I think that the energy that is growing at Hinenu is one of optimism. It's one of saying that yes, full LGBTQ inclusion in our synagogues was our starting point, and now we're thinking about what's next. Egalitarianism is our starting point. What are we growing into? The desire for progressive Jewish voices is so needed in this time around our world. It's a need, and it's also an opportunity. And so, to be a player in that, that mood of optimism feels very true.

Ariana Katz:  	The ability to get stuck in, "Here's everything that's wrong with the world. Here's how I need to transform guilt into accountability into action. Here's what's happening to my planet." Those are all really heavy, just like shoulder sagging, things to talk about.

Ariana Katz:  	The thing that saves us time and time again is our calendar, is our tradition, is the joy of just being together singing. That interplay between seeing the horrors of the world, seeing the pain that human beings van cause each other with a bright future that we're dreaming of and working towards together. That's what saves us from getting stuck and the growth that is possible to do together, which is why we need both. We can't just sing, and we can't just organize. You have to sing and organize at the same time.

B. Schwartzman:	Thank you. I enjoyed this conversation, Rabbi Katz. I do hope we're around to do this again some time.

Ariana Katz:  	Thanks. You and everyone that's listening is so welcome in Baltimore any time.

B. Schwartzman:	Excellent. Thanks so much for listening in to our interview with Rabbi Ariana Katz. If you enjoyed the conversation, please be sure to read Katz's essay, Here We Are: Congregation Planting in Baltimore. What'd you think about today's episode? We want to hear from you. Evolve is about curating meaningful conversations and that includes you. Send us your questions, comments, feedback, whatever you got. You can reach us through the contact form on the show's website or heck, you can email me directly at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org.

B. Schwartzman:	We'll be back next month with Rabbi Joshua Lesser to discuss his essay, Preparing Our Communities For Conversations on Race. Evolve, ground-breaking Jewish conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Watts. Our theme song, Ilu Finu, was composed by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and we'll see you next time.