Bryan Schwartzman:
From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations. (singing)

Elyse Wechterman:
It's odd to talk about the 50 years anniversary of something that actually has a 2000-year-old history. (singing)

Bryan Schwartzman:
I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman. Today I'm lucky to be speaking with Rabbi Elyse Wechterman and we'll be discussing Rabbi Wechterman's essay, the Reconstructionist rabbinate at 50. This essay was written as part of a symposium of essays on the state of the rabbinate. The essay marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, the RRA, which Wechterman leads, and it was published in advance of the RRA's biennial convention in Atlanta, which will include, we're told, a serious dance party as well as substantive discussions of difficult topics, as well as a post-convention trip exploring the history and relevance of Jim Crow and the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama. In this interview, we'll discuss the evolution of the rabbinate mostly over the last 50 years or so and the demands and opportunities of being a rabbi today. We'll talk COVID, the gig economy, and some of the conversations most emotional moments we get into what it's like to be a rabbi in our post October 7th world. We ground the discussion in why the state of the rabbinate matters to everybody who cares about Jewish communities and Jewish life, and not just insiders.
If you want to stay up to date on the latest essays, videos, and podcasts from Evolve, sign Up for the Evolve newsletter. We'll put a link in our show notes, and you can also find it easily at evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. In this forum, we're going to be encouraging folks to sign up for our newsletter with a little extra incentive. We'll be offering an exclusive essay to all of our newsletter subscribers. Sign up today and don't unsubscribe tomorrow, and you'll get this exclusive, groundbreaking content. In another rabbinic anniversary, as you know, this show is a production of reconstructing Judaism, and this year marks 10 years of Rabbi Deborah Waxman's presidency and leadership of the organization. She's met these turbulent times with hope and resolve projecting a vision of Judaism that lowers barriers, inspires meaningful action and defends the most vulnerable. On Wednesday, April 3rd at 7:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time, you'll have a chance to hear Rabbi Waxman reflect on her leadership.
This program is called, When Jewish Women Lead, Activating People and Possibilities Through Turbulent Times. Don't miss your chance to be part of a conversation with Rabbi Waxman and other Jewish women leaders about the Jewish past, present, and future. We'll include a registration link on our show notes, and you can find it on the events page at reconstructingjudaism.org. All right, let's get to our guest. Rabbi Elyse Wechterman has served as CEO of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association since the fall of 2015. She's created the Office of Rabbinic Career Development to serve the professional needs of rabbis in any field of work. Before coming to the RRA, Rabbi Wechterman served as a spiritual leader of Congregation Agudas Achim in Attleboro, Massachusetts from 2001 to June 2014. Note, we recorded this conversation back on January 22nd, and we tried to stay clear of real breaking news events. Keep that in mind as the situation in the Israel-Hamas war keeps changing. Rabbi Elyse Wechterman, welcome to the podcast. It's good to have you on the show, finally.

Elyse Wechterman:
Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.

Bryan Schwartzman:
We were all set to do this in person. I was looking forward to seeing you in person. I got a little cold sniffle, so we're being extra safe in this world and doing this on Zencastr.

Elyse Wechterman:
And that's the way to do it these days, and the wonders of modern technology make it possible.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Absolutely, absolutely. Great. We are here in part because the organization that you lead is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, RRA for acronym. I know you're gathering with members for the RRA convention in early March in Atlanta. Just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how and why the RRA came about and what does it do? I think...

Elyse Wechterman:
Sure, I'm happy to.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I don't know that everybody knows what a rabbinical association does.

Elyse Wechterman:
Probably not, so I'm happy to do that. The Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association is exactly what it sounds like. It is the association, the professional association of the rabbis of the Reconstructionist movement. There are about 380 of us, most in North America. We do have a handful of rabbis who are based in Israel and a few in some other parts of the world, including Western Europe. I like to say that the Rabbinical Association has three primary stool legs that it stands on. The first is that we are the professional association, meaning we provide for the professional nourishment and advocacy of our rabbis. We help them with professional development. We provide placement services and contract negotiation services. We provide access to a retirement plan and all of the things that are necessary for rabbis to excel and move forward in their profession. We seek to provide consulting, education, all of that kind of stuff.
We are also the rabbinic voice of the Reconstructionist movement, and we seek to be a reconstructionist voice in the public square. We spend a lot of time raising up the voices of our rabbis, the views and positions that our rabbis hold, the wisdom that they share, both within the Reconstructionist movement largely and in the broader public square. Then finally, the third leg of our stool which is somewhat unique to us is that for many of us the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association is also a primary community. We call it a community of practice. When you share the experience of going through an intense program like rabbinical training and then working in the field of being a rabbi, which frankly can sometimes be quite isolating, the only other people in the world who understand your experiences are the people who've had those experiences. In many ways, we are also a community of friends, an alumni association and a support network for those of us who are doing the work of leading Jewish communities around the world today.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And why you might be known as rabbi out in the field, I assume with one another, you go by first names? You're able to shed something.

Elyse Wechterman:
Yes, I like to say, and I think quoted as saying, "The only place where a rabbi is not a rabbi is when they're with other rabbis." We are the place where we get to take that kippah off, even just for a little while.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Thank you. Right before we hit record, you were talking about how you're celebrating an organization that's 50 years old, but it's really at the very tip of a very long story. Think of a geologic survey of the Earth or something where humans show up at the very end. The RRA is at the very, maybe the tail, the last little inch of the story of rabbis in general. I'm like, "Is there a way to talk about that standing on one foot?"

Elyse Wechterman:
Absolutely. I would say that we may be at the tail end at this moment, but eventually someday this moment will be the middle, right? There'll be an entire other story that comes after us. Although the Reconstructionist rabbinate is technically officially 50 years old, 50 years ago this year, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association was founded with the first graduates from RRC. The fact is that we are rabbis who see ourselves as working in and existing in the long line of rabbis that came before us. Although our particular brand of rabbinate is 50 years old, it's actually close to 2,000 years that the term rabbi has been in use. You can follow that trajectory all the way back from then from the Mishnah until through, all the literature and all of the work of the Jewish people, of Jewish civilization until now. We are also in that history. We are both 50 years old and 2,000 years old.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And it means teacher, right?

Elyse Wechterman:
Literally it means teacher. It means master. It means someone who has expertise in something, and we are the people who dedicate our lives to studying and unpacking Jewish resources, Jewish sources, Jewish traditions, to help make that accessible to the rest of our people.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Your essay does a really good job of tracing the history of the rabbinate, at least in American shores, in an American context. You really start the story in the '60s, in the post-war boom where there's really a settled image of a rabbi serving, maybe thriving suburban congregation, having a very set of expectations and responsibilities. And that story has really changed. I want to probe that because you really explain some dramatic and really interesting ways that it's changed. But I guess a place to maybe dive into this is what makes a Reconstructionist rabbi different? Or what are the ways that Reconstructionist rabbis think of this leadership model that may be different from where that starting off point of the '60s suburbans authority figure?

Elyse Wechterman:
Right. I actually think that what's different about us comes from the origin of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and its training program in that moment of American history, in that time. It's important to remember that for the Jewish community and for much of America, the period of the '60s was filled with a lot of upheaval, a lot of changes, a lot of rapid social changes. For the Jewish community, it was a time of significant disaffection among younger generations from what they had experienced growing up in a more authoritarian, traditional model of Jewish community and rabbinic decision-making. It was a time of protests against the war in Vietnam. It was a time of rising feminism. It was a time of a lot of those social upheavals.
In the Jewish community, it was a time of the creation of, for example, the Jewish catalogs and the notion of do-it-yourself Judaism. There was a desire for younger people to be empowered and take on the role of empowerment. The founding of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College happened at that very moment that gave birth to an early group of rabbis who saw themselves not as deciders for Jews of what should be, or interpreters of Torah and tradition with one voice, but actually working in concert with and in partnership with people to create something that was more accessible, more available, and frankly, more progressive than what had actually been experienced in American Judaism up until that time.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Is there an example you can think of how this would've played out at a congregation that might've looked different than a previous model?

Elyse Wechterman:
Well, it's important to remember that the earliest Reconstructionist congregations were usually affiliated with other movements as well. The place to look is actually a little bit later than those earliest times when Reconstructionist rabbis actually had enough stature and experience to begin creating their own communities and building communities that reflected their values. One of the things that we have often talked about is that the rabbi in a Reconstructionist community can sometimes be seen as an authority, a source of wisdom, a facilitator of tradition, as opposed to the facilitator, the interpreter, the decider. At one point we went so far as to talk about rabbi as facilitator. I think we've backed away from that language a little bit because it actually devalues the learning that we've done. But you can see that it's Reconstructionist rabbis who pushed for things like the prayer book of the Reconstructionist movement to be created in partnership with our lay people, right?
It is a prayer book that came out of a lay rabbinic partnership. It is Reconstructionist rabbis that pushed for and created educational models that brought the voice of youth to the forefront of those experiences. It's really about a rabbinic model based on empowerment and bringing others into the pathway of creating their own moving Judaism. Sometimes it sounds a little too intellectual, but I think in our experience, it's been one of overwhelming partnership and spreading of joy in doing the work of living Jewish lives together.

Bryan Schwartzman:
One thing that's interesting is you write that almost from the beginning there was a sizable percentage of Reconstructionist rabbis who did not serve in pulpits, and that's only grown today. I think you say more around 60% of your graduates don't serve in pulpits at all. How does that affect the model of the rabbinate? Are rabbis able to live this vision and how has that affected Jewish communities? It seems like a major...

Elyse Wechterman:
That's a great question. It used to be said, and in other movements there was long tradition. I don't think this is true anymore, but it was long tradition that posited that a successful rabbi is the rabbi of a congregation, and that the traditional career path was to start at a small congregation, maybe as an assistant rabbi, and then go to a bigger congregation and a larger congregation after that. Reconstructionist rabbis from the very beginning did not either have access to that career path or choose that career path. We had people from the very first few years of the graduating classes who in addition to studying for the rabbinate, studied education, theories of education, not Jewish education, but PhDs in education and wanted to create new models of teaching Judaism. Developing schools, working in day schools, working in camps, working in alternative or supplementary Hebrew schools.
We also had many rabbis who sought immediately after rabbinical school to work on college campuses, either in Hillel or in other settings working on college campuses to the point where it has remained the case that, as you said, 60% of members of the RRA work in fields other than the pulpit rabbinate. The fact that that has always been the case for us means that we've always valued that and had a broader understanding of the role of rabbi in community. Our rabbis can serve in Jewish federations, in Jewish community centers, in Jewish family services, social service organizations.
Partly because we understand the breadth of the rabbinate, that reinforces what is a deeply held reconstructionist belief that Judaism isn't simply a religion, but it is a religious civilization. We use that term civilization to talk about all of the aspects of our lives, including all of the social, emotional welfare aspects of our lives that we care so much about. And because that core belief in civilization is so strong, we can value the rabbis who serve in all those places, and then the rabbis who serve in all those places continue to help evolve and help us understand and help create more nuanced, more creative understandings of what Jewish community can look like.

Bryan Schwartzman:
One thing that also struck me is you wrote that as recently as the '90s, there was a certain amount of specialization in the rabbinate. The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College used to have tracks that you could go down where you could focus on campus work or focus on chaplaincy, which was a newer field or focus on education. What you write is there's much more diversity in rabbinic career trajectories today. I guess I'm wondering why that is and what some of the impact is. It seems like on some level that could make somebody's career more interesting and rewarding. It could also make it more difficult to navigate.

Elyse Wechterman:
Right. Well, and I think the answer is both those things. A lot of it is... There was a time where, as I said, we've always had this diversity. At a time, it was actually during the time that I was at the rabbinical college, there was a thought that said, "Oh, if this person thinks they're going to be a pulpit rabbi, we should train them for the congregational rabbi. And if this person thinks they're going to be a Hillel rabbi, we should train them for the campus rabbinate. And if this person's going to be a chaplain, we should train them for chaplaincy." But what we've realized, I think, very quickly is that people's career paths rarely work like that. They rarely work like that because career paths in America don't work like that. We see far more movement, far more changing in evolution over the course of someone's work life in almost all fields than we have ever before.
It is very common these days for people to change careers and get new schooling and education in their 40s and 50s across America and across all fields. Why would that not be true in the rabbinate? That is one reason. The way America looks is the way the rabbinate looks, but it's also the case that what we've learned is that some of the very same skills that make someone an excellent chaplain or an excellent campus rabbi are equally applicable and equally important in making someone an excellent congregational rabbi. Those skills are transportable and malleable. Yes, of course, there are things that are specific to each of those fields, but really what a rabbi is, in many cases, the same thing in all of those settings.
Of course, there are specific skills, but the core of what a rabbi does, which is about bringing the wisdom of our tradition to all of these various settings is a thing that we all do all the time. I was a pulpit rabbi for 14 years, and I spent a lot of time working with people in a chaplaincy role, and I spent a lot of time counseling families and working on education of young children. Some way, you could say that we are at our best when we are radical generalists.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I feel like it's not used so much anymore, but not that long ago you heard the term rent-a-rabbi, and it was used, I think, derogatory.

Elyse Wechterman:
Yes.

Bryan Schwartzman:
It wasn't thought of as a good thing. You write, we live in a gig economy and we're seeing a lot more gig rabbis, entrepreneurial rabbis.

Elyse Wechterman:
Right.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I'm wondering if you could talk about that development and some of the, I guess, pluses and challenges of it.

Elyse Wechterman:
Sure. It's funny that you use the term rent-a-rabbi. My congregation, the congregation that I served for 14 years refers to a part of its history as the rent-a-rabbi period of their history. You're right, it was somewhat derogatory. Partly, I think... Unfortunately it was inappropriately derogatory, in that there was a suspicion that people who did that kind of work either didn't have the training or were somehow unethical or there was something wrong with what they were doing. Who knows, that may or may not have been the case back then.

Bryan Schwartzman:
There was also a judgment on folks who didn't belong to synagogues or didn't send their kids to religious school, or maybe were marrying somebody who wasn't Jewish. It was a judgment on the consumer as well.

Elyse Wechterman:
Right. Absolutely. The Jewish establishment believed that the right way to be Jewish was for you to be a member of a synagogue and use the rabbi of that synagogue for all of your lifecycle events. That was what was expected, and anything outside of that was looked down upon as being not serious and not real. Well, the world has changed, and what we understand now is that Jews and the people who love them connect to Judaism and connect to Jewish resources in all sorts of different ways and in all different times in their lives, which may at some point be synagogue affiliation, but at other times it may not be. And that in all of those cases, people still want rabbis to meet them where they are and do the work of helping them make their lives meaningful. Whether that's a freelance rabbi who does a wedding or a freelance rabbi who is available for private B'nai Mitzvah study, or someone who teaches adult education courses on their own through an adult learning program in a city. People are accessing those purveyors of tradition in all sorts of ways.
Why wouldn't it make sense that our rabbis would pursue that work as well? There are some rabbis for whom the notion of freelance or entrepreneurial work is very freeing. It means they don't actually have the constraints of a larger institution. There may be opportunities to be a little bit freer with their schedules. Sometimes it provides them the opportunity to say no, right? In a congregation, you can't actually say no to the people in front of you very often. That benefit. And, of course, the downside is the same downside that we have in all fields in the United States today, which is that it does not provide job security. You constantly have to sell yourself, and lo and behold, there's no health insurance. What we're seeing is the impact of the changing nature of work in this period of American life impacting the rabbinate, in much the same way it impacts everybody else. There's nothing particularly special or unique about how rabbinic work changes. It's just particular to the way we do it. Again, I think, it's reflective of American society more broadly.

Bryan Schwartzman:
One dramatic change from 1974 to now is who is a rabbi, right?

Elyse Wechterman:
Absolutely.

Bryan Schwartzman:
What does a rabbi look like? There was one Reconstructionist female rabbi... I guess Sandy Sasso graduated in 74?

Elyse Wechterman:
Sandy Sasso graduated in 1974 and became the first female Reconstructionist rabbi in America. RRC was founded almost from its very beginning as an egalitarian institution. I think that notion of egalitarianism and access, baked into the very beginning, has made the Reconstructionist rabbinate one of the places that we've seen the diversity of the rabbinate reflecting the diversity of American Judaism flourish.
It is no surprise in my mind that we were the first rabbinical school to welcome and ordain and hire and support LGBTQ rabbis. It is no surprise that we've pushed really hard for racial inclusion in our rabbinate and in our trainings and in our communities. I think that's because of this notion that the rabbinate has to look like the civilization it's serving. And as the Jewish civilization grows in its diversity, and as we become more aware of the diversity that's always there, the rabbinate is going to change in that way too. While that is also true in some of the other movements, we've been possibly quicker to adapt and more open to that, partially because of that understanding that's baked in from the very core.

Bryan Schwartzman:
My sense is as authorities on Jewish law, like one of the things rabbis did was keep the boundaries of who's in the Jewish community, who's not. My sense is that's changed, but if there's anything general we want to say about the relationship of rabbis and communal boundaries in 2024 and beyond.

Elyse Wechterman:
Yeah, we have often traditionally understood that one of the roles of the rabbi is to be the gatekeeper. Who is in in Jewish community? Who do we count as a Jew? What rabbis approve or agree to work with which people who are seeking conversion. What weddings will they do? Who do they get to call up on the [inaudible 00:28:22] for an aliyah, an honor at the Torah. Reconstructionist rabbis tend not to want to ascribe that role to themselves and would rather have that be a communal conversation. I know that many of us think of our role, especially in North America, where identity and religious connection is so fluid and studies have shown that very few people continue to live in the religious community and practice in the religious community in which they were raised, that Judaism is a wonderful product. It is a beautiful way to experience life.
It has deep riches and resources for marking moments of transition, moments of pain, moments of joy, and that anybody who wants to take advantage of that should be able to. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't certain things that people who have Jewish status should do and people who don't might not do, but opening up that conversation to say, "Yeah, this is a resource for humans to live meaningful lives. Let me help you take advantage of it." Means that we come from a place where we're not as concerned about keeping people out or drawing those boundaries as figuring out what are the ways that we can bring people in and help them connect.

Bryan Schwartzman:
You said product. I've also heard spiritual technology. I would imagine maybe some orthodox rabbinic colleagues might not love that terminology, but we have no problem calling it things like that.

Elyse Wechterman:
No, not at all. And I'll say as a Reconstructionist, I believe wholeheartedly that Jews are not the chosen people, and Judaism is not the only way to access spirituality and to create meaning in the world. There are lots of paths. It's the one that I know, and it's the one that I can offer. And if there are people in the world who want to take advantage of that, I want to show them how to do that.

Bryan Schwartzman:
It's a big world and the human story is a very large one. We're not at the center of it all the time.

Elyse Wechterman:
Right.

Bryan Schwartzman:
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Now, back to the conversation. COVID was a big earthquake that impacted the rabbinate, right?

Elyse Wechterman:
Absolutely.

Bryan Schwartzman:
We're going to have a before COVID and after.

Elyse Wechterman:
Right.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I guess one thing I'm thinking is just being part of this world working for reconstructing Judaism, I really saw during that time an acknowledgement of the pressure that was put on Rabbi, a focus on rabbi's mental health and self-care. It seemed like there was an appreciation maybe like there hadn't been before. I believe you wrote that 2023 was... We'll get to October 7th in a couple of minutes, but 2023, those problems were still there. I'm wondering if you could talk about that at all, or any of the other ways that COVID was this earthquake that we might not think about?

Elyse Wechterman:
Yeah. Well, I would say to a certain extent COVID was an earthquake, but it was also an accelerator of trends that were already in existence, right? What happened with COVID... The immediate thing that happened was, as we're now using the term pivot, that all the rabbis across the world had to make to all of a sudden go from providing services, teaching, education, access to Jewish tradition in person, to doing it online. That was a huge and heavy lift, which many rabbis, particularly those in our movement, did phenomenally well and really excelled at. And it was a heavy lift. We did not go to school to learn how to do podcasts and Zoom meetings and Zoom services. That was all new, and we had to learn it, which was exhausting. And that was at the same time that the increased demands that had been building up over a generation on rabbis who were actually coming to a fevered pitch.
In many communities, rabbis, and now I'm talking about the pulpit congregational rabbi in particular, rabbis are looked to provide almost everything to being the religious leader, spiritual presence, teacher, executive, fundraiser, cheerleader, friend, counselor, runner of the Hebrew school, chief cook and bottle washer. It had become exhausting for many rabbis, and we were already starting to have conversations about how sustainable was that world of work. Again, not dissimilar from other fields where support staff is disappearing and where fewer and fewer people are expected to do more and more of the work.
But that was all happening at the time that COVID hit. One of the unique experiences for rabbis and religious leaders in general is that usually in normal times, whatever normal times means, when a rabbi has an experience that's affecting their personal life, like we lose someone or someone is sick in our family, we can back away from our work and we say, "Okay, I'm going to go mourn that loss." Or, "Okay, I'm going to go take care of that sick person." Then that happens. We do that, and then we come back into our work and we're able to separate a little bit from that personal experience and come back into work.
What happened during COVID is that rabbis were holding all of the crises and all of the losses and all of the illness in their congregations and in their families at exactly the same time. By the way, this is true of nurses, teachers, and all the rest of the people as well. That emotional toll of having to lead services online and help everybody deal with the losses and fear in their family while your 6-year-old is sniffling over here and someone else is calling for your attention over there was a particularly painful and dramatic moment for rabbis, that took its toll. I think we're still seeing the impact of that today. At the end of COVID, we're also talking about the impact of the Trump years. What we also discovered is that people in America are just very short-tempered and have a lot less patience for things in general, for disagreements in general.
While that sometimes can't come out in people's workplaces or schools, one of the places it does come out is in their religious communities. Religious communities became a place of strife and conflict. I think that that also impacted rabbis mental health and spiritual sustenance. We spent a lot of time trying to help and address that, right? That's one of the jobs of a rabbinical association is to say, "Okay, how are we going to get you the mental health support?" We spent a lot of time trying to have our non-pulpit rabbis step in and give a break to our pulpit rabbis.
We ran a program at one point called, Call in a Friend, where a pulpit rabbi who'd just been on for however long could actually take a weekend off, and someone who doesn't do that round the clock work could step in for them. We helped our rabbi support each other. We provided mental health grants. We ran spiritual direction groups, and we still do a lot of that work, and I'm glad that we had the opportunity to do that work, but the demand for it in 2023 was the highest that I remember it being in my time in this position so far.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Is there more you would do if you had triple the resources? Maybe your listeners will pour in.

Elyse Wechterman:
Absolutely. Well, I think that the number one thing that could be done to help rabbis is to hire more staff in the organizations in which they work, whether that's hiring additional rabbis or hiring other staff to take some of the burden. If I could, I would make sure that there was a spiritual care director or a therapist in every congregation in the United States. That would be a dream come true. Short of that, if the RRA had more money to provide mental health grants, that would be an incredible gift. And what we do with that money is we say to people, because accessing mental health care is often a challenge in our country, is, "Here's the money to go for your first couple of appointments. Find a good therapist." And if we can help someone do that without diminishing their own resources for their family, we're more than happy to be able to make that happen for people.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I believe, like me, you've been in your current role since 2015, which is give or take a decade. There certainly have been some positive developments in the world since 2015, but at times it just seems like the kind of tumultuous rollercoaster ride where we'd gone from bad to worse. 2015 was the start of the rise of Trump and Trumpism. Daily wondering what he was going to tweet and how that was going to affect the world once he was in office. We had COVID. We'd had had January 6th. All of the reckoning after George Floyd. Again, even before October 7th, really provocative, divisive things happening in Israel. I feel like I'm getting... Like you know you're living through historical times when it's really difficult to make sense of it. Is there anything in... Yeah.

Elyse Wechterman:
I'm going to quote one of my favorite rabbis, this is Billy Joel, the singer, who says, "The good old days weren't always so good and tomorrow is not as bad as it seems." Right? One of the things that-

Bryan Schwartzman:
Keeping the faith, right? Yeah.

Elyse Wechterman:
Keeping in the faith. Right, exactly.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Maybe that's an episode title?

Elyse Wechterman:
It might be. One of the things that's true is that the benefit of wearing the lenses of Jewish history is that we can go back and say the Jewish people have experienced a lot of tumult and tumultuous times over the course of our entire history, right? I am not going to be the one who says this is worse than the year 70 when the temple in Jerusalem is destroyed. This is worse than the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Probably not.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Sure.

Elyse Wechterman:
But we have those stories and we know that the Jewish people have survived those times by being creative, by looking in new directions, garnering new ways of connecting and doing things Jewishly out of those moments of tumult. We look back at those now and say, "That was a moment." But for the people who were experiencing it, it was probably a couple of decades, right? It may be, and this is the place where I feel as much as I find the events of the world destabilizing and upsetting, I also can find a moment of hope to say, in 200, 300 years, they'll look back at this as a moment in time and say, "Oh, yeah, that's when all those terrible things happened." And then they invented whatever the next thing is that we're inventing.
I believe Reconstructionist rabbis are on the forefront of those inventions, is going to be what Judaism becomes for the next generations. Our understanding of that evolving civilization enables us to take the long view, right? To take a much longer view and a much more hopeful view. I think that that's one of the jobs of the Reconstructionist rabbi today. I became a pulpit rabbi in the year 2001 and this will lead us to the conversation about October 7th.
I became a pulpit rabbi in September 2001. I met my congregation a few days before 9/11, and then it was the High Holy Days, and I had to figure out what to say. I don't know that I was the most brilliant rabbi in that moment, and there have been collections of the sermons that people wrote at those times. Some of which are very moving and powerful. But the thing that I could say and that I knew to say was that we as the Jewish people had been here before and knew that terrible things happen in the world. And we know how to pick up the pieces and start over. That's what I said in 2001. I think that's what people need to be saying today. And as hard as it is, that doesn't excuse the pain of the moment or the awfulness of the pandemic or the awfulness of the Trump years, or the both awfulness and hopefulness of the racial justice reckoning that we're experiencing.
Those emotions are real, but by understanding that human evolution is long, slow, and difficult, and I believe that the arc of the universe bends towards justice, we actually can have a hope that the pain that we're experiencing now will lead to something better, if not for us than at least for our children's generation. The best Reconstructionist rabbis that I know are the ones who are able to say something along those lines. And I will say even in the post October 7th world, which has been so destabilizing for the Jewish community in Israel and around the world and the fear and dislocation and existential anxiety that many of us feel, it's deeply frightening, but it is not the first time that the Jewish people have experienced that.

Bryan Schwartzman:
A lot to unpack there. It's true. We look at division over Israel as this new thing, but I was a graduate student in Jewish history 20 years ago, and it was old then. It's not new, but yet something does seem profoundly shifted. If one wanted to look at a cross section of where opinion on Israel is really sharply divided, they certainly could look at RRA and its members.

Elyse Wechterman:
Absolutely.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I know from conversations, you have staunch Zionist members. You certainly have members who live in Israel, serving in the military. You have members who've really taken strong, even before October 7th but certainly with the war, strong anti-Zionist positions who've protested for ceasefire sometimes in really provocative ways. I guess I'm wondering how you hold it together and is there an overarching value that holds RRA members and community? I just think it's not a given. We don't expect, say, anti-abortion activists and pro-choice activists to serve together in community or take your picks. I guess I'm wondering what's... I can stop now.

Elyse Wechterman:
Yeah, it's a very good question and it's a deeply painful question. Shortly after, maybe even [inaudible 00:46:26].

Bryan Schwartzman:
Sorry, I feel like I have to ask it. I know it's not-

Elyse Wechterman:
It's an appropriate question to ask. Absolutely. I will say shortly after the big march and gathering in Washington, D.C., that happens towards the end of last year, the support rally for Israel and against antisemitism. Someone wrote a piece about the big tent of the mainstream Jewish community becoming more united and are divided, and anti-Zionists or non-Zionists, were outside of the tent and far over to the left. What I found really interesting about that article is that in my experience the Reconstructionist rabbinate sits directly in the middle of that divide, and he's not even acknowledging that there was a middle of that divide, actually felt a little bit erasing and painful to me. That is true, but we sit in the middle of that divide because we have committed to being an organization and being a group of people and being a community that can hold ourselves together across a divide and acknowledge that we don't all agree, but we all care very much about the future of the Jewish people, about each other's success, and about our broader family that we see ourselves as a part of.
It doesn't mean that the fights are pleasant. There can be some very difficult, painful moments, but we have been able to, at least until now, been able to say that we are committed to a fairly broad tent of viewpoints on politics around Israel and Palestine. These divisions are very painful right now because of this moment that we're in. But, again, I don't actually think that they're new. We've had them at other times in our own history, in our association's history. I think that if we can hold onto the idea that different people with the same knowledge base, the same level of commitment to the Jewish people, the same level of ethical concerns and the same understanding about the evolutionary nature of Jewish life and Jewish community, can come to very different points of view and that is okay. We will survive.
That is in keeping with the core of the Jewish tradition, that there are arguments for the sake of heaven, that there are differences of opinions. Our Talmud contains in it arguments and counter arguments. It is a very Jewish tradition to hold that, and if we can hold on to the core belief that we share something in common, even when we disagree profoundly on some of these issues, then, I think, we will not only survive as an association and as an organization, but we will be modeling something very profound for the Jewish community and the world at large, which is deeply lacking in those models at this moment.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Are there other ways that the last 100 plus days have presented new challenges for rabbis in any way you've been able to help them?

Elyse Wechterman:
One of the things when people have asked me since October 7th, how are the rabbis doing? I've gotten that question exactly. "How are the rabbis doing?" One of the things that I've chosen to say is that it doesn't actually matter what viewpoint you hold. Whether you are an ardent Zionist, who lives in Israel, whose children live in Israel, who serve in the Army, or you are an activist, anti-Zionist, who thinks that is not the right way to go for the Jewish people. Regardless of where you are in that political spectrum, you have people that you care about who are directly impacted by what has happened on October 7th and since. There's not a member of the RRA who is not worried about someone in the land of Israel and called to see if they're okay or been worrying about hostages or been worrying about the children of our friends who are being called up, whether we think it's for a good cause or not, we all want those people to come home safely. Right?
There's a personal stake that every single one of us has. This isn't some far off war in a land that we are not connected to. There is something personal for every single one of us. That's number one. And number two is we all work in communities that are wrestling with these issues and where there are mixed feelings and divisive conversations and where people are not 100% in agreement. Reconstructionist rabbis, and I'll expand that, I imagine all rabbis are currently experiencing both personal impact, pain, concern, and worry, and professional tumult, dislocation and disarray. And the fact that they're still standing is actually pretty awesome. Is actually pretty awesome. The fact that they can hold that and say, "Yeah, this is really troubling me and I'm still going to show up for work the next day." Takes an unbelievable amount of fortitude. If there's nothing else that I say in this particular podcast, I will say that Reconstructionist rabbis are some of the strongest human beings I know, as evidenced by the fact that they continue to show up for work every day.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And hopefully finding ways of self-care.

Elyse Wechterman:
Absolutely.

Bryan Schwartzman:
You're going to see a whole bunch of them pretty soon. What do rabbis do when you all get together?

Elyse Wechterman:
When we all get together, we greet each other with our secret handshake. RRA conventions are known for being some of the most fun rabbinic conventions. One of the advantages of being such a small and fairly young association, only 50 years old, is that significant portions of us overlapped with each other in school. We all know each other really well. At some level, our conventions are giant alumni classroom reunion parties. That's a lot of fun. We will actually have some really hard conversations. We're going to talk about the differences of our interests and concerns in Israel and Palestine, hopefully an artful and beautifully facilitated and managed conversations.
We are going to unpack a little bit about resurgent antisemitism because that is what is true today, and we have to talk about that. But we're also going to inaugurate our new newly elected president. We're going to celebrate our 50th anniversary, and we're going to have a dance party because rabbis at the RRA really love to dance. That's what we'll be doing in Atlanta. At the moment. There are over 110 people registered. I am proud to say that is almost a third of our membership, which is phenomenal, and it's going to be an exciting convention.

Bryan Schwartzman:
My executive producer, Rabbi Jacob Staub, wanted me to ask a question. If you don't like this one, we can go to Jacob was, will non-Orthodox Judaism, is it going to survive? Is it going to thrive? What do we think is happening?

Elyse Wechterman:
That's a good question. I won't claim to predict the future more than a few years out.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Sure.

Elyse Wechterman:
What we do know is that at the same time that Jews are struggling and that Jewish families are struggling to find meaning, there is a huge uptick in the number of people who want to be Jewish. My rabbis tell me that they're being inundated with potential Jews by choice, potential converts, so much so that we, as the RRA, are currently offering an intro to Judaism class so that our rabbis don't have to, and we have over 55 students in that class. This is the first time we're doing it, right? There are people who want to be Jewish coming from all walks of life. There's something that's attractive. I don't think something that is attracting that many people can be written off that easily. Will it look the same as it looks today in 30, 40, even 20 years? Absolutely not. Will I recognize my grandchildren's Judaism? Probably not. Will I guarantee that there will be such a thing as non-Orthodox Judaism for my grandchildren? I'm pretty sure, yes.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Maybe it's my years in journalism and just the biases that come with it, but I feel like I asked you about a lot of woes. But what are you most hopeful about in your work in the rabbinate?

Elyse Wechterman:
Well, the story of all those people who want to become Jewish is a very hopeful story. I also am someone who finds hope in the most challenging moments. The fact that there is strife over within various parts of the Jewish community as to how to relate to the Palestine-Israel conflict, I actually find hopeful. I believe that shutting off conversation and denying that there is a problem is the worst thing that you can do. As horrible as the events of October 7th, the massacre, the terrible tragedies and brutalities that befell the victims of that event, and as horrible as the war that has ensued since that event is, in the American Jewish Community, it has forced a conversation that had been more or less squashed for many years. To me, that's hopeful. That's a good thing. I think the rise of Trumpism has done the same thing for many of the challenges in the United States.
Many of the things that we took for granted and said, "Yeah, everything's fine." We actually were shown that it's not. It's a good thing that we're having those conversations now. It's a good thing that we're talking about the inequities in our society because of the terrible violence that Black men have experienced at the hands of police officers. It's not good that that violence happened, but it's good that we're now talking about it. I actually find hope in the moments of pain that shatter us out of our complacency and make us sit up and say, "Oh, wait a minute. We have to do something about this. We have to talk about this." It may be a counterintuitive way to think about it, but that's where I'm going to hold on to hope in the moment.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Rabbi Elyse Wechterman, thanks for a really insightful, profound conversation and wish you a fantastic convention.

Elyse Wechterman:
Thank you, thank you, thank you. It's always a pleasure to talk to you, Brian. Thank you so much for inviting me to be here today.

Bryan Schwartzman:
We'll be back next month with an all new episode. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song, Ilu Finu, is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host Bryan Schwartzman, and I'll see you next time. (singing)